Wouldn’t it be simple if life did the same for us? Gave us these little repeated cues that we were engaged in something we were definitely going to need later on?

I believe life does, but the problem is that it gives us these clues when we are too young to be aware of them. The current movement of the fitness industry is giving us some clues right now, but are you paying attention?

The big trends in the fitness industry right now are bodyweight training and movement-based training. They could even be realistically thought of as the same thing, but maybe two sides of the same coin – one is strength, the other mobility. Interestingly, that dual relationship is found within the Hardstyle RKC system as well as in many traditional martial arts. There’s a clue right there. When something has been around for thousands of years and is still practiced en masse you should have a look at why.

Let’s break this down further. Many of these movement-based systems are based on what we did as children – the so-called primitive patterns. In many cases, such as when we use the FMS and Primal Move, we deliberately take people back and practice only these early developmental movements. We see staggering gains in ability almost instantly.

A few years ago I was working with some very talented volleyball players. Like, play on the professional beach circuit good. But some of them were missing some basic athletic movements. Like a guy who could jump high enough to touch the top of the antenna out of the sand (about a three foot jump), yet couldn’t skip. I’m not talking about any fancy double under crazy stuff either. I’m talking about plain old skip like a kid on your way to class. And the more I looked around the more I saw that most of the players had a serious deficiency in the way they moved.

That made things difficult for me, as they were paying me to make them faster and jump higher. I’ve kept this a secret for a while now and hopefully the statute of limitations is out and they won’t come jumping after me, but I didn’t do any actual speed training with them. We did some strength work, so their vertical jumps all increased, but when it came to speed work we did nothing. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

But they all were faster than ever.

My secret?

I treated them like I would six year olds. I don’t mean that we played duck-duck-goose or had nap time after training, what I mean is that I did exactly what I would have done if someone came to me and wanted me to help their child athletically.

I taught them how to move. And if you look at the direction of the fitness industry you can see the exact same clue being shouted at us again and again and again. We see guys like Gray Cook and his Functional Movement System. You see MovNat with Erwan Le Corre. You even now see these guys together going through how moving well should be our first priority. Primal Move is all about playful, childlike, graceful movement, too. And when you listen to top training minds talk about lifting, there’s as much focus on good execution of the lift (movement skill, albeit loaded) as there is programming. Events like Spartan Race have gone from five hundred participants in their first race in 2009 to a quarter million entering their events in 2011. Why?

Because movement is the thing that counts and we are hard wired to enjoy full body functional movement.

The cues are there, staring us squarely in the face. But the modern fitness industry is really good at reinventing itself. We all know functional training is the next big thing, right? We all train whole body movements and we use TRX, kettlebells, or maybe even that dopey ViPR thing, because they’re functional, right?

But how many of us are worried about how we do our reps, instead of how many reps we do? Did we take our old school bodybuilding ‘go hard or go home mentality’ and just start using new implements? Gray Cook states that the tool you use or the manner in which you use it doesn’t make you functional – it’s whether or not it makes you move better as a result.

The FMS allows us to screen people before and after training to make sure we’re on the right path. Primal Move has the Primal Flow Evaluation, which we do before and after to check and make sure that we actually got better from training, not worse. If we’re not concerned about our movement quality, then we’re doing it wrong. That’s not functional training, because the goal of functional training is to help us move better. Ian King has repeatedly said how the modern sedentary lifestyle is ruining our kids’ athleticism by not forcing them to discover their environment and move more.

When I look at all the common threads – that so many smart minds like King, Cook, Le Corre, and Lakatos are all moving in the same direction, that even some of the best athletes I’ve trained needed movement-based training that centered around childhood development, and that events such as Spartan Race are focused on efficiently moving the body – then the message is clear to me.

You will see this again. We need to be worried about movement first and foremost. Our mantra shouldn’t be, “I’m going to move as much as I can and hope that I can handle it.” Instead, as Cook says, it should be “move well, and then move often.”

Photo 1 courtesy of Shutterstock.

Photo 2 courtesy of Erwan Le Corre.

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Having spent the last few weeks looking deeply into overtraining syndrome and speaking with various people who have suffered in varying degrees from it, I’ve been left wondering what on earth we’re doing that our training, the thing that is supposed to be making us “healthy” often leads us in the exact opposite direction.

For once, I’m not actually speaking of performance. If you want to go to the Olympics, then you’re going to need to be okay with seriously beating yourself up over a number of years. But if you’re not that rare 0.1% athlete who may actually make the Olympic games (you know, just like the rest of us), then trying to emulate the training programs, volumes, and intensities of those elite athletes is only going to hurt you.

Where did we go wrong?

