Chapter 14: Position - The Practice of Natural Movement

When you have regained efficient control over the fundamental, internal movement that is breathing, you want the same efficiency and control over the movement of your whole body, starting with the positions that you will need and use.

The world of human positions is vast. Of course, your position in the sense of location is first on planet Earth, regardless of where your current geographical location is. This generality is important because I’m going to talk about gravity and how it affects us—particularly our positions and movements.

Beyond that, position generally refers to an enormous diversity of possible physical or anatomical configurations of the human body, which also is called human positioning. Human positioning can be anything from the position of your fingers, toes, eyes, or tongue to the position of your whole body. The same way the scope of human movement is not limited to natural movements, the scope of human position is not limited to natural ones. Anyone can explore atypical positions or create some, such as in dance, mime, or acrobatics. Positions can also be associated with given traditions or rites (yoga, religion, spirituality). One can pose with an aesthetic, artistic, or goofy intention in mind.

Not surprisingly, this book focuses on an astounding number of natural positions, such as lying, crawling, kneeling, sitting, squatting, standing, balancing, or hanging (and more). Natural positions are all practical and can be used to wait, rest, recover, sleep, eat, defecate, meditate, work, ride, shoot, hide, protect, play, have sex, and give birth. Life is an endless succession of positions—intentional, reflexive, and unconscious.

Although our primary understanding of position is to think of it as being something exclusively static and motionless, and indeed that is part of it, we must make it evolve to dynamic positions in movement; we must view movement itself as nothing but a dynamic change of the body’s position. It is illusory, though, to think of position and movement as separate. Unless you are entirely relaxed in a lying position, holding any other position demands an active participation, with some level of strength and tension to first enable a transition to a position to establish it, which is nothing less than movement, and then to maintain that position. On the other hand, movement is no less than a dynamic succession of positions you perform while following a sequence, with a particular timing, duration, and intensity. Movement is the process of transitioning positions. Strong, efficient, controlled positions provide a significant mechanical advantage in movement, optimizing balance, relaxation, coordination, and transitions to the next movement…or next position.

Understanding and mastering position means learning, improving, and ultimately mastering movement faster. Control position and you control movement. The better you control position, the better you move. Enter positional control.

Positional Control

 

Positional control is the ability to intentionally and optimally organize body segments to hold a given position or perform a given movement and physical action as effectively and efficiently as possible in a given context.

Positional control first implies alignment—that is, the control of how you position, or “align” each segment of your body in relation to other segments independent of the environmental complexity.* In other words, alignment is the intentional organization or relative position (orientation, angle) of bones to each other for optimum positional efficiency (in terms of maximal stability, leverage and force production, minimal energy expenditure, and minimal wear on the joints).

Because the goal of alignment is effectiveness and efficiency, perfect alignment does not necessarily imply linearity. For instance, a “straight back” is great to lift something heavy and a “rounded back” isn’t, but you can’t roll with a straight back; a pronounced spinal curvature is mandatory for rolling smoothly. In the former case, the straight spine is perfectly aligned, but in the latter case, a well-rounded spine is perfectly “aligned” as well.

Posture is an integral part of alignment. Conventionally, posture refers specifically to linear alignment of the spine from sacrum to neck (the infamous “straight back”) when the body is in an upright/vertical position, such as when you’re standing or sitting. I like to extend the notion of posture to any position that demands a straight back to be optimally efficient, such as in the Hip Hinge or the Foot-Hand Crawl, which coincidentally are among the best movements for activating the same muscles that support postural integrity and control. Postural control is the ability to maintain a stable “neutral” spine (or straight lower and upper back) and is an aspect of positional control that’s of paramount importance.

When you have decent control of your positions when you’re going slowly, the challenge is to be able to replicate the same level of positional integrity as you transition at a faster pace from position to position, which is what you do when you start to move.

Positions require many of the same elements necessary for movement:

• Strength: Except for positions where the body is fully relaxed with zero muscular tension anywhere (which is the only real “passive” position that can exist because you are either unconscious, paralyzed, or dead), assuming any position obviously starts with muscular contraction. Tension is indeed necessary to establish and then hold the position with stability at every joint involved in holding the position. I discuss more about this in Chapter 15, “Tension-Relaxation.” Similarly, position influences muscle function and output.

