Chapter 20: Learning Techniques - The Practice of Natural Movement

Now that I have underlined the importance of natural foot function and detailed the pros and cons of controlled and uncontrolled environments, are you itching to get some Natural Movement going already? Well, I want to share a lot more information with you to help you practice as optimally as possible. However, before I get into those details, it isn’t a bad idea for you to experiment with some basic Natural Movement practice. The information in this chapter will make even more sense after you’ve had some actual physical movement experience. I invite you to browse the pages of the book where I explain and demonstrate techniques and strongly recommend that you get started with ground movement techniques (see Chapters 24 and 25), which you might be able to do on the floor right where you are. A few minutes should suffice for now. Be curious, explorative, and willing to experiment freely and safely. At this stage, structure or programming is not a concern; there’s no need to complicate anything.

Spend a certain amount of time daily—fifteen minutes, for instance. If possible, practice more than once a day. Even a few minutes devoted to short sessions throughout the day is great, and that arrangement—which for many people is most feasible on weekends—might be more beneficial than a single hour-long session in one day. Reoccupy and reawaken your body. Feel free and happy to move without judgment or a preconceived idea of how much movement you should do. Your first experience in Natural Movement is not about counting but about feeling.

Remember, you don’t need to be fit to practice movement; the practice of movement will make you fit. As you explore and practice a wide repertoire of movements and focus on quality and efficiency, you will trigger many essential and beneficial adaptations—physiological and neural—that will occur without the need for supplemental drills. This functional potential has been dormant and has been awaiting the natural physical behavior required to make it become active and operational again.

Once you feel ready to start approaching practice in a more committed manner, to dig deeper into technique acquisition, and to structure your sessions more, you will need to learn and apply the information that follows.

Start Fresh

 

It is quite challenging to learn, assimilate, or improve movement patterns if you are already mentally and physically tired. Get your sleep right so you’re sufficiently rested. If the goal of a practice session is to learn or improve technique, you certainly don’t want to start with a grueling “workout” that physically drains you. Being tired—physically, mentally, or both—is the best way to impair the assimilation of new movement patterns. In fact, practicing technique while you’re tired can not only prevent you from improving but could cause you to acquire several inefficiencies.

Movement Preparation

 

The term warm-up suggests that all you need to do before any kind of movement is to jog on the spot or do jumping jacks to get your heart pumping and stretch each body part separately. Movement preparation is a more accurate description in the sense that there are diverse ways to get prepared for movement. I use both terms to express the same idea; just keep in mind that whenever I use the term warm-up, I’m suggesting more than the conventional idea of warming up.

Movement preparation isn’t optional; it’s an inherent part of any session because it places you in the best mental and physical conditions for your practice—which in most cases should involve more than just raising your heart rate and stretching your body. Movement preparation generally implies the mobilization of the whole body for general movement, or of specific muscle groups or body parts for a particular movement or effort. In other words, you might do a general movement preparation, a specific movement preparation, or both.

A winning effort begins with preparation.”

—Joe Gibbs

 

General Warm-Up

A wonderful general movement preparation includes ground movements and breath control because these two things mobilize practically all the joints and muscles in the body, which makes the muscles more active and the nervous system and mind more “alert.”

However, people who have been physically inactive for a long time may also use the “Local Positional Control” movements that I describe in Chapter 17, before you do complete movements.

However, the movements available for warming up are, of course, not restricted to ground movements; your movement preparation may include movements in any Natural Movement skill. The rule of thumb is to use simple, low-intensity, low-complexity, and low-volume movements. You obviously can’t “warm up” by going full-on right off the bat. Although it seems counterintuitive to jump as part of a warm-up routine, you might perform jumps at such low-level intensity—jumping an inch high or a few inches forward at first—that it may absolutely fit the purpose of a warm-up. In fact, the only difference you may notice between warm-up and the rest of the practice does not lie mostly—if at all—in the type of movements you do, but in the intensity at which you perform them.

When you do a general warm-up, it is best to already enter a mindful state to pay attention to mental and physical relaxation, body sensations, and breath control. If you feel that areas of your body need more attention and time, movement preparation is exactly the right time to do that. Check out your sensations as if you are screening your entire body through slow motion. Soon you will feel ready to perform the movements a little more dynamically, with intermittent accelerations that will prepare you for even more dynamic movement and activate your energy systems for the more intense efforts ahead.

