Chapter 30: Manipulation Movement 1 - The Practice of Natural Movement

Object manipulation is generally defined as the skillful throwing and/or catching of a great variety of light objects (balls, clubs, hoops, poi, knives, nunchaku, or any ordinary object that is relatively light) primarily through the motion of the arms and hands, although any part of the body can be used. The most frequent purpose of this type of object manipulation is recreation and entertainment; it demands high levels of dexterity but a relatively low level of strength.

Many specialized sports are based on other forms of object manipulation. An Olympic lifter uses a single type of apparatus, using two techniques to lift the object from the ground to overhead, which requires enormous amounts of skill and power. A powerlifter focuses on three heavy lifts of somewhat limited range of motion, which demand enormous amounts of strength but little power (strength + speed). A bodybuilder manipulates barbells for the sake of gaining muscle mass, which requires strength but no significant movement skill. A javelin specialist might not be efficient at pitching a baseball, and a baseball player might not be good at throwing a javelin. An expert juggler might not be able to squat with a load equal to his own body weight, and a powerlifter might be unskilled at throwing or catching anything with accuracy. We can learn useful techniques and training methods that have been developed for each of these modalities, but except for “strongman” training that provides the most diverse and realistic display of manipulative skills and challenges, most manipulation activities are very standardized and limited in scope.

A Natural Movement perspective of the concept of object manipulation is broader and more practical, without concern for sport-specific rules. Natural Movement manipulation aims at moving any kind of object in any useful way necessary, from contact to release. A natural spectrum of manipulation will include a great variety of techniques and movement patterns with objects of varied shape, material, texture, and weight and displaced on diverse types of terrains. This inclusive approach to manipulation implies throwing and catching objects that aren’t necessarily light, as well as lifting potentially heavy loads or voluminous objects off the ground, carrying them over a long distance or quickly over a short distance, and sometimes carrying an item in partnership.

The objects you manipulate are irrelevant: It is why and how you manipulate them that matters. The goal is not to develop elite levels of proficiency in a given, standardized manipulative discipline but to acquire the basic skills, strength, and work capacity required for real-life competency. Therefore, you should learn a large number of lifting, carrying, throwing, or catching techniques, which will help you develop greater levels of strength, power, and endurance of “work capacity under load.”

Technique aside, strength, power, and endurance are highly desirable and necessary physical qualities one must increase and that are an integral part of MovNat training. However, developing such physiological adaptations requires specific training and programming that goes beyond the scope of this book but which follows some of the principles of progression delineated in Part 3, “Practice Efficiency.”

I’m addressing Manipulation movement in two chapters. The first focuses on lifting and carrying; the second focuses on throwing and catching. The general concepts covered in this introduction apply to the skills of throwing and catching as well as lifting and carrying. With the comprehensive information I’ve provided, you will learn everything you need to know for efficient and safe real-world object manipulation.

The Basics of Manipulation Movement

 

The efficient manipulation of objects demands great positional control. Therefore, all the motor-control, physical, and physiological benefits you should have already gained through the practice of natural locomotive skills, such as greater mobility, stability, balance, coordination, or strength, will prove to be a precious help to your progress in diverse manipulation techniques. The same way a lot of people who are movement-proficient would gain from developing greater levels of strength, a lot of people with great strength would benefit from moving better first.

Focusing first on efficient form at low intensity rather than insisting on how heavy you can lift, carry, throw, or catch might expose issues that prevent you from reaching the greatest levels of performance you could attain, which gives you a chance to resolve them. For instance, ankle, hip, thoracic spine, and shoulder mobility are fundamental to being efficient at lifting heavy loads. Can you assume a comfortable Deep Squat or perform an efficient Hip Hinge with optimal spinal position? If not, what do you think will happen as you load those movement patterns with heavy weights? It’s important that you not immediately focus your Natural Movement practice on manipulation skills, and you especially shouldn’t practice them at high levels of intensity.

Manipulation movements such as in lifting and carrying are not entirely new movement patterns; they’re movements you’re familiar with for the most part, but you modify how you execute them so that you can sustain external loads. The Deadlift relies mostly on hip hinging, which is a pattern employed in the Power Jump and the Square Landing. Carrying implies locomotion with patterns such as get-ups, walking, running, occasionally crawling, balancing, jumping, climbing, and even swimming. You just learn to do it as efficiently as possible with a load. Learning to skillfully move your body around before you learn to skillfully move stuff around—not the other way around—is a wise approach.

Great technique does not “give” you strength that you don’t have; it enables you to maximize the use of the strength you do have. So, after you’ve acquired efficient form in manipulative techniques, it’s time to work on greater levels of strength and power as you simultaneously keep refining your skills continuously. You see, in an authentic quest for general and rather equalized movement competency, strength folks should consider their deficiencies in diverse areas of movement function and skill, whereas the proponents of “mindful movement” should consider their inability to handle heavy loads and intensity. After all, courage is about putting your weaknesses on the line, whatever those weaknesses might be.

Contact Event and Grip

Manipulative movement sequences are called contact events in which you first grasp, hold, or displace the object, and then you release it. Grasping happens when you first make contact with the object using your hands or another body part. You can grasp an object while it’s still or when you catch a moving object.

After you’ve grasped the object, you can hold it or displace it to a new location. Last, the object is released by being set down, dropped, or thrown. Like climbing, grasping objects has a lot to do with gripping or the mechanical interface between your body and the load or object. Without an effective grip, all manipulation becomes ineffective.

The application of a gentle yet skillful grip is necessary when you’re throwing light objects, whereas a very strong grip is required to lift a heavy load off the ground or to strike powerfully with a heavy handheld tool. You might use intermediate levels of tension in your hands and forearms as the load and movement require. Hand position varies depending on the shape or weight of the object or the technique used for manipulation. Sometimes grip means balancing the object on some part of your body—flat open hand, head, or shoulder—rather than grasping it with your hands. The good thing in manipulation is that losing your grip doesn’t necessarily mean losing your balance or falling. Only the object or load should fall if you have released your grip before it compromises your position.

Combined Center of Mass

It’s easy to hold a book at arm’s length to put it on a shelf without realizing that your center of gravity has slightly shifted. However, you might notice a shift in your center of gravity if you carry a heavy bag of groceries with one hand as you walk to your car. Do you feel that you’re pulling to the side with every step you make and that you have unusual instability in the way you step? You feel this way because the external load pulls your center of gravity in a given direction. Efficiently managing the combined center of gravity is an integral part of positional control that relates not only to the position of your body but also to the position of the object in relation to your body.

Regardless of the specific manipulative skill or technique, whenever you’re handling an external load, its center of mass will alter the position of your center of gravity, resulting in a combined center of gravity. This is especially true as you hold the object farther away from your center of gravity and as the load gets heavier. The heavier the object gets, the more technically important it becomes to vertically align the center of mass of the load with your center of gravity and with your base of support to make the combined center of gravity more manageable. Even a slightly misaligned combined center of gravity affects your balance, movement, and work, causing unnecessary resistance and muscular tension. If the shift of the combined center of gravity farther beyond your line of gravity continues, you’ll be forced to drop the object and maybe lose your balance as well. On top of losing your balance, you may also compromise your spine with a greater risk of injury. Efficiently managing the combined center of gravity, especially in the manipulation of significantly heavy objects with uneven weight distribution and on uneven terrain, reduces the necessary muscle force and compression on joints, and it keeps your body safer. In short, an efficient combined center of gravity ensures economy and safety in carrying.

The necessary management of the combined center of gravity, including the path it follows in a lift before being stabilized as a carry, also forces you to trigger faster compensatory responses in positional control, which is based on a higher sense of alertness. Because balance under load is more demanding than balancing without a load, a positive side effect of learning to manage the combined center of gravity is that it may aid in developing the righting reflex and greater balance when moving without a load.

Bone Density, Back Health, and Injury Prevention

Lifting and carrying heavy loads improves mineral density in your bones, regardless of age, which is essential to robust health. It makes sense that resisting the downward pull of gravity on the loads you manipulate requires bones to be strong enough to handle the stress of greater levels of muscular tension. Doing lifting movements correctly also makes your back strong, but doing them incorrectly can be a source of everything from a mild strain in the back muscles to a disabling back injury. Intervertebral disks (the fibrous rings that act as cushions between vertebrae) can bulge and even rupture because of the compressive forces of handling heavy loads, especially when you lift while your spine is in a compromised position. Since the central nervous system is made up of the spinal cord and brain, back issues may cause discomfort, acute pain, or even motor-control issues. If you get injured lifting, there isn’t much movement you can do afterward, so ensuring safety in lifting is paramount.

To prevent injury, take the following considerations very seriously.

Neutral Lower Back

The better your technique, the less chance that you’ll be injured. The single most important aspect of all manipulative techniques is to keep your lower back neutral, which you can learn before you begin lifting by doing other natural movements. Once you’ve acquired the neutral lower back reflex, adding a load both reinforces this reflex and strengthens the “natural belt” (the muscles that stabilize your spine) that protects it even more.

Although rounding, arching, and rotating your lower back are natural motions of your spine, excessively rounding, arching, or rotating—hyperflexion (including laterally), hyperextension, and hyper-rotation, respectively—your lower back as the intervertebral discs are compressed under load can squeeze the discs from the front, back, or side, which puts the spine at a serious risk of injury, such as a herniated disk. The middle and upper spine statistically suffer less injury incidence, but you should still keep them neutral to avoid any risk. Also, a neutral middle and upper spine support a neutral lower back. Maintaining a neutral spine from sacrum to neck is not only the most significant key to reducing the risk of back injury, but it leads to greater manipulative performance.