• Mobility: You need to possess enough range of motion to reach positions without being limited by a lack of mobility.

• Proprioception (also called kinesthetic awareness): This is an innate ability to sense body signals relative to position, motion, and balance. In other words, when you hold a position, you are aware of the position of each of your body parts in relation to the others but also in relation to the environment and gravity, which enables you to establish and maintain balance. Balance is covered in Chapter 26, “Balancing Movement.”

• Exteroception: This is the part of proprioception that relates specifically to positioning and the variables of environment you are directly interacting with through physical contact. Exteroception is an innate ability—although you can develop it—to sense stimuli that originate from the surfaces that support the body to enable you to determine your position and how sustainable it is. This ability enables you to balance and transition to the next movement. Therefore, a very important part of exteroception has to do with perceiving frictional resistance or “friction,” which I explain in more detail on here in the “Perception of Friction and Surface of Support” section.

Last, but not least, positioning has to do with how you intentionally position each segment of your body in relation to the environment—and not the mere perception of it (exteroception). The environment can be any external variable (terrain, weather, someone else’s body) that you need to adapt to so that you can ensure effectiveness and efficiency. For instance, how you position your arms on a horizontal surface to hang and rest is different than when you want to pull from it to climb on top of the surface. The environment presents demands that cannot be denied—which exteroception enables you to feel—and it dictates how you make both minor and major positional modifications. (Again, I’m talking about adaptability.)

When you have decent control of your positions when performing them at a low level of intensity, the first challenge is to maintain the same level of positional control with more intensity—for instance, going faster, jumping higher, and so on—within a simplified environment. Ultimately the challenge is to maintain such control over your positions when moving through complex ones. If you’re not already able to hold fundamental positions impeccably and at will, if you’re not able to make minute adjustments without overthinking (or even without thinking), or you’re getting confused in the absence of intensity (speed, distance, height) or environmental complexity (uneven, slippery, moving surfaces), then what will happen when you need to replicate the positions at greater levels of intensity or within complex environments?

It’s simple: You’ll be in a lot of trouble. In Natural Movement, positioning is a fundamental skill because the more you advance your practice and as environmental complexity increases, the more intensity increases. Therefore, positional control is ultimately about anticipatory positional adjustments relative to how movement needs to be performed in a given context—environment and situation—to ensure the stability, and therefore the effectiveness and efficiency, of the next position or movement, which is the very essence of movement adaptability. When you see people moving very slowly in nature when the terrain gets rough, it is not necessarily because they need strength or cardio; it might be because it takes them a long time to figure out reliable and safe positioning with every move they make.

Like all aspects of movement training, positioning is trained by respecting progressions from simple environmental demands to complex ones and increasing the level of intensity.

Positional Variability and the “All-Purpose Position” Myth

Ever heard of the “all-purpose squat” position? Well, it is the idea that a single squat position can be used for any purpose. Any purpose? Then why are we capable of diverse variations of the squat position? That’s because each variation has a purpose, a given practical context where it is best. Thank you, Evolution! Knowing what variation is most appropriate for the context in which it is being used makes you understand the actual purpose of each variation and the necessity for positional variability to exist in the first place. In fact, which position is a “variation”? Is a Narrow-Base Deep Squat with the feet pointing out a variation of a Squat in which the feet are hip-width apart and pointing forward, or is it the other way around? It reminds me of two people who speak the same language but have two different accents; which person has an accent? Both, right?

Dealing with diverse contextual variables demands varied and frequent modifications of your position. In this case, purpose-specific position is a more appropriate name than “all-purpose” position, even though any position variation may have more than one use.

So, forget the idea that any position is the “only,” the “standard,” or even the “best” and that variations of the same position should be dismissed as unimportant or less important, which is what happens when you start to believe in a so-called “all-purpose” position. “Best” means nothing without understanding a specific application. All-purpose positions simply do not exist. No single position ever fits absolutely every contextual purpose, and that’s the reason why the human body is capable of many positional variations—for the sake of adaptability and efficiency. Just go and move in nature sometimes and experience this reality firsthand.

You won’t need to have control over a single squatting, sitting, kneeling, or hanging position that will supposedly enable you to be comfortable and in control of all other variations. This is a myth. To develop actual positional control, you need to practice a wide variety of positions, become comfortable in and control all of them, become able to easily and smoothly transition from one to the next. Furthermore, you need to become experienced in the strengths and weaknesses of each position in different contexts so you can assume the ideal position in each situation without hesitation, without wasting time, and without losing your balance.