The younger and the more physically active you are, the faster you can warm up, and you can use a greater intensity. Conversely, if you are older or physically inactive (or both), you should take longer to complete your warm-up and keep them really gentle in intensity. Movement preparation is not a one-size-fits-all proposition, and one person’s warm-up may feel like a full workout to someone else. In fact, a healthy and trained individual can start moving with intensity at almost any time with relatively little preparation.

It’s true that when you’re using your movement skills in the real world, movement preparation is usually a luxury; you usually need to start cold. Advanced movement practitioners occasionally practice a cold start by performing challenging moves or intense efforts with little or no movement preparation to get the body ready. These practitioners also have a lifestyle that enables them to stay healthy and keep themselves ready in a pinch. I strongly recommend against beginners trying a cold start because it can cause immediate injury. Advanced practitioners know their bodies and know what they’re doing.

NOTE

 

When you need to do movements unexpectedly in the real world, even the briefest of warm-ups can be helpful. For example, if I need to jump to a depth and land without first preparing specifically for that movement, I do a quick, short series of squats on the spot to simulate the deceleration and muscular contraction specific to landing, which quickly mobilizes the joints and muscles I need for the upcoming landing. A combination of “context-free” physical and mental mobilization helps a lot when warming up properly is not possible.

 

As I mentioned previously, your ability to warm up quickly and effectively has a lot to do with how you live your life. If you are maintaining your body in motion frequently throughout the day on top of training regularly, you are very likely able to be ready for more intense movement practice after just a few minutes of low-intensity movement preparation.

In any case, take your time when you prepare for movement. There is no predesigned, standard warm-up routine that is appropriate for all people or situations. You can design your own warm-up, create several, or just go by feel and never do the same warm-up twice. All ground movements are wonderful for general movement preparation.

Specific Warm-Up

The specific warm-up is about ensuring that your body is specifically ready for a particular training emphasis in terms of either motor control, strength, energy systems, or all of the above. The purpose of the specific warm-up is to help you avoid injury and prime yourself for optimal performance.

In a specific warm-up, you follow simple linear progressions. For instance, your sense of balance can be relatively dormant and needs to be sharpened with a few minutes of practice before you feel that your central nervous system is fully awake and can do more complex balancing movements. If you are going to lift heavy loads and reach your maximum levels of strength, you want to start with light loads and progressively get heavier instead of trying to immediately lift the heaviest object you can. If you intend to do sprints, you want to prepare your cardiovascular and metabolic systems by doing warm-up runs and progressively accelerating. Last, if you intend to go through a “course” involving all three movements and physical efforts I’ve described—or more—then a specific warm-up is required for each type of movement and effort you expect to do.

A simple example of specific warm-up before heavy lifting would be to start with a light load and progressively increase the weight through single repetitions with a bit of additional weight each time until you reach close to the level of intensity where you want to train your lifting movement.

Technical Self-Learning

 

Feeling relaxed but alert and ready? It’s time to focus on technique—one at a time of course! Pick a movement. Look at the photos of the whole movement sequence and read the descriptions. At this point, you’re mentally absorbing information—conceptual knowledge—that you’ll need to experience physically through movement. Reading gives you insights; experience turns these insights into a reality-based feedback and experiential knowledge. Of course, there’s no guarantee that you’ll immediately understand and assimilate the insights or perform immediately with efficiency; hence, the need for practice and mindful repetitions.

Assimilating technique has a lot to do with kinesthetic memory, which means that once you learn a movement pattern, you can reproduce it because you have memorized the set of positions, the timing, the sequence it follows, and the sensation it generates. The feedback of internal sensations during the movement is what makes you instantly feel that you’re doing the particular pattern and lets you know how well you’re doing it. Memory is about consistency and repeatability. You don’t want to just “explore” new movement patterns; you want to learn and memorize the efficient patterns so you can reproduce them any time you want or need them.

There will be many obstacles on your path to technical mastery! Keep in mind that it isn’t technique that fails us; we fail technique, and we do so for reasons we must become able to identify.

Are you ready to pay attention to the details of your movement, breathing and position, sequence and timing, tension and relaxation, points of support, body-weight shifting, and body sensations in diverse areas of your body? Go for it! BUT WAIT! Make sure that you first pick the simplest movements and start at a low level of intensity and complexity.

Feedback and Assessment

 

Attention to impeccable movement execution never stops—even for expert movers—but mindfulness doesn’t stop the moment a movement has been physically executed; it leaves a “trace” in your central nervous system, a feedback that you want to pay attention to support continuous improvement. After you’ve practiced a technique a few times and you have some experience and feedback, you might have some ideas on what or how to self-correct. But that won’t necessarily fix your patterns immediately or fully.

