Chapter 6: Unspecialized - The Practice of Natural Movement

“We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable.”

 

—R. Buckminster Fuller

 

Natural Movement is unspecialized so that the practice can be both practical and vital. Being unspecialized makes Natural Movement practical because human beings have evolved as “movement generalists,” so we could survive not only a variety of environments but also so we could use a variety of survival strategies that require diverse movement skills. As a result, human beings are, from a movement perspective, extremely versatile compared to most other animal species. However, because humans are generalists, we might not really excel at any particular movement skill compared to other animal species: A regular goat easily leaves behind the fastest human on Earth; the weakest gorilla will prevail over the strongest MMA fighter; and many other animal species will effortlessly surpass humans in terms of jumping, balancing, climbing, swimming, or diving. Other species have developed movement strategies for their locomotion that humans cannot perform, such as slithering or flying in the air.

However, from the same movement perspective, what animal species on Earth is as versatile as humans? Our natural movements for the purpose of locomotion are quite diverse, and we also excel at manipulating external bodies by the means of lifting and carrying loads long distances or throwing and catching with amazing dexterity and precision. Such versatility is obviously extremely practical when it comes to real-world movement adaptability.

Natural Movement is also unspecialized from a vital standpoint. Just as you never know when you might have to run for your life, you also cannot possibly know if you’ll have to run, jump, crawl, or swim for your life, or lift and carry someone else to save his or her life. To be prepared to meet real-world demands effectively, you need to be well versed in all movement skills because none are optional. How could you respond to life-threatening situations with only a single specialized skill? You would have to be extremely lucky that the physical response required is made of the single skill which happens to be what you are trained for.

Similarly, you cannot afford to be physiologically ready only for endurance efforts or only for short bouts of high intensity. This is because real-world capability is made of the combination of movement competency (the Natural Movement skills) and physical capacity (the physiological adaptation we develop through the practice of said skills). From the vital principle standpoint, deficiencies in competency and capacity are unforgivable, which dramatically highlights the evident importance of the unspecialized principle.

If you can lift heavy, but you can’t run fast or long in a situation that only demands that you run, how fit are you? Conversely, if you can run fast and long but can’t lift or carry anything heavy in a situation that requires zero running, how fit are you? In those cases, you are “specific-fit,” not real-world fit; when you’re exposed to contextual demands you do not train for, you’re immediately in trouble. I have encountered countless fit, athletic people like that. These people are so accustomed to their specialized exercise regimens that they aren’t able to rapidly transition to other movement skills and different types of physical effort without immediately going outside their comfort zones, and their performance suffers for it.

Sports Specialization

 

Even within a movement skill, the problem of specialization arises often. Say you are a great runner on pavement but you slow down significantly and are fearful of running on natural, uneven terrains; if that’s the case, are you really a great runner? Your running performance depends on a type of terrain you have specialized on. If you have interest in real-world physical performance, this simple example of “specialized specialization” and how it affects broad capability should profoundly transform your perspective of what it means to be fit, or simply able and ready. Life includes both predictable and unpredictable events. The predictable events require us to be adapted, and the unpredictable events require us to be adaptable. Although it is usually relatively easy to manage preparation for predictable events, it can be seriously challenging to handle the unpredictable events because it might require instant situational decision-making that implies appropriate movement in relation to unfamiliar parameters. The more contextual parameters you are familiar with, the better off you are, and vice versa.

The implications of specialization aren’t limited to a lack of overall real-world physical capability. Evidently, specialized sports coaches often obsess over highly specific movement patterns while overlooking general functional deficiencies that can actually weaken performance in the specific skills while inducing chronic injury of the body parts that are consistently stressed. Overuse injury rates are extremely common in specialized athletes; stress and burnout also are problems. Training more holistically through Natural Movement could reduce such risks. It could also potentially increase performance in a given specific skill as deficiencies and inefficiencies in overall fundamental movement function are addressed.

A specialist’s mind is a slave to his specialization.”

—Mokokoma Mokhonoana

 

Movement specialization is a cultural luxury of modern times. The versatility of our Natural Movement is one of the main reasons humans have been so successful as a species; why should we limit ourselves? What else but culture compels us to see such specialization as something both normal and desirable, to the point of even pursuing specialization within a given physical specialty—for example, to swim using a certain technique but not others, or to never swim underwater, dive deep, or train to water rescue? Or to lift very specific heavy objects but not others, or to lift objects without ever carrying those objects over diverse distances and terrains? In short, what’s up with our modern obsession for specialization? Is it because the whole culture around us is systematically pointing us in that direction from a young age?