The notion of “power position” is contextual also. A power position in a certain context becomes a weak one the moment the context changes. In that situation, the alternative may be a position you never practice so you feel weak or incompetent with it because it’s not a “power position,” and you’ve utterly ignored it. For example, you might be able to assume a comfortable Wide-Base Deep Squat in which you feel strong, but when you must use a Narrow-Base Deep Squat, you might feel weak or off-balance even though this position should be your “power position” in the given context.

Understanding context helps you understand whether a given position is relevant or irrelevant, effective or ineffective, and efficient or inefficient. It is understanding what position has power, where, when, and what that power is. This is an important part of positional control.

Conceptual and Experiential Understanding

 

At this point there are more insights into understanding positional control and movement efficiency principles that I want to share with you, which is the “conceptual understanding” part, but I believe they are best assimilated if you can get a perceptual or “experiential” understanding of them simultaneously. Before we go through some discrete positions and patterns, I want to lead you through a series of simple “perception” drills designed to give you both a broad perceptual and experiential understanding of some of the most fundamental and universal aspects of movement. Although science can provide immensely more detailed information about such movement efficiency principles, the reality is that conceptual knowledge can take you only so far; eventually, experiential understanding rules your ability, or lack thereof, to move efficiently. Ultimately you want your “movement brain” and body to get it—not just your mind.

All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions.”

—Leonardo da Vinci

 

The ten following perception drills relate to gravity. Gravity is a universal and omnipresent force that pulls every body that has mass toward the center of the Earth. Astronauts who spend time in a zero-gravity environment rapidly lose muscle mass (they suffer from sarcopenia) and bone density, but even in the presence of gravity, absence of interaction with gravity through movement has the same result, just not to the same degree and speed. You don’t need to be launched into space to suffer the adverse effects of lack of gravity; all you need to do is to stop moving.

Humans have evolved in and exist in a gravitational field, and it is not just movement and life in nature but also movement in relation to gravity that has shaped the way we move. Because every movement technique is about being effective and efficient, gravity is always a factor, and you must understand how to best “negotiate” it. You can’t change gravity; the only thing you can change is how efficiently you interact with it. The only way your mind can optimally command your body is by first understanding and obeying the forces that govern its movement. In that respect, gravity ranks as the number-one force.

As you work through the following drills, I suggest you keep your eyes closed so that you can better feel what’s going on in your body. Let’s go!

Don’t fight forces, use them.”

—R. Buckminster Fuller

 

Perception of Gravity, Body Weight, Points of Support, and Contact Force

When you lie down and relax, why doesn’t your body float off the ground and levitate? Because of the gravitational force!

Visualize Earth and the immense power of gravity. When you lie down and relax, do you have a physical perception of gravity at this moment? If yes, can you describe it? How do you feel it, or where do you sense it? You feel gravity in every body part that is supporting some of your body weight at this moment. Body weight is the amount of gravitational attraction between your body and the Earth. You should feel weight, or pressure, in the back of your head, shoulders, arms, legs, feet, and bottom, correct?

Take a moment to focus on the sensation of pressure on those parts. Feel all the body surface that is touching the ground: These areas are called points of support because they support at least some of your body weight—and sometimes all of it depending your position. Points of support can be any body part, but they are primarily our feet, hands, and bottom; secondary points of support are our knees, elbows, forearms, shoulders, belly, and so on.

Except for the occasional moments where the body is airborne, the rest of the time it is connected to the environment through points of support. The points of support are primarily responsible for your perception of both gravity and your own body weight. But we also experience gravity in the muscles, which must be contracted so you can hold active positions to resist gravity and prevent it from pulling your body weight down.

The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.”

