Chapter 4: Practical - The Practice of Natural Movement

“The essential is always threatened by the insignificant.”

 

—René Char

 

When I discuss principle 11, “Mindful,” I explain that movement is more than a physical drive; it is an agenda. The primary motive for movement comes not from muscles but from an intention in the brain, conscious or not, with the nervous system commanding to the body. But what is the intention? What are you trying to achieve?

The fundamental purpose of Natural Movement lies not just in the vital ability to effectively respond to the challenging circumstances of the real world and stay safe, which is the premise of principle 5, “Vital,” but also to ensure day-to-day needs are satisfied through physical performance of diverse difficulty or intensity levels. Natural Movement has an applicability with outcomes or rewards that are both immediate and useful in an obvious, tangible way. Natural Movement is about real-world capability, which itself results from both movement competency and physical capacity. Natural Movement competency spans the whole range of evolutionary movement skills, such as jumping, climbing, lifting, and so on, which require motor-control qualities such as coordination, balance, or accuracy. On the other hand, physical capacity involves diverse physiological adaptations such as strength, power, endurance, or resiliency.

In that sense, Natural Movement it is not just effectively taking place for no obvious reason or for the sake of “freedom of movement.” It has a practical purpose. Originally, squatting was not done for the sake of gaining mobility but to enable people to cook, rest, work, poop, or give birth, and mobility was maintained in the process of performing these activities. Lifting and carrying heavy loads weren’t about strength; those skills were used to move children around, bring fresh game or water to camp, and build a shelter; strength grew in the process of performing these tasks. Jumping was not done for plyometrics and stamina, and balancing was not done just for the sake of balance; those skills were used to clear obstacles as one traveled from one place to another. Crawling was not done to imitate animal species, but to move as humans must move when they stalk, hide, or find themselves in confined environments.

Practicality is the primary motive for Natural Movement. The bulk of the physical activity of hunter-gatherers is made of practical physical actions. Regardless of whether a movement is low or high intensity, almost every movement is necessary rather than optional. In Natural Movement, you don’t have to guess or imagine whether any movement is easy or hard, simple or complex, safe or risky: It is evident.

Even in history from the ancient civilizations—Assyrians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans—to the medieval times to during and after the Industrial Revolution, physical training was based on Natural Movement (even though people in those times did not use this particular term). The goal was to form physically capable soldiers who were able to defend the land or conquer more. Beyond the obvious weaponry practice, soldiers’ training heavily relied on walking, running, jumping, climbing, lifting, carrying, throwing, catching, and barehand fighting in close-quarter combat, which are all movement skills necessary to fight wars. The original Olympic Games and the diverse physical education methods that emerged in Europe in the nineteenth century involved the same skills.

An old-school gym is not like a bodybuilding gym from the 1980s that’s filled with vintage barbells. A gym from the nineteenth or early twentieth century was filled with horizontal bars, ropes, poles, maces, obstacles, and other apparatus designed to train practical physical competency through jumping, running, balancing, climbing, combating, or manipulating objects. Earlier civilizations were practicing Natural Movement intuitively. They didn’t know kinesiology, and they didn’t know exercise science. In short, they didn’t know “better.” What those people did in those gyms was all about practicality and being ready for physical performance by training practical movements and scenarios. People understood the practical principle intuitively because they also understood the vital principle: Real-world physical capability can prove vital for saving lives; lack thereof could be fatal.

The degree of usefulness of a movement in a real-world context is ultimately how the practicality of any movement can be assessed. For instance, balancing on a single arm and balancing on a single leg are both physiologically useful, but you would be hard-pressed to imagine any realistic real-world scenario that would demand that you balance on a single arm, whereas the ability to balance on a single leg is fundamental to day-to-day life. Similarly, it is biomechanically possible to train a young elephant to balance on its hind legs for a circus show, but what that elephant primarily needs is to be free to move through the savanna and develop the Natural Movement skills required to stay alive in the wild. Anything beyond those vital movements are optional tricks for fun or show rather than fundamental movement skills.

My philosophy is that it is the practical actions to be performed and the practical goals to be reached that justify movement; the by-products that movement generates are secondary. “Training with purpose” is a no-brainer, but it is also not enough because different people have differing purposes.