As a matter of fact, physical education programs in schools are far from addressing the complete range of Natural Movement skills our children should practice—and certainly would love to be free to practice; instead they have them compete in specialized sports from a young age. Sometimes parents also push their children to become the next champion at a given sport. Children aren’t given a Natural-Movement-based physical education; they are episodically kept busy with highly regulated sports activities.

The sad reality is that generations of children forced to sports specialization at a young age often end up physically deficient and imbalanced. While a minority may develop a taste for a particular sport or for sports in general, the majority develop an aversion to physical activity.

The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.”

—Robert Greene

 

Those children who are intensively trained to become the future champions often end up psychologically broken, and all the childhood years of joy and innocence are lost because they were forced to embrace the mindset of an adult Olympian when they were just kids longing to just have fun. In this case, I’m talking only about those few naturally gifted children who draw most of the attention, but we have to also talk about the majority of children who apparently don’t have a special gift; haven’t been deemed future champions; don’t get much attention, guidance, or praise; and end up disheartened and believing that they aren’t “made” for a physical activity. Those children are condemned to experience sports only when watching TV. How unfair and messed up is that?

Specialized Fitness

 

Even the modern industry we know as the fitness industry is for the most part into specialization. It starts with specialized exercise machines: one for the calves, one for the quadriceps, one for the biceps, those for strength, those for cardio, and so on. Technically speaking, muscle-isolation has never been achieved in a gym; it happens only on dissection tables.

Muscles are designed to work synergistically for movement effectiveness and adaptability; attempting to isolate them is a biological heresy and a falsified physical behavior. The only “full-body workout” I know is that which covers the full range of human Natural Movement. Conventional fitness programs based on muscle isolation reflect a shockingly profound dismissal of the original way humans are designed to physically perform; those programs ignore the Natural Movement potential in us.

Rather than focusing on the lower body one day and the upper body the next day, which is indeed effective for bodybuilding, shouldn’t most people simply move their whole body every day? Rather than artificially isolating body parts to bulk them up, shouldn’t we mostly make sure that we become skilled and strong at operating our whole body through complete practical movements? The answer is a clear “No” if your goal is limited to growing your muscles for an aesthetic purpose regardless of what you can do with them. The answer is “Yes” if your goal is practical performance in the real world. Methods are only relevant in relation to the goal they pursue, and muscle isolation is highly effective for bodybuilding goals.

A “movement-based” rather than “muscle-based” approach is certainly more natural, but only to a limited extent as “movement” may entail pretty much anything. If you are to move your whole body vigorously while techno music is playing loudly, you could say that it’s a movement-based program even though you’re not training Natural Movement and certainly not getting ready for the highly diverse physical demands of the real world. You’re not even getting ready for a zombie apocalypse; you’re still specializing.

Compartmentalized Fitness

 

Among the more functional fitness modalities that reject muscle isolation, most inherently maintain an isolation approach in the sense that they systematically dissociate, isolate, and target strength, power, endurance, mobility, balance, or coordination with specific drills and programs as if they couldn’t or shouldn’t ever be addressed symbiotically the way it’s been done by all humans until only recently. This is not to say that compartmentalized training can’t be used on occasion to achieve specific benefits; compartmentalized training is used in the MovNat method as well, but it is not the priority or the main method.

Is a fully compartmentalized approach—separating mobility, strength, and metabolic conditioning—to physiological functions and adaptations the best way to approach human physical performance, especially in nonathletes? Such compartmentalization can certainly be helpful and effective in particular cases, but why would you systematically compartmentalize each of those components and forget the big picture and the fact that all these “systems” are designed to work synergistically? The common denominator of all those physical attributes and physiological adaptations, and the original “glue” between them, is a Natural Movement behavior.

By evolutionary design, our brain is masterful at connecting and synchronizing what our modern analytical minds are so eager to intellectually disconnect and subjectively separate. Mobility, strength, cardio-conditioning, coordination, balance, and so on were neither finalities in themselves nor able to operate in isolation; those tasks were designed to serve Natural Movement, which itself was designed to serve life. Wild predators don’t train mobility, power, or coordination in isolation before they become able to use their movement skills to catch prey because they would starve to death; instead, they move naturally to perform practical, adaptable actions, which develops and maintains those physical attributes they need to use their skills at the highest level of effectiveness.