Self-correcting logically starts with assessing the issues. Do you encounter inefficiencies? What are they? Before you ask yourself what to do with your feedback, so you can modify and improve your movement, how do you know for sure that such feedback is accurate and complete? You need to make sure you have quality feedback. When you practice movement, you can use the following forms of feedback:

• Proprioception: This is basically a sense of the alignment and position of your body as well as the sense of how movement feels: stable or unstable, tense or relaxed, coordinated or clumsy, and so on. Everyone, regardless of the level of efficiency of their movements, receives this type of feedback. The key is to pay attention to it. Slow movement practice helps hone this sense…if you are mindful, of course.

• Visual input: Watching your positions and movement patterns, which is possible when you go slowly or break down a complex sequence into discrete components, provides feedback. Occasionally practicing in front of a mirror can provides very useful visual feedback, and filming your movement is even more valuable because you can watch the movement repeatedly and even see it in slow motion. This type of external visual feedback can help you notice inefficient patterns you never knew you had. You can also get feedback from another person, but that feedback is useful only if the person knows what to pay attention to and how to interpret what they see, which would imply that they are a MovNat certified trainer or at least are well-versed in Natural Movement.

As you become aware of each new aspect of your movement pattern and with every modification of your technique that you notice, you should ask yourself these three fundamental questions:

• Was it intentional?

• Was it beneficial to my performance?

• Can I replicate it at will?

Your goal is to become in control of every minute aspect of your technique. Any change you make should be intentional and should support performance (such as when you have to adapt to the environment). Techniques are mastered only when they can be both replicated at will and also modified at will any time necessary and to the extent necessary.

Before you rush to fix issues you have observed, felt, or seen, it is useful to ask yourself the three fundamental questions covered in the next sections.

Is It a Cause or a Symptom?

Knowing the difference between causes and symptoms is essential. Let me give you examples. You’ve placed a simple 2x4 board on the ground, and you’re walking across it. Your arms are flailing, and your whole body is tensing in a vain effort to remain stable. You may think that you lack core stability and that you are way too tense. Indeed—good observation!

You might think you should step down to do some conventional “core strength” drills and other relaxation routines, but have you even checked the positioning of your feet? The position of your feet affects what happens “upstairs,” so if your feet are misplaced on the board, your upper body is going to struggle to compensate for the unstable base of support. What your arms are doing is a mere symptom of the issue with your feet. Make sure that your feet are centered with the board, and you might immediately enjoy considerable stability and relaxation. Instead of inefficiently chasing multiple symptoms, you have tackled the single cause. Voilà.

Here’s another example: Every time you jump forward with the aim of landing and standing on a specific area, you end up off balance and stepping forward. You notice that you tend to hold your breath and to unnecessarily tense up all over upon landing, so you manage to breathe better and relax, but you still step off balance and forward each time you land. You haven’t noticed yet that you keep looking down at your landing spot, so your head is forward and down when you land, which shifts your center of gravity outside your base of support and throws you off balance. In this case, inefficiencies such as stiffness, intermittent breathing, and mental tension aren’t the cause of the lack of balance; they’re symptoms generated by lack of positional control. By fixing your head and neck position, which is the cause of the issue in this particular example, you will be able to perform stable landings while relaxing your breath, body, and mind.

I’ve explained that breathing, position, sequence, timing, tension, and relaxation are totally interconnected in movement. Bad timing can mess with a whole sequence, bad position can result in tension, bad tension messes with position and timing, and so on. Each aspect affects another and identifying what is the cause and what is the symptom and then self-correcting is part of the efficiency of your self-learning practice.

Is It Physical or Psychological?

Is the mind or the body the cause of the issue? Is the problem in the hardware or software? You might be quick to blame your body for issues that stem from a lack of attention or self-confidence. Conversely, you could be quick to blame your lack of attention because you don’t realize or acknowledge that you may have a physical limitation that prevents you from performing the way you want.

Physical causes may have to do with

• A lack of mobility, stability, strength, or all of the above.

• A structural issue in your body, an injury, or a sensation of pain (explained or not). Poor technique doesn’t necessarily imply dysfunction, but dysfunction or pain always leads to poor technique.

• Levels of volume, intensity, or complexity exceeding your current ability. Such mismatch ruins your efforts to learn new patterns or to improve them and also magnifies or worsens your underlying inefficiencies; it also causes early fatigue, which only aggravates the problem.