There’s an agenda behind everything we do. Bodybuilding isn’t purposeless, is it? The goal of having a bulky muscular physique is a perfectly valid purpose to those who value or prioritize that body style. The question is, how much clarity do we have about our own agendas when it comes to exercise?

In Natural Movement and the MovNat method, the core purpose is “Practical Physical Capability.” This purpose might not seem to be a timeless or universal endeavor, but it unquestionably remains a timeless necessity. Very clear end-goals facilitate defining effective strategies to achieve them. Otherwise, we easily get confused by the plethora of diverse modalities available when we’re not absolutely sure of the end result that we are pursuing. A clear goal precedes effective methods and programs. The inverse statement isn’t necessarily true. If we agree on specific goals to be attained, we can constructively debate the methods required to achieve the goals. If we pursue different end results, comparing methods is totally irrelevant. Even the notion of “movement-based” fitness programs isn’t sufficient to address the issue of lack of practicality. Remember, movement can be anything, including absolutely nonpractical movements. However, although practicing some form of movement activity is commendable, its effect on our physical ability to perform when confronting real-world demands (its practicality) is what’s most important.

Modern society has reached a point where little of what we see being done in schools for physical education or at commercial gyms for fitness is actually practical. There is widespread physical ineptness throughout society. Most of us can operate electronic technologies more effectively than we can operate our own bodies beyond standing and walking short distances. Such physical lack of capability is no longer an embarrassment. Normalcy not only makes it socially acceptable that kids spend significantly more time playing video games than playing on the playground but also that they become experts at virtually “killing” characters in those games with their thumbs on the game controller although their bodies are clumsy on the playground.

What’s worse is that a new norm has emerged in which physical inability is not even part of a debate: We don’t question it simply because we don’t realize there is an issue. In today’s society, being able to do things that once were normal activities for all people is now considered something almost incredible. In a world crippled by physical degeneration, those people who have great movement skills seem like they are endowed with some kind of superpower. But they’re not. They’re just physically capable individuals, and their skill shouldn’t be seen as anything special.

Everyone expects children to get out of school with basic knowledge that makes it possible for them to perform professionally in the real world. If young people were to leave school without knowing how to read or write, it obviously would be scandalous. Yet every year millions of young people leave school physically uneducated and inept. Physical education programs are ineffective at producing physically capable young adults, which is not the fault of physical-education teachers but an issue with the way PE programs are designed. The result is that it leaves generations and millions of people close to being physically helpless. If you haven’t built a body that is strong, reliable, competent, and capable, can you actually call yourself a “grown-up” just because you’ve naturally grown in size over the years? Regardless of one’s muscle size and shape, strength, mobility, and stability, a body and mind that cannot effectively respond to the practical physical demands of the real world in every way necessary hasn’t been fully built. You get what you train for…or don’t train for as the case may be.

Except in rare cases, the current fitness industry, which predominantly emphasizes physical appearance rather than practicality and real-world capability, falls short of solving the issue. It is as if the commercial fitness technocracy wants to maintain everyone in a state of physical ineptness by promoting physical-conditioning programs that have almost no practical application so that participants come away from the program with nothing other than the facade of fitness rather than building a foundation of physical capability. Fitness is the mere replacement of a biological necessity for physical activity that has ceased to exist, except that the substitute is irrelevant to how we are naturally built to behave physically. The original purpose of movement is gone, and our original movement behavior has gone with it, as if nobody can even remember why we ever had to move in the first place. Practicality is absent from most fitness programs. This is not to say that they aren’t effective, which is a different thing. Effectiveness has to do with reaching particular objectives, but those objectives aren’t necessarily about developing practical physical capability.

Few people actually want to be fit; most just want to look fit.”

—Erwan Le Corre

 

The tragedy of conventional fitness is seeing people led to pursue goals that will never make them fit from a real-life practical standpoint even if they achieve all the goals of the program. Few people actually want to be fit; most just want to look fit. Many people want the image but not the function.

The notion of “functional exercise” was born as a result of trying to steer the industry back toward more realistic practices and goals, and it has had mixed results. For most people, stepping into any fitness program is a big step out of their comfort zones, so movement-based approaches to exercise—where one mostly stands on one’s feet rather than sitting and where one performs full-body movements rather than doing isolated movements—feels revolutionary. Despite being a commendable step toward healthy movement behavior, the conceptual notion of “function” supersedes that of empirical practicality.