It’s not hard to see the loss of perspective on health, vitality, and fitness starting in the fitness and sporting fields as early as the 1920s. Looking at pictures of old time gymnasiums the focus turned from rings, monkey bars, vaulting, and odd implements like Indian clubs and kettlebells, to benches and fixed weights. Before you know it we started to see machines and treadmills.

In the sporting world, as athletes and organizers sought better and better performances, we have seen the death of the amateur spirit of Olympic competition. While professionalism in sport has seen performances improve, the increased standards have seen greater and greater specialization necessary to succeed at the elite level.

The reality is sports and games are a social construct for us – a way to reconnect with our past. Think to popular sports hobbies like the marathon. Peak finishing time in a marathon is about four hours. Have a think about how long a hunt used to take place in tribal cultures – about four hours. Now, instead of having the whole tribe present, flushed with the thrill of the chase and the success of the hunt, we have a group of people isolated physically from each other by iPods and home theatre systems and email. The only chance many of us truly have these days to connect with others on this massive tribal scale is at events like these marathons.

This communal gathering atmosphere is only part of what is missing in today’s fitness world. At one time, maybe many years ago if you’re my age, we didn’t count sets or reps or worry about how many times we ran around the yard. We just did it. We ran and played and explored and jumped and threw and came in when it was dark. We simply played, and as we played we learned to use our bodies and grew stronger and better each time we did a new activity. This mindlessness, scientifically called the flow state by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 1975, describes a mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in an activity. Athletes speak about rare, career defining moments where they were “in the zone” and it is this that they are referring to.

This immersion in an activity is very important. Without being involved in something they find intrinsically rewarding people won’t continue. Tied in with this are elements such as feeling in control – if the task is beyond their abilities it won’t be enjoyable and they will be self-conscious while attempting it. Have you ever seen a giggling, laughing kid worried about if their ass looked fat while they played tag?

One of the best ways we’ve found to fix this in our training is to incorporate playful periods into our training. This concept comes directly from Primal Move and for me, with a background in the super serious world of elite performance, the idea of actually having a “fun break” in training was incredibly foreign. But it works and here’s how we accomplished it:

We begin with a Primal Move warm up. This allows me to see how clients are moving and what is realistic for them in this session. As the warm up continues we introduce various elements of playfulness and some new skills. Usually we finish this section with a game that gets everyone fully warmed up and grinning from ear to ear.

All our clients have an individual plan, so the feeling of control is always there – no one is ever given a task that is beyond him or her. On some days it will be a stretch, but I am a firm believer in allowing clients to always be successful in training. Pushing them to failure leads to a host of negative ramifications long term, the least of which is the loss of the right mental state.

I’m about to ruin one of biggest secrets right now, so I hope not too many of my clients are reading this. While everyone does have their own plan for training, because many of our clients have similar goals, such as training for the RKC, there are quite a few who have plans that are also similar. It’s quite fun to watch two people slyly keeping an eye on each other making sure the other doesn’t get in a set of swings without them. That little game going on between them is actually allowing them to be lost in the action, to only care for the process itself. Another good way to set this up is to have clients share kettlebells and they rest only as long as it takes their partners to do their reps.

The final thing we do is to have birthday workouts. These are a break from the normal structure of training. They are as structured as the days gone by, when you said to a friend, “Race you to that tree over there then back again!” Little challenges thrown at them to get them to band together. Truthfully I don’t mind if I get abused by all of my clients during these – getting them to band together, as a tribe, is the most important thing here. The sense of shared suffering is important as it strengthens the tribal bond and these workouts always include odd exercises such as crawling, adding to the playful nature of them.

So despite the fact we’ve taken many years, decades even, to mess up our idea of fitness, it may only take a very simple thing like play to bring us back right. Community, play, natural movement, fun, and flow – these are the keys to getting fitness right.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Barring injury, the problem is often not where you think it is. The answer to squatting poorly is usually not to squat more. It may not even be as simple as being taught how to squat. The answer might just be in your very first movements as a child.

Life begins on the ground. Our first movements involve looking around us to see what is happening. As we are attracted to voices, we start looking for these people as our eyesight begins to develop. Soon we’re rolling over onto our bellies to initiate the process of crawling, which will eventually lead us to grab hold of something and take our first stuttering steps forward. Once we’ve done that it’s not long until we’re running around like crazy and our uncle is left wondering how on Earth people can keep up with kids’ energy levels for entire days (or maybe that’s just me).

For the first few years of our life we explore our environment with movement. We move towards things, we squat down to inspect them further, and we learn how to control our bodies.