With regard to physical causes of inefficiency, you need to be patient and progressive, and to first address the particular functional, physiological, or health issue(s) you’re are dealing with that prevent you from performing the way you should. You may need to emphasize particular movements that help with a specific issue (for instance, ground movements to help with mobility restrictions), change your lifestyle (such as by making dietary adjustments to reduce inflammation in your joints), or undertake a specific therapy until the limiting issue is solved.

Mental causes may have to do with aspects of mindfulness (remember principle 11, “Mindful”):

• Distraction or lack of concern: Your body may do a movement correctly, and your central nervous system knows how to do it correctly. You need to invest your mind, pay attention, and genuinely value efficiency of movement to see improvement.

• Mental tension: Negative emotions such as agitation, frustration, impatience, and negative self-judgment disrupt your ability to focus on efficient movement execution. “Overthinking,” which is a form of mental tension that causes you to think hard and even constantly self-talk as you move, can also be a problem.

• Lack of self-confidence: How much confidence do you have in your ability to learn? Do you believe you can learn with relative ease or with full comprehension? What is your past experience of learning something new? Self-efficacy is rapidly reduced or even completely absent when you don’t trust in your ability or when you’re self-conscious, such as when people watching makes you uncomfortable.

• Fear: Unless you are an experienced Natural Mover and you’re dealing with higher level of practice that involves both risk and danger, you should not fear any movement. Ask yourself if you’re trying to do something that is physically beyond what you can do effectively or safely. If that’s the case, you need to lower the intensity and complexity of the challenge so you can feel secure and relax your mind. To learn more about this, study Chapter 21. If a movement involves zero danger—the risk is that you might fail but you won’t be injured—then your fear is real, but the reason for it isn’t.

• Mental rigidity: If you refuse to try a movement in a different way, you are being mentally rigid. For instance, you might insist that you can make a given movement work a certain way even though that way is clearly not the most efficient. Another aspect of rigidity can be when you insist on performing a complete technique rather than deconstructing it to fix the one issue that’s causing the problem and needs to be corrected. Either way, you aren’t improving, and every inefficient repetition only reinforces the issue you have.

• Uncontrolled enthusiasm or a desire to show off: Feeling happy, free, and wild is great, but the body still needs to respond to and respect natural laws. A reckless movement behavior can easily turn you into a jackass and result in injury. Here’s an anecdote: I was training a group by having them slowly and carefully balance on thin logs that were set at an incline running from the ground to a height of 3 feet. The logs were a bit wobbly. Immediately after I had announced that we were ready to move on to the next station, one of the students decided to attempt to literally run up one of the logs. He fell to the ground, hit his head, and lost consciousness for a few seconds. After recovering—and being checked out at a nearby hospital—he admitted that his ego had gotten the best of him and that he thought he could do better than everyone else. Everyone in the group was surprised because this person was adept at yoga and meditation and had been exhibiting very tranquil and humble behavior. The point is that this man’s body didn’t fail him; his mind forced his body to rush to its self-defeat.

Is It a Simple Motor-Control Issue?

Some inefficiencies relate to motor-control issues, although I consider the issues in this category to be issues that stem from the brain rather than the rest of the body. Imagine you possess the physical, functional ability to do a movement, and you are 100 percent focused each time you perform the movement. However, your body won’t do the movement right until the pattern has been “written” in the brain and recorded by the central nervous system. Indeed, if your brain has not learned to operate the body in a very specific way—which has to do with motor control—the body is not the cause of the issue; the central nervous system is. Here are some examples:

• While jumping and landing, are you having trouble swinging your arms in sequence (forward, backward, and forward again) with impeccable timing? Your jumping movement looks and feels great except this arm sequence never “wants” to come out right. It’s either too early, too late, too short, or too ample. You don’t need upper-body strength drills; you just need to acquire the right pattern.

• Another very typical issue in learning new techniques is that as you attempt to improve a particular aspect of your movement, other inefficiencies may worsen or inefficiencies that had disappeared might return. Say you want to fix the arm-sequence issue, so you make changes. You may manage to fix it, but the fix might come at the expense of inefficiencies appearing somewhere else in the movement—one step forward, two steps backward. This kind of “trade-off” happens when your central nervous system can’t pay attention to all the details at the same time, so it’s forced to prioritize efficiency in some aspect of your movement while sacrificing it in others.

