Chapter 23: Programming - The Practice of Natural Movement

An intuitive practice will do wonders for you as a beginner. It gives you the latitude to explore many diverse movements and opens options for very diverse ways to practice without limiting yourself or having to learn the science of programming. As a beginner, programming might unnecessarily limit the overall range and speed of your progress. In short, programming is completely optional for beginners and could easily prove counterproductive. The necessity for programming mainly arises when you start to reach a plateau in a given area and need to opt for a specific approach to move beyond it. Obviously, this issue is likely to be more of a concern for more experienced or advanced practitioners who are seeking effective strategies to keep increasing their performance.

However, you might as well start programming some aspects of your training early on, as soon as you have acquired technique—for instance, to develop greater strength and performance in particular aspects of your capability, such as in lifting and carrying. From an unspecialized approach to physical training, you might want to use programming to support greater or faster progress in bringing a given skill to near equal performance with other skills. If you’re a beginner, you should not drop all other aspects of your training because you want to make specific gains in a particular area; any program you decide to follow should be a part of your practice, not your only practice. More advanced practitioners may temporarily dedicate themselves entirely (or almost entirely) to improving a given aspect of their capability because they have already become proficient at the overall spectrum of Natural Movement and need a greater emphasis to achieve the gains they’re looking for.

Programming is about designing your practice to achieve results over the course of days or weeks (sometimes months) by determining in advance what each training session should be made of. So if you are planning the content of a single session in detail, or even the detailed content of all your practice sessions, but you don’t have any connection or continuity between sessions, that is not programming; it’s just planning. Programming can address the progressive development of skills and techniques, but it can also address the development of work capacity including the strength, power, and metabolic conditioning that enables you to sustain efficient movement, effective performance, and physical action for a longer time and makes your capability more durable. You can design a program for progress in one skill or several, for specific physiological adaptations, or to achieve multiple gains simultaneously.

Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.”

—Jim Rohn

 

If you decide that you want to approach your training and progress systematically and determine what particular objective you want to make a priority—for instance, achieving one of the Natural Movement physical challenges or training to surpass them—you need to figure out what particular improvements you want to make in technique, strength, power, energy systems, mobility, and so on. Then you must figure out the process you will use to achieve your goals. Whereas your fundamental goal is to always increase your real-world physical capability, a program—which is by default temporary—could emphasize very specific improvements that indirectly support that fundamental goal, such as losing weight (through high-intensity Natural Movement training) or gaining in mobility. Also, specialized athletes may use a Natural Movement practice program to support performance in their particular sports.

NOTE

 

Note that I didn’t say that you must approach your progress rationally. Using a systematic, predefined, quantifiable approach isn’t the only rational approach.

 

Programs are only relevant if the objectives are well understood, and also if they are specific, individual, realistic, measurable, and adaptable.

• Specific: For a program to effectively help you achieve goals, the goals have to be limited in scope. You can’t pack a program with an endless list of drills and expect specific results, and you can’t expect a great variety of improvements, either. You must limit your target goals so you can better identify the strategy that will help you achieve them the most effectively. In short, keep your program(s) simple. It’s well known that physiological adaptations can conflict with each other; for instance, there can be a conflict in attempting to develop high levels of power and endurance at the same time. Fortunately, this issue is not really a concern for beginners who can actually achieve very diverse improvements in gains with a general approach to their practice. The only exception is a lack of upper-body strength that prevents beginners from achieving a number of climbing movements on horizontal surfaces. The issue of needing specific emphasis and programming to break plateaus and enable further progress occurs mostly in highly specialized athletes or in MovNat practitioners who have already reached an advanced level. Natural Movement/MovNat beginners and even intermediate level practitioners can absolutely develop greater power and endurance at the same time. In fact, by designing programs that resemble the example I give later in this chapter, you can reach your objective while simultaneously making progress in a variety of skills.

• Individual: Programming necessarily starts with determining what objective(s) you should reach. Your plan must be individualized and customized to enable you to reach your own goals, not someone else’s. Even if you and another person share the exact same goal at a given time, it doesn’t mean that you should use the exact same strategy to achieve it.

• Realistic: Both your objective and the strategy must be realistic. You may never be able to perform at the level of world-class athletes who have been training their entire lives—unless you specialize the way they do. You might not be able to achieve your goals in a matter of days, or maybe not even in a matter of weeks or months. Don’t lose sight of the big picture, which is a relatively equalized scope of physical capability, and don’t dismiss your current physical capability and health status. The process of adaptation demands time. Don’t raise the bar too high too fast, but don’t self-limit too much by thinking “I can do only this” because you’ll end up with a very easy but boring program.

• Quantifiable: A systematic approach to practice implies that you will track sets, reps, weight, distance, and/or time so that you can quantify any aspect of your work and progress that is measurable. Non-measurable aspects of your progress should be validated through feel, observation, and/or someone else’s feedback.