Symmetry

Symmetry has to do with distributing the load equally on both sides of your body as much as possible. Loading a single side of the body, such as in a Single-Hand Carry or Shoulder Carry, forces the back to lean sideways with the muscles on the loaded side shortened and muscles on the opposite side lengthened. If you don’t do this with control, the result might be a lateral wedging of the disk (lateral hyperflexion), which places it at risk of injury. I’m not saying that you must avoid unilateral manipulative movements, only that you must approach them even more carefully than those with an even distribution of the load on the body. Also, it’s essential that you train any single-side manipulative movement on both sides equally.

The weight distribution of the load is also important, as an object with a center of mass that moves tends to create more instability and asymmetry.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness always is key to ensuring good form. A single short moment of inattention may place your spine in a dangerous position, such as hyperextension, hyperflexion, lateral hyperflexion, or axial hyper-rotation. A moment of imbalance, foot slippage on challenging terrain, a lack of grip, or hand slippage can easily distract you.

The integrity of your back position should be your highest focus point from the moment you grasp the object to the moment you release it. You should approach every lift as if the weight you’re going to lift is heavier than what it is so you reflexively assume a strong position. During the contact event, if you ever feel that your back position is compromised or is about to be compromised with little chance of recovery, you should be ready to drop the load. It’s much wiser to pick up a load from the ground again than to risk a severe injury, isn’t it? Even after you’ve dropped a heavy object, be mindful of getting your feet out of the way. Sometimes loads bounce back or roll off, hurting your toes, feet, or ankles.

Volume and Intensity

Even the best technique and being mindful won’t protect your spine if the intensity, volume, or both are too high for your strength. Nurses who must lift heavy patients multiple times a day are taught to use efficient and safe body mechanics simply: “Keep your back straight; bend at the hips and knees.”

However, even the best body mechanics in the world won’t protect your back if the overall forces and stress placed upon your spine are too large and too repetitive, which will end up disrupting your form and placing your spine at great risk. Therefore, it’s essential that, aside from having efficient form, you commit to respect sustainable intensity, volume, and individual progressions.

Progressive Complexity

Beginners should start not only with light loads but also with more controlled environments, including the type of load. You need to use objects with a secure grip and an even distribution of weight, and you should stand on an even, flat, non-slippery surface. Read more about this later in this chapter in the “Choice of Equipment.”

LIFTING AND CARRYING

 

Lifting and carrying in MovNat are tightly related because the main practical purpose for lifting a load is obviously to carry it (sometimes throw it), not to drop it on the spot immediately after lifting it.

I show how lifting and carrying work together depending on the object you lift and how you intend to carry it. For instance, it makes sense to learn the various carry strategies that are already available immediately after the basic lifting methods—Deadlift or Lapping—rather than learning the significantly more complex Clean-and-Jerk technique first.

What you learn in this chapter also makes you better able you to throw objects that are relatively heavy and to better handle them after you catch them.

 

Lifting

 

When you lift, your aim is to cancel the inertia of an object to raise it vertically, which most of the time is necessary before the object can be carried, thrown, or lowered back to the ground. Lowering an object can be important for protecting the load, the surface below it, or the operator. Though we can’t say that lifting and lowering are the same, they’re related parts of the same practical goal: moving objects from one vertical position to another—either upward or downward. Indeed, you lift a heavy box full of glassware off the ground to hip level and then slowly and carefully lower it to the ground a few steps away with the same muscles and movement pattern; only the type of muscle contraction differs.

Raising a heavy piece of furniture off the floor and picking up a pair of socks from the floor are both lifting. While the latter is accessible to anyone with fundamental movement ability because of the lightness of the object, in the absence of technique and strength, the former becomes inaccessible.

The type of lift depends on many variables, such as the shape, texture, volume, and weight distribution of the object; its position relative to your body when you grasp it; the surface where you stand; and what you intend to do with the object after you lift it. Short-range lifting movements, such as the Deadlift, require strength, whereas lifting a load with the Clean-and-Jerk movement demands power and greater levels of technique. The higher you move the load vertically, the greater the chance you’ll lose balance and the more important it becomes that you maintain a balanced combined center of gravity.

Setting

Setting is the part of positional control that happens before the lift to ensure effective and efficient lifting. It involves several aspects that are pretty much constant regardless of the lifting technique you’re using. Setting becomes more important as the loads you’re lifting become heavier.

Grasping and Body Position

Placing your hands on the object to grip it securely (grasping) is the first phase of the contact event in lifting, and it’s a crucial one that you shouldn’t rush. A strong grip matters mostly at the beginning of the lift when you’re overcoming inertia and as you slowly raise the load. In more explosive lifts such as a Clean, the load becomes significantly accelerated upward after it leaves the ground, and with such momentum, the level of grip strength required rapidly decreases.

The weight of the object, the position of your hands or arms, and the level of surface friction where your hands grasp the object determine the level of gripping friction you need. For instance, you can lift heavier with a Hook Grip than with an Open-Hand Grip, but lifting something of equal weight with a Hook Grip when the surface you’re grasping is slippery necessitates a much higher level of grip strength.

In the weight-lifting world, you will often hear that you must “squeeze” the handle you grasp as hard as you can before you attempt to lift a load, which makes a lot of sense if you are dealing with a load that’s very heavy relative to your strength. It signals the muscles in the posterior chain that are involved in the lift to activate strongly as an intense effort is coming up; it also makes sure that the level of friction in your grip matches or even slightly exceeds what lifting the load demands. Indeed, if your grip is weak, you won’t be able to lift the load even if the rest of your body is strong enough, and your hands will give in. Another advantage is that tightly grasping prevents latency in the gripping reflex at the very beginning of the lift. Your hands are ready even before the rest of your body is.

However, efficient gripping is not always as simple as “squeezing as hard as you can.” There’s no need to squeeze as hard as you can unless you’re trying to lift an object that weighs nearly the maximum weight you can lift. Regardless of the weight of the load and grip position, the friction in your hands should match the gripping strength required to lift the load. Think of it this way: There’s no need to squeeze a pet as hard as you can to pick her up, correct? You need to make sure, by feel, that the level of friction you create in the interface with the load (fingers, hands, wrists, and forearms) is enough to secure it while executing the lift. To be on the safe side, you might use slightly more friction than what is needed but no more than that.

Another important consideration is that grip strength doesn’t always come only from your fingers; you might need to try a variety of handholds, some of them involving inward pressure from your arms, to assist hand gripping. Ensuring a secure grip and adequate levels of friction in the real world might require more than a strong Hook Grip because you usually don’t get a handle narrow enough to wrap your fingers all the way around it. For instance, when lifting a log that’s thick and rounded, you use an Open-Hand Grip, and although you’ll apply some force from your fingers with no thumb opposition, you mostly apply force through the wrists, forearms, and the pectorals with your arms pushing inwardly to help squeeze the extremity of the log between your forearms.

Last, when dealing with unfamiliar and oddly shaped objects, and when you do not have an accurate sense of their weight, it’s tricky to determine the levels of grip strength required for the lift. The strategy for producing the right levels of friction before lifting is to assume the bottom deadlift position and grasp the object. As you activate and tense your muscles by simulating an imminent lifting effort, feedback travels between the muscles in the posterior chain and those muscles at the front of the body that are handling the gripping. It feels a little as if you’re pushing slightly backward on your feet and preventing yourself from falling backward by holding on with your hands. Such “feel” is a mutually regulating phase that tells both sets of muscles how much tension is required, which prevents latency in muscular contraction responsible both for the lift and the grip. Although such feedback might trigger positional modifications and muscular activation adjustments in the front of the body to secure the grip, it might also do the same at the back of the body to secure friction in the footing to “ground” the body. The process also ensures you have the best positional set to get a better sense of the combined center of gravity and facilitate efficient muscular synergy from start to end, which helps you avoid having your balance be disturbed. So, the level of grip strength you can apply also depends on your general body position. Finding optimal positioning of the hands relative to the body, and the other way around, might take several seconds. What matters the most is that you’re in a strong position before lifting.

Upper Back and Shoulder Position

We know how important keeping a neutral lower back is, but establishing and maintaining a neutral upper spine is another critical aspect of efficiency in lifting and carrying as well. You want to keep a “big chest,” which you do by extending your upper spine to push your chest forward and pull your shoulder blades backward to keep your shoulders neutral. The shoulder girdle and upper spine are strongly associated, and, in most cases, protracted (slouching) shoulders indicate a flexed upper spine, which under load is a very weak position.

Neck and Eye Position

As I explain in Part 2, “Movement Efficiency Principles,” eye position can be beneficial or detrimental depending on the movement. During lifting or lowering, maintaining a forward or upward line of vision facilitates back extension and supports maintaining a neutral spine, and it keeps the position of the neck either neutral or slightly extended.

Preloading and Bracing

The last part of setting up for your lift involves creating tension and bracing. You want to start creating some level of tension in the muscles responsible for producing force and stabilizing your position just before you lift, not as you lift; indeed, being overly relaxed as you begin lifting can easily compromise not only your position—starting with spinal alignment—but also the whole lifting attempt.

“Preloading” necessitates that you develop a familiar sensation of contracting (or “loading”) the specific muscles responsible for generating the force you want rather than generating unnecessary tension all over, especially in antagonistic muscles, because, as I’ve said before, selective tension with proper timing is a must for efficiency. Of course, preloading isn’t exclusive to manipulative movement, but it is crucial in lifting heavy loads. Bracing hard is a fundamental part of creating tension before you lift heavy loads. The control of spinal alignment and stability is especially important when you’re manipulating heavy loads as in lifting and carrying.