Whereas muscle-isolation is rejected as part of these functional fitness programs, functional movement is still practiced mostly in isolation of context (which is something I discuss in detail in principle 7, “Adaptable”). The extraordinarily rich scope of Natural Movement is reduced to a few “functional” movement patterns (squat, lunge, pull, push, twist, bend, and so on), and performing the movement is divorced from the specific demands of the environments or situations in which they normally take place. The result is that there’s no possibility of genuinely understanding the practicality of the movements and assessing the results in real time, which is something you can do with Natural Movement because it is mostly contextual.

These “functional movement patterns” are treated as if they’re the be-all and end-all of functional performance, whereas the fantastically wide range of actual natural movements is viewed as merely “supplemental.” Experts even talk about “transitional movements” when they mention the movements required to switch from one of those “fundamental” patterns to another without considering that all natural movements are fundamental and that all movements are, in essence, “transitional.” The reality is that no set of specific movements can constitute a substitute for the full Natural Movement spectrum. By emphasizing a small selection of movements, you are excluding a great variety of equally important practical movements. The problem—which I address in principle 6, “Unspecialized”—is that all those many other natural movements that are discarded are equally functional and demanding, and without training them specifically you can’t be competent at them regardless of how much “functional training” you do.

By discarding a significant number of practical movements, you shrink your overall practical physical capability. Conversely, by training such a diversity of natural movements, you will actually improve in those particular functional patterns on top of becoming skilled at a much more diverse set of practical movements and skills.

Gray Cook, a highly respected and well-known physical therapist, lecturer, and author, wrote an article entitled “Function?” in which he said, “The sad truth is most exercise and rehabilitation professionals believe in the functional value of an exercise by what it looks like and not by what it produces.”*

It doesn’t matter how adept you think you are at particular functional movement patterns, until you submit them to real-world demands, you just don’t know what your actual practical movement competency is. Permanently insulating fitness training from the reality of the real world unfortunately produces unrealistically “fit” people. By avoiding the test of reality or leaving it to the individual to figure out—if they want to—physical practice becomes an intellectual pursuit whereby movements must fit theory. If you want to realistically know how functional your body is, go run on natural terrains; jump and climb obstacles; and lift, carry, throw, and catch uneven objects and loads on uneven terrains and you will discover how functional your fitness is.

Is it beneficial to break down complex natural movements into smaller patterns and to isolate such patterns from external demands? Yes, it may be; we use that strategy in the MovNat method, and I give you examples in this book. However, you have to rapidly get past the stage of separating movements from their practical purposes and gradually educate people in practical physical capability—that is, techniques, skills, strength, and physiological adaptations that are appropriate to the diversity and complexity of environmental and situational demands. Keep it practical all the way.

Unfortunately, too many by-the-book fitness experts often turn themselves into pseudoscientists who reject any practice protocol that isn’t considered “science-based.” The tragedy is that exercise science overwhelmingly addresses the diverse physiological adaptations that stem from particular training protocols because it can be measured relatively easily, whereas very little scientific literature discusses the effects of training on practical capability. Yet there is a difference between being smart about movement and being movement-smart; there’s also a difference between intellectual or conceptual knowledge of exercise physiology and biomechanics and having a personal experiential knowledge and competency in movement.

Practical training immediately shows you whether you’re effective and efficient. It’s not about proving a theory; it’s about assessing one’s movement capability because it can meet a variety of contextual demands. It’s an observation that cannot be denied. Either it works, or it doesn’t. “Results” in that sense, or lack thereof, are based on tangible practical consequences rather than theoretical outcomes. Someone once said, “paralysis by analysis,” and I want to give that person’s hand a warm handshake. The dismissal of real-world context is a rejection of realism, which confines practice to a certain level of artificiality. In truth, by carefully avoiding any confrontation with real-world demands, you are conveniently avoiding the ugly little facts of lack of capability to be exposed so they won’t ruin the grand theories you’ve been cherishing. Theories always need a reality check.

Whereas functional exercise tries to replicate a (limited) scope of real-life movement patterns and the practicality is unclear, Natural Movement actually performs them all as they’re used in the real world. If the practicality of your exercise isn’t clear, it is very likely that it is because it is not even that practical in the first place. Functional maybe, but not practical. Once you’ve realized the power and specificity of contextual demands and the necessity of matching and confronting them as closely as possible, functional isn’t enough and practical becomes the end goal.