In that sense, Natural Movement is not a “cross-training type of fitness.” We only need to “cross-train” diverse fitness modalities when we have isolated them and have become specialized in the process. When you are a sport or a fitness specialist, it’s very likely that you need supplemental training to cope with the deficiencies of your preferred (or exclusive) physical activity. Such supplemental exercise, which may be called “physical preparation,” is an attempt to address the physical deficiencies, lack of aptitude, or even chronic injuries caused by specialization. Ironically, physical preparation to the weight lifter might be to do running for cardio, whereas to the runner conditioning could be lifting weights to gain strength. Were it not for such benefits to their activity, the lifter wouldn’t run for the sake of his or her actual running ability, and the runner wouldn’t lift for the sake of developing actual lifting ability and practical strength.

We have seen that Natural Movement skills are no longer practiced for what they are—that is, for their practical applications. Instead, they are used for indirect, sometimes ultra-specific outcomes. I have explained this already in my explanation of principle 4, “Practical,” but the point is that if we were to seek real-world practicality, we would broaden and tend to equalize our physical capability more. The results would be that we would avoid ending up with massive deficits in our physical competency. If you value being “ready for whatever life throws at you,” you had better hone broad movement skills rather than specialized ones.

No single exercise can represent the full spectrum of human movement.”

—Gray Cook

 

Even a set of twenty fundamental functional movements—based on the concept of General Physical Preparation (GPP, which is general conditioning to improve strength, speed, endurance, and flexibility to support specific movement skills and performance)—are extraordinarily better than most other approaches in terms of overall physical preparation, but they’re still significantly limited and limiting when compared with the broad scope of Natural Movement training. Most fitness professionals and aficionados love the convenient idea that a handful of movement drills is sufficient to keep them “in shape” without realizing that to maintain optimum levels of function, competency, and preparedness, dozens of techniques and hundreds of movement variations must be regularly practiced.

You want to be a well-rounded, unspecialized movement athlete who is physically and mentally conditioned in a “broadly specific” manner. Let me explain. “Broadly specific” means that you’re specifically adapted—note that this is about specificity, not specialization—to a broad variety of motor skills and physiological adaptations that stem from exposure to a broad variety of specific practical demands, and that makes you unspecialized and highly adaptable. A single movement variation alone isn’t the practice of an entire movement skill, is it? For instance, a Pull-Up is a climbing movement pattern, yet it clearly doesn’t represent the full scope of climbing movements. In short, being strong at Pull-Ups may help your climbing ability to some degree, but in the absence of actual climbing techniques and the diverse physiological adaptations that stem from them, you are not at all ready to climb diverse surfaces. “Conditioning” your legs in a general way through specific drills doesn’t make you instantly skilled at running, jumping, and landing. Such general physical preparation isn’t specific enough; for that reason, it’s actually also a specialized approach. Natural Movement training is general yet highly specific. There is no dissociation between strength and other physiological adaptations and specific motor skills, and strength doesn’t precede development of motor skills. They both happen symbiotically (for the most part). In short, even though it sounds like an oxymoron, training that’s too general is also inherently overly specific. Strength and conditioning is not the be-all and end-all. Technique is not everything, either. Physical capability not only requires both, but it needs both to work synergistically, which is mostly achieved by training synergistically. The real world is way too complex to realistically expect any general physical preparation program to prepare you for absolutely anything.

In sports, to be declared an individual of superior physical value, it is enough to carry out an exceptional performance, even if that person is hopeless in other kinds of exercises. The records established by the specialists thus distort the outlook on the value of the individual who is capable in a complete and practical way. The latter, being capable of all kinds of exercises, yet cannot reach the performances of the specialists.”

—Georges Hébert

 

Equalization

 

Natural Movement is a naturally integrated system in which a fundamental level of capability in each Natural Movement skill—including both the skills and physiological adaptations associated with them—is established in an “equalized” fashion. This is especially true for the beginner, who should absolutely embrace a practice of Natural Movement that’s as inclusive as possible. Whereas you might have a liking for or possess strengths in one or several skills and might even occasionally emphasize a particular skill and enjoy the specific benefits of temporary specialization, the necessity of overall real-world capability doesn’t really leave you with the option to become a pure or permanent specialist. No natural capacity of movement should ever be totally neglected. The goal is to be well-rounded, maybe with a few sharp edges.