Bracing involves abdominal tension and a temporary abdominal breath-hold to increase intra-abdominal-pressure. The pressure inside the abdominal cavity acts on both the diaphragm and the vertebral column and supports positional control and stability of the pelvic-spinal-thoracic complex under load. It also helps you keep your trunk extended to a neutral alignment. Before you begin to lift, you need to inhale through the abdomen while keeping your abdominal muscles tight. You hold your breath in the first seconds of the lift until you’ve raised the load past your knees; then you slowly exhale. The goal is to keep the spine as stable as possible when it needs stability the most, which is when a large force must overcome the inertia of the load to create vertical acceleration. Often, you should hear yourself taking a strong breath before you lift.

Bracing is a reflex you must develop and activate before attempting any lift, even when the load is not your maximum. Bracing is also used when you carry heavy loads for postural control and also to regulate a high-intensity effort under load. When you brace while carrying, you don’t hold your breath, but you maintain strong abdominal tension while also limiting the amplitude of your abdominal breathing.

Mindset

Last, approaching any heavy lift requires a confident, determined—even aggressive—mindset. Don’t wait to start lifting before you realize that you need more willpower to achieve the lift. Be mentally strong before you lift so that you can create and maintain optimum muscular tension throughout the lift.

Center of Pressure

Something that is common to all lifts is the necessity to stay balanced over your base of support as you move the object upward. The best way to achieve such balance is to maintain an efficient combined center of gravity throughout the movement and have the load follow a vertical path as linearly as possible, minimizing any forward, backward, or side movement. Such motions of your combined center of gravity away from vertical alignment with your base of support would disturb your balance, potentially compromise your position, and decrease overall efficiency. Although such disturbances may not always be visually perceptible, you feel them in your feet right as you start lifting the load because it influences overall weight distribution, which combines your body weight and the weight of the object you’re lifting, which you experience as pressure in your feet. Your goal is to establish an even distribution of the weight through your feet and maintain it throughout the lift; the center of pressure should be in the middle of your feet whenever possible, even though uneven surfaces might be more challenging in this regard.

It’s often said that you should shift your body weight to your heels when you lift, but I don’t necessarily agree with this. The goal is to be stable to lift in the most vertical way possible and to avoid having the center of pressure shift around through the feet, which you can do by controlling the upward, vertical path of the combined center of gravity. The result is that your feet are stable and connected evenly to the ground. Experiencing shifts such as feeling that the balls of your feet, your heels, or the side of your feet want to take off from the ground (or actually do) shows that you’re unable to make the combined center of gravity follow the line of gravity from bottom to top. In a nutshell, it’s not the stability of your feet that determines the stability of your body and the load while lifting but the other way around. Bottom line: ensure the vertically linear motion of the combined center of gravity.

Standing Position

The “top” position that’s you achieve through the lift and must establish at the end of it is also something people often neglect. Strong lifts demand a powerful, constant contraction of the glutes, and it’s essential to keep the glutes and the abdominals contracted while holding a load at the end of the lift to stabilize your lower back and keep it safe. Finishing lifts with the lower spine extended rather than keeping it neutral with a stronger glute contraction stresses the lumbar area unnecessarily. Last, strong positional control with neutral spine must be maintained as long as you’re holding the load; only when you release the grip can you relax.

Lowering and Dropping

From a practical, real-world perspective, it’s assumed that the object you lift should be immediately positioned onto the body to be held and carried. In training, the object can often be immediately dropped after a lift. In fact, although learning to lower a load safely—for both the performer and the object—is necessary because in real life you might need to gently lower an object or person to the ground, it is recommended that you carefully drop the load when weight and intensity reach a high level because slowly lowering a heavy load is a liability to your spine.

When you lift something heavy, your sense of strength is boosted by the upward acceleration imparted to the load, but as you lower the same weight slowly, the absence of upward acceleration makes it feel heavier. It’s more difficult to decelerate the load and the significant downward force gravity imparts to the heavy load.

Choice of Equipment

In Natural Movement practice, you may or may not use the typical equipment available for specialized manipulative discipline. There’s nothing wrong with that equipment, just as there’s nothing wrong with practicing with logs, stones, beer kegs, or any odd heavy object. The different types of objects that you lift and carry serve different purposes, and because they have both advantages and downsides, they all have their place in your practice.

The way you want to look at equipment depends on the following considerations:

• The technique you’re training, and how much scalability you need to ensure methodical progressions. Sports equipment is highly scalable by design; odd objects are much less scalable.

• How realistic you want the practice to be. At equal weight, deadlifting a bulky round shape stone resting on the ground is much harder than deadlifting an Olympic bar.

• How much comfort or safety you need. A medicine ball keeps your palms smooth and your toes intact; rough stones might not.

• How much money you want to spend if you want to own your props.

My recommendation is that you start with controlled environments. Equipment that provides a secure, replicable grip, an evenly distributed weight that can be scaled down and up, and a flat, high-friction surface is best because it enables you to focus on efficient technique. The manipulation of an oddly shaped, less-predictable object on a complex, uneven, low-friction surface demands greater levels of adaptability, which might distract you from the more priority aspects of technique, and it can slow down skill acquisition.

You should do lifts on a flat, high-friction surface. A relatively light kettlebell is perfect because you can securely grasp the elevated handle. Another advantage is that it’s a compact object, and its whole volume and weight fit between your feet. You can extend both arms between your knees, which is a convenient positional set.

Olympic bars—although their design is quite unrealistic from a real-world perspective—make it possible to place the load on the sides of the bar, which enables you to optimally manage the combined center of gravity without the volume or shape of the load impairing movement. Olympic bars also provide a very strong and secure handhold, and you easily can scale the weight. These characteristics mean Olympic bars are a phenomenal training tool for increasing strength and power.

I’m not suggesting that you must invest in pricey sports equipment; I’m only mentioning how convenient such tools are. If you don’t own or plan on owning any particular equipment, you can practice with a variety of objects such as stones of different sizes, weights, and shapes and which you can get for free.

Lifting Techniques

 

The Deadlift and Lapping are the two most fundamental lifting techniques. The Deadlift is a core component of the more complex and dynamic Clean lifting technique, and Lapping enables a great number of carrying holds.

Deadlift

When you pick up a young child who’s sitting on the floor or pick up a box full of books, chances are you executed a Deadlift. Dead in the name relates to the fact that whatever you lift has zero momentum; you need to overcome its inertia to raise it vertically.

The Deadlift is the most fundamental lifting technique; you lift an object from the ground to hold it at waist level or just below in a standing position, primarily through a Hip Hinge motion. From a practical standpoint, the Deadlift is used to free something stuck (that it is the object itself or something underneath it), check out what is underneath an object, toss an object to the side, or initiate a Waist Carry. It’s also a big part of the movement pattern used for Lapping, and it’s the first phase of the Clean, which is a more explosive and complex lifting sequence, so acquiring the technical skills of performing a Deadlift is a prerequisite to learning an efficient Clean technique.

You probably have heard people say, “Lift with your legs, not your back.” Well, in my opinion, a better way to put it is, “Lift with your hips and legs, not just with your back.” Although you engage the muscles of your back and legs in a Deadlift, the leverage you gain from a strong Hip Hinge motion is the most fundamental component to performing an efficient Deadlift while keeping your spine neutral and safe.

Deadlifting tremendously strengthens your back, improves your posture, and helps prevent back pain. As you deadlift increasingly heavier loads and lift more explosively, the strength and power you gain transfer directly to doing heavier Cleans, sprinting faster, performing greater Power Jumps, and gaining similar benefits to other locomotion skills.

SAFETY NOTE

 

In the examples, I do the Deadlift with a natural stone. If you’re new to this technique or can’t Deep Squat with ease (which makes it difficult to grasp with your hands at a level close to the ground), I recommend a light kettlebell or anything that enables you to secure a grip without necessarily reaching a Deep Squat position.

 

TECHNIQUE TIP

 

If you’re using a kettlebell, skip step 2 unless you intend to lift the kettlebell without using the handle.

   

1 Stand with your feet close to the object on each side of it. Your feet should be about shoulder width, and your arms are relaxed. Look down and envision standing in the same spot as you hold the object at waist level or just below, with your arms extended, after you’ve elevated the object along a vertical path as much as possible. You should see your waist and hands vertically aligned with the center of mass of the object (or close to it). Since the object should end up in front of your body resting against your waist, and since the object’s path should be as vertically linear as possible, a simple way to determine how close to the object your feet should be is to vertically align your waist with the close edge of the object or slightly beyond. Otherwise, if your feet aren’t close enough to the object, the combined center of gravity is not optimal, your balance is challenged, and unnecessary stress is applied to your spine at the beginning of the lift until the load is high enough to be pulled back toward the center of gravity.

 

2 Squat down to grasp the sides of the object; get your fingers as far as possible under the object as they can go. At this point, you’re getting a sense of grip on an odd object. You may slightly push it side to side with two advantages: You might be able to reach a little farther underneath the object for a stronger grip (make sure not to roll it on your fingertips and pinch them), and you can get an idea of its weight. The optimal grip isn’t restricted to finger and hand position; it also involves arm position, and you exert inward pressure onto the object through your arms. Externally rotate both arms in the lockout position as much as possible.