When he was about two my younger son saw me do a reaching movement from a Tall Half-Kneeling position I had assumed while waiting for him to take a bath. In the absence of context, I was indeed simulating reaching out to something. He looked at me and simply said “catch.” Not “mobilizing,” “mobility,” “stability,” “functional,” or even “practical” for that matter. He actually did not even ask what I was doing, he just stated what he saw, and what he saw was a practical catching movement. Daddy was trying to reach and get something invisible. He had not studied fitness theory, so he went straight to the point based on his age-appropriate vocabulary. He recognized a practical movement because he does it every day of his life, empirically and experientially. Fitness experts would see a bird flapping his wings while in a standing position and would think “upper-body mobilization.” A child would see the same thing and recognize that the bird is about to take off and fly.

A pragmatic approach to physical exercise starts with a context-oriented mindset. It aims at practical goals, and the relevance of the movement is validated by such goals. This is Natural Movement. It is not about having your body do anything you want but about having it do anything that is or could be necessary in a wide range of environments or situations that necessitate a physical response.

Natural Movement doesn’t necessarily demand that you must always train in real environments or situations; the only demand is that you train in sufficiently realistic environments to develop practical mind-body capability.

You might be wondering how play factors into movement behavior because of the emphasis on practicality in Natural Movement. It might seem that play is movement without having any useful value. Wrong! For one thing, utility movement doesn’t necessarily mean work in the same way play does not necessarily mean fun. Play often uses movement, but movements—at least large ones—are not necessarily required to engage in play, as you can “play” while sitting and using only your arms or even fingers. Many games are played mentally rather than physically, which also means that players are not just experiencing fun but can also experience tension, frustration, or even anger. In fact, even when it involves a physical aspect, play is a mindset more than anything: One might have no fun participating in some games, whereas one might find ways to have some fun while performing a chore many other people find boring or arduous.

Playfulness is one of the mindsets that can be employed to achieve utility actions, the same way utility actions can be employed to have fun. Having fun serves the purpose of experiencing fun and ultimately creating happiness, and that is an important purpose. Having fun can make practice more enjoyable and productive, but not always.

In the case of Natural Movement, playful exploration is certainly not devoid of practical purpose. It is an innate strategy employed by most baby animals to develop and refine fundamental movement skills that are vital. Play is the strategy for achieving capability. Even when kids play through movement, the biological, evolutionary purpose is to enhance function and develop greater levels of competency through play and not for the sake of fun.

Coincidentally, once skills have been acquired and a youth has become an adult, the drive to play doesn’t fully disappear, but it does diminish very significantly. When hunter-gathers play, it is often based on Natural Movement, such as running, jumping, balancing, or throwing for friendly competition, show, and amusement. That type of play might look like it’s just for fun, but the point is also to keep practicing movement competency and for everyone to show that they are still physically capable and adept at supporting the group. However, it is very natural that adults who have been deprived since late childhood of Natural Movement activity and then were led to machine-based and muscle-isolation types of exercise in their teen and adult years would first experience Natural Movement practice as pure “play” because they finally are being liberated from rules, conventions, programs, and artificial environments and equipment that have been limiting their natural physical expression.

Again, play is one of the mindsets that can be part of your practice as well as a modality of training when Natural Movement is occasionally expressed in the form of a game such as tag that would involve many Natural Movement skills, but it’s not a finality or what Natural Movement is. It doesn’t matter whether you call it play, work, or practice; Natural Movement is not monodimensional in how you choose to experience it. Are you having fun? Are you working hard? Are you exploring on your own or following someone’s guidance? Are you remembering and rediscovering? Are you learning something new? Are you growing or fine-tuning? All of it is a possible part of your Natural Movement practice and experience as long as you never lose sight of the practical finality of movement.

PRACTICAL VERSUS NONPRACTICAL MOVEMENT

 

I am not in any way being dismissive of forms of movement training that don’t aim at real-world practicality. Fortunately for us, our minds are creative enough and our bodies are adaptable enough to enable a diversity of positions and movements. The exploration and practice of nonpractical movement types can be enjoyable and expand our movement horizon very beneficially.