—Ernest Wood

 

For every position that is not airborne, we are physically attached to the environment—the ground, a tree branch, or water. This physical connection of our body with the environment generates a contact force regardless of its duration. A contact force is a direct force that acts at the surface of contact between two objects but in opposite directions, such as between your points of support and the environment. For example, when you pull a heavy object off the ground, there is contact force between your hands and the object, and there is contact force between your feet and the ground. The latter force is called the ground reaction force. In fact, the same “ground” reaction force takes place if, for instance, you pull or push off a tree branch, which isn’t technically the ground. Both contact forces last as long as you stand while holding the object. When you’re running, the contact force (in this case the ground reaction force) is applied in a short burst every time one of your feet lands. Basically, the idea is that the environment provides the support for you to stand, hang, push, pull, or rebound, which you couldn’t do without contact force. Points of support “anchor” the body to the physical environment, which is the reason you can’t keep jumping unless you have touched the ground.

Try this drill: Lie down completely flat on your back with your arms and legs lengthened (don’t cross them). Breathe in a relaxed manner and release muscular tension. Slowly raise both lengthened arms at an angle (diagonally). As the sensation of pressure due to contact force is relieved from the backs of your arms, muscular tension in your shoulders that’s necessary to oppose the pull of gravity commences, which gives you both another sensation of the pull of gravity and a sense of how much your arms weigh. Now completely let go of tension in your shoulders and let gravity pull your arms back down. Gravity takes over as soon as you release tension in your shoulders.

Perception of Base of Support

Hold a regular standing position. Do you feel any pressure in the back of your body? No, you don’t. You feel all the pressure of your body weight in both feet, which tells you that your feet are the two points of support that are currently supporting the totality of your body weight. The area running between and under your feet is called your base of support. Generally speaking, a wider base of support makes your position more stable; conversely, a narrower base of support is less stable. For example, standing on one foot is clearly not as stable as being on all fours using your knees and hands for support.

Perception of Body-Weight Shifting and Body-Weight Distribution Without Change of Base of Support

As you continue from the previous perception drill, your entire body weight is equally distributed between your feet, with each foot supporting 50 percent of your overall body weight. Shift your body weight from one foot to the other while keeping both feet grounded. This does not change your base of support or points of support, but it does change how your body weight is distributed over those two points of support. As a result, the pressure under one foot increases as it decreases on the opposite one. You can come close to putting 100 percent of your body weight onto one foot, but you can’t have a full 100 percent because doing so would require that you lift one foot off the ground. A swift change of body weight distribution using the pull of gravity can generate useful momentum, which is something I cover in Chapter 16, “Sequence and Timing.”

Perception of Center of Gravity

The center of gravity (also called center of mass) of your body is the point in space about which your body weight is evenly distributed. When you stand upright, your center of gravity is located around your navel. Depending on your physical makeup, your center of gravity when standing can be slightly higher or lower than another person’s. The precise location of your center of gravity changes depending on your body position because the center of gravity is determined by how the weight in all your body segments is positioned in relation to each other. Changing your position changes the distribution of your body weight and consequently changes the position of your center of gravity to some degree. The center of gravity continuously shifts through movement toward the greater concentration of your body weight.

For instance, if you lift both arms, you are shifting some of your weight upward, which shifts your center of gravity upward from your navel toward your sternum. When you crawl all on all fours, your center of gravity shifts below and actually outside your body.

Perception of Line of Gravity and Balance

The center of gravity is considered a theoretical point that can be tricky to physically locate.

The perception of the line of gravity and body-weight shifting can help you get a sense of the location of your center of gravity. The line of gravity is an imaginary line that runs vertically between your center of gravity and the ground (or the center of Earth). The center of gravity, the line of gravity, and the center of Earth are always aligned. However, to be well balanced in any static position, which is called static balance, the center of gravity and line of gravity must be vertically aligned with your base of support. Conversely, to initiate movement, which is dynamic balance, you must shift the line of gravity outside vertical alignment with your base of support; the amplitude and speed of the shift depends on the movement you’re performing.

In the standing position, feel how your body weight is evenly distributed between both feet, then visualize your line of gravity running from your center of gravity to the center of your base of support and all the way to the center of Earth as it keeps you well balanced and stable. If you shift body weight toward one of your feet, you’re shifting both your center of gravity and line of gravity toward the side of your base of support, which is still sustainable but not as stable. If you keep shifting your body weight further to the side, you would end up pushing your center of gravity and line of gravity beyond and outside vertical alignment with your base of support; without the support of a base, gravity immediately pulls you off balance and toward the ground. For this reason, vertically aligning your center of gravity with the center of your base of support is the primary condition that creates more stability in all directions.

