The most popular solo drill in BJJ would probably be shrimping, which is a lateral pivoting movement you do on your side in order to create distance between yourself and your opponent. Aside from that, there are a variety of rolls, turns, flips, and other semi-acrobatic maneuvers. But one thing I notice is that a lot of these solo drills involve being either on your side, or with your back on the ground.

Crawling Through Guards

When I first got into MovNat, I noticed that there was some emphasis put on crawling movements. We went through a bunch of variations for different purposes, and as I got more into this general culture of movement, I was exposed to more and more crawling patterns, covering pretty much every possible way I could imagine a human being could crawl. Bent arms, straight arms, different widths, sideways, backwards; a million and one ways to crawl! Soon, I started to connect the dots between the things these crawls had in common with guard passing in Brazilian Jiu jitsu.

In Brazilian Jiu jitsu, guard passing is where both people are on the ground, one facing up, one down, and the person on top is attempting to navigate past the legs of the person on their back. The idea is that the legs can be used to tangle up, kick, or manipulate the person on top, so naturally the person on top wants to navigate past all this trouble and end up in a pinning position where they can control the person on bottom. It’s a hugely important part of Brazilian jiu jitsu, and one which is strangely ignored in solo drills. This is where the crawling practices in MovNat start creeping in.

On a simple level, crawling is simply traveling from one point to another on some part of your arms and legs: hands and feet, hands and knees, elbows and knees, and all other combinations. The first thing you notice when you begin to crawl is that you have to establish a strong point of contact with the ground you will be moving onto. When you shift your weight onto that point of contact (let’s say it’s your palm, to keep it simple), it becomes a point of support for your body.

This mirrors the concept in BJJ of getting a grip on your partner’s legs or hips, and shifting your weight onto that grip or point of contact to create a connection with your partner. You then use that point of contact to support your weight as you either navigate your body around your partner, or manipulate your opponent’s legs to move them out of your path so you can get on top of them. You are essentially crawling or climbing over your opponent.

The simple act of getting used to trusting your weight to your hands is hard for a lot of people in BJJ, because you are putting those hands on a moving opponent who is trying to flip you over or strangle you. For some of my students, I will introduce basic crawling practices just to get them used to the feeling of shifting their weight to their hands in a simplified and safe format, without a partner. Then I’ll have them go back to working with a partner in increasingly complex ways, through drilling and progressive sparring practices.

Control Your Center of Gravity

MovNat and BJJ also share the concept of your base of support (BOS). This is the shape created by your points of contact with the ground and your center of gravity (COG). For example, if you are in a plank position on all fours, your COG would rest inside the rectangle made by your hands and feet on the ground. As you shift your weight forward and begin to crawl, your COG starts to shift, and your base of support changes shape, as each hand and a foot comes off the ground and is placed somewhere else.

In BJJ, this is a crucial concept because any time your COG comes close to the edge or goes outside of your BOS, you can easily get flipped onto your back, or simply fall over and lose your balance. So the challenge is to maintain your COG inside of your BOS, while on top of a live person.

The crawling practices again offer a lot of insight into this aspect of guard passing. Not only do you get used to shifting your weight around between your limbs, but you get to experiment with exactly what it feels like to be close to the edge of your base. You can play with different hip and body angles, different palm and foot positions, and see how they affect your balance and stability. It’s a great place to tinker with all of these elements!

This Is Not a Shortcut

Crawling is not a super movement which will skyrocket your jiu jitsu to unseen heights. Doing more jiu jitsu is more likely to do that. It’s not a substitute for training, either. But it is useful for exploring base, body control, and stability in dynamic movement, and as a supplement for times when training with a partner is not possible.

My suggestion is that you use crawling as a tool to practice, play with, and test your sense of balance and base. You can also use it as a training tool to develop certain physical attributes which have some transfer over to other things. Experiment with the concepts of base, points of contact, and center of gravity while doing other things like rock climbing, lifting and carrying, grappling arts, and other challenges you find in real life.

Go for a roll on the mat:

Roughhousing Is Good For You

The post Where Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Meets Natural Movement appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Low-Key Strategies for Skill

Using these tools, I was able to take my first try balance on a waist-high, round bar hand rail from an awkward :20 seconds to a fairly comfortable 3:54 minutes.

Set a Simple Goal

There are six and a half billion goal setting books, blog posts, and videos out there, so I’ll spare you another one. I kept my goal simple and rough. I just wanted to be able to stay on the damn bar without looking stupid for three minutes cold, first try. I wanted to be able to do this with no warm up or practice, so I could just randomly hop onto something and balance for enough time to accomplish a task if I needed to. Since this was a “lazy mission,” I wanted to keep this a fun goal, but still something I could progress with. Success minus the stress. I picked Friday lunch break as my time to practice, because I could devote a good 20 minutes to getting better and there was a perfect practice bar right next to the BJJ school where I work.

Videotape Yourself

I used my phone to record my attempts; unfortunately, I erased most of my footage in a complicated accident. But you aren’t missing much. Just me flailing around for a few weeks, then starting to walk around more comfortably on a metal bar.

There were a few benefits to taping myself. First, I was able to immediately see what I was doing and how it differed from what I thought I was doing. Those two things can be surprisingly different. By comparing what I was actually doing with what I thought I was doing, I was able to instantly make improvements. I got a good sense of what happened when I would lose my balance, what the causes were, how my body reacted to the loss of balance, and how I could design and practice drills to improve on those points.

Also, comparing my videos to videos of more skillful people practicing and performing gave me valuable insight into what I wanted to look like and model myself after on the bar. I was able to make improvements by trying to match certain points of my technique with theirs.