Again, nonpractical doesn’t mean useless or devoid of benefits and value. For instance, elite gymnasts display exceptional levels of body control, strength, and agility through the pursuit of acrobatic skills and performance. However, if you can balance on your hands better than you can balance on your feet, then from a Natural Movement perspective you have your priorities wrong. The ability to perform impressive physical tricks or beautiful choreography is part of the amazing human movement potential, but if you can’t run fast or long, can’t jump or climb, can’t lift and carry heavy loads, and can’t fight to defend yourself, you are necessarily entertaining enormous deficiencies in your real-world physical capability, which is massively problematic.

There is no opposition between practical and nonpractical movement skills; they are not mutually exclusive, and both have their benefits. You must simply decide which of the two is the priority. Understanding principle 5, “Vital,” which I cover next, might be a great help in helping you decide which of the two matters the most to you.

 

In the same way that trying to match the conventional image of a fit body will always keep you unsatisfied, not having a clear sense of the usefulness of your physical practice leaves you unsatisfied as well. A lot of people are looking for a fitness program that quickly brings results, in the shortest amount of time and for the least time spent exercising. The reason is that they just detest exercising. They see it as a chore and want to spare the amount of time and energy dedicated to that chore. Most often we need motivation not because exercise programs are too challenging but simply because they are overly boring, and they are boring because we are missing the original practical point of being fit or because the point is not that desirable after all. When you’re given the chance to see that training for real-world capability and actually testing such capability—so you can see what it does, what you can do with it, and what you’re capable of thanks to it—might be the point you’ve been consciously or unconsciously looking for.

Exercising is a lifestyle option with no social consequences for not doing it. Among those who exercise, training with the intention of acquiring a baseline of practical physical capability is itself an option. Yet since modern lifestyles rarely involve practical movement demands that are challenging, it becomes our choice and responsibility to place those demands upon ourselves and to aim at such a level of capability. It is about adopting a down-to-earth, pragmatic, realistic mindset and objectives. You want to think about real-life situations, the possible challenges you might face that would demand a physical response from you, and how well you want to perform. You want to train real movements with imaginary situations in mind, so you don’t find yourself responding to real situations with imaginary movements later.

The first step in becoming capable is deciding that you are capable and re-acquiring the most ancient movement skill set—not for a romantic reason but for its practical value. Knowing that your goal is to clear an obstacle or carry a person over a distance is a powerful source of motivation. You never know when people around you might need your physical assistance. Are you prepared? Are you physically helpful or helpless? Physical empowerment is not about physically prevailing over others; it’s about being strong to never be helpless for oneself and to always be potentially helpful to others. False physical capability is the belief that you would be able to perform any physical task, including those you’ve never before experienced. With Natural Movement, you can experience many diverse movements, efforts, environments, and situations in a way that is progressive. You can acquire a realistic knowledge of your ability; you won’t have to guess what your level of ability is. Trust and belief come through practice…of the practical!

You don’t build a body just by growing the size of its muscles the same way you don’t build a human being just by building the body. There are many ways to be helpful to others in practical ways, such as teaching or encouraging others, that do not involve physicality. Yet possessing Natural Movement skills is a great start as they’re a form of “equipment” that is available at any time and in any place. You don’t even need to imagine having to face any life-threatening situation outside your house: Can you get down to the ground and back up smoothly, pain-free without using your hands, in several ways? If that isn’t the case, it already indicates that your practical movement capability is considerably diminished. If the word practical that I’ve been using repeatedly seems a little abstract, you could replace it with freedom of movement. How much freedom of movement do you have? How much do you want in your life?

The benefits of a practical approach to physical exercise expand beyond the training itself. You will love the serene self-esteem and self-confidence that acquiring real-world movement and physical competency will bring to your life. If looking fit can boost your self-confidence, think of what having actual real-world physical capability could do it?

Self-entitled people expect everything from others. Self-empowered people expect everything from themselves. Ultimately, we are not dealing with issues of physical strength versus weakness or physical adeptness versus ineptness; it’s an issue of self-limitation versus self-actualization. Forming yourself into a physically capable human being to the greatest extent you can—which extends to thriving mentally and why not spiritually at the highest level you can—is not just a lifestyle option; it’s a duty to yourself, your family, and your community.

Get your power back for yourself and others. Because if you can’t empower yourself, who will do it for you?