Chapter 22: Structuring Sessions - The Practice of Natural Movement

For your practice sessions, you can take the approach of not planning a particular structure; instead, you decide what you do as you go “by feel.” Most of the time, even when you don’t have a detailed plan of what your session should include, you will have an idea of some of the particular movements you want to practice.

Structuring sessions is optional, but it can be an effective way to organize individual sessions as well as maintain some continuity of specific aspects of your progress over several sessions. How you structure each session depends, of course, on what you intend the session to be made of and the results you expect. You can use diverse practice types in training that is part of an individually designed program or of an impromptu session. The shorter the session is, the more specific it should be. For instance, if you have only five minutes, you shouldn’t be deterred from practicing, but you should avoid trying to do too much or having too much diversity unless your intention is to keep your body alert and functioning in a limited amount of time. The more time you have, the more movements you can practice and the more diverse your practice can be. Structuring your practice sessions, even in the absence of planning, means that you know what particular improvements you’re looking for and you have some basic level of organization to guide your practice and optimize the results.

Eventually, despite the diversity of movements trained, you might create your own practice patterns that you know fit you best, and some aspects of your practice will be consistent but still have a degree of variability. Sometimes, the totality of a practice session will be spontaneous. Sometimes a single session will emphasize a single technique, a single skill or physiological adaptation. In a nutshell, there are many diverse ways you can approach your practice to achieve Natural Movement capability.

 

Practice Types

 

The following suggestion is one recommendation of an effective sequence that’s broken into practice types when you have sufficient time—at least twenty minutes—for training:

• Warm-up/movement preparation: Spend five to fifteen minutes preparing your body for movement.

• Emphasis: An emphasis can be either focusing on one or more specific techniques or on particular aspects of capacity (a practice session may involve several emphases).

• A technical emphasis involves selecting techniques that you want to learn or improve, with a focus on efficiency (measurable aspects of practice are secondary and counting repetitions is relevant only if it helps you evaluate a percentage of efficient repetitions). The less time you have, the more you should limit the number of techniques to be involved. You could also decide that technical practice will fill the entire time after your warm-up. Capacity emphases may involve any movement with a focus on either strength, power, and/or conditioning (as long as you don’t compromise technique efficiency). Lastly, you may have an emphasis that pushes your limits in terms of both efficiency and capacity as a means to develop your ability to delay the deterioration of your technique under fatigue. In this case, it’s best to limit the scope of techniques involved to at most three techniques.

• Combo practice: Combine at least three but no more than eight movements into a sequence, including the particular techniques you just practiced. Using a circuit of movements is a very valuable and beneficial type of technical practice. Instead of spending ten minutes each on three different techniques from different Natural Movement skills, you could spend thirty minutes alternating the same techniques, doing a single or several repetitions of the first movement, then the second, then the third, and then going back to the first movement again. The advantage is that you’re not stressing the same areas of your body in the same way for too long, which is the case if all the movements belong to the same Natural Movement skill (crawling, balancing, jumping). Also, your central nervous system gets an opportunity to “reset” every time the task changes. Another highly important aspect of combo training is that it teaches you to seamlessly transition from one technique to another. You learn to connect movements rather than practicing them in isolation, which helps your transitions to be more efficient.

Combo practice also helps you maintain motivation and avoid boredom. The same idea can be used with the goal of developing strength, improving mobility, or improving energy systems. Another way to use a combo is to mix up high-intensity movement with low-intensity movement—for instance, lifting and carrying a heavy load followed by balancing across a beam. In this case, alternating high- and low-intensity movements is a form of “interval training,” and the low-intensity movements enable you to continue technical practice while under mild fatigue, which challenges your ability to maintain efficiency.

Last, a combo may exclusively contain movements performed at high intensity, which is a very effective way to develop your work capacity by improving your energy systems through metabolic conditioning.

With hundreds of techniques and thousands of movement and position variations and all the potential differences in volume, intensity, or environmental complexity variables, you can literally come up with a limitless number of combo variations.

Combo example (repeat 10 times or perform for 10 minutes):

• 100 yards fast-pace run

• 6x Forward Power Jump, distance of 5 feet, with a precision Square Landing

• 30-second Side Double-Hand Hang Front Swing

• 25-yard Inverted Crawl at a moderate pace

ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL

 

I could give you many examples of combos, but they’re just general ideas that aren’t customized to your individual ability and specific goals as they should be. Customizing practice is part of programming that you must do based on your needs. The main thing to remember is that the priority of a combo is always to maintain efficiency throughout the practice.

 

• Course: Work through a course, which is akin to an “obstacle” course. Like the combo practice, there is no standard course that applies to everyone. The course you use depends on where you are and what environmental variables you can use, such as terrain, surfaces, walls, boulders, fallen trees, and so on. The length or duration of the course will vary as well. In addition, what you include in the course obviously depends on what you are capable of.

The difference between a course and a combo is that you might not rehearse the same course several times in a row. The point of a course is not to learn and practice efficiency; it’s to test capability and sometimes also willpower. On a course, if you have imperfect execution of a movement, you don’t stop and do it again; you just keep going.

