Chapter 7: Adaptable - The Practice of Natural Movement

“Adaptability is the simple secret of survival.”

 

—Jessica Hagedorn

   

Adaptability is the essence of evolution. Evolutionarily and biologically speaking, the fundamental reason why animals—including humans—have a brain is for locomotion and so they can perform adaptable movement within complex environments and situations that demand displacement. Plants, on the other hand are incapable of locomotion, which is why they do not need a brain.

Not surprisingly, adaptability is a core principle of Natural Movement and its practice. With regard to movement, what do we have to adapt to? To constantly changing context, including diverse environmental variables and changing situational demands. A context is primarily a combination of an environment and a situation. Adaptability is your ability to respond, through your movement and physical effort, to contextual demands that are either chosen by you or placed upon you.

It is important to understand the difference between environmental variables and situational ones. Natural Movement inherently adapts to your direct environment and its specific parameters (muddy, sandy, icy, stony, dry, wet, cold, hot, smooth, rugged, slippery, flat, inclined, declined, narrow, wide, stable, unstable, linear, curved, and so on), as well as adapting to the situation you are dealing with (usual or unusual, safe or dangerous, predictable or unpredictable, urgent or insignificant, short or long duration, intentional or accidental). Adaptability involves a reaction to or an interaction with something external to ourselves. In some cases, like fighting, it is not just where the fight takes place that is the environment. The opponent’s body and movement are environmental factors, with their ill intentions toward us being the situation, which makes a single individual practically a whole context to deal with. In a way, the term contextual adaptability is redundant because adaptability always means reacting to the context.

Imagine you’re running on flat surfaces but those surfaces alternate between being soft and hard. Your gait will have to go through minute adjustments to remain as efficient as possible on both surfaces because the environmental variables are changing over distance. What about if you’re running to the top of a hill and then running back down? Though the environment itself remains the same, your direction, orientation, position, and movement interaction with the environment is nonetheless modified. You are adapting to it. In fact, intentionally or not, consciously or not, you must adapt to it to remain as effective and efficient as possible.

Situations are also part of the context we must adapt to. A situation is not necessarily something unexpected, challenging, or even unique. For example, right now you might be casually sitting and reading. This situation implies that you’ll be holding a particular position for some time, and although it doesn’t seem to be anything special you have to adapt to, it actually is to a relative degree. During the day you could be working, relaxing, going through a routine, dealing with problems, having a party, doing the same old thing, or trying something new. You might be doing something you’ve chosen to do or something that’s been forced on you and you must react to. Depending on the case, you might have to remain idle or move intensely; you might have to be physically active for only seconds or a whole day. You might have a clear and simple path in mind or have to use snap judgment and make hard decisions.

Maybe your context today is to stay in an office and sit for many hours. Maybe it is to be in the woods and hike for hours. Those are two significantly different contexts. You will have to adapt to one or the other both from a movement perspective, a physiological perspective, and a psychological perspective. Even the seemingly least physically active context demands a particular behavior and response from you, which you may not perceive because you’re accustomed to it.

Adaptability is being able to adjust to any situation at any given time.”

—John Wooden

 

You could find yourself in a natural environment yet decide to just sit there if the situation does not demand movement from you. In this case the situation is defined by your own decision to stay idle. However, if a predator lurks nearby, or if hunger, cold, or nasty bugs start to overwhelm you, the situation will change, and you might be forced to move because of a situational demand and your self-preservation instinct. The opposite example would be that, while you are confined to a small, empty room, you nonetheless want to engage in Natural Movement practice. The range of movement you could do is still relatively broad, but because the only environmental variables you can interact with are flat, linear surfaces within a small area, it is not nearly as broad as if you were in a larger, more diverse area, such as the woods.

The environment is where you move, and it influences how you move. The situation is either what you choose to do or what happens to you. It’s also how you choose to respond to what happens to you, and it influences how you should perform. Say you are going on an easy and relaxed hour-long hike on your favorite trail. The weather as you start is gorgeous, but it suddenly changes dramatically, soaking you in a cold rain and making the trail muddy, slippery, and difficult. The hike ends up lasting several hours. The sudden weather change causes a radical modification in the environmental demands, which affect your gait and overall physical effort. On a different day, the gorgeous weather might not change, but an unusual event could happen, which forces you to swiftly run, jump, crawl, and climb to the best of your ability to get back to the trailhead.