Tools that encourage consistent, positive practice will help you achieve your goal. [Photo credit: Adam Jones|CC BY SA 2.0]

Take Notes

After each try, I wrote down what seemed to work to keep me up there longer. Taking notes helped me observe the technical points I learned in the Movnat courses. I also wrote down what didn’t work very well, and what factors were causing problems. Things like: different types of footwear as opposed to bare feet, different bar/branch heights or widths and if bar was slippery from skateboarders putting wax on it. I came up with a good mental and physical formula that worked well for me.

I found I always did better when I breathed slowly and relaxed my whole body as much as possible. I would lightly press downwards into the bar to feel more connected. I also would try to keep my focus 80% on the task, while keeping some awareness of my surroundings, lest someone try to run off with my bike while I was slinking around the bar. I also found that talking to myself helped a lot. I would murmur under my breath stuff like “Dude, this is so easy. You could balance on here forever.” I don’t know why that helped, but it really did make it easier for me to stay on. I would test out ideas and constantly trim out things which were useless or counterproductive to my improvement.

I made a point to always begin my next session by focusing on the most helpful points I observed from the prior session in my notes.

Passive Competition and Regular Practice

I mentioned earlier that I would seek out experienced people on video to compare myself to. Part of this was modeling and trying to pick up technical points to implement. The other part was competitive. I use a light-hearted and friendly competitiveness to improve my skills in other areas, and it helped here. I would study video of people who were actually good at balancing and challenge myself to get better at it than them. I seldom accomplished that goal, but the friendly competitiveness was enough to motivate me to do an extra five minutes when I wanted to be done, or to go out and practice when I didn’t feel like practicing. I came away with more practice and better skill than I would have, were I only focused on myself.

You run faster trying to catch someone than you do running alone.

A funny side note about this: I notice that I improved even more if I tried to compete with people who I find obnoxious. This is definitely something I picked up from BJJ. People there are mostly awesome, but there are a handful unlikable personalities around who would be hard to swallow a loss from. Some MMA fighters talk about this too, using dislike of an opponent to fuel their training. But this tactic is just a lighthearted thing, not too serious. It’s more, “Haha, that dude gets on my nerves, I want to be better at this than him,” than a super negative or hateful thing. It works the same way if you have a training buddy that talks a little trash to you. You will work harder just to shut him up. It’s a mental trick I use when I’m struggling to find motivation.

Use Whatever Tools Work

Ultimately, these tools boil down to finding ways to chart progress and find motivation to inspire progress and consistency of practice. By taping myself and taking notes of best practices and ineffective practices, I can get a sense of what really works for me. These tools help me get a clear picture of how it works, and avoid the mismatch between what I think is happening and what really happens. By using a lighthearted form of competitiveness, I give myself that kick in the butt I need to go out and practice or keep going for another five minutes when I am really tempted to go back home and watch cat videos on Facebook.

More ways to advance your fitness:

10 Tips to Smash Through a Training Plateau

The post Low-Key Strategies for Skill Building appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

“Begin with the end in mind,” says Stephen Covey. I don’t recall much else from Covey’s book, but that quote sticks out in my mind. His idea is to have a firm vision of your goal in mind, and the actions you take should all move you closer to that goal. This is a principle I apply when I practice both Movnat and Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ).

Here’s what happens: we learn the technique. We practice all the steps, cross all our “t’s” and dot all our “i’s”. We try to do the move accurately, seek instruction and feedback to make sure it is right.

This is all good stuff. But there’s this mysterious thing which creeps insidiously into practice from time to time. It’s a disconnect. The technique begins to separate from its purpose. They drift apart.

Analyze the Disconnect

In BJJ, this is most obvious when I teach people how to strangle each other.

Ideally, strangle holds in BJJ work to compress the carotid arteries of the neck, reducing blood flow and resulting in unconsciousness or a tap out. There are hundreds of ways to make this happen.

When I teach these techniques, the student focuses on the parts, what does what and where. When sparring begins, the opponent resists you and is not as predictable, and problems pop up. The choke is harder to get, too much energy is being used, and the opponent simply is not tapping.

Often, the culprit is the disconnect I mentioned. The student focuses on applying the technique but forgets the point.

Putting the arms and legs all in the right spot won’t do much without applying pressure to the right spot (those carotid arteries). The foot is on the pedal and the car is moving, but you forgot where you are going.

Have a Purpose

In the MovNat workshops I have attended, a central concept was context. Are you doing pull ups just to do pull ups? Or is a pull up a component of a climbing technique, to ascend something?

If you are pulling up to ascend something, the mindset and intent are different than if you are doing pull ups for the purpose of building capacity for more reps, or higher weight, or for cosmetic reasons.

The goal directs the process; begin with the end in mind.

No matter the skill, when you work backwards from the purpose, the details and nuances of the technique are easier to remember because they are in context.

They aren’t random elements of a movement, but functional components of what you are trying to accomplish. Imagine a scenario where these skills you are practicing make sense.

If I am practicing a crawling technique, in my mind I am crawling carefully through a tunnel or under an old front porch, mindful of sharp objects, animals, and so on.

This informs my crawl. If I am doing a combo, say a crawl/carry/throw, then I will relate it to a situation where I have needed those skills. Perhaps crawling under that porch, carrying a bag of heavy trash out from under it and throwing the bag onto the back of a truck.

Keep the Goal in Mind

Always strive to keep the skill and the goal firmly in mind so it doesn’t become a dead exercise, but rather a way to train for a specific skill. When you keep the end goal in mind, it helps keep you honest.

Are the details and movements you are doing really functional for the activity you are training for?

In BJJ, if the goal is to strangle my partner, are there elements of my technique which can be done more efficiently, or are they superfluous and not contributing to the goal of compressing those arteries?

If I am training to climb a tree, are there things I am doing in my solo drills which are not contributing to that (or any other) goal? This becomes a lens you can use to examine, refine and improve your training process.