 

3 Now that you have a sense of grip, start assuming the positional set for the Deadlift. Load your legs and drive your rear backward in a Half Squat with your torso at about a 45-degree angle. At this point, your knees and hips may be level or your hips may be slightly above knee level, depending on the height of the grip or your physical makeup. Ultimately, as you start deadlifting, your hips will have to be higher than knee level. Both arms are fully extended. Your spine is in a mostly neutral line from lower back to neck or head; it’s not rounded. A slight arch in your lower back is natural and may be maintained to help prevent flexion (rounding your spine), which is good as long as it doesn’t turn into hyperextension. Your shoulders are straight and centered as well as vertically aligned with your knees, arms, and hands. You may very slightly tilt your head back to maintain a forward or slightly upward line of vision. In this positional set, the combined center of gravity is optimally aligned with the line of gravity and base of support.

4 Breathe in through your abdomen and brace (hold your breath) to increase intra-abdominal pressure to help stabilize your torso. Tightly contract your lats, lower back, abdominals, hamstrings, and glutes to prevent losing position and balance upon beginning the lift and throughout the pull. Slightly extend on your legs to elevate your hips a little above knee level. As you do so, your lower back extends in a slight, natural arch, and you should apply more strength through your hands to ensure grip friction. At this point, you have fully assumed the positional set for the Deadlift. Slowly but strongly start exerting force through your legs and rear, which overcomes inertia and starts elevating the object off the ground. It should feel through your feet as if you’re pushing the ground away from you as much as it feels that you are elevating the load. As you keep your spine, shoulders, and arms straight, slowly exhale shortly after the load takes off. If you’re concerned with grip friction, generate more pressure on the object by pressing it inwardly between your hands and arms to tighten your grip.

 

5 Keep extending your legs and, as your grip level reaches past knee level, start powerfully driving your hips forward while maintaining a neutral spine and a balanced position without being pulled forward or pushed back.

 

6 Finish extending both your legs and hips at the same time to end standing straight with your arms fully lengthened, shoulders down and neutral, and chest out. Contracting your glutes and abdominals helps you maintain a strong standing position, especially as the load becomes heavy. Your hips are in the lockout position, but since the mass of the object wants to pull you forward, adjust the combined center of gravity by driving your hips forward and extending your lower back very slightly (it’s barely noticeable by the naked eye) while maintaining a neutral lower back. From here you want to either Waist Carry the object, Power Clean, lower the load, or drop it.

7 This view provides a insight about the width of your base of support when grasping, so your arms can extend fully and follow a path between your legs and knees. Your arms and hands are positioned to support optimum friction. Notice the lockout arm position and the possibility of a wider base of support.

TECHNIQUE TIP

 

When you’re lowering yourself from standing to grasp a kettlebell, bend at the hips and knees in a Hip Hinge. Because the handle extends above the kettlebell, your hips will be slightly higher than the knee.

 

Lowering

How you bring an object down to the ground is a product of both practicality and effectiveness. You could have to drop a load. You also could quickly or slowly lower it with varying degrees of accuracy depending on whether the object or the surface where you’re relocating it are fragile, whether you need to position the object a certain way, and whether you need to lower the object to a raised surface or all the way to the ground. Obviously, lowering the object should follow the same positional sequence as lifting, but it happens in reverse, with a hip flexion instead of a hip extension.

Whereas lifting a heavy weight demands that your muscles shorten to create an upward acceleration, lowering it means that the same muscles lengthen to resist a downward acceleration through eccentric contraction. This movement is significantly more stressful on your back, especially as your trunk approaches being parallel with the ground. The heavier the load gets, the faster you should lower it. As mentioned previously, when you practice with heavy loads, it’s safer to carefully drop the object. Resisting the downward pull is mechanically easier close to the top position than the bottom position, which means that lowering a heavy load should be slow at the top and accelerated toward the bottom.

Inefficiencies

The Deadlift is a deceptively simple movement, and many inefficiencies may occur. Although not all inefficiencies may prevent you from effectively deadlifting the load, they do effectively put your lower spine at risk. You might manage a Deadlift inefficiently when the load isn’t too high, but any inefficiency greatly compromises how much strength you can use.

 

1 Your knees aren’t bent; your torso and head are leaning down, and your back is entirely rounded. The intention is to pull the object using only your arms, which is a tendency that’s typical of people who have no sense of lifting mechanics whatsoever.

2 The intention is to lift the object through your legs and arms only from a bottom squat position, without using hip motion. Notice the lowered head and shrugged shoulders. This position sets the combined center of gravity forward beyond the line of gravity, which keeps your lower back rounded throughout the lift and puts it in a very stressful and dangerous position. Deadlifting with low hips and an upright torso in a squat pattern with no hip drive may work with loads that aren’t too challenging, but it doesn’t work as the load becomes significantly heavy.

3 Raising the heels shifts your combined center of gravity forward and throws you off balance as you start to lift.

4 Your legs are too extended, which raises your hips too high and makes your torso parallel to the ground. Because your legs are almost fully extended, they won’t assist much, which leaves all the effort to your lower back and puts great stress on it as the load starts to leave the ground. This position also increases the risk that you’ll be pulled off balance forward. Your neck is overly extended to help maintain balance.

 

5 The positional set is good except for the hyperextension of the neck, which compresses the nerves in the area and potentially decreases overall levels of strength.

6 As you try to pull through your arms and extend your legs before driving your hips forward, you focus on the effort of your arms and get distracted from the position of your back, which becomes completely compromised. Your back rounds after the object leaves the ground. Unless the load is light, your arms aren’t strong enough to raise it, and you may also hurt them.

7 Your legs are in the lockout position before your hips are finished extending, shifting your combined center of gravity forward and forcing great levels of unnecessary tension in the posterior chain and in your arms to maintain balance. This leaves your back responsible for finishing the pull in a stressful and dangerous position.

8 Your torso is too erect for this level of knee flexion with your hips trying to lock out before your legs. Your legs are not extended enough to allow your hips to move forward smoothly.

 

9 Your hips and legs have not reached the lockout position. Incomplete extension of your leg and hip causes stressful tension in your upper back and shoulders with your combined center of gravity not aligned with your base of support.

10 Your legs are in the lockout position, but your hips aren’t, which results in hyperextension of your lower back and neck to compensate for the forward pull of the combined center of gravity that’s not aligned with your base of support. You might have a false sense of positional control that is not at all efficient.

11 You have an exaggerated backward lean with a hyperextended lower back at the top of the lift. This issue often happens when you don’t activate your glutes, but it also occurs when you have an exaggerated contraction and a false sense of strong top position.

Other inefficiencies include the following:

• Starting the Deadlift with a rounded low back and attempting to make it neutral after the object leaves the ground. Start neutral and stay that way throughout the lift.

• Keeping your arms straight but shrugging your shoulders. Shrugging your shoulders does not increase your grip.

• Breathing through the chest, exhaling just before or at the start of the lift, or holding your breath all the way to standing.

• Having a downward eye position and line of vision may facilitate a flexion reflex and compromise your spinal position. Look straight forward or slightly upward the moment you initiate the Deadlift.

 

Progressions

Regardless of grip or stance variation, the two big takeaways regarding Deadlifts should be maintaining a neutral spine at all times and lifting through the hips. Practice this pattern whenever you pick up something, even when the object is light, so it becomes a second-nature reflex. Once your hip hinge pattern is efficient with a load, you may practice it on a single leg, which has a possible practical application while also helping to improve gait and standing balancing.

Lifting heavy, bulky objects that cannot be lifted by a single person is also a great way to work cooperatively.

Progressions naturally involve increasing intensity with greater weights to build higher levels of strength. As your strength grows, handling variables such as odd objects and uneven terrains becomes easier, but don’t wait until you’ve reached powerlifting levels to explore complexity. The Single-Hand Deadlift is also a good practice; it strengthens your shoulder and grip. Make sure to alternate sides when you do it.

If you practice several repetitions of Deadlifts in a row for strength training, make sure you systematically lower the load all the way to the ground for the safety of your back to prevent unnecessary stress on your lower back. Lowering the load also gives you an opportunity to reset your position each time. If you’re training with objects and surfaces that allow you to make the load bounce as it hits the ground, do not use the bounce to lift more and faster because using artificial momentum may prevent you from maintaining a safe back position.

Lapping

Lapping objects is an alternative to deadlifting when the object is too difficult to grasp with the hands and raise from the ground to hip level in a single motion—for example, when the object doesn’t provide any form of handhold, has a low friction surface, is bulky, or all of the above. Compared to the Deadlift, the Lapping option shortens the vertical distance you need to raise the load. After you’ve brought the object as high as your knees, you can rest the object on your lap, and the effort is handled by your legs more than your back. The second great advantage of Lapping is that once the object is in your lap, you can adjust gripping or positioning of the object on the body before you carry it. This slow, step-by-step elevation of the load is especially useful when you can’t lift it explosively. Alternatively, it might happen that you deadlift the load and reach a standing position but decide to lower yourself into a Lapping position.

Elite lifters, such as those who compete in strongman competitions, manage to lap very heavy and bulky loads such as Atlas stones with a rounded back from start to end. The main reason for a rounded back is that the volume of the object forces the arms to reach forward and down almost to the front of the object to enable grasping and gripping strength, which makes back flexion unavoidable. I don’t recommend this technique for the casual lifter. If the shape, volume, or weight of the object is too much for your ability to maintain a neutral spine, it becomes quite too dangerous to your back health, and you should renounce attempting to lift the object. What you have learned from practicing Deadlifts will be very useful, as the positional set and start of the sequence are the same.