Following are some other ways of ensuring more stability:

• Enlarging the base of support (increasing the horizontal distance between the line of gravity and the edges of the base of support) by widening it or by adding points of support

• Shortening the distance between the center of gravity and the base of support

Perception of Linear Joint Alignment

From the same standing position, visualize and feel how centering your center of gravity and line of gravity with the center of your base of support also causes you to instinctively center all body segments and their segmental mass by stacking them from feet to head as vertically as you can, which produces the most stable position possible, while avoiding any unnecessary tension to minimize effort. It’s like stacking cubes; the straighter the stack is the more stable it is, right?

Indeed, efficient static balance implies that you “center” your joints in a neutral fashion as much as possible depending on the context to obtain the most structurally stable and energy-efficient position. You do this through joint centration, which is organizing your joints in a linear vertical alignment to handle the downward compressive force that results from gravity and your own body weight. It’s a mechanical advantage because your bones are aligned so that weight is transferred down through the centers of your joints to rely as little as possible on the support of ligaments and muscles.

We unconsciously learn this principle when we learned to stand for the first time. However, as effortless as a vertically well-centered standing position feels, it is not truly effortless for two reasons:

• A certain amount of tension, even minimal, is required to maintain the position.

• You can never take your balance for granted.

Close your eyes while assuming a standing position. Pay attention to the subtle, barely perceptible oscillations of your body moving forward, backward, or sideways and the subtle positional adjustments that accompany those oscillations. This is your vestibular system managing your balance for you. Holding any static position is part of movement because it is an interaction with gravity. You may try to prevent those oscillations and make them disappear by trying to relax or by trying to add tension to your body: Either way, you will fail. You cannot force your body to become perfectly still whenever you hold a static balance position. This is because you are not an inanimate object but a living being who must organize the pluri-articulated structure which is your skeletal system to find and maintain the body’s point of balance. That point of balance can be optimal, but it’s never perfect; it’s always temporary and never shielded from the action of gravity.

Perception of Angular (Non-Linear) Joint Alignment

Now tilt your head forward. Do you feel how the segmental mass of your head has moved outside vertical alignment with the rest of your body? Now move your head further by rounding your back. Don’t you already want to reset your posture so it’s straight? Your head isn’t stacked on top of your body anymore, and your vertebrae aren’t stacked on top of each other. The support is gone, and gravity is naturally pulling the weight of your head down, which forces you to create extra tension in the back of your neck and back and to also slightly shift your center of gravity to avoid tipping over. Unless it is contextually necessary to assume this position, this is a bad posture to hold.

Now bend at the hip and knees and feel the extra tension necessary in your body to hold this position. This is a stable position, but it would clearly be a very uneconomical way to stand, right? Absolutely, because your hip and knee joints are no longer vertically aligned with your base of support and the rest of your body. You have lost the benefit of joint centration in a number of your joints, demanding your muscles and joints to work more. However, if you had to lift something heavy off the ground, you would want to bend at the hip and knees (as well as make other positional modifications) and intentionally align your joints and body parts for maximum efficiency. (Remember: Alignment isn’t always linear.) You must create angles at the joints to produce force. Could you jump upward from a standing position without first changing your alignment, bending your joints, and changing your position?

Perception of Change of Support

Changing support implies a modification of both point of support and base of support, which is the very essence of locomotion; and not just “movement.” Indeed, it is possible to produce movement without producing locomotion by moving on the spot without changing your base of support or location.

From your standing position, shift all your body weight to a single foot, vertically align your center of gravity and line of gravity with it, and then pick up the opposing foot. Your base of support is now made of a single point of support and feels less stable. Extend the nonsupporting leg forward and place the foot one or two feet away from you. Voilà, you have displaced one of your two original points of support, changed the location of your base of support, and initiated not only movement but locomotion. You are not standing in the exact same place anymore!

Whenever you want to produce locomotion, you must let go of existing points of support to establish new ones some distance away. But you also must let go of your balance on the existing base of support until you can establish balance on the new one. Easy? Well, anyone can let go of their position and points of support and destroy their balance, but not everyone is confident of their ability to rebuild their balance somewhere else on new points of support. If you fail at rebuilding your balance, what happens to you? Gravity takes you down (which you’ve known since you were a very young kid). That’s the difference between the person who moves skillfully and the one who moves clumsily, between the person who moves confidently and the person who is afraid and reluctant to.