• Adaptable: Although you program progressions in diverse variables (numbers of sets and reps, weight, time) to be consistent, sometimes you might observe that you should modify them on the fly, either by decreasing or increasing them. The plan is the tool rather than the finality; if the plan doesn’t effectively advance your goal, you must be pragmatic and flexible to modify it. Being adaptable doesn’t mean that you want to extensively modify your training plan every session. Doing that would only be necessary if the program was very badly designed from the beginning. Adaptability means that you should always retain the latitude to modify your program if you believe that modifying something might make the program even more effective depending on how you physically respond to it as you progress through it. Don’t force yourself to go as fast or as slowly as the plan says; make the plan follow the pace of your progress. Use common sense: Don’t brutalize yourself into progress faster than you can manage or self-indulge in progressing much slower than you are capable of.

If you’d like to see an example program, visit the Beginner’s Guide to MovNat page at www.movnat.com/beginners-guide-movnat/. There you can find tips for beginners as well as a four-week beginner-level program.

Remember, that a generalized program like the example is a real program, but it’s not programming. If you can already perform the skills in the example program, that particular training plan is irrelevant to you (though its content still might be very beneficial to you). However, if you currently can’t do he skills, this objective is relevant to you, but that doesn’t mean that the way it’s designed is customized to you. Maybe you’d need two weeks to achieve the same goal; maybe you’d need six months. You must look at diverse aspects of your current level of fitness and health to determine what is realistic for you. You might need to modify the quantities and measurements, which applies both to the number of sets and reps and to the duration of the plan. After you have made modifications to customize the program for your purpose, you still want to keep your plan adaptable and modify the numbers if you judge that the program will be more effective. In a nutshell, effective programming is about adapting the program to you as much as it is about you adapting to the program.

Programming is a real science, and, as in most sciences, experts often argue about the best methods and offer diverse strategies for obtaining the same results. By definition, science is never set in stone and should always evolve with new findings. The particular programming relative to Natural Movement/MovNat practice is just starting and has a highly promising future.

In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results.”

 

—Michael Crichton

   

Success is not a matter of mastering subtle, sophisticated theory but rather of embracing common sense with uncommon levels of discipline and persistence.”

—Patrick Lencioni

 

CONSIDERATIONS FOR MORE ADVANCED PRACTICE

 

This part covered the basics of the principles of efficient practice. However, it doesn’t cover the full spectrum of Natural Movement/MovNat practice, which also involves developing mental toughness, physiological resiliency, and situational awareness. However, an in-depth discussion of those aspects of practice is beyond the scope of this book.

You can start developing your physical and mental toughness by progressively exposing yourself to harsh weather during movement practice. Situational awareness, though, is something that is learned through specific instruction and training but also through actual action. You can train situational awareness by simulating some of these situations as long as you do it safely—ideally in a group setting.

If you want to put your Natural Movement skills and mindset to real use and learn more about real-world contextual demands, you certainly could consider working with firefighter and rescue teams. These people always have my utmost respect and admiration.

 

MOVEMENT SELECTION IN THE BOOK

 

For the sake of keeping the volume of material in this book manageable, I decided to not include swimming/aquatic skills or combative skills. For the same reason, a number of less essential techniques and movement variations did not make it into the book. It doesn’t mean in any way that they are missing from the MovNat method. It’s just impossible to show absolutely everything in a single book.

 

POSITIONS AND MOVEMENT NAMES IN THE BOOK

 

When I started instructing MovNat many years ago, I quickly realized that the number of positions, techniques, and other movement variations I was teaching far exceeded the names that existed in sports, the fitness industry, or other movement disciplines. I also found some of the existing names to be unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons (too conventional, in a different language, associated with a particular discipline, inaccurate, confusing, or silly).

In any case, for the sake of teaching the MovNat method, each position and movement needed a name. And, of course, for this book I obviously couldn’t introduce and describe so many positions and techniques without naming them. It is also my observation that we tend to unconsciously reduce the range of positions and movements we practice to those that we can name, as if they are the only ones that have value, whereas unnamed positions and movements are easily neglected and forgotten.

I made the decision to name or rename practically all the positions and techniques practiced in Natural Movement—which is several hundred—in a descriptive way. The names are usually longer for that reason, though some are named in a subjective way for the sake of simplicity. Ultimately, as a solo practitioner, you will not need to memorize all these names unless you find it useful to do so.

 

PHOTOS IN THE BOOK

 

My publisher and I decided that the best course of action was to shoot all the photos indoors rather than in nature, chiefly for the sake of ensuring consistency of lighting and photo quality. Another important consideration was time management, as several days of shooting were necessary to take photos of the hundreds of techniques and movement variations on the list and verify that each sequence was complete and satisfactory.