 

1 Grasp the object and start deadlifting it with a neutral spine. A bulkier object would require that you modify your position with a wider stance, with knees and feet pointing out to let your legs work. Your arms would reach more to the front and grasp the object not only with your hands but also by “wrapping” it with the inside of your forearms. As the load raises closer to knee level, initiate a slight pull with your arms.

2-3 Once the load passes knee level, and as you pull the object strongly toward your body, rotate both legs inwardly to have your knees contact and remove the space between them, providing a secure area for the load to rest. Because your combined center of gravity has shifted backward, let your torso lean forward so you avoid being pulled backward. Though this will make you round your back, it’s not an issue because the load is resting on your legs. This is also where the movement starts if you grasp the object from a position raised above the ground at above knee or hip level.

 

4-5 Depending on your strength, stability, or comfort, you may maintain a relatively high position, which demands great static strength in the legs, or you may transition to a Deep Squat to rest or recover your balance. From this position, you can manage your grip to transition to a Waist, Chest, or Shoulder Carry. To transition to the Waist Carry from the bottom squat, you have to push off your legs to elevate your position and rearrange your grip before your position gets too vertical to rest the load on your thighs. To transition to a Chest Carry, you need to make sure your arms wrap to the front of the object, so you can press it toward your chest as you stand up with it. You also can use the upward momentum to shift the object to your shoulder on your way up or wait until you’re standing in a stable Chest Carry before shouldering it.

 

6-7-8 Alternatively, you can shoulder the load in the bottom position by sneaking one arm between your legs and underneath the object. You use that arm as well as your back to raise the object to your shoulder while maintaining balance before you stand up to a Shoulder Carry.

Carrying

The Deadlift and Lapping enable you to assume a large number of carrying holds, which I want to address before covering other lifting techniques. After all, in the real world, lifting is often immediately followed by carrying, and the goal is to initiate some form of gait to horizontally displace the load over some distance to relocate it.

Carrying can be done in many ways, both in terms of how you hold the load—various parts of the body can provide support for the load—and in terms of the locomotive pattern you use to carry it. Although carrying is most often done while you’re walking, you can run, crawl, balance, climb, and swim with a load, as long as you can effectively maintain the load on your body.

As in every other manipulative skill, the gross mechanics of carrying are simple: manage the combined center of gravity as efficiently as possible over the distance you have to cover. It’s always preferable to lower the load and lift it again to reposition the object efficiently on the body rather than continuing with a bad position. You don’t want to waste energy with each step you make as you walk by holding the load in a miserable manner, do you? Keep in mind that this concern has to do not only with energy cost and economy but with the potential risk of injuring yourself if an inefficient way of carrying makes you stumble. Simply put, inefficient manipulation with the way you carry a load ensues inefficient locomotion. Once a grip or holding position has become inefficient, it’s already unsustainable. If you can’t fix your position without lowering the object first, then you must accept that lowering and lifting the load again might the best thing to do.

Grips and Holds

Deadlifting and Lapping enable you to assume a number of grip positions and holds without necessarily having to lift the object explosively or higher than hip level. The grip is restricted to hand positioning on the object, whereas the hold entails your grip as well as the position of your arms and the part of your body where the load rests. With certain holds, the hands grasp each other but not the surface of the load itself, whereas other holds might not involve any gripping or only minimal gripping if the way the load is positioned on the body and the way you wrap your arms around it minimize the need for gripping strength.

Choosing a grip and hold position is a factor of how sustainable it is in relation to the shape and weight of the object, the distance that you need to travel with it, and how fast you need to move. For instance, with the Waist Carry, you avoid having to lift the load higher than hip level while conveniently positioning the center of gravity of the load close to your center of gravity, which is stable and economical. In addition, you can help your walk with a slight forward hip drive when you step forward, which also helps support the load and gripping strength. But with loads involving objects that extend below the waist, the Waist Carry often prevents you from moving quickly on your feet if needed.

Comparatively and at equal weight, with a Chest Carry the combined center of gravity is more elevated and isn’t as easy to manage, but you can accelerate rapidly on your feet in a second. Managing the combined center of gravity in the Side Shoulder Carry is highly efficient for long objects such as logs, but it’s much more challenging with compact objects because they can easily roll off the shoulder.

The goal is always to manage an efficient combined center of gravity and find a hold that helps you avoid unnecessary tension in your arms while still being reliable.

You want to use a carry that enables the most efficient movement on your feet for the distance and speed you need to travel. For instance, in a Waist Carry, managing gripping that allows you to keep your arms extended is better than having to bend at the elbows. However, this is not always possible, and to ensure gripping, additional levels of tension in the arms, shoulders, and upper back are sometimes necessary.

Attention to grip and great grip response (the ability to automatically increase tension when you sense that your hold becomes unreliable) are very important. Letting a handheld object slip or changing position might mean you need to drop the object or compromise your position as you attempt to save your hold. In either case, it’s a waste of your energy and time.

When you’re in a standing position, an efficient combined center of gravity systematically requires some degree of positional adjustments and that you pay more attention to your midline/core stabilization:

• Your torso slightly leans to the side opposite of the load and your hip shifts slightly toward the load in the Single-Hand, Hip, and Shoulder Carries.

• Your torso slightly leans backward with your hip shifting slightly forward (without hyperextending the lower back) in the Waist and Chest Carries.

• Your torso slightly leans forward, and your hips shift backward in the Lumbar and Forehead Carries.

Following are most options available for holding a load. Other variations exist; the specific carry you use depends on the shape and volume of the object. For instance, with the Deep-Wrap, Wrist-Grip, Palm-Grip, Cross-Fingers, and S-Grip Chest Carries, the load can be supported from the bottom of the object, so the object rests on the forearms and chest rather than being held with the arms wrapped to the middle and front and pressed in toward the torso. It’s also obviously possible to hold more than one object at a time.

   

1 Single Hand Hold

2 Hand Hold

3 Waist Hold

4 Hip Hold

5 Lumbar Hold

6 Deep Wrap Chest Hold

7 Wrist Grip Chest Hold

8 Palm/Gable Grip Chest Hold

 

9 Cross-Fingers Grip Chest Hold

10 S-Grip Chest Hold.

11 Side-Squeeze Chest Hold.

12 Over-Wrap Chest Hold.

 

13 Under-Wrap Chest Hold (optionally, you can cross your forearms and position the load lower or higher).

14 Rack Chest Hold.

15 Shoulder Hold; you can stabilize the load with one or both arms, or you can carry the load without using your arms.

16 Forehead Hold; optionally, both arms can be relaxed.

 

17 Head Hold; you can stabilize the load with one or both arms, or you can carry the load without using your arms.

Carrying children can be done in diverse manners. The main point is to make sure that the hold is very secure and comfortable for the child first and for the adult second. Carrying a child can be challenging because young children tend to move in any direction without warning, which suddenly disrupts the combined center of gravity. Despite being a casual activity to any parent, lifting, holding, carrying, and lowering children multiple times in a day should not make us forget efficient mechanics, even though it will often place us in quite awkward positions and a suboptimal combined center of gravity, such as when having to place very young children in their car seats.

NOTE

 

Professional porters in the Himalayas and some African women have learned the Forehead Carry since a very young age and have developed highly efficient positional control specific to these kinds of carries. The load is not actually resting on the forehead but rather on the front top of the skull close to the forehead. Even though handling the load relies in part on resting on your back with your torso leaning forward, it nonetheless produces compression on top of your head with a strong protective contraction of the neck flexors, which increases compressive force on the cervical area. It’s essential to prevent the hyperextension of your neck when compressed under load because hyperextension makes the central nervous system trigger a reflex to shut down muscular activity; you may fall because you’re pulled backward by your load, a vital reflex designed to prevent damage to the nerves and disks in the neck.

Fortunately, your hands can assist and help prevent issues by pulling forward on the strap to keep your neck stable. However, if lots of force is required from your arms to ensure neck stability, this means that your neck is already at risk of injury. The Forehead and Head carries must be approached very cautiously, with very light loads in the beginning. Sound progressions will help build a healthy and strong neck.

Both carry methods are proven to be highly energy-efficient for traveling long distance. Another advantage is that you may free one or both hands to momentarily hold something and assist your balance or even to carry something else with your arms.

 

Regardless of the carry hold and grip you choose, once you’ve established an efficient combined center of gravity, it’s time to move to relocate the object. To be an efficient motion, only your legs and (to some extent) your hips should move, and any positional disturbance should be avoided as much as possible otherwise. Your highest priority is maintaining a neutral spine or a very slight arch or side lean of the lower back, depending on the hold you’ve opted for. (Impeccable abdominal breath control tremendously helps with midline/core stabilization as well as economy of movement.) The initial positional set from lower back to head must remain as still as possible as you move. Depending on the weight of the load, it can be preferable to stop to a stand to rearrange either your grip or to switch your hold—to distribute the effort over diverse muscles—rather than attempting to do so while in motion, which can throw your balance off and compromise neutral lower back.

 

1 Hand Carry (also known as “farmer walk”): With an ideal distribution of weight, the combined center of gravity is perfectly aligned with the line of gravity and enables body joints from head to feet to remain vertically aligned.

 

2 Waist Carry: In the swing phase (Single-Leg Standing with the opposing leg moving forward) your hips may optionally shift forward slightly more to push the load forward and rest the load a little more on the waist. Notice that the backward lean of the torso does not imply hyperextension of the lower back.

3 Inefficient Waist Carry

Clean (Squat Clean)

Cleaning in manipulation means lifting an object from the ground to shoulder level in a single, explosive, and rather complex movement, which requires great technique.