• A similar issue is a lack of “mind-body movement synchronicity,” which typically happens when movement goes too fast for your attention to keep up. For instance, you become so focused on the takeoff step that when you land a few seconds later, you are still focusing on the takeoff. You’re too late to be mindful about the landing! In other words, your mind is out of sync with the timing of the body’s motion.

As you practice Natural Movement, it’s likely that you will encounter most, if not all, of the diverse types of issues I’ve mentioned so far that prevent you from performing optimally.

After you have some feedback and a better sense of what goes wrong and what goes right in your movement, you need to know what strategies to use to fix the inefficiencies and effectively improve movement.

Self-Correction

 

While practice may help, psychological issues that impair your practice cannot be solved by practice alone. Self-reflection, honestly assessing and acknowledging negative emotions about yourself that work against you, positive self-talk, and meditation are some of the strategies you may use in addition to movement practice to help with such issues.

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.”

—Hosea Ballou

 

Physical issues may be partially or totally solved by practice—something I have witnessed many times—or they might not be solved at all. The outcome really depends on what the issue is. For example, if movement causes pain, it is highly recommended that you consult a physical therapist of some sort. I am obviously not talking about minor and temporary pain as you move and is naturally linked to the particular movement or effort you are doing, such as a slight discomfort in your joint or burn in your muscles. You have to consider the magnitude of your pain, its frequency, and its duration before you decide to rush to a specialist. There are too many possible causes of physical issues and too many therapy modalities for me to be able to recommend anything more specific. For instance, a lower-back issue could have to do with a structural issue, too much sitting and not enough physical activity, too much stress and negative emotions, body inflammation, bad footwear, or all of the above. Aches and pains are common problems all people deal with in their lives, sometimes chronically, though they tend to be limited in magnitude, duration, and frequency in healthy people.

Generally speaking, therapists tend to have an immediate explanation for issues, which always happen to be exactly what they are trained to treat. Many are quick at pointing out so-called “dysfunctions”; however, physical limitations or symptoms you have may not be dysfunctions but mere deficiencies that movement practice and a better lifestyle could rapidly help with. The healthier you can make your lifestyle, the better you will feel and perform. It is all interrelated. Healthy lifestyle involving quality food and sleep, daily Natural Movement, physical therapy, the reduction of stress, meditation, and time in nature might be the most potent combination for a strong, healthy, happy life. This being said, a healthy lifestyle does not prevent all physical ailments, nor does it necessarily fix them.

Let’s talk about strategies for fixing inefficient movement execution when the cause isn’t psychological or physical.

Commitment, Consistency, Patience

Speaking metaphorically about movement patterns, I would say that ingrained patterns are “sticky” and new ones are “slippery.” Rarely can you fix a technical issue with a single repetition. Being patient means staying calm and committing to improvement regardless of how many times you must rehearse the same movement, even if the process takes longer than you would like it to.

Spending a lot of time on anything doesn’t guarantee that you become “world-class” at it; mastery is more than a matter of practice. Mastery depends on so many more variables than the amount of time you spend on practice—for example, how you do the practice, what mindset and degree of attention you have, your individual talent, your physical and mental health, and so on. While progress for beginners is often spectacular in scope and speed—because mindful practice precipitates improvement—you can’t expect big revelations and breakthrough all the time. In fact, progress is often made of minute changes; they can be a series of “micro-epiphanies” that are so subtle and imperceptible that you may not even notice them. You’re making progress with every mindful move or repetition without necessarily realizing it.

So, you should commit to being consistent at seeking and obtaining efficiency. A single efficient repetition is not a mark of consistency, but performing several efficient repetitions in a row is. Regardless of the strategy you use to improve your movement efficiency, it doesn’t happen unless you are mindful, of course, but also committed, consistent, and patient.

Prioritization

When you first practice a technique, your attention may not be directed at anything in particular until you observe something happening or notice something that’s bothering you, and it naturally draws your attention.

Most of the time, like most beginners, you’ll be dealing with more than a single inefficiency. Don’t try to address all the inefficiencies at once! Unless you have great mastery of your body, you won’t be able to do it; you’ll just waste time and energy. A step-by-step approach is much more effective than trying to address all your inefficiencies in one go. If you try to fix all inefficiencies at once, you might end up fixing none.