Perception of Body-Weight Shifting with Change of Base of Support = Perception of Gravity as a Free Energy Motive

But what would happen if you were to swiftly remove one of your feet from the ground without first vertically aligning your center of gravity with the next intended base of support? By lifting a foot, you are removing a point of support and changing your base of support (from two feet to a single grounded foot). This immediately places the center of gravity outside and beyond vertical alignment with the base of support, and gravity is quickly pulling your center of gravity off-balance toward the direction where your center of gravity is already leaning.

Is having your center of gravity off-balance a bad thing? Not necessarily. If the move was unintentional then it’s undesirable because you are now off balance and must quickly react by re-establishing a new point of support that will enable you to recover a balanced position. Otherwise, you will fall hard to the ground. This type of reflex is covered in Chapter 26, “Balancing Movement.” However, it can be an intentional strategy for efficient movement, which is covered in Chapter 16, “Sequence and Timing.”

Perception of Friction and Surface of Support

For this next drill, you again need to lie down on your back. Bring both feet to rest on the floor close to your buttocks. Keep your back and hips on the ground and push off from your feet and legs as if you’re trying to slide your body backward. Can you? Unless the surface where you lie is slippery (and maybe your clothes are synthetic), you won’t slide backward. It’s likely that your feet will slide forward if you try to push harder.

The reason you can’t slide is because of the difference of frictional force (or friction) under the points of support, which are currently your back, rear, and feet. The frictional resistance from under your back and rear is significantly superior to that under your feet, for two reasons:

• The overall surface in contact with the ground of your back and rear is far greater than the surface of your feet in contact with the ground.

• Your back and rear are supporting much more of your body weight, increasing friction in those areas.

Because of the difference in friction level, there is only so much force from the legs you can apply to your feet before either your feet slide forward, or your hips elevate off the ground when you try to push and slide on your back. It doesn’t matter how strong your legs are, if the static friction in your back exceeds the static friction in your feet, the force applied in your feet meets the resistance of your back and loses.

It would be even “worse” if the bottoms of your feet were oily, or if they were resting on a wet or icy surface. Your feet would helplessly slide forward with little effort, right? Conversely, if your feet were resting on a rugged, firm surface that provides a lot of friction, and your back and hips were on an icy surface (or if you were wearing a jersey made of synthetic fabric), sliding backward on your back would be easy.

It’s frictional resistance that gives our points of support “static friction” or “segmental inertia,” which is a resistance to change in its motion or position so that force can be applied in other body parts and create motion in a controlled direction. Without static friction, even for a millisecond, we can’t ensure the points of support required to push or pull ourselves in any direction, and kinetic energy produced would be dispersed. Simply put, deficient static friction under a point of support reduces the amount of force we can apply to it, whereas the absence of friction renders a point of support useless. This is why it is so challenging to move on icy surfaces.

Now, from the lying position, shift your body to the left side, raise your hips off the ground, and load your left shoulder with body weight. Tense your feet and “plant” your heels in the ground with downward pressure. Push off from your heels and fully extend your legs, letting your hips move to the side and toward your shoulders. Have you now moved backward? You have, and you were able to do it not because of the absence of friction but because you made efficient use of it by changing your base of support before applying force in your legs. This is the technique called the “Hip-Thrust Crawl,” which is described in Chapter 24, “Ground Movement 1: Lying, Rolling, Crawling.”

What this teaches us is that we need to understand friction to move efficiently. The strength and reliability of your contact with the environment, your ability to hold a position, and your ability to produce and direct force and momentum rely on how much friction you’re able to establish and maintain as you apply force and use momentum.

Friction has to do with four main variables:

• The external surface you are in contact with and that supports you, called the surface of support. If the rock you are landing on is wet, you will have much less friction upon landing than when it is dry—and less friction can cause you to slip. If the rock is covered with sand, you will also have less friction under your feet when landing. Different surfaces provide different levels of friction, and weather conditions may also alter friction levels.

• The external surface of the point(s) of support in contact with the surface of support: If you are landing on a dry rock barefoot and your feet are wet, you have less friction than if they are dry, which can cause you to slip.

• The total surface area for contact of your points of support: The friction from the full surface of your feet when they are flat on a surface is greater than if you stand on a smaller surface, such as your forefoot, which you might do because you are elevating your heels or because the surface of support is too small for the whole foot to be on the support surface.