NOTE

 

The term clean comes from early times of Olympic weight lifting when touching the bar with any body part other than the hands before it reached shoulder position was forbidden.

 

Although the Deadlift and Lapping are done relatively slowly as weight increases, cleaning heavy objects is an explosive physical feat that relies on power to achieve the greatest vertical acceleration and momentum possible.

Great upward acceleration and velocity enables you to elevate the object to the maximal pulling height possible in the fastest way possible, so that your body can swiftly position itself underneath the object in a Deep Squat position and establish a hold at shoulder level to the front of the body, which is called the Rack. This movement is known as the Squat Clean because of the specific ending position. In short, it’s a powerful move in which the object first rests on the ground with its center of mass below your center of gravity, and you pull it high enough to end up supporting it at shoulder level above ground, with the object’s center of gravity above your own.

As with most objects, the greater the grip friction and the more even and stable the weight distribution, the more efficiently power can be used. That means that cleaning becomes nearly impossible when the level of power required to produce vertical force exceeds the ability to generate sufficient levels of gripping friction. Although you might be able to raise a heavy, bulky object with no handles just high enough to lap it, there is no way you could clean the same object successfully because you can’t pull it high enough and quickly enough. In a nutshell, although you might eventually end up achieving the same practical task, it’s often the object itself that dictates the best, if not the only, movement strategy available.

In Olympic weightlifting, the Jerk follows the Clean, which means you raise the object overhead and then balance it for a moment with both arms fully extended. However, in Natural Movement, the practical reasons for the Clean are more diverse, including lifting overhead to stack the load on or toss it over a raised surface, keeping it at chest or shoulder level for a Chest or Shoulder Carry, or throwing it using a Push-Press Throw.

The Rack

The Rack is an essential part of positional control in cleaning, and without a strong Rack position at the end of the Clean, you might have to drop the load, which is a waste of a tremendous amount of energy and time. Before attempting to clean a log or any object, you must understand the mechanics that make the Rack position strong and reliable.

 

Photos 1 and 2 show optimal Rack position:

1 The elbows and triceps are resting and pressing against the chest. The combined center of gravity is close to the line of gravity, which provides strong support from the upper body for the arms and prevents the arms from lowering forward.

2 Elbows are in with the inside of the forearms and wrists facing and pressing against each other, which prevents the arms from lowering downward.

Photos 3 and 4 show inefficient Rack position:

3 Elbows are away from the chest. The arms have no support from the chest, which puts lots of tension in the shoulders and neck and pushes the combined center of gravity away from the body and makes it impossible to resist the pull of gravity. (This is the most problematic inefficiency.)

4 Elbows are out with the forearms separated, which makes it impossible to ensure enough tension to maintain the hold high. The hold might lower until it’s entirely lost.

Experiment with the Rack hold and managing your combined center of gravity with diverse objects that require full support (as opposed to the log, which has one end resting on the ground) as you get up and down in a Squat or Split Squat fashion and as you hold the bottom Squat positions. Practicing helps you assess your stability, which is a key component of an efficient Clean. The type of object you lift is relevant to positional adjustments to the Rack position.

Logs won’t move forward (unless they slide), so if your arm/Rack position is good and you engage close enough to it, a log won’t pull you off balance forward or send you off balance backward (which might happen with objects and loads that you fully support—a sandbag, for instance).

Odd objects that are compact with a certain volume are more difficult to deal with. You must do what you can to pull your head back or shift the object a little sideways with your head leaning in the opposite direction, so you can pull the Rack in toward you without getting the object in your face; pulling the combined center of gravity toward you the best you can is quite challenging. Olympic bars are designed to optimally align the Rack and weight the closest to your line of gravity, which makes managing the combined center of gravity and keeping a vertical body position easier.

The Clean starts the same way a Deadlift starts; therefore, I’m not describing that part of the movement pattern. As a matter of fact, if you’ve already deadlifted the object but marked a pause in the top position, you have the option to Clean from that position with a limited Hip Hinge (a movement called the Hang Clean). The particularity of the Deadlift when it’s part of the Clean is that it has to generate upward acceleration greater than in a regular Deadlift. Although you might not feel the acceleration at the beginning of the lift when you’ve just overcome inertia, you should start to feel it starting before your grip reaches knee level, and even more so as it passes knee level and your hips powerfully drive forward. However, it’s important that you not try to generate speed right from the start of the lift-off. When a load is moving at a fast rate too early, it eventually decreases your ability to increase its upward velocity as you keep elevating the load. We could say that the goal is to “accelerate the acceleration” by starting to lift relatively slowly so you can accelerate the load more efficiently later in the movement.

As both your legs and hips approach full extension, the difference between the Clean and the Deadlift is that you also extend your ankles (raise your heels) to push off the balls of your feet and add vertical force. This movement is called triple extension. However, if maintaining friction at the feet (surface friction) and stability at the ankles (on uneven, unstable ground) is challenging, skip or minimize ankle extension for the sake of conserving maximum frictional force at the feet and ensuring a strong, balanced base of support.

As your body position becomes completely vertical, most of the upward force has been produced already, and it feels as if you’re trying to Power Jump upward even though your feet shouldn’t get off the ground. However, you still can amplify the upward momentum beyond that point to keep elevating the object (or where you grip it) to the endpoint of the pull. Now I can resume the description of the Clean technique.

 

1 Upon full extension of your legs, hips, and ankles, shrug your shoulders to add pulling force to the upward momentum.

2 The velocity you’ve created keeps elevating the object and making it feel “light,” which enables you to flex your arms to keep guiding the upward path of the load. Without forceful muscular action, pull your elbows sideways and as high as you can while maintaining your grip; you want to reach the maximum pulling height possible before upward acceleration drops to zero. Ideally, you want your elbows to be higher than your grip, but to maintain such a grip on a log you might have to keep your elbows and hands relatively level. The maximum pulling height depends on your power compared to the weight of the load, and you might not be able to elevate your grip higher than your navel. At this point, there is ideally zero or minimal force in your feet.

3 The moment the object reaches the vertical endpoint and for a brief moment it feels as if the object is suspended or even “floating,” you must quickly change direction from upward to downward by dropping your center of gravity as low and as fast as you can to pull your body under the object to receive it in a squatting position. As you’re moving downward, bring your elbows down and slide your hands down in the Rack hold position to receive the load smoothly and securely. Optionally, if the load is not too heavy and you generated sufficient vertical velocity, you could catch the load in the Rack in a position taller than the Deep Squat (such as a Half Squat), which is called a Power Clean. The Power Clean is convenient for people who lack the mobility to assume a strong, stable Deep Squat. However, the risk of catching the Rack too high is a compromise to your back position. However, it’s good practice to train yourself to pull under the load as low and as fast as possible.

 

4 Get up to recover a standing position.

TECHNIQUE TIP

 

Because the Clean is a complex sequence that demands impeccable timing and positional control, it’s great practice to break down the whole sequence into discrete drills to acquire proper timing, as I explain in Part 3, “Practice Efficiency.” I describe the drills later in this chapter in the “Drills and Progressions” section.

 

NOTE

 

The gross mechanics of cleaning a log, a stone, or an Olympic bar are the same, with relatively minor positional modifications in the Grip, Rack position, and trajectory of the object.

 

Inefficiencies

Aside from the Deadlift faults that I previously covered, the following are inefficiencies for the Clean:

• Ankles, knees, and hips don’t reach full extension simultaneously.

• No ankle extension (unless required).

• Early pull from your arms (bending at the elbows) with or without shoulder shrug before triple extension.

• Bending at your elbows (after triple extension) before shoulder shrug.

• No shoulder shrug.

• Not pulling your arms/elbows as high as possible.

• Kicking your feet toward the rear upon reaching the endpoint of the pull.

• Catching/receiving the object into the Rack position while standing or in a Half Squat, which is known as the “Power Clean.” This might work with loads that are not excessive and save time when you’re in a time-sensitive situation, but it won’t work with heavy loads. This inefficiency could be the result of latency, letting your feet take off too high, kicking them backward, fear of receiving the load in the bottom Rack position, or all of the above. It might result in your combined center of gravity being too much forward and dropping the object.

• The object shifts and pulls forward upon receiving the object in the bottom Rack position because the load moved away from your body (usually at the endpoint of the pull), the feet move backward which moves the base of support away from the load, or both.

• Upward acceleration is too slow. Most of the vertical force must be produced from lift-off to triple extension (ankle-knee-hip). Beginners tend to go to slow, thinking that they only need to lift the object high enough that they can pull it from hip to shoulder using only (or mostly) their arms. Another cause could be a lack of grip friction.

• Upward acceleration isn’t steady. Upward momentum temporarily loses speed, usually upon the hip extension. Even though the object maintains upward momentum, the slower acceleration prevents you from reaching maximum pulling height, making it very difficult for the body to pull under.

Jerk

The Jerk normally starts after a Clean; however, you do it regardless of how you brought the object to shoulder level in the Rack position. The aim of jerking is holding and balancing the load overhead.

Holding an object overhead can be useful if you’re stacking it or tossing over a height, passing it to someone who will pull it from a more elevated position, or holding it high to cross a deep stream while preventing the object from getting wet. The Jerk is the only way to efficiently shoulder a heavy log that has been resting on the ground. Even with enough arm and shoulder strength to push the load upward (Press) or with a push from the legs before pressing on the arms (Push-Press), with heavy weight you can’t generate enough vertical force to achieve full arm extension. Instead, the strategy is to generate most of the vertical force from the lower body and to lower the center of gravity fast enough to be able to fully extend the arms from underneath the object as it still has upward momentum. Finally, you stand back up with the load balanced overhead.