Instead of merely hiking, your physical experience turns into an intense, prolonged, and exhausting “obstacle course.” In both cases, even though the trail is very familiar to you, you have a completely different experience because the context radically changes due to an environmental or a situational change. In fact, the whole context might be altered also because of you. Indeed, your ability to perform and adapt relies on your physical and mental state in the moment. Being exhausted or sleep-deprived, being cold and numb, being ill, being doubtful, afraid, or distracted are some individual parameters that can affect your ability to adapt.

You can’t predict what will happen. The point is, are you ready for whatever comes? How adaptable are you?

Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.”

—John Wooden

 

Adapted Versus Adaptable

 

Real-life physical action occurs because of contextual demands that are sometimes predictable and sometimes unpredictable. Context is not necessarily easy to handle just because it’s predictable, and it’s not necessarily challenging to handle just because it’s unpredictable. Your level of physical capability and mental control in relation to the level of difficulty of the context determines how easy or hard the context is. Regardless of whether context is predictable, context is rarely linear. If the environment or the situation changes, the context changes. When context changes, contextual demands change, and physical behavior should change.

How much difficulty can you handle before you reach the limits of your capability and how much complexity can you handle before you reach the limits of your adaptability? You will realize that levels of adaptability are the true measure of capability.

Let’s use a concrete example of an individual who’s fit enough by conventional standards to sprint really fast on an athletic track. This person is trained for sprinting—in short, the person is adapted to this movement and effort. Now the same person is forced to run for miles on a rocky terrain, and because she is not trained for such terrains, distance, and duration, she might get fatigued rapidly and might become injured with a twisted ankle. Despite a specific adaptation to running, the running capability of this individual is tremendously reduced by over-specialization in environment, movement pattern, and physiological effort, which means she has low adaptability when exposed to unusual types of challenges and stresses in running. Adapted and adaptable are not the same.

In the absence of contextual necessity, it’s deliberate practice that is the input necessary for both adaptation and adaptability. However, adaptation and adaptability are not exactly the same. Adaptation is what consistent practice made you acquire, be it motor skills or physiological improvement. It’s not the finality of training; it’s the means to an end. Adaptability is what you must do and display as you move to be effective and efficient in a real context. Without practice of a wide scope of contextual demands—real or simulated—you can’t develop adaptability. Just a bit of complexity may defeat you: a simple obstacle in your way as you sprint, an uneven surface where you lift or land, an unstable surface where you balance, a surface from which you hang that’s much thicker than usual, and so on.

Although the environment where you move and physically perform might be random and the situation chaotic, how you physically respond is geared for a particular outcome: practical effectiveness and ideally efficient and safe performance.

Adaptability in Natural Movement is not just how you respond in the moment; it actually requires a perception and anticipation of the immediate future to enable fast responses that are both deliberate and reflexive. You only move “randomly” because you have no idea what you are doing or how to do what you need to be doing. Simply put, you do random things because you have never had to adapt to such demands before. You only feel that you must “improvise” because you’ve never learned techniques or consistently trained for conditions like the context you are dealing with. Your movement isn’t random or improvised when you’re trained and experienced to reflexively move in a way you know fits best for a given context and that you’re able to instantly adapt in every way necessary, move after move; your movement is adaptable. There’s more than one way to jump, yet how many patterns or techniques have you experimented with? On how many diverse environmental variables have you practiced those jumping moves to increase their adaptability?

Take in every detail of your environment and adapt.”

—Carlos Wallace

 

The biggest disservice ever done to physical training was removing natural environmental variables and demands. People doing movement patterns in isolation from environmental demands are like goldfish in a bowl—going in circles, bored, living a useless life.

Originally, or evolutionarily speaking, movement was rarely dissociated from external demands as those demands couldn’t be dismissed or ignored. Environments and situations always impose changes in the way movements are performed in terms of pattern and physiology, which leaves the body no choice but to adapt at every level and to work at the level it has to.

Adaptation occurs when a specific and repetitive input and challenge is imposed to your nervous system and to your physiology; it thrives on consistency. This notion that your body adapts to demands as it experiences them consistently has been termed the Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand (SAID) principle, and it applies to both motor skills and physiological adaptations. Simply put, with regard to motor skills and physiological adaptations, you only own what you practice.

