A few key reflections can help us put this in perspective and bring a bit of life back to our practice.

The Evolutionary Perspective on Health

I love this concept. It’s brilliantly simple. I first heard these questions from Dr. Andreo Spina at the Functional Range Conditioning seminar. If we want a clear picture of how to organize our training, we can ask ourselves these questions to point the way:

1. What did the human animal evolve to do?

Let’s pump the brakes before the paleo fans go into a frenzy, extrapolating some idealized version of our ancestral behaviors. We don’t know the specifics what the human animal evolved to do. However, based on contextual cues we can make some guesses:

• Food didn’t exist; plants and animals did. There was likely quite a bit of moving through natural environments to acquire plants and animals. And of course, the decidedly unsexy acts of processing said plants and animals into something we might call food.

• There was no work and no Netflix. We likely spent a lot of time sitting around in leisure.

• We weren’t always undisputed food chain champs. As with most other animal species, we’d have to play defense now and then, moving quickly, outmaneuvering or outsmarting the predators.

• We didn’t spend much time alone. When survival is at stake, you tribe up real quick. And modern neuroscience has shown us that our brains are geared for social interactions.

• Oh, yeah. Sex. You and I wouldn’t be here without it.

If we put this into a rough sketch, humans as we know them came into being frequently moving together in diverse ways through complex environments.

2. What do we currently do with it?

By and large, we do large bouts of nothing, with the occasional burst of something called fitness. And we do it alone, because relationships require a scary level of vulnerability. You know this. I know this. Which leads us to…

3. What do we do on a daily basis to address the deficiency?

Here’s where that uncomfortable issue of choice comes into play. What will you choose to do every single day to make up for such a broad gap?

The first step is reclaiming your body’s ability to move. Improving your capacity to do human things (see question #1) makes life easier. But if the extent of your fitness journey is relegated to the prep phase, you’re still missing a step. Get off the bench and go live.

As we say in MovNat, it’s time to reclaim your nature.

You can’t take care of your body once in a while:

Mobility Matters Every Day

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I think they’re fun, and I feel good doing them. Who cares if there are better ways to build upper body strength? And how much unilateral stability of the legs do we really need to develop for day-to-day life? These moves aren’t a goal in and of themselves. They’re a step above party tricks, but I don’t care.

When I move, I move for me.

I move to explore and express. I want to explore my body and my surroundings. I want to express my capacity and my self. There are no sick gains, and I’m not too concerned with PRs. It’s a joyful practice, one that’s rewarding for its own sake. Everybody (and every body) is capable of getting to this point.

I didn’t get here by accident. In fact, there’s a systematic framework that allows us to find such freedom in our practice. We can think of it in two stages: prerequisites and play.

Prerequisites for a Joyful Practice

Because we live in a physical body that follows physical rules, we need to be mindful of those rules. When we aren’t, we expose ourselves to needless injury and stalled progress. We get good at what we do often. We get better when we gradually increase the stress.

We’re human animals that have adapted to an alien environment. We suffer from a lack of both quantity and quality of movement, a wicked combination if ever there was one. Flat floors, climate-controlled rooms, uniform textures, and everything else we know and love have left us in bodies that just don’t work the way bodies should.

Nature doesn’t need a warm up. You and I do.

So how do we get this body back on track? There are three main stages.

Awareness

Think of this as mapping the territory. You wouldn’t go on a long road trip without a working GPS. How can we practice effectively and efficiently if we don’t have a clear sense of what we’re working with?

I find that the easiest way to tune in is to spend a few minutes lying on the floor. When you’re there, ask yourself:

• What’s your embodied understanding of your central axis, the spine?
• How familiar are you with the three bodyweight centers of head, ribs, and pelvis?
• Do you carry your weight evenly on both sides of the body?

If you don’t have a good grasp on self-awareness, you’re going to have a hell of a time controlling your body in more complex tasks. Forget handstands, snatches, and the rest. Get familiar with your body in stillness. Then own it in motion. Which brings us to…

Mobility

The biggest limiting factor we’re going to come up against is mobility. As we’ve talked about before, mobility is pretty important. If your joints can’t actively control the required range of motion, then we’re not equipped to perform that movement.

If you want to practice handstands, you better be sure your wrists can move into 90° of extension and your shoulders can reach all the way overhead. If you want to squat, your ankles need adequate dorsiflexion, and hips need to be able to flex too.

A safe way to check your prerequisites is to see if your joints can actively move into the range of motion you need to access. Can you actively extend your wrist 90°? Can you actively flex your ankle into its necessary range of motion? If not, you don’t control that range of motion. And when you don’t control that range of motion, you do not pass “Go” without setting yourself up for injury. When you have adequate control over your joints, our next step is…

Capacity

Finally, something that looks like training! When we build capacity, we’re focused on those familiar traits of strength, power, and cardiovascular endurance. I don’t need to tell you much about this. There are plenty of smart people on Breaking Muscle who do that.

When we establish a foundation of awareness, mobility, and capacity, then it’s time to play. This is where we really start to pick up new skills and find freedom in our practice.

The Power of Play

As Frank Forencich of Exuberant Animal says, “Absence of play is not a sign of maturity, it is a sign of pathology.” Play is pretty difficult to define, but there are certainly some common themes:

• It’s movement that isn’t directly related to survival
• It’s spontaneous and voluntary
• It isn’t work
• It often involves repetition with variation
• It requires an absence of stressors

Some folks simply sum it up by saying that play occurs when animals are warm, fat, and happy.¹

Why Is Play So Effective?