The Jerk is a highly dynamic movement that demands equal amounts of power and technique. I first describe the Press and Push-Press techniques to help you better understand how they differ from the Jerk. All three movements start from the Rack, and, to the uninitiated, they may seem relatively similar.

• Press technique: From the Rack position in a stand, brace then push the load upward using only your arms and shoulders until you have full extension overhead. This movement relies entirely on upper-body strength. The center of gravity remains constant at standing level.

• Push-Press technique: From the Rack position in a stand, brace, slightly bend at the knees (also called the “dip”), and strongly push through your legs to immediately extend your arms until you have full extension overhead. This movement mostly relies on lower-body strength and on some upper-body strength. The center of gravity lowers and then elevates back to standing level.

• Jerk: This movement starts like a Push-Press, but you lower your body under the load until you fully extend your arms, and then you go back to standing. Instead of extending the load upward through your arms, you extend your arms away from the load as you lower your body below it. The center of gravity lowers and then elevates to generate upward momentum, lowers again to reach the Rack, and finally elevates back to standing level.

Push-pressing and pressing are useful both from a practical standpoint and from a strength training one. For instance, pressing enables a greater control of speed and elevation of an object, such as for stacking something or manipulating it above your head in a controlled fashion. It also develops valuable upper-body strength. The Push-Press pattern is also used to throw an object upward and at an angle; you simply release the grip at the end of the triple extension. However, although the Press and Push-Press work with weights that are not too heavy, it becomes impossible to achieve the same overhead result with heavy loads.

Jerking a log looks like this.

 

Unlike other objects that aren’t supported on the ground at one of their extremities, the grip necessarily moves away from the body as the log elevates to a greater height, and while you raise it overhead, you do it at an angle instead of in a purely vertical manner. If the lifter fully supports the object without any portion resting on the ground or another surface, even a slight forward lean would force the load to fall forward.

In the next set of photos, I’m using a light load (a medicine ball) to show a Power Jerk (which means that I pull my body under the load just enough to catch the object with my arms fully extended).

 

1 From a stand with your knees already very slightly bent (or unlocked) and holding the object in the Rack, lower your center of gravity and load your legs in a dip while maintaining a perfectly vertical stance. To help manage the combined center of gravity more efficiently and prevent any forward lean, keep your head back so you can drive your Rack in so it’s more toward your shoulders and line of gravity.

2 Elevate your center of gravity a little higher than standing level by strongly extending your ankles and legs; immediately shrug your shoulders to generate as much vertical momentum as you can.

3 As the object accelerates upward, with zero force and no friction in your feet, swiftly dip again by bending your legs to lower your center of gravity. The reversal from an upward motion to a downward motion must be as brief and fast as possible.

4 Keep lowering your center of gravity until your arms fully extend. Despite what it looks like in the photo, you’re not pressing on your arms to push the object up. Instead, you’re extending your arms by lowering your body farther below the object until full extension before the object completely loses upward momentum.

5 After you’ve secured a balanced overhead hold, elevate your center of gravity back to standing level.

Once you’ve generated upward momentum of the load, how far you need to lower your body to reach the overhead position depends on how much vertical momentum you can generate in the load and how quickly you’re able to lower your center of gravity. It’s good practice to systematically train yourself to move under the load as quickly and as low as you can. In reality, you may “catch” (reach the overhead position with arms fully extended) it in a taller position (which is known as a Power Jerk) when the load isn’t too heavy and you want to save energy and time. However, with heavier loads, lowering yourself all the way with the knee of the back leg almost touching the ground in a Deep Split Squat position will be the only way you can catch the load. Otherwise, you might not reach full arm extension and become forced to either drop the load or lower it to the Side Rack.

Repositioning the feet to a Split Squat means that you swiftly move one leg to the front and the other to the back at equal distance. The Split Squat position gives you two important advantages compared to a square position:

• It enables you to reach a lower position, which means more space and time for your arms to extend fully.

• The Overhead Hold with a grip as narrow as the Rack specific to the log is much stronger and more sustainable than a Deep Overhead Squat with such a narrow grip, especially with people who lack mobility in the thoracic spine and shoulder. My personal preference is a flexed-foot (back foot) position that helps me better control and stabilize my hip position.

Log Shouldering

No matter how you get the log overhead (Press, Push-Press, Jerk), the main purpose of the overhead position is to shoulder the log before you carry it. The distance you need to reach with the log must justify the effort of shouldering it. Otherwise, you may roll or pivot it on its base unless there isn’t enough horizontal clearance (terrain, obstacles), in which case you might have to either raise it and topple it in the direction you want or drag it. (Those options are also available if you’re unable to shoulder the log to carry it.) Side shouldering is a unilateral hold, with a single shoulder supporting the log’s weight so you can balance it between the front and back of the body. This orientation is clearly more convenient than supporting it across the shoulders and upper back, which makes holding it harder on muscles and joints and also makes locomotion impossible if there’s a lack of clearance on the sides, as in when you walk through a wooded area.

Side shouldering is an asymmetrical carry, both regarding position and force production on opposite sides of the spine. A slight side lean toward the side opposite the supporting shoulder ensures a balanced combined center of gravity. The core, back muscles, and lateral flexors on the supporting shoulder side (log side) lengthen, whereas they shorten on the opposing side. The lateral wedging of lumbar disks combined with compressive forces presents a risk of injury similar to the front wedging when flexing or back wedging when hyperextending the lumbar area under load. You can’t maintain a completely neutral spine as you can with a symmetrical carry, and a slight lateral wedging is unavoidable. This doesn’t mean that the side shoulder carry will hurt you. It just means that the risk of injury tends to be greater, which is especially the case if the load is heavy, you have issue managing the combined center of gravity, you can’t strongly stabilize your core/midline, or you carry this way for a sustained period or over a long distance. In the latter case, a simple strategy to minimize the risk is to switch shoulders regularly.

Before you can attempt to shoulder the log, you need to position yourself by progressively elevating the log so you can move your body closer to the log’s center of mass, as I describe in the following steps:

 

1 Start in a Split Stance in a strong, stable Overhead Hold position with your hands at the extremity of the log. Both arms are in the lockout position. Ensuring a neutral spine and midline stabilization by maintaining bracing at all times is very important. That doesn’t mean you hold your breath throughout the whole sequence; just exhale partially to maintain strong, steady intra-abdominal pressure at all time. As you elevate the log, you have the options of supporting the log with both arms in a still stand so you can secure its balance or rest, lowering the log to a Side Shoulder Rack (which means that you’ll have to jerk it back to overhead) or dropping it entirely to the side if your position becomes compromised. The objective is not to elevate the log as high as possible; you just want to raise it enough to move your hands down the log as it goes up to get your shoulder close to the center of gravity of the log.

2 Release the hand of the arm opposing the front leg and move it down and forward. Be very focused on stabilizing your position from palm to shoulder (in the lockout arm) to feet.

3 Push off your feet and have your back foot step forward just behind the front foot so your front hand can contact the log and create a point of support.

 

4 After establishing a strong and stable Single-Arm Overhead Hold with your front hand, release your back hand and start traveling it down and forward as you push off your feet again to step forward.

5 Step forward while reaching with your free arm toward the log to establish a strong Overhead Hold with both arms.

6 Push off your feet to let your back foot step forward behind your front foot as you push through the front arm and release the back arm to travel it down and forward toward the log.

 

7 Step forward again and establish a strong Split Stance and Overhead Hold with both arms.

8 With one more forward step and a switch of the arms, you’re reaching the point where you might be able to shoulder the log. This is a crucial stage of the movement. Look up and down the log to verify that your hands are just a few inches below the center of gravity of the log. You may elevate or lower the log a little until you’ve ideally placed your hands. Assessing the log’s center of gravity before shouldering it is rarely perfectly accurate. If you attempt to lift the log with the center of gravity too much to the front of your shoulder and body, the log will feel excessively heavy, and you’ll need to press up the front part hard with your arms to manage to elevate the front part of the log off the ground. Even if you do manage to shoulder it that way, you might lose balance forward as you’re pulled by the weight of the log, compromise your back position, waste great amounts of energy, and risk injury before you can adjust the combined center of gravity (if you can). Conversely, if you attempt to lift the log with its center of gravity too much to the back of your shoulder behind your body, it will feel very light and easy to lift the front part because gravity is pulling the back part down using your body as a fulcrum. Next, you either try to resist the pull of the back part of the log with your arms, or it just is too strong for you, and it pulls you off balance backward, with the possibility that you’ll fall on your rear or back with the log on top of you, which is the worst scenario. When in doubt, it’s always best to keep the center of gravity of the log in front of you. If you attempt to lift the log and it’s too much to the front, you can use a partial Jerk to bump the log so you can slide your shoulder down a bit and get your shoulder closer to the center of gravity of the log.

 

9 Once you have assessed where you want to place your shoulder on the log and what side of your body you want to shoulder it on, bring both hands to the same level. Lean forward to bring your shoulder in contact with the center of gravity of the log as you lower it as smoothly as possible toward your shoulder.

10 Establish contact with your shoulder, with the side of your neck and face pressing against the surface of the log. The arm on the same side as the weight-bearing shoulder wraps over the log.

11 Extend the arm opposite to the weight-bearing shoulder a little forward and bring your hand beneath the log to support it and push it upward. Then lower your position by bending at the knees.