All of this may seem too obvious. But I can’t count the times I’ve lost sight of this simple concept myself, or observed it with my training partners and students.

Sometimes the most obvious things are the easiest to overlook.

My advice is to periodically do a goal check. Ask yourself two questions: What is my end goal with this action? And is my technique done with this goal in mind?

More on making and reaching goals:

Why Better Than Average Isn’t Good Enough for Me

The post What’s the Point? Check In With Your Goals appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Penn’s style is how I approach my study of many of the fundamental skills of MovNat, including walking. The following four ways are how I make walking more interesting.

Each step is an opportunity to refine your walking skill. [Photo Credit: Pixabay]

Take the Most Difficult Path

I live in a major metropolitan area with a lot of flat sidewalks, level ground, and symmetrical surfaces. It’s not the most nutritionally varied environment for my joints. You can walk for miles and miles in a straight line punctuated only by traffic lights.

To add complexity, I look for the most asymmetrical path. I walk down streets with busted up sidewalks, along sidewalk cracks (for all the moms who will suffer broken backs from this article, I’m deeply sorry), on cobblestones, or in a path that forces me to navigate targets like dodging stop signs, bus stops, outdoor store signs, or trash cans. My goal is to create variety in how I use my joints and give my brain problems to solve.

You can apply this technique anywhere – walking through the city, a parking lot at the grocery store, or in a public park. When you seek obstacles and challenges and stray off the beaten path, you can also integrate other MovNat skills into your walk like vaulting, carrying, and climbing.

Walk Fast Through a Crowd

The good thing about living in the city is there are a lot of people. The bad thing about living in the city is there are a lot of people.

I eat lunch at an indoor market a couple times a week and it’s almost always packed with people moving (or not moving) at various speeds in various directions. I used to get frustrated navigating through the throngs of oblivious gawkers, unexpectedly standing still and blocking whole avenues for what seemed like an eternity. Then I figured out how to use them for practice.

I walk as fast as I can through the crowd. My two rules are to maintain as much speed as possible without crashing into people, and to move continuously. You will learn how to read the body cues of those around you to quickly change direction or dodge limbs as people abruptly move about. You have to be mentally aware to anticipate and react quickly. Your eyes scan, focus, and absorb information centrally as well as peripherally.

The challenge grows if you are carrying something because you not only have to navigate people, but you also have to make sure you don’t lose what you are carrying. This is a big reason why I almost always have coffee stains on my pants.

On a technical level, you quickly notice the need for a variety of unusual footwork patterns including pivots, shuffles, skips, and side steps. The trick is to move efficiently and quickly through the crowd without looking like a weirdo river dancer.

Play With Body Mechanic Variables

Walking is a great time to explore different body mechanics by exaggerating and hyper-focusing on different parts of the movement: the pendulum-like qualities of the arms and legs, the subtle shifts of head position, the light twisting of the torso, stride length, the rebound as you quickly change direction, the stretch and release of the muscles as you make larger movements, or the compression and extension of the joints as your weight shifts. The opportunities to explore each element are endless.

Besides the actual mechanics of walking, you can explore the sequence of movements like rhythm, breaking, pace, and timing. Which parts move first and power the other parts in what order? What is the rhythm of that movement? What happens if you do things in a different sequence?

Mimicry

Tied in with feeling and studying your own mechanics and rhythm is mimicking how other people walk. Without being too much of a creep, you can mimic the arm swing, stride length, or degree of foot turnout of people walking around you to compare and contrast what their movement flavor is like versus yours. Mimicry can offer great insight into your own body, but you can also weird people out, so be subtle and respectful if you play with this one.

Step By Step

Walking is so basic that it’s often overlooked as something to be practiced and developed, but it doesn’t have to be. You can walk for distance and time but don’t forget complexity. For many people, taking long walks can get boring, so take the mundane and do something interesting with it.

By challenging your walking patterns, you not only develop a more versatile skill, but you also develop the sub and auxiliary skills which are related to walking practice. The examples above are only a small sample of what is possible. I use walking to practice all kinds of odd stuff. Some practical and some purely exploratory. Some just plain weird. All interesting and fun.

With all of this walking, are you taking care of your feet?

Unlock Power and Performance With a Golf Ball

The post The Skill of Walking appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

It is impossible to completely separate attribute from technique completely. When we say “don’t use strength” we really mean to temporarily minimize the use of attributes like strength, explosiveness, or unusual flexibility or mobility to highlight other skills. In Brazilian jiu jitsu, if you don’t rely on your normal physical attributes, you are forced to solve your problems with sharp timing, intelligent body weight placement, sensitivity to movement, and devious strategy.

Sharpen Your Attributes

Efficiency is one of the core principles in MovNat, and I think this concept of “not using strength” is an excellent way to train this principle. Think beyond the traditional notion of strength by trying to apply it broadly as a de-emphasizing of physical attributes. How would you crawl if you lacked strength and speed? How would you climb a tree if you had limited range of motion or strength? How would you lift and carry a heavy stone?

Like in jiu jitsu, you are tasked to solve certain problems with limited resources, so you have to focus on technical precision, timing, and clever strategy to make things happen. Sometimes you use tools to enhance your technique or momentum from a leg or an arm to sit up rather than the tension of your torso.

This is a form of constraints-based practice to develop the purest technique possible by taking away attributes. It is similar to removing a limb from play to simulate injury in training or closing your eyes to develop sensitivity of touch in certain situations. Later, when you reintroduce your attributes you have a broader and sharper set of tools to solve problems with.

If you had a broken arm, could you still climb a tree? [Photo courtesy of Pixabay]

Putting Concept Into Practice

When I teach this concept, I ask my students to perform their skills as if they are an 80-year-old with the flu. Naturally this is an exaggeration, but it gets the point across. It is also helpful to include an external task or situation to add context to the practice. In MovNat training, put something in a tree and ask your student to retrieve it, or transport a heavy log from point “A” to point “B” 10 times. Allow for as much creativity as needed to accomplish the task.