Ideally, you should tackle the most important inefficiency you have identified rather than taking on the most obvious issue. The most important inefficiencies are those that cause the problem—not the inefficiencies that are symptoms that have been generated by other issues. Fixing a “root” inefficiency always helps reduce or fix related inefficiencies. Let’s say you notice that you tend to chest breathe or intermittently hold your breath and to be overly tense while doing a movement. It’s very likely that you are physically tense because you are not breathing properly. You likely will fail at improving if you insist on trying to relax without first addressing your breathing. The first order of business is resetting your breathing pattern to make sure you maintain ample, relaxed abdominal breathing the next time you perform the movement. In this case you will keep focusing on your breathing until you consistently observe and feel it has been fixed as you perform several repetitions in a row. Then you may move on to another issue, making sure the one you just tackled doesn’t come back, until you have taken care of them all.

Patterns of superfluous muscular tension can be some of the hardest aspects of practice to reset. Any pattern that has been rehearsed thousands of times either through day-to-day habits or through specialized training has become deeply ingrained in your neuromuscular memory, and those patterns are often the trickiest to replace.

Resetting the Body and Mind

Because we are mental creatures, we tend to think and analyze. However, overthinking can be a real issue. There is nothing wrong with thinking about your movement—just don’t do it as you move unless you are moving very slowly and marking pauses by holding positions with the goal of learning and improving.

Too often we are conditioned to think about quantity, and we mentally count the number of repetitions we do as if the number of repetitions is the most important aspect of our practice. Focusing on the number of repetitions makes efficiency secondary. Some people tend to rush from one repetition to another without any “down time,” as if movement is all about conditioning, speed, and intensity.

It’s time to press the reset button. Resetting is a little like taking a break; it’s a form of brief rest for the body and mind that enables you to relax and prepare for another attempt. During this time, you can assess your tensions, breathe deeply, quiet your mind, and reset your focus and intention. You can also rapidly process some of the feedback you just got from your last execution. We know that perception—how you mentally approach movement—influences physical behavior, but it’s also true that your movement behavior and experience influences your perception.

By mentally directing your body to perform a specific way to modify your physical behavior, such modified physical behavior will in turn influence how you mentally approach and perceive movement, and you will be establishing a mutually beneficial mind-body interaction in the process.

Being mindful through your repetitions with the goal of constant improvement means that instead of doing ten repetitions of the same movement in a row without any time in between to process each repetition, you actually perform the movement ten times with a brief moment in between each execution. (Think of it as ten sets of one rep rather than one set of ten reps.)

Otherwise, you may mindlessly perform repetition after repetition and wonder why quantity does not naturally generate quality. Sometimes, if you feel tired of—or frustrated by—a given movement, you might decide to switch to something completely different for a moment. In fact, this is an inherent part of “combo practice,” which is a form of circuit training. In that case, the variety of movements is not aiming at metabolic conditioning but at improving both movement and practice efficiency by allowing your central nervous system to reset not by pausing any physical activity but thanks to alternating movement patterns.

The “One Shot” Principle

This practice strategy is an extension of the “reset” principle, and you will indeed need to reset your body and mind to make it work. The idea is to treat each repetition (each execution) as if you have only one chance to do it right, which forces you to fully engage with and fully value your movement every single time you perform. It is about demanding complete mental and physical commitment from your practice.

In many ways this translates to some of the critical situations of the real world where you get only one “shot” at doing something because you’re dealing with an actual situation rather than practicing. By embracing this mindset, you approach each repetition, every second, and each effort spent practicing as if missing means having to face real consequences.

Visualization

Visualization is the process of mentally envisioning and, to a limited and subtle degree, internally feeling your movement before you physically perform it. The goal is to prepare your mind to focus on key aspects of execution, especially when the execution time is brief because of the nature of the movement. For instance, it’s difficult to slow down a jump enough that you can give attention to the diverse elements of the technique. With visualization, you can mentally break down a fast movement into a slower one in your mind as if you were observing it from the outside while at the same time you imagine your body experiencing it from the inside. You might feel your nerves trying to make your body move as you mentally re-create the intention of performing the movement even though your body remains still.

This process doesn’t need to take a lot of time; a few seconds may suffice, especially if you are focusing on a single aspect of the execution, such as maintaining breath and relaxation, improving the action of your arms, or fixing the specific position of your feet. You can use visualization even with totally new movements if someone slowly demonstrates the movement or you look at a photo sequence or video of the movement. As you observe the movement, you internally replicate the sequence and timing before you physically attempt the move for the first time.

The main use of visualization is to use it as you “reset” between each repetition of a movement or whenever you feel that you become a little confused or inefficient with a movement pattern.