 

12 As you lower yourself into a Half Squat, pull the log back with your top arm and push up with the bottom arm to assist the elevation of the front part of the log. As the front part of the log elevates, the back part lowers, which naturally facilitates reaching the combined center of gravity faster. If there’s too much weight to the front and if the ground is slippery, the front extremity of the log might slide forward. In this case, you don’t need to resist this motion; simply extend back up on your legs and step forward to maintain your hold on the log. As the log becomes more vertical again and its weight is pressing on its front extremity, it will stop sliding. This is often an indication that you need to move your shoulder farther down the log and closer to its center of gravity.

13 Get back up and keep paying attention to the motion of the log and its speed. The pendulum motion of the log should ideally bring it level. However, depending on how you have your shoulder positioned relative to the center of gravity of the log, you might have to push upward with your free arm if the front part of the log elevates too slowly. Alternatively, you might have to press down with the arm that’s over the top of the log if the log elevates too rapidly. Both arms should be in a position to ensure either a pressing up or pressing down action onto the front part of the log.

 

14 Stand up fully with the log horizontally level. A slight lean to the side opposite to the weight-bearing shoulder helps manage the combined center of gravity and prevents the log from exerting much tension against your top arm. Your body and shoulder are acting as a fulcrum onto which the log can pivot. If the front part tends to tilt down, you need to slide the log a bit backward; if it tends to tilt up, you need to slide it a bit forward. You can easily readjust the combined center of gravity by bumping the log in a Jerk and repositioning the log with your arms. You may move the center of gravity of the log very slightly to the back of your shoulder, which tends to elevate the front part of it, but which is counterbalanced by the weight of your arm over the log at the front.

15-16 When you have found a point of balance, you can release the arm opposite to the weight-bearing shoulder.

Loaded Squat Get-Up—Heavy Squat

 

While holding or carrying a load, you may have to partially or fully perform a Squat Get-Up, be it in the Clean, as you lift a body before using a Cross-Shoulder Carry, or to bring a load down. Technically speaking, a loaded squatting pattern, or heavy squat, is no different from the unloaded one except for the slight positional modifications necessary to hold the load and manage efficient combined center of gravity. The loaded Squat Get-Up may be performed in a square or Split Stance, and with a base of support that is relatively narrow or wide.

Several holds are possible: on a single shoulder, upper back, front shoulder Rack, and Chest Hold, for example. In the real world, it’s unusual to have to repetitively squat down and stand up with a load on the spot, but it might happen after you’ve passed underneath low obstacles or if you have to lift and unload several objects over a short distance and in a short amount of time. However from a strength training standpoint, squatting several times in a row with a heavy load is a phenomenal way to develop high levels of strength and power in the legs and lower-body muscles (quads, hamstrings, glutes, back, and abdominals). That strength transfers not only to the ability to lift and carry heavier loads but also to greater power output in other natural movements, such as sprinting and jumping.

 

TECHNIQUE TIP

 

Following are some efficiency tips when squatting heavy loads:

• Focus on efficient positional control rather than load. If you don’t have the mobility necessary to perform unloaded Squat Get-Ups, doing loaded Squat Get-Ups only magnifies your mobility issue. If you’re new to strength training, don’t overlook body-weight Squat Get-Ups; performing high volumes of them (up to 100 times a day) at high intensity (rapidly) increases strength endurance and vertical jump, and it’s great for metabolic conditioning.

• Managing an efficient combined center of gravity when holding the load to the front of the body is challenging when the object is bulky, which is often the case with real-life objects and load. This tends to shift the combined center of gravity significantly to the front of the body and results in decreased force output compared to squatting holding an equal weight at the back. For this reason, the front rack is a great way to develop strength in the thoracic-spine muscles responsible for extending and stabilizing the back.

• Managing an efficient combined center of gravity is easier with the load on your upper back, but it tends to increase compressive forces on your spine.

• Manage an efficient combined center of gravity especially to prevent your torso from leaning forward (more than it needs) to use the back muscles to lift the load. Keep your upper body as vertical as the load allows, drive your torso up as much as possible, and use power from the hips when getting up.

• Using a base of support at least as wide as shoulder width or slightly wider, especially if you have mobility deficiencies, helps you maintain efficient bottom position and better recruit groin muscles for more force production.

• Keep a steady neck and eye position from start to end.

• Control the descent, which means resisting the load and preventing it from making you “collapse” under it, so you have better positional control and balance throughout the downward motion all the way to the Deep Squat. You can gently rebound on your knees at the bottom of your squat if your knees are healthy; otherwise, you might stop flexing your legs just before full flexion.

• “Spreading the ground” as if you want to make your base of support wider by pretending to slide your feet apart can be a useful cue when getting up from the Deep Squat under load. It helps engage the posterior chain, keeps the hips externally rotated, and keeps the knees over your feet.

• If you want to develop more power, you must explode up as swiftly as you can the moment you reach the bottom position and keep accelerating all the way to the top, as if you want to Power Jump with the load on your back. Speed, as well as acceleration or deceleration rates going downward and upward, can be varied to train adaptability of muscle contractions.

• Train the “pause,” which is holding the Deep Squat for a few seconds while maintaining impeccable positional control.

 

Lumbar Carry

The Lumbar Carry, though it isn’t only for carrying people, is mostly used when someone can’t walk, when it’s too hard for the carrier to elevate the person onto the shoulders, if the environment makes it difficult to stand tall while carrying a person, or as an active way to rest. In the Lumbar Carry, you place the carried person across the lower back and secure the person’s position through your body position and arms. Because the weight of the body you’re carrying is closer to your center of gravity, it allows you to carry a heavy person more easily and to ensure more stable movement on uneven grounds. The trade-off is that it might be relatively more challenging to secure a firm and reliable grip on the person’s body, which tends to prevent running while carrying. Because of the transversal, “cross”-like position of the person’s body relative to yours, this technique isn’t suited for wooded or narrow areas; however, it works fine on open grounds.

Standing next to the person with one foot in front of him, use the hand that’s away from the person to hold the wrist, lift it, and wrap the arm around your neck. Your other arm slides across the person’s back so your hand can grab the back muscle (the lat) just below the armpit. You can optionally use this simple stance to help the person walk, which is known as the Support Carry.

SAFETY NOTE

 

If one arm of the person is hurt, wrap the uninjured arm around your neck.

   

1 Step far forward in front of the person to establish a base of support wider than the person’s base of support; drive and engage your hips far sideways while pushing the surface of your lower back against the person’s abdomen area. Maintain a firm grip on their wrist, arm, and opposing armpit.

2 Bend your knees and lean forward in a Hip Hinge while pulling the person’s body forward to load the person on your lumbar area. It’s essential that you maintain a very firm grip with your arm gripping the person’s back, so you can release the arm that grips the wrist and wrap it over both legs to reach and grip the back of the knee. The person’s arm stays wrapped around your neck. Because you can’t see the body, you must feel the position to balance the person’s body weight on yours with an optimum combined center of gravity before you start walking. You can revert back to this position anytime as you walk and adjust the combined center of gravity by briefly bending and pushing off your legs to “bump” up the person; this leg action makes it easier to either reposition your waist, pull the person with your arms, or do both simultaneously.

 

3 While maintaining a neutral spine, drive your hips forward to regain a more erect position, but don’t reach complete hip extension so you can maintain support for the person’s body on your lower back.

Cross-Shoulder Carry

The Cross-Shoulder Carry (or the Fireman Carry) is the most emblematic of all body carries; it’s a staple for first responders who regularly use it to carry victims or casualties to safety. This technique is a very efficient way to carry somebody because it keeps the body ideally balanced and stable on the upper back of the carrier, allowing them to jog if necessary or to cover a significant distance. You can secure the body with a single arm, so you can use your opposite arm to facilitate your balance or motion or to hold an object (gear, weapon, and so on). In most cases, the carry can’t be done without first lifting the body with a Squat or Split Squat Get-Up.

SAFETY NOTE

 

If one of the person’s arms is hurt, grab the uninjured one.

   

1 Facing the person, grasp their wrist and lift their arm out.

2 Step forward in a Split Squat (a Tall Half-Kneeling, Deep Squat, or Half Squat are possible options) with your leg and arm opposite to the hand gripping the person’s wrist between their legs. Pull their arm down to guide the torso onto your upper back as you slightly lean forward with your torso. While maintaining a strong neutral spine, press your shoulder and neck tightly against their belly while your inside arm wraps tightly around their leg, preparing for the lift.

3 Lean back (bring your posture up to an erect torso) to lift the person’s body entirely off the ground. You may assist the motion of your back by pressing up onto the back of the person’s thigh with your hand.

4 Stand up in a Split Squat Get-Up manner and establish a Square Stance. Bring the person’s arm toward the arm you have wrapped around their leg to grasp their wrist with that hand, which enables you to free your opposing arm and tighten your hold.

 

SAFETY NOTE

 

The lifting pattern for the Cross-Shoulder Carry can be used for defense—to swiftly lift and throw an opponent off balance.

 

5-6 Alternatively, you could start in a Deep Squat with your arm wrapping between the person’s legs and already gripping the wrist. With this technique, you’re holding the person’s body tightly before you lift, and you can even use your free arm to push off your leg to assist with getting up.

Skill-Mixes

 

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, carrying is not solely done by walking and can be done using any locomotive movement, such as getups to begin with. With the real-world mindset of practical and adaptable physical performance, you’ll open the doors to many ways to apply and practice the techniques you’ve learned with a diversity of contextual variables.