Then we go to school and ruin it all. From the moment we enter school to learn, while our head is being filled with what can mostly only be called trivia, our body is doing the physical equivalent of watching television. For the next twelve years (and more if you go to university) we spend our days sat down learning.

To counteract this we are encouraged to get involved in sports. Early on these sports are fun, mere games that include some more physical exploration of our bodies and how we move. But soon enough we’re again encouraged down a path of sport specialization and instead of learning new skills and moving more we end up performing just a few things over and over.

To become the kind of athlete we see on TV, you’ll need to have had the right parents. But for the rest of us it would probably have been better if we just kept on playing games and kept enjoying ourselves in the act of doing physical things instead of worrying about perform, perform, perform.

It may seem odd to hear this from someone who has spent half his life working with elite athletes, but I’ve always been concerned about the cost, both physically and psychologically, of elite performance. One of the things that makes me worry is that we spend all of our time looking at the end of the spear, the very tip. We look at the final few percentage points – the plyometrics, the supplements, and the high intensity work. But at the bottom of our pyramid of sporting skill lies one thing – movement.

Without good movement skills we cannot become athletic and without being athletic we will never be great athletes.

The very first of our movements support everything else that we add on top of them. Take crawling for instance. The crawl is a cross body pattern – you move your opposing hand and foot at the same time. If we rotate a crawling person ninety degrees and put them into a standing position what you’ll notice is that walking and running are the same movement – just performed at different speeds.

So I’ll ask you this – if you can’t crawl well, what on Earth are you doing when you run? If you can’t crawl without your hips sagging wildly from side to side, or with your knees coming straight up instead of having to go out to the side, or if you lack the ankle flexibility, what makes you think all of that has disappeared when you add speed and load in standing?

I’ll tell you what the result is – it’s injury. So, what can you do about it? Let me share something I’ve discovered – Primal Move. As they explain, “Primal Move’s goal is to make changes through playful, beautiful, and mindful movements. Through better movement you will be able to enjoy whatever you like doing in life. We want to show you the potential we all have in us buried deep down. Primal Charge is our basic level division, that later on you can use as a warm up routine or even a full program.”

What really sticks out in my mind when I look at Primal Move is one thing – you can’t have functional movement without FUN. Read the following excerpt from the Primal Move website to understand why I believe it is the logical progression following our earlier discussion:

The 10 Elements of a Primal Session:

1. Mobility preparation – Normally we use the Primal Flow Assessment drill, so we get clear picture of the movement status of the client or clients.

2. Injury prevention – Rocking, crawling, and light rolling strengthen the most primitive movement patters, lightly loading the mobilized areas.

3. Torso coordination – Tying the body together, starting to use the body as a unit is the goal. No, it is not a core training, whatever that means, it is simply creating more awareness for the linking of upper and lower body, so heavier loads can be handled later.

4. Sub-maximal plyos – Plyos and sub-maximal plyos are not for everyone, especially real depth jumps. Our goal in this part of the practice is adding a cardiovascular component and loading the primitive patterns with a touch of intensity – load makes patterns permanent, so it is vital to have them correct before adding load of any kind whether it is speed or physical weight.

5. Skill training – A very important segment, where the client must be relatively fresh, but now with great body awareness, after completing the first four segments. Every single step of the progressions should be mastered with grace and elegance, from static holds to sport specific speed. This concept of beautiful movement with aesthetically pleasing quality, or Kalos Sthenos as Gray Cook calls it, is a vital element to good movement.

6. Resistance training – Applying the benefits of the full preparation to strengthen the major patterns. Push, pull, lunge, hinge or bend, rotate and gait and even carry are the most important patterns, and many times these can be blended while practicing.

7. Games – This segment is one of our favorites. Our experience is this part of the practice creates fun and a competitive environment, and this is the segment we clearly see how playfulness creates the flow. Remember, there is no functional movement without FUN. Why should kids be the only ones who get to play?

8. Free-flow practice – Almost like a dance, playing with range of motion, speed and intensity – like shadow boxing but with movement. Exploring the movements you have learned and working on the skills within them.

9. Energy system development – this is the most intense part of the session, where our goal is metabolic conditioning. In case Flow practice is not part of the program, ESD can be used for this purpose. Normally created from 3-5 moves, contains hops or jumps for greater physical demand.

10. Mobility cool down – Almost identical to the PFA [Primal Flow Assessment], however can be modified by demand of the whole practice.

Primal Move is taking the functional training world by storm for a very good reason. Already recognized as an official partner of FMS and used by both the Carlson Gracie BJJ team and Krav Maga Global, this somehow brand new, yet old school fitness trend will add to your fitness in ways you’d forgotten you even knew existed.

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