You will find yourself experimenting with improved body alignments, distributing your body weight in specific ways, using your limbs to generate momentum, timing the sequence of your body movements, and paying special attention to the placement of your points of contact with the tree and leveraging your body to achieve the goal in the most efficient way.

In addition, this type of training allows you to train longer during the hot summer months. I can’t speak for the weather across the globe, but here in Philly it gets hot as hell. When it’s hot and you are tired, it helps to have efficient ways to train, rather than burning up all your energy in short bursts, particularly if you want to work to improve your skills.

The final and most obvious benefit to developing an efficient practice is that it is something you can sustain in old age, through injury, and in times where attributes don’t do the job or when they simply no longer exist. One of the lessons I take to heart daily from my older training partners in jiu jitsu is when speed starts to leave and timing slows down, cunning is still a fine and potent weapon.

Not only is this an important concept for our own practice as we advance through life, it also gives us a better sense of how to approach these skills when we teach others. I have always believed strongly that Brazilian jiu jitsu is for everyone, not just the young and fit. I feel the same way about the skills I have learned in MovNat. Practicing this way can help you better understand the issues people who may have fewer attributes face and perform better than people who rely too much on their superior attributes.

Challenge Yourself

So here is my challenge to you for this month: Find three ways to climb a tree, three ways to lift and carry something or someone, and three ways to put something heavy over a ten-foot wall, all with minimal use of strength, speed, or energy expenditure. How would you do it if you were an 80-year-old with the flu? To make it more fun, post your solutions to Instagram or facebook and tag them with the hashtag #howwouldyoudoit.

Let’s see what you come up with!

Train with awareness and move with precision:

Be Silent to Be Efficient

The post Do You Rely Too Much on Strength? appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

One of the best lessons I learned from the MovNat courses I’ve been to is an emphasis on silent movement. Silent, smooth, and graceful are all components floating around in the same pool of efficient movement. If you can adopt these qualities in most skills, you will see your levels of precision, body control, and energy conservation improve quickly.

Where does noise come from in movement and why is it problematic? Noise mostly comes from your points of contact with whatever surface you put your body weight on or whatever object you move. Slapping, stomping, prematurely shifting weight, regripping, or adjusting your point of contact all are “noisy” movements which usually benefit from “quieting.”

The most obvious benefit of silence is it is, well, silence! There are a lot of activities where you don’t want to be noticed. Games and hunting immediately come to mind. There are also skills where noise draws attention to or “telegraphs” movement, which can cause problems.

There is an old saying that the most dangerous punch is the one you didn’t see coming. This holds true for kicks, trips, throws, and sweeps in martial arts. Unnecessary noise or movement can draw attention to your attacks when you want them to go unnoticed.

Aim to move with precision and awareness. [Photo courtesy of MovNat]

Quiet Movement Is Safe

From a safety perspective, rule number one of doing anything potentially dangerous is to check your equipment and environment first.

If you are climbing a tree, gently test the branches and trunk first to make sure it can support your weight. If you are lifting a heavy air conditioning unit or a rock, gently test your grip on it to make sure parts don’t break, dislodge, or slip when you lift it.

When you are grappling and the mat is wet, gently place your foot where you want it to go before shifting your weight so you don’t slip and tear useful stuff in your knee.

Quiet placement is less jarring for the surface you are putting your weight on. Jumping onto a surface, even a stable one, can jar it loose and make it unstable.

Cracking a tree branch, knocking the screws loose on Stahl bars, or even carelessly handling training equipment over time are all things to consider. Plus, there is the wear and tear on your body as well.

In a lot of circumstances, you are adding extra and sometimes harmful trauma to your body by slamming heels into the ground, plopping onto pull up bars, and otherwise noisily placing yourself on objects.

Quiet Movement Is Precise

Precision is another element of silent movement. Being able to place your body on a surface with precision eliminates the fumbling and adjusting that goes on when you carelessly plop a hand wherever on a rock.

Gripping with precision can be decisive in a grappling match, and it can be the difference between staying on a rock wall or falling off. It can mean landing a punch squarely on the chin instead of glancing off of the forehead in a fight, or stepping on a nail on a construction site versus stepping safely on a clean surface.

Walking across a creek on moss-covered stones will quickly show you why careful stepping is crucial. Placing your body with focus, awareness, and precision saves you the time and energy of readjusting.

Silence also provides more control over the movement you are performing. If you carefully place a hand or a foot on the ground, you have to control the motion from beginning to end, and placing it with accuracy requires a degree of focus and control you won’t develop by mindlessly flinging your limb somewhere.

If you use momentum to swing a limb to jump up onto a high pull up bar or tree branch, you still have to control the movement to generate appropriate force. Imagine a leg swing from MovNat to get on top of a tree branch.

If the movement is uncontrolled and noisy, you can fall off, slide your limbs out of position, or simply not generate enough momentum to get on top of the branch. By pairing silence and control, you can focus your momentum into that sweet spot.

Quiet Movement Is Not Always a Reality

Lastly, I understand that it is not always possible to be silent. The goal is to aim for silence but in reality, when you speed your movement up you will likely make some noise and there will be jarring, slips, and bumps.

When I use “silent” in this context, I mean it more in the sense of energy conservation. A well placed kick can be loud, but also efficient and not energetically wasteful.

If your goal is perfect silence, even when there is “noise” it will be less than if you were to ignore this idea.

A mental trick I use is to imagine that I am touching thin glass or something expensive. This guarantees I will approach the surface with awareness, precise placement, and care before shifting my weight onto it, catching it, or manipulating it.

I am treating the object, surface, or person with respect. Being careless and overly rough with a person, place or thing can often make it hard to come back and play again.