• The position of your points of support in relation to gravity and the force applied to them: The more perpendicularly to the point of support that body weight or a force is applied, the greater the friction. If you place your foot on a horizontal surface of a cliff and push down, the force is perpendicular to the foot that’s supported by the horizontal surface, and you can elevate your position. If you place your foot on a vertical surface and push down, your foot meets no frictional resistance, so it slides down and you go nowhere regardless of how hard you try to push on that leg. To create friction, you need to modify your position so you can push into the surface.

In other words, “friction,” from a practical Natural Movement perspective of movement efficiency refers to how reliable a point of support is, which is critical when you’re moving fast through unknown complex environments—natural ones in particular. The reason friction is widely overlooked or completely ignored in the fitness world is probably because neither programs nor gym environments are designed for adaptable movement and meeting the challenge of physically navigating through diverse, complex, and unpredictable environments. In a gym, unless water or sweat makes the floors slippery, accidental slippage is not really a concern.

So, is friction that important to Natural Movement? Yes, extremely. Locomotion requires constant change of support, and points of support enable you to transfer momentum and produce force. The faster you move or the more complex and unknown the environment where you move is, the more difficult it becomes to ensure friction for change of support and to avoid partial or complete slippage and a loss of energy, time, and balance that can even cause a fall and an injury. This kind of movement practice and physical performance is more demanding than moving on flat surfaces and predictable, unchanging environments. With every movement and every change of support, the perception of friction will be one of the primary reasons for success or failure, safety or injury. It is not just body weight and gravity that give us a sense of the points of support that connect us to the environment where we stand; it is also the perception of friction.

The perception of friction gives us a sense of

• How balanced and confident we can be on a given surface of support.

• What should be the optimal positioning of our points of support in relation to the supporting surface, as well as what the alignment of the rest of the body should be.

• How much force we need to produce and in what direction to ensure sufficient friction.

• How much power we can produce relative to the amount of friction we perceive we can rely on.

• How much momentum we can transfer from our base of support.

• How long we can afford to remain in a position on a given surface of support.

• Even what, where, how, and when should be our next move. An instant decision to modify the movement we were intending to transition to can be made depending on a perception of friction different than what we anticipated.

It is not unusual to witness people who otherwise have a “normal” sense of balance be challenged by their inability to manage efficient positioning (position in relation to the environment) and to trust their points of support; you may have experienced it yourself when walking in nature on rainy days. People—including athletes and fitness aficionados who aren’t trained to move in nature— slow down considerably while having little ability to accelerate, especially off trails. This is because not a single surface of support is exactly the same and static friction can only be assumed. Inexperienced people don’t know what to expect every time they make a move, or expect the wrong result. They experience apprehensiveness about slipping, insecurity, and even fear of falling and hurting themselves, which causes tension and stiffness in the body and increases clumsiness. Because you cannot always choose or predict the surfaces where you move, you cannot just “trust your body” in the absence of experience. To move faster, you need to become skilled at quickly changing support while ensuring static friction, which is a task that requires lots of practice and experience when moving within a complex environment you’re not familiar with and where surfaces change with every move you make.

Frictional resistance can be obtained from any body part because pretty much any body part can be used for support. However, most of the time we move while we’re supported on our feet, hands, or both. Ensuring friction is probably one of the main reasons why the feet and hands are extremely sensitive to environmental stimuli for locomotion. (In the case of the hands, it has to do with both locomotion and manipulation.)

When ensuring friction is an issue, we adapt through diverse strategies to avoid slippage (changing position, positioning, gait, speed, timing, direction, intensity, and so on) to enable us to maintain the highest level of performance that is contextually possible.

In this book I show you specific positions that ensure optimal friction for each technique, but it is ultimately your practice with diverse real-world environmental variables that will ensure efficient, adaptable proprioception.

Here’s the last drill for this chapter: Close your eyes to give yourself greater internal awareness. Slowly explore a variety of movements and positions on the spot and involve many parts of the body as points of support—for instance, the hands and the feet, knees and elbows, shoulder, buttocks, back, heels, fists, and so on. Pay attention to the interaction between the surface and the new points of support, friction, and body-weight shifting. Maintain breath control at all times.