Slow Movement

Slow movement is an amazing way to get started with any movement, and it helps you acquire efficiency more rapidly. Slowing down may be the simplest, most potent way to improve your form, make faster progress, and eventually perform movement faster. You can’t do some movements slowly—there is no such thing as a slow-motion jump for instance—but you can do most movements at a slow pace. Slow movement also enables you to better assess your current level of efficiency and helps you better determine if you’re ready for greater levels of intensity for a particular movement.

There are many benefits to slow movement. One is that you will notice many more details of the “landscape” of a movement sequence. It is akin to the difference between walking down a street rather than taking your car. Obviously, it takes more time when you walk, but you can discover so many details that you’re unable to notice when you travel in a speeding car. Similarly, you can screen your movement pattern by going slowly rather than speeding. By lengthening the entire sequence of a particular movement pattern, the time it takes to execute each part of the sequence lengthens, which enables you to better understand how the sequence works in terms of position, body-weight shifting and balance, and tension and relaxation. You’re dissociating the diverse inputs, signals, and sensations that performing the sequence generates. Numbers stop mattering when your focus is entirely on sensations, observation, empirical feedback, and experiential input. Slow is truth.

You begin to consider questions like these:

• What is taking place in my foot or my hand? Are they correctly positioned?

• Am I following the right sequence with the right timing?

• Can I get rid of the tension in my neck and shoulders?

• Should I add more tension in my glutes and abdominal muscles to stabilize my hips and lower back?

• Why did I hold my breath for several seconds? Can I improve my breath control?

• Where should my attention go the most?

If you tend to tense up, if you have uncoordinated movement, or if you lack joint stability, slow movement will expose the issue while it also helps solve it.

The low intensity of slow movement enables you to improve selective tension dramatically because you can better focus on detecting and minimizing tensions you would otherwise not notice at faster speed. Moving slowly is a great opportunity to ask yourself whether you can achieve the same movement with the same efficiency but with less tension.

“Fitness cowboys” tend to have a hard time slowing down, and they don’t understand that slowing down could enable them to ultimately go faster or at least avoid wasting energy if only they first could have the patience to take their time to improve movement. Slow movement requires a mindset: If you can perform a movement slowly and efficiently, you not only own the “right” to perform it at higher intensity but you will perform it much better when you do. For instance, if your mind and body are out of sync—something I have mentioned earlier—you can fix the issue by using slow movement to ensure synchronicity before you gradually increase speed and intensity while maintaining the synchronicity.

It’s better to be slow and controlled than fast and inefficient. Besides, even from a real-world practical perspective, slow and controlled movements matter as much as fast and controlled ones. The physical feedback from slow movement is clearer to your brain than the feedback from same movement when you do it faster, which enables the brain to “rewrite” an improved version of the pattern in its memory. This is called neuroplasticity.

Switching Pace

Another useful practice efficiency principle is to alternate slow and fast execution of the movement, still with an emphasis on slow movement. The idea is to provide the central nervous system with different feedback based on the pace of execution rather than on a changing pattern. Comparing sensations when the same pattern is executed with sharply different speeds can give you valuable feedback and help you learn faster. In any case, technique is only mastered when it can be replicated with the same level of efficiency at any speed.

Deconstruction and Isolation

Breaking down a complex movement to more basic, isolated segments to improve them separately and then reintegrating them into the entire sequence they are part of can greatly help reduce your learning curve or solve a physical—or mental—block that prevents you from performing the entire sequence. Chapters later in this book that are dedicated to each movement skill start with positions that will become part of most of the techniques I cover, which is a form of breaking down the movements. Breaking down a whole movement pattern means practicing separate, smaller movement patterns that are parts of the whole sequence. Indeed, while practicing complete movement and addressing inefficiencies one at a time can be an effective way to improve, practicing first the distinct positions of a sequence a technique is made of can also facilitate improvement.

Working on separate segments helps you identify issues and solve them. For instance, you might identify an inefficiency in a complex movement sequence but have trouble fixing it through rehearsing the whole sequence, even if you do it slowly. Deconstructing the movement and practicing the troublesome part might resolve the issue more effectively. Sometimes, you may become aware of an issue without being able to identify exactly what the issue is or when it happens. Deconstructing the whole movement into parts enables you to spot at what moment of the sequence the problem occurs, and you can also tell if the issue concerns motor control, strength, mobility, or some other thing. Obviously, you need to address the issue to take care of it, which you can do quickly if it is a motor-control issue, but strength or functional issues take more time. In any case, you might not need to work on each segment of a whole movement; you might only need to focus on the problematic ones until they are improved or fixed.