Move With Awareness

Silence is about efficiency. If you apply this concept to the skills of MovNat such as climbing, carrying, throwing and catching, or crawling, or in other activities such as grappling, weightlifting, or running, you will find yourself wasting less movement, moving with more precision, and most importantly, being much safer.

Now Get Up and Start Moving:

Beyond GPP: Find Your Movement Flow

Coaches: Prioritize Movement Quality:

Move Well First: A New Path for Coaching Fitness

The post Be Silent to Be Efficient appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

When I can get to these places, I love every second and go home feeling recharged. But I live in a pretty big city, and I don’t often get out into nature.

Playing in Urban Semi-Nature

Most cities have some form of green space to play in. These spaces are a weird gray area – a sort of urban semi-nature. They may be construction sites in the process of mowing down a forest to build waterfront business (as is the case in my video below), places behind office buildings or warehouses, or forgotten areas in old neighborhoods.

Survey Your Surroundings

Sometimes in these areas you are operating in less than perfect conditions. Being aware of natural issues like dead tree branches, thorns, sharp rocks, bugs, debris, and animal presence applies, but there is also the concern for sharp objects like glass or old metal, splinters of wood, and other things not often found in more natural settings. I’m not talking about anything too extreme, but stuff you need to keep an eye out for.

Here is a possible scenario for the movement nerd: You’re waiting in the loading area of a local hardware store with your father-in-law to pick up lumber for a project. It’s taking forever to fill his order, and in between awkward conversation you spot a sweet-looking tree perfect for practicing MovNat techniques like pop ups.

There are Jersey barriers to climb over before you can get to the tree, and you notice broken beer bottles littering the area. Surprisingly, your father-in-law encourages you to climb the tree and you wonder if this is his way of showing acceptance of your odd lifestyle or confirmation of your long-held suspicion that he doesn’t like you and would like to be rid of you? Either way, the tree has some solid looking branches, just ripe for climbing.

If you live in a city and practice MovNat, Parkour, or other movement arts, chances are you will find yourself goofing around in these “in between places” from time to time. I’ve spent most of my life exploring areas like these in both suburban and urban environments and these spaces pose a unique set of challenges and potential dangers. There are three points I want to mention so you are less likely to run into trouble if you decide to poke around.

1. Attitude

Don’t goof around in areas known to have high crime rates. You don’t want to get into a fight or a dangerous situation. It’s fine to be wary when you come across other people, but don’t be a smartass. You might come across security guards who want to make sure you aren’t stealing or breaking things or police officers who are just doing their job. In between takes on my video, I came across teenagers who were going fishing, a guy walking a dog who liked to pee a lot (the dog, not the guy), and a bunch of twenty-something’s who were heading to the woods to do graffiti and drink beer.

Being respectful of other people and of the environment you are in goes a long way towards avoiding trouble. Although, having an idea of the best route to run away if trouble strikes is useful from a self-defense perspective.

Explore these areas with friends and make sure you all have cell phones. If you’re solo, play around in an area that’s close enough to major streets or businesses that are open to get help if you need it. Don’t go with friends who are going to encourage you to do stupid things, and definitely don’t take silly risks trying to impress them. The point of your practice is to improve your skills and have fun without pushing into the zone of unnecessary risk.

With a careful eye, you can find opportunities to practice natural movement skills anywhere.

2. Attire

The right clothes are garments that allow you to move well, feel what you need to feel (e.g., sharp objects on your leg or slippery surfaces with your foot), and have some kind of protection against various objects.

Wear shoes. I know – ancestors, barefoot, etc. – but where there is potential for broken glass, you wear shoes. Be conscious of your foot placement and keep an eye out for screws, nails, and glass that can puncture the soles of minimalist footwear. I like to wear jeans that let me move but aren’t too baggy. They allow me to go on unplanned excursions without having to change, they are thick enough to be semi-protective, and they don’t get snagged when climbing. I wear well-fitting shirts for the same reasons, though they are usually easy to rip and offer little protection.

3. Awareness

The last and most important safety tip is awareness. Practicing extreme awareness in the surfaces you are treading on and in your surroundings both near and far is absolutely crucial to playing in these places. Mindfulness in your own movement is a big part of natural movement training.

Use Your Six Senses

If you practice your MovNat skills in these transitional areas, make sure you take precautions. No matter where your environment falls on the urban spectrum, always scout the area first. Test every tree or rock you want to climb, and move slowly and deliberately through the environment until you are sure it is safe enough to move faster. Picture what could go wrong and move accordingly. Happy playing!

More on Movement Practice:

• The World Is Your Gym
• Understanding and Analyzing Your Movement Environment
• You Don’t Need Fancy Stuff: 3 Creative Ways to Use a Stick
• New on Breaking Muscle Today

Photo courtesy of Eneas De Troya via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Movement in Urban Semi-Nature appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

The one percent is an arbitrary number, so don’t get hung up on that. The important point is to try to make some small improvement in a given skill over a period of time, rather than trying to make big jumps in one or two areas, which is not a bad strategy, just a different one.

Train for Marginal Gains

A few years ago I read an article from Dave Brailsford, the manager for British Cycling Team Sky, about his concept of marginal gains. He proposed that if cyclists could improve everything about their approach to training by one percent, the trees won’t look much different in the short term, but in the long run, the forest will be significantly bigger and heartier. In other words, the little gains add up.

In Brailsford’s case, the team was looking for elite performance in cycling, so they sought to improve everything, big and small, from the method they used to clean each bike part to the pillows the athletes slept on. I know little about cycling, as evidenced by my ride (a hideous old Raleigh), but the concept is easy to apply outside of the world of elite cycling. Let’s take a tree climbing sequence I learned in MovNat as an example:

My Super Slop segment is a hot mess. I bounce too hard onto the branch, sway my legs too much during the pop up, and my exhausted collapse on the branch is a joke. I staged this video and am exaggerating, but there is plenty to fix.