Another purpose of a course is to make your performance more situational than technical. There’s more to working a course than the technique or what environments or obstacles you’re training for; it’s also about simulating a scenario. Why are you going as fast as you safely can? It’s not just for metabolic conditioning; it’s because you’re imagining an emergency. Even though the situation is only simulated, your effort is very real. Not all obstacles are walls and ropes: speed, duration, distance, weight, weather conditions, and even fear can be tremendous obstacles, so course practice can be designed according to the type of difficulties you want to prepare for and to verify that your practice has actually prepared you for them.

THE BENEFIT OF COURSE TRAINING

 

Course training can help you verify your capability instead of only assuming it. Therefore, part of this type of training could be to confront tough conditions that you don’t normally encounter, such as cold, heat, mud, fear, darkness, slipperiness, and possibly a state of food and sleep deprivation. Undertaking these types of challenges doesn’t have so much to do with testing your technique or physical ability as it does with testing your mettle. You have to be aware that the tougher you make the course, the easier it is to become injured. However, not all courses have to be turned into a physical and mental ordeal. You can keep the course safe and not overly hard, especially as you’re beginning.

 

• Games: Try incorporating games into your practice from time to time. Games are inherently playful or competitive (if you’re not training solo). In fact, you don’t necessarily need to make something a game to have fun. Balancing is inherently fun; so is precision throwing on a target. Games tend to imply that several players are involved, that there are rules and a goal to the game, and possibly that it’s a competition with a winner. The point is this: Just like any specialized sport that’s based on some specific Natural Movement skill, when you incorporate a game into your practice, you might combine several skills.

Injury Prevention

 

Now that I’ve covered aspects structuring your practice, it’s a good idea to address injury prevention in more detail:

• Environment: Check out the environment and surfaces where you practice. If you step down or fall, is there a danger? Can you stumble on a rock hidden in the tall grass and break toes?

• Efficiency: The primary strategy for avoiding waste of energy where efficiency is concerned is learning technique and paying close attention to biomechanically sound, quality movement.

• Mindfulness: Self-preservation requires the mindset of behaving realistically, cautiously, and wisely to avoid reckless movement. Another important way to avoid injury is to anticipate fatigue—both muscular fatigue and the fatigue of your central nervous system—long enough before your form degrades too much and you can no longer perform safely. Indeed, injuries frequently occur toward the end of practice sessions or when fatigue peaks. Some issues you notice, such as significant impairments in performance or painful body signals, could turn into injury if you dismiss them, so be careful not to ignore the signs telling you to start becoming extra cautious, slow down, or even stop the activity (which are the brain’s natural responses to muscular fatigue anyway). If you start practicing regularly, you will notice that you aren’t always feeling “fresh” at the start of a session, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you must skip practice until your body feels perfect. You are good to practice through mild physical fatigue as long as your movement quality doesn’t degrade much.

• Progressive practice in relation to VIC: The body in motion is subjected to the action of both external and internal forces. A single movement event at an intensity that exceeds the ability of your tissues to handle overly stressful effort may cause a trauma, such as a torn muscle or broken bone. Know your capability and limits and respect progressions in all three aspects of VIC.

• Consistency: How you used to perform some time ago may not be how you’re able to perform today. If you haven’t been consistent at practicing particular skills, techniques, or at a certain level of VIC, you can’t assume that you can resume at the same level of difficulty you once could handle. The longer you have paused training, the more cautious and patient you must be before you can train at the level you used to again.

• Variety: We can injure ourselves when unintentionally and forcefully reaching positions past our maximum flexibility or positions that are biomechanically unsustainable. But we can also injure ourselves in positions that we are not familiar with or prepared for, in habitual positions we aren’t trained to handle past a certain level of intensity or volume, or in positions unusual to us that we perform at a high level of intensity. (In this latter case the potential for injury is quite high.) This is why it’s essential that our practice is comprehensive enough to have us regularly practice the full spectrum of Natural Movement and at sufficient levels of intensity.

• Recovery: Injury can occur from the systematic repetition of a stress-inducing physical action over time. In this case, the force is too small to cause an immediate injury, but unnoticeable microdamage can occur that will eventually lead to injury because it accumulates with every repetition. It’s essential to ensure proper recovery (time, rest, hydration, nutrition) so your tissues can physiologically adapt to a greater level of stress. Otherwise, instead of your tissues getting stronger, you enable cumulative fatigue to weaken them, which leads to injury. Recovery time is highly individual and depends on diverse variables such as

• Volume and intensity in relation to your current level of physiological adaptation

• Type of effort or muscle involved. The eccentric component of muscular work is responsible for most muscle soreness. Large muscles recover more slowly, and large muscle groups recover slower, too.

• Age

• Lifestyle: Healthy habits support health, energy, physical robustness, recovery, and resiliency, which are all necessary for sustainable Natural Movement practice.

• Frequency: Frequency implies that you are moving regularly and also that you are practicing a variety of movements and effort regularly enough to remain physiologically ready.

• Therapy: If you notice any functional issue or have a known past injury, you must give it special attention, and possibly special treatment, as it can aggravate if it remains unchecked.

With efficient Natural Movement practice—that is, if you follow my recommendations and always practice mindfully—you are taking a risk that you might occasionally injure your body in minor and temporary ways, but with chronic physical idleness you are absolutely guaranteed that your body will continuously deteriorate. Practicing Natural Movement can prevent numerous physical ailments. Physical idleness unavoidably promotes physical suffering, even when you do not link the two. The return on investment is evident, and the rewards are beyond expectations.