However, positions are positions—not movement patterns seamlessly linking such positions. Eventually you must “reattach” movement segments one by one, link by link, until you’ve re-formed (and usually improved) the whole kinetic chain. You will find numerous practical examples of this strategy of breaking down movements in each chapter of Part 4.

Exaggeration of Inefficiencies

This practice efficiency principle may seem counterintuitive, but it can really help. Instead of trying to attenuate or getting rid of inefficiencies you have identified and that you may have already tried to do with limited success, you may want to intentionally—but temporarily, of course—amplify them.

If you want to truly understand something, try to change it.”

—Kurt Lewin

 

It might seem strange to amplify an inefficiency, but that could be the most effective way for your central nervous system to realize how counterproductive a given pattern is, and it might lead to quicker remediation of the issue. For instance, if you tend to be too tense when you move, you could add even more tension in your whole body to help you better realize and address this pattern.

Self-Imposed Contextual Limitation

This is a strategy that has everything to do with perception as you add or simulate environmental or situational variables. Here’s an example: When students jump and land, they tend to get off-balance and step forward before they can stabilize themselves on the target where they land. If pointing out the alignment issue that causes the instability doesn’t work, I tell them to imagine that they are landing on a rock and would fall into a raging river if they could not achieve a stable landing. Having the student visualize an imaginary context—with the environmental part being the small landing area that doesn’t offer the possibility of stepping forward and the contextual part being the dramatic consequence of falling off—sometimes solves the problem, but some people need a motivation that is more tangible than what they must imagine.

When the first method doesn’t work, I stand just in front of the landing area. A student who is off balance steps forward and bumps into me, and no student wants that to happen. The result is that students look straight forward rather than looking at their feet, which helps them keep a more erect and stable position when landing. Voilà—problem solved very quickly every single time. There’s nothing like context to make practice real and breed effectiveness and efficiency!

NOTE

 

So, you might be wondering why I don’t use the second method from the start. Because, in the absence of the tangible context, it’s important that you be able to visualize the consequence of failing the movement and taking such consequence seriously even though it is imaginary. When you practice, it’s not always possible to have a tangible motivator that helps you stay on track. Sometimes, you have to rely on your inner eye to help you visualize risks, threats, and consequences.

 

Bilateral Practice

Practicing bilaterally means making sure you perform any “one-sided” technique on both sides. For instance, in get-ups, where you place a single arm on the side, or in jumps, where you step and launch from one leg, you must practice the technique on both sides equally; otherwise, you’re apt to consciously or unconsciously emphasize and rely on a preferred side. In fact, you should practice more on your less-used side (or less-able side) until you can do the movement with close to equal efficiency on either side. Usually, switching sides to improve the neglected side feels awkward at first, as if one side was a “black belt” and the other a “white belt.” What’s good for you, though, is that what the central nervous system has learned on one side helps improving the opposite side faster than if you had no skill or experience on either side.

Another technique involves imagining that you are at ground level as you balance at a height, which can reduce anxiety. Conversely, you can imagine being at a height when you are balancing at ground level to elevate—pun intended—your level of focus. This practice strategy resembles the “one shot” principle in the sense that you imagine facing real and adverse consequences if you miss.

Strategies like the examples I’ve described are designed to modify your perception to improve your performance. In these cases, the body follows the mind, not the other way around.

NOTE

 

Does this strategy of self-imposed contextual limitation remind you of something? It’s the adult version of the childhood games of “hot lava” and “snake pit.” If you fall, you burn or get bitten and die. Children intuitively use the strategy I’ve described to make their instinctive Natural Movement practice more realistic and engaging. Why not you? It is a brilliant and effective mindset.

 

Knowing When to Stop

When you practice your techniques and skills, you might make many successful attempts that can be seen as partial or even complete failures, but that are the necessary path to improvement and success. Misses are inevitable and can be discouraging. They can also motivate you to keep trying until you succeed.

However, it is important to not keep pushing yourself when you reach a state of physical and mental fatigue. You will start failing in a way that becomes counterproductive because it has stopped supporting improvement, and you should avoid coming close to this type of failure when learning new movements and trying to improve your technique. Pay attention to your sensations—both physical and mental—and stop practicing when you feel and observe that the quality of your movement declines despite your attention and efforts to maintain efficiency.