In each segment after this, I show a little bit of improvement during different parts of the jump, hang, pop up, tripod position, and landing roll sequence. This video lets you see how a little improvement here and there can take you from being really sucky to being less sucky.

Dissect Your Movement

Here’s how to test out this advice for yourself:

1. Choose a Movement: Pick an activity you want to improve. Try something easy so you can clearly see whether or not you make progress. A lot of the MovNat skills are great starting points. Running, jumping, climbing, crawling, and lifting are all easy to quantify.
2. Break It Down: Break the activity down into measurable parts. The parts slated for improvement can be technical, but they don’t have to be. You could also work on improving physical changes (maybe improved skin toughness on your hands during tree climbing), mental aspects (confidence or calmness during scary movements), tempo (better speed regulation or timing of movements), improved mobility of certain joints, or quality/duration of your rest and recovery time.
3. Get a Little Better: Keep things simple and improve each segment by at least one percent (just a little bit) over the course of a month. You could break it down into two or three improved parts per week to make it manageable, if you like. This is a good way to dissect a particularly complicated activity. Some parts may need to be worked on separately via isolated training, whereas other parts can be improved simply by working on the larger movement. Others will fall somewhere in the middle.

One Step at a Time

Some movements and skills are easier to tighten up than others. This may be because you don’t have the tools you need to develop more challenging areas. A lack of strength or technical knowledge, or simply a lack of time, can all be limiting factors. Improve what you can with the resources you have, but also note your limitations so you have areas to research later.

By the end of the month, using whatever metrics you use to measure progress, evaluate how you’ve progressed. You will see some decent overall results simply by working to improve the individual parts of your art one percent at a time.

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• Daily Movement Snacks: 2 Tools to Move More at Home
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Photo courtesy of MovNat.

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This process all hinges on you, the patient, giving the doctor clear information every step of the way. If I were to show up to my doctor’s office and say, “Doc, I don’t feel good,” and was unable to provide any more specific information than that, my doctor would have no idea where to even begin to address my problems.

This article is for people who are looking to obtain that clarity so they can improve in their practice, whatever it is. The approach I will discuss is especially useful if you have a coach or are a coach working with an athlete or student. I find it particularly valuable for practicing natural movement skills in a complex environment where there are a lot of variables to account for.

You think you move like Spiderman, but is your perception a reality?

Don’t Ignore the Details

Like the example of the doctor and patient, when I teach Brazilian jiu jitsu or MovNat lessons, I need my students to provide specific information about what works and is not working in their personal practice. I need to know how a choke is working in BJJ practice or how a pop up is working for my students when they try to climb various types of trees.

More than this, I need specific information about what happened when they attempt these movements, especially when the context is complex. If I’m told a choke didn’t work because the opponent used his or her left hand to cup my student’s right biceps to block, then I can help. If I’m told the student was unable to do a tuck pop up onto a tree branch because it was a particular type of tree with extremely smooth and slippery branches, then I can suggest a more appropriate technique for ascending.

So how can I get the most accurate information from my students? I know from my own practice how difficult it can be to know what went wrong in a technique. Maybe I simply cannot remember, or maybe I don’t know. Or perhaps I have an unclear and inaccurate picture of what happened in a situation. Without this accurate information, I’ll have a hard time giving or requesting feedback.

Here are two methods I use to obtain accurate information from students and in my own practice.

1. Video

The most obvious way to get accurate information is to videotape your sessions. The benefit of video is it does not lie. You can see almost exactly what happened, at least on a gross surface level. You can also refer back to it endlessly (provided you don’t accidentally erase your footage on a regular basis like I do) and measure your progress with each iteration of video taping. It’s also pretty easy to video your sessions, given the wide availability of smart phones with decent quality cameras.

There are a few downsides to video, though. First of all, relying too much on video makes it easier to outsource the work your brain should be doing. It’s kind of like how relying on a calculator can make it easier to let your long division skills atrophy.

Another downside is it can be hard to capture small, nuanced movement on video. You also really can’t capture how something feels on video. Both of these are important aspects of performance.

2. Internal Video

The second method I focus on with my students is developing an “internal video camera.” This is a skill to be developed over time. The idea is to develop a more and more accurate and clear sense of exactly what happened during a Brazilian jiu jitsu match or movement session. Internal video also improves your ability to remember it afterwards.

Do you have the body awareness to know why you lost the match?

At first you will likely remember big, fuzzy shapes and rough outlines of the major parts of what happened, but with practice and focus, you begin to sharpen the picture and remember with more and more clarity. The process begins with me asking my students directed questions. “Exactly what happened when you tried to choke Angie?” or, “What was the hardest part of climbing the tree the other day?” I explain to them why I am asking this, and over time I get better and better answers which I can work with.

This technique trains my students to develop a strong awareness of what exactly is happening during their matches, which also develops intense focus. My students develop a sense of how the movements work and what each part of the movement does. This is a crucial part of teaching my students how to solve their own problems, and it gives me a sense of how well they grasp the techniques and concepts we are practicing. It also helps fine-tune the students’ visualization abilities, which are a valuable part of practice, particularly when you are injured or unable to train. These are the elements I feel are outsourced by relying too heavily on video footage.

Combining the Two

The major problem with the internal video camera is it can be wildly inaccurate. This is why it’s important to combine actual video with this approach so you can make sure what you think is happening is actually happening. My brief forays into the world of muay Thai practice are a perfect example of this. In practice, I often felt like my technique was perfect and beautiful. Rather than slick, powerful techniques executed with feline grace, video footage revealed I more often looked like a drunk six-year-old throwing a temper tantrum on the heavy bag. Mercifully, my coach expressed my need for improvement more kindly.