I want to emphasize that this principle does not, in any way, undervalue some of the great benefits of specialization; it also does not negate precious advancements brought by sport specialization over the last decades in terms of technique, training protocols, or scientific data. Sport specialization has proved to contribute to understanding and, in many aspects, to improving physical performance. But such achievements or benefits are not collectively shared. Millions of us aren’t pursuing gold medals, breaking world records, or into any kind of sport specialization. Shouldn’t we simply aim at achieving our Natural Movement potential and be equipped with the baseline levels of movement skills and physical preparedness required by the real world, while also enjoying a healthy body and life for as long as possible?

There is also hope that even in these days of increasing specialization there is a unity in the human experience.”

—Allan McLeod Cormack

 

Unless you are a pure specialist at heart or a high-level sport practitioner and competitor, you have everything to gain by practicing evolutionarily natural skills in an equalized way; you’ll be rewarded health-wise, fun-wise, and satisfaction-wise. Natural Movement is everything our human biology needs in terms of physical behavior. In that regard, any other physical activity is either incomplete or optional.

The bulk of Natural Movement skill acquisition to quite decent levels of effectiveness and efficiency takes place in significantly much less time required than to reach competitive levels in specialized sports. Why pick one skill when you could simultaneously develop many at once without having to isolate them in practice? It is said that thousands of hours of practice are required to master a single skill, yet the progress that you can achieve in many diverse skills in just dozens of hours of dedicated Natural Movement practice is breathtaking. It is often much easier to specialize in a given skill after you have equalized your overall skills than to equalize your capability after you have become specialized; therefore, you should equalize before you specialize.

An unspecialized Natural Movement approach to training can even tremendously benefit the sport specialist from many aspects—in skill acquisition, physically and physiologically, and even psychologically.

As you begin, I strongly encourage you to first address your deficiencies and weak points rather than persist in reinforcing your fortes. At a minimum, before you reinforce your strengths, you should enrich and broaden the practical movement scope you can perform with a decent level of efficiency, even if the movements don’t feel quite “natural” to you at first and you’re out of your comfort zone. Exposing your weaknesses is definitely being honest with yourself, and it also demonstrates courage.

Lifestyle Specialization

 

No human is born a specialized athlete or a specialized mover. We are natural “polymovers,” not “monomovers.” Hamsters run endlessly in a wheel not by choice but because they’re caged. Humans run endlessly on treadmills pretty much for the same reason; they limit themselves to a single physical activity because of their culturally induced, self-imposed limitations. They don’t know different because everyone around them does the same.

The behavior and mindset involved in specialization isn’t even limited to sports or the fitness world. It starts at home in the scope of movement we do—and in the wide range of movements we rarely or never do but that all our ancestors did daily. For most modern humans, sitting, working, eating, and playing on surfaces raised above ground level occupies 90 percent of our wake time; the other 10 percent of time is spent either standing or walking short distances on flat, linear, stable, predictable surfaces. How would you describe such a movement behavior and pattern in a straightforward way? Specialization. It is not a “hidden” form of movement specialization but simply a form we no longer notice. For instance, sitting for hours each day is clearly a form of physical specialization that stems from our modern “movement poverty” issue.

Except in rare and very unfortunate cases, we’re all born with incredible mobility. Yet how do you explain that millions of “modern”—which is not to say “advanced”—humans cannot Deep Squat any longer? Is it because they don’t do yoga, stretching, or mobility drills? Is it because they have opted out of whichever compartmentalized, specialized physical practice would help with the issue? Or is it simply because they never, or too rarely, use the essential natural movement that is the Deep Squat, and as a result they have lost the range of motion needed for it? Mobility is a built-in physical quality, yet it has become supplemental training because lifestyles have become significantly deficient in fundamental natural movements. This is just one example. If you feel that your muscles get weaker over time, there’s a special fitness compartment to address just that. If you feel that you get stiffer over time, do yoga. If you feel that you get out of breath easily, you need cardio-training. If you feel that a “compartment” of your body is deficient, then you turn to a series of drills, an accessory training, a necessary chore, a temporary program or therapy until it feels better. You might have been thinking, “I have a specific issue; therefore, I need a specialized solution,” but in doing that, you have separated and isolated one of the diverse physiological functions that’s necessary for movement.

Maybe you even have multiple issues that stem from poor movement behavior. Instead of needing a specific remedy for each issue that stems from a lack of Natural Movement behavior in your life, maybe you just need to use Natural Movement to globally address all your functional issues.