Play really taps into our primal neural wiring. In a nutshell, our nervous systems crave a few things:

• Safety
• Function
• Variety

These factors are the fundamental architecture of our neural performance. If we have an immediate threat or stressor nearby, we revert to survival mode. Once we’re safe, we can work on functional tasks: moving from point A to point B, picking things up, and so on. And variety is brain candy. We aren’t machines, and we don’t work like them. Time and time again we see that variation enhances the acquisition of new skills.

An emphasis on play brings a new level of autonomy to your practice, which is also linked to improved motor skill learning.² When you set your own rules, enjoyment goes up, and perceived exertion goes down. You learn and perform more without the feeling of grinding through rep after rep.

Now we start to get a clue as to why play is so effective for skill acquisition and better movement. It’s inherently stress-free, it brings about variation in habitual patterns, and it’s just plain fun. Really the only goal of play is to continue playing; if we happen to accomplish some extraneous task (like a handstand) along the way, so much the better. Who could ask for more?

Move For Your Own Sake

How nice would it be to let go of the compulsion around your practice? There’s no need for the nagging thoughts of:

• I should be doing XYZ
• I really ought to blah, blah, blah
• I’ll never be as cool as that-one-guy-I-follow-on-Instagram

Your practice is your own. And it can be infinitely rewarding for its own sake.

Once we get our bodies back to baseline it’s time to unbox our practice. Who cares about calories? What does lifting more weight let us do? Training only takes us so far. Movement connects us to ourselves, our environment, and the people around us. In this somatic ecology there is a beautiful context for growth, both physical and emotional. That’s a joyful practice.

Life is too short for fitness to be so serious:

Are You Having Any Fun?

References:

1. Lewis, Kerrie P. “From landscapes to playscapes: The evolution of play in humans and other animals.” The Anthropology of Sport and Human Movement: A Biocultural Perspective (2010): 61-89.

2. Wulf, Gabriele, and Rebecca Lewthwaite. “Effortless motor learning? An external focus of attention enhances movement effectiveness and efficiency.” Effortless Attention: A New Perspective in Attention and Action (2010): 75-101.

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Before proceeding further, it might be a good idea to settle on some definition of health. I think that we can find some common ground in agreeing that a healthy person is one who is free of injury and degenerative disease, and physiologically and psychologically sound. Now let’s take it a step further and look at the goals of sport.

Sports Goals and Liabilities

The goals of sports are to equal or exceed certain goal numbers, outperform other individuals, and to show consistent improvement under increasingly more challenging conditions. This almost always leads to situations in which the structural integrity of the tissues is tested, and frequently succumbs. It can also develop physiological conditions that are detrimental to health, and in all too many situations injurious to the psyche.

In my own sport of weightlifting, it is not uncommon for practitioners to experience varying degrees of joint trauma that can lead to arthritis in the aging athlete’s body, not to mention connective tissue strains and sprains and ligament calcification and bone spurs.

Sports that require reduced body fat can cause hormonal and glandular disruption among their practitioners, as well as eating disorders. Sports that require excessive bodyweight increases can also adversely affect the metabolism.

Among youth sports and some adult athletes, parental and coaching psychological abuse can lead to damage to the psyche as well as difficulties with socialization and substance abuse.

A Look Back in History

At one point in American history (say in the mid-20th century), it was normal for sports to be regarded as adolescent activities played primarily by high school aged children, and subsequently by elite-level athletes at the university level. There was very little organized adult sports activity. At that time, much of the population was rural, and made a living through manual labor. Sports were also pretty much a male domain.

If you took the athletes of that era who grew up performing physical labor, and where the elite ones were chosen for sport teams, some argument might have been made that the athletes were the healthiest individuals. This could probably make a convincing argument for the relationship between health and sports.

Then came the ‘70’s.

Sometime during the 1970’s, heart disease became the leading cause of death among Americans. This was undoubtedly due to the switch from manual labor to more sedentary occupations, as well as the move from rural settings to urban, and the incongruity of living in a city and eating a farmer’s diet. This led to the jogging craze that encouraged millions of adults to take up competitive and recreational running. There was no selection for this group, just the ability to buy expensive running shoes.

When adults got bored of running and sought out other types of sports, the idea became firmly planted that sports could lead to improved health. While it may have proven true in many cases, the result is that far too many unsuitable individuals are involved in competitive sports at a level that is definitely not conducive to good health.

Why the Connection Survives

We have been able to learn a great deal about human physiology by studying athletes, and we’ve learned some training approaches that have benefits for general health. We also like to use specialized equipment and clothing developed for athletes for those that are not lifestyle athletes. Since physical fitness has emerged as a populist movement, the public’s desire to associate itself with athletes has also contributed to the association. Subsequently, many non-athletes have adopted what they believe are behavioral norms of athletes and inserted them into their own training regimens. The results in all too many cases are injuries and conditions that are hardly conducive to good general health.

There are some valid connections between competitive athletics and physical activity for the improvement of general health. Be they training principles, clothing, gear, or attitudes, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish the blurred boundary between the two domains.

Let’s Stop Confusing the Sports and Health

I believe the confusion results because the leadership is not often clear about the two concepts. When you have top athletes advertising exercise equipment, exercise clothing, food supplements, and training approaches, the association is very powerful in the minds of the uninformed. Likewise, many leaders in the field of physical fitness use sports imagery and sports association to market training facilities, equipment and strategies.

At some point, a distinction should be drawn so that those interested in improving their general health and fitness are not misled into potentially dangerous pathways. Rather, they should place the filter of “Is this good for me?” on their approaches before embarking on them. Remember, the entire goal of sports is to “go beyond your limits,” and that’s where the damage is done.

Sport can still serve as an effective model for general fitness:

How Sports Performance Can Fix Functional Training

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