The task then becomes to close the gap between what you think you are doing and what you are actually doing. This is where regular practice of both methods and comparison between the two becomes crucial. If I can match the Josh Vogel in my brain with the Josh Vogel on video, I can get better at giving my coaches more and more accurate information, and in turn, they can provide me with better feedback. And that’s the golden combination.

You’ll Also Enjoy:

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Photo 1 courtesy of MovNat.

Photo 2 courtesy of Ana Nieves.

Headline photo courtesy of Jorge Huerta Photography.

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What do you see here?

The Ben Franklin Bridge connecting Camden, New Jersey to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Become a Hammer

Growing up skateboarding in the suburbs of New Jersey in the 1990s, I noticed a distinct shortage of awesome places to skate. My friends and I would go behind Quick Mart near the dumpster, the bump in front of the manhole cover, and the rocky curbs at Latta Court most frequently. As we got older, we would take public transportation to Trenton, Philly, and New York City as much as possible to find more interesting spots to skate.

When there are slim pickings for places to skate, you get creative really quickly. You develop a hawk eye for anything which might have even the smallest nugget of skate value and you milk the hell out of the thing until it breaks, you get yelled at, or until you have exhausted the possibilities. An old desk could be used as a ramp, a platform, a ledge, or something to jump over. A bike rack could be arranged in a number of ways so you could slide, grind, or ollie over it. A piece of plywood dug out from construction trash had equal potential. That’s why the Quick Mart dumpster was great. There was always something to drag out of there to skate on.

Without even noticing it, our view of the world became shaped by our search for skate spots. The old saying, “When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail” sums it up well. It reminds me of the cartoons where one character is starving and his buddy starts to look like a roasted turkey.

As an adult, even though I seldom skateboard anymore in any meaningful way, I still see the potential in a park bench, or a marble ledge, or a hand rail. But now, I see these same things from an expanded view. Where most people see a picnic table as something to eat a nice lunch on, I see it as something skate-able, something I could climb on, crawl over, leap on, lift, or tilt on its side to help me climb onto something higher.

What do you see here?

The Schuylkill river path in southeastern Pennsylvania.

Adapt to Your Environment

That’s cool and all, but how does this help anyone?

The idea is to be able to find a way to play, practice, train, and move anywhere, any time. To not be limited by your thinking and to be able to adapt your skills to the environment. When you adapt to your environment, you will be forced to change the shape your body takes and the way you perform your movements.

My challenge to you is to go to a park or any other public place and look for new ways to practice your movement skills. I don’t care if it’s push ups, squats, crawling, fighting, or some sophisticated combined practice. Find ways to apply your art to the environment. Find three ways you can play on or use a park bench aside from sitting on it. Find three things you can do with a wall aside from leaning on it. View your environment through fresh eyes and see what is around for you to play with.

What do you see here?

The Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

View the World With Fresh Eyes

With this view, the nice, tidy lines drawn in the world start to blur. The municipal building in Philly stops being only the place where I get upset arguing about my city taxes and becomes a place where I can run, jump, climb, and crawl across the various obstacles. The park becomes a place where you can climb trees, throw rocks, or play games with your friends, rather than just a place where you sit on a bench. Even the bench becomes something you can navigate, its use limited only by what you can see.

The world becomes your gym and your playground instead of just a segmented place where different duties are performed. Before you know it, you will start to see new uses for everyday objects. Photos will speak to you differently, and the most boring of places will become a lot more exciting.

More Ways to Ditch the Gym:

• Understanding and Analyzing Your Movement Environment
• How to Make Nature Your Gym
• The Power of 5-Minute Practice Snacks
• New on Breaking Muscle Right Now

Photos courtesy of Josh Vogel.

The post The World Is Your Gym appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

This is perhaps best exemplified in martial arts training. Martial artists practice movements like shadow boxing or grappling, drills on a dummy, and kata (choreographed sequences). These movements make martial arts look pretty. But then sparring happens, and things get ugly.

It’s like going to McDonald’s and looking at the beautiful hamburger picture on the menu. The bun has a nice golden hue, perfectly spaced sesame seeds, and just the right amount of cheese melting lazily down the sides. But what happens when you actually order a burger? You receive a flattened puck hiding between two flat, smashed buns, with a sliver of soggy pickle barely hanging on to the burger patty, like Stallone clinging for dear life to the rock wall in Cliffhanger.

The gap between ideal and real can be pretty big.

Train your body to thrive in compromised situations.

Prepare for Imperfect Conditions

The chaotic conditions of sparring change things. You have to adapt your body’s shape, adjust tension in your body, and use different grips. Before you know it, the sesame seeds are falling off the bun. You have to be able to adapt physically and mentally to the changing conditions.

Natural movement skills present the same issue. Your crawls look beautiful under ideal conditions, like the soft surfaces of mats. But when you change the variables, issues arise quickly. The difference can also be seen in indoor rock climbing versus outdoor, trail running versus treadmill running, and pretty much every other discipline.

Don’t get me wrong: non-chaotic training serves an important purpose. But your kata should always serve your sparring practice. In other words, your training needs to prepare you for chaos and complexity.

A 3-Phase Preparation for Chaos

So how do you practice chaos? Very carefully. Here’s the three-part progressive model I use in Brazilian jiu jitsu, and it applies fantastically here.

1. Drilling

Practice the technique or set of movements until you have a base level of competency. There is little to no chaos here. Drilling is intended solely to build the toys you will play with.

In the video, you can see an example of me drilling a Brazilian jiu jitsu technique with no resistance against my friend. The goal is to get a sense of which sequence my body parts need to move in, and to work on timing and mechanics.

In movement training: You might try using a specific technique to climb a tree.