Doing compartmentalized, specific training a little every day or a few times a week can certainly be helpful (and yes, it is better than nothing), but that practice is a supplemental approach to “fixing” an overall impoverished movement behavior. Can you compensate for the adverse effects of a highly processed industrial diet just by swallowing supplements every day? No. The supplementation of a deficient, unhealthy diet is not as effective as a healthy diet without supplementation. By the same token, supplementing a deficient, unhealthy movement behavior with a compartmentalized solution is not as effective as a healthy, complete movement behavior without specific drill supplementation.

Again, specific strategies or therapies can be extremely helpful. However, they will fail to last for the long term in the absence of healthy, consistent movement behavior. We keep looking at the tiny percentage of deliberate movement activity we could add in our life and that could make a bit of difference, but we are still failing to understand that it is the overwhelming percentage of our unconscious movement behavior—which mostly consists of sitting and standing and that cruelly lacks diversity, variability, frequency, and consistency—that is causing the problems we need supplemental exercises for.

When you think of specialization, you normally think of how it makes you so skilled at one thing you do the most. For 95 percent or more of our wake time, most of us are simply sitting and not moving. When we do move, we are probably just walking very short distances. That is a specialized movement behavior even though it isn’t “training.” Does that mean that people today are amazing at walking? Not in the least. First off, most people cannot walk very far, or very fast, without being quickly out of breath. Second, they become even slower and look very clumsy the moment they have to walk on uneven terrain. Last, if you remove a person’s protective footwear and have him or her walk on a rocky terrain, they start looking absolutely ridiculous, with their arms flailing all over; they move very slowly and grimace a lot. Clearly this kind of “specialization” has not made people into walking experts. The only thing we’re specialized in is being physically idle.

But what did we expect? We can’t diminish and neglect our original Natural Movement behavior that much and expect to become magically adept at it in time of need. What people need is not some kind of “bio-hack” to help them “break in” their bodies as if they’re alien things. People don’t need temporary quick fixes; instead they need long-term behaviors. The magic potion you have to drink frequently—every day—is a Natural Movement lifestyle that reintroduces a significant number of lost, forgotten, and natural movement patterns. It is not, and can never be, a quick fix. You can’t trick, fool, or hack your biology. You can only understand, respect, and nurture it.

The silver bullet you need is the one that shoots dead the perception that “a little movement is good for you (especially if ‘science-based’).” Let me reverse-engineer this idea: The truth is that “very little movement is terrible for you,” and very little movement is probably the reality of your daily life. A lot of movement is your default biological duty. If you approach Natural Movement in the conventional three-times-a-week way, you are still specializing in the sense that for the majority of time, your physical behavior remains very limited movement.

An unspecialized approach means that your practice is not limited to the “special” moment of practice that must take place at a certain time or place or with particular clothing or gear. Not all movements are “exercise,” but you can turn every movement into a practice, as well as add many movements to your practice throughout the day. Don’t just ask yourself how many times a week you should exercise; instead ask how many times a day you should practice movement.

The beauty of Natural Movement lies in the fact that your drive to become better will be so strong that you will stop looking at the clock, you might want to stop counting repetitions, and, last but not least, you might want to prolong your movement sessions rather than shrink and expedite them. Rather than avoiding extra exercise, you will be seizing every opportunity you can find to practice extra movement. You will devise strategies to create opportunities for practice. You will brush your teeth in a Deep Squat, work on your laptop while kneeling, read a book while sitting on the floor, tiptoe when you wait in line, practice position and breathing while sitting, walk or jump up the stairs rather than choosing escalators, hang from that tree branch for a few seconds every time you walk under one, and so on. You will fall in love with movement again, and you will want to move all the time.

You are not switching to a different body or becoming a different person the moment you stop exercising. Your activity may change, but the person you are and the biology that is alive in you won’t change. Just like anything else that you do, movement exercise is not solely something you do; it’s an expression of who you are. Experiencing and manifesting who you are is never compartmentalized; it’s an uninterrupted process. The you who is exercising and the you who is physically inactive are the same person. The more you realize this continuum, the more the illusion of a separation between the different activities and occupations in your life becomes clear. Only the activities differ; the person is the same.

Depart from your physically idle self and reunite with the physically live one by reconnecting with the original, diverse Natural Movement behaviors all humans once practiced.