2. Positional and Situational Sparring

Start off slow and light, then apply some kind of chaotic condition. In jiu jitsu this usually means starting off in a specific position (say, on bottom of a side mount position with someone sitting on top of you). You then try to apply your techniques against increasing levels of resistance from your partner.

Here is a video showing elements of discussion, training, exploring, and feedback. It’s of my brother and I working through a new arm position while being pinned.

In movement training: This could be having a friend lightly throw things at you while you try to dodge them and practice your climbing technique. Troubleshoot and experiment with your partner to get valuable feedback on what worked well and what can be improved.

3. Progressive Rolling and Sparring

Once you’ve put a technique into a slightly chaotic context, gradually build up the difficulty. In jiu jitsu, this is what sparring and rolling are for.

This video shows me using the technique I showed you in section one in a more complex context (I am in the blue uniform). It’s a competition match from about four years ago. In the beginning of the video, you can see me attempt – unsuccessfully – to use the technique in a more demanding and complex situation.

In movement training: This might entail a specific situation that requires multiple skills, including your new technique, to be applied against increasing levels of complexity. For example, you might build an obstacle course in the woods and have a friend chase you across the terrain or throw things at you.

Find Order in Chaos

Your ultimate goal in training is to narrow the gap between the burger on the menu and the one you get in the drive-through window. The grace, power, and finesse you develop when performing solo techniques should also be available under chaotic conditions. Your sense of timing, sensitivity, control, and other micro-skills shouldn’t disappear under stress.

It takes time and progression to strike this balance safely. It’s easy to get carried away in the excitement of doing too much too soon, because it’s a hell of a lot of fun to play this way. Know when to back off, and choose responsible training partners who will push you past your limits without goading you into the hospital.

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Photo courtesy of Dan Halpin.

The post From Rehearsal to Reality: How to Train for Chaos appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

This advice is for anyone who wants to get a workout without taking the traditional gym route. As my former job taught me, you don’t need fancy equipment to build strength, mobility, and endurance that will be useful for real-world situations.

The motto “be strong to be useful” is thrown around a lot in movement circles. One of the best ways to accomplish both goals is to do things the old-fashioned way – the “take the stairs, not the elevator” method. But this is just the start.

This advice is for anyone who wants to get a workout without taking the traditional gym route. As my former job taught me, you don’t need fancy equipment to build strength, mobility, and endurance that will be useful for real-world situations.

Real-Life Training

Before I began my current career as a full-time Brazilian jiu jitsu teacher, I worked for a moving company. I carried all sorts of heavy things while covered in cat hair and dirt.

On an average day, we would meet at the main office at what now, in my spoiled mind, seems like an ungodly hour (7:30 am, I think it was). The owner of the company would put together a crew of three guys and give us a few jobs to get done. We didn’t know the size of the jobs. After getting into the truck and making sure we had our equipment, off we went into the unknown.

The variables were…well, varied. The weather, objects carried, structures of the homes I moved to, distance I had to carry stuff, and crew I worked with – all these conditions made one job wildly different from the next. The skills required were varied as well. We lifted and carried every conceivable object in every conceivable way, with and without a partner. We crawled under tables, through porch crawl spaces, and in old and dirty attics. We climbed, hoisted, and threw things to each other and onto a truck. We walked up and down endless flights of stairs – particularly during jobs in Manhattan, where it seems every apartment is on the fifth floor.

Make Every Day Like Moving Day

I didn’t appreciate it at the time, because I didn’t have the understanding of natural movement skills I do now. Though it was awesome to get paid good money to work out all day, every day.

But having had the retrospective insight of doing this job and later learning the MovNat system and philosophy, I have some ideas for those of you who want to work out and cross train without paying for a gym:

• Help your friends move. No one really wants to help their friends move, which is why everyone magically has six weddings to go to on the same Saturday you are moving. I challenge you to be the person who sees lending a hand as an opportunity to improve, rather than a burden to be avoided. View it as an opportunity to get some practical training time in an unchoreographed situation.

• Perform frequent “mini-moves.” I suggest creating “mini-moves” around your house a few times a week. Pick some heavy and awkward stuff, arrange your furniture in inconvenient ways, and move your stuff around. Carry your air conditioner down to the basement, over the chairs, and back upstairs again. Throw and catch trash bags full of clothes with a partner. Carry your mattress around the house using various grips. Lift your couch up and hold it there while you dig out the remote control you lost last year and that random sock tucked down the back, all covered in dust balls.

• Focus on being effective and efficient. Effective means you get the job done. Efficient means you get the job done with as little energy expenditure as possible. Play with different levels of efficiency and see if you can find clever ways to solve difficult problems (i.e., how do I get a box spring up three flights of narrow stairs alone without killing myself?). See what happens when you do things less efficiently (i.e., can I carry that box spring with one arm while carrying a trash bag full of clothes in the other?).

• Get a moving job. If it makes sense for your life, try getting a job at a moving company. There are lots of things to hate about that line of work, but it’s also a good opportunity to practice a variety of practical movement skills while getting paid.

• Skip the gadgets. There are a ton of energy-saving devices made to help make moving stuff easier. Don’t use them. Pretend you live in the 1920s and don’t have all the fancy straps and tools.

The Power of Situational Complexity

So what does this have to do with natural movement? Everything. When you and a colleague are carrying a sleeper sofa covered in cat hair (from a cat who probably died before Justin Bieber was born) up five flights of narrow stairs on a rainy day, there exists a level of complexity that far exceeds anything you can recreate in a gym.

The skills you acquire while lifting and carrying heavy objects up long inclines of stairs while being sensitive to your partner’s micro-movements and shifts in weight are both intricate and significant. Add to this the fatigue of a ten-hour day, and you have a perfect example of situational complexity.

Looking back, I think it might have been the most MovNat job I’ve ever had.

You’ll Also Enjoy:

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Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

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