The more diverse the contextual demands you subject yourself to, the more varied the adaptations and the more adaptable you become. The effect of linearity and predictability of most gyms and the absence of a diversity in environmental opportunities to expose and address deficiencies in physical performance leads to an “atrophy” in the movement adaptability of athletes to the benefit of a few “hypertrophied” adaptations, such as strength or metabolic conditioning. Don’t get me wrong: Strength and metabolic conditioning are extremely valuable, but without adaptable movement skills to operate them, physical training is specialized, which leads to deficiencies. Although focusing on specific adaptations is understandable from a highly specialized athletic perspective, real-world capability depends on a much greater diversity of skills and adaptations.

To adapt is to move ahead.”

—Byron Pulsifer

 

Freedom of Movement

 

From a Natural Movement perspective, freedom of movement lies in our ability to adequately respond both to a changing environment and to changing situations in the most minute, accurate, and efficient way possible. It doesn’t mean being free of natural laws and efficiency principles but being free of traditional, conventional, or self-imposed limitations so you can instantly identify the most appropriate physical response to the context.

The diversity of Natural Movement techniques and movement variations doesn’t stem from subjective or superfluous movement creativity that has no practical value. When you’re running over uneven terrains, climbing a tree, or jumping over an obstacle, you’re not being creative, really; you’re just being adaptable. You’re rediscovering what your ancestors collectively placed in your cellular memory, and you’re making it your own. Natural Movement variety is an inherent biological necessity to physically perform and adapt to the near endless environmental complexity of the natural world.

Biologically speaking, as well as from the practical and vital perspectives of Natural Movement, it’s a mistake to dismiss the context in which movement was originally shaped. Without an “in-context” assessment of your movement capability, you don’t take risks, and you don’t expose your potential flaws by confronting them with external demands. Your moves may be complex when they’re context-free (in other words, they’re performed on flat, even ground), but they aren’t adaptable. Simply put, you have no skin in the game. When people train contextually they learn to adapt quickly because they aren’t insulated from demands external to themselves or from the consequences of their deficiencies. Think of it this way: Meditating in a quiet place is easier than meditating in a chaotic place. By the same token, moving with control in a context-free environment is easier than moving in a complex environment.

Perfect Form

 

In Natural Movement, “perfect form” is seen as a highly misleading term; if I ever had to define “perfect form,” I would say that it’s the movement that adapts the best to context, not that conforms the best to a convention that stems from tradition, analytical interpretation of a scientific theory, or a subjective individual criteria. When movement practice is permanently absent from interaction with the environment and external variables, adaptability becomes unnecessary; in fact, we start to avoid it.

Under traditional fitness practice and theory, reaching “perfect form” starts with controlling the context by first restricting environmental variables as much as possible and then by imposing a situation where only predefined positions or movements are allowed. An example is an exercise machine that mechanically dictates the exact movement pattern your body can follow. Another example is a tradition that conventionally dictates the exact position your body must assume. In any case, your body is either mentally or physically forced to conform to a certain behavior.

Conformism and adaptability are radically opposing notions, and a “natural” approach to physical exercise that avoids adaptable movement interaction with nature is not actually natural at all.

From a MovNat standpoint, movement is either technically efficient or inefficient, but ultimately it is the form that adapts best with your direct environment or the situation at hand that matters the most. Whereas efficient running technique normally implies, among other criteria, a straight back, you’d still better round it and lean forward to avoid running into a low-hanging branch, right? That’s adaptability. If instead you were to prioritize the dogma of perfect form over pragmatism and adaptability, you would bang your face into that low-hanging branch. There is no way you can ignore real-world conditions to fit your idea of what perfect movement should look like. This explains why taking a leg-extension machine to the woods or doing “body-weight” muscle-targeting drills in nature does not qualify as a “natural” way of exercising. Being in nature and interacting with it in a practical and adaptable way are not the same.

We should train muscles in the way we use them.”

—Gray Cook

 

The naturalness of your movement behavior primarily lies in your movements’ practicality and adaptability to the environment rather than in the naturalness or artificiality of the environment where you perform them. Machines and conventions do not breed adaptability; they restrict it.

Low Adaptability, Small Comfort Zone

 

We have seen how the evolutionary mismatch between the lifeways and conditions of our ancestors and modern humans is affecting us, and that includes our movement and physiological adaptability, both of which have shrunk considerably. I’m not saying that adaptability has completely disappeared from our everyday lives; we keep physically adapting, more or less passively and more or less effectively, to a variety of environmental stressors, such as the kind of seats in which we sit, how we carry children and grocery bags, the type of shoes or clothing we wear, the type of mattress where we sleep, and so on.

Yet modern culture, which promotes efficient management of pretty much everything in our lives, ends up regulating and standardizing most aspects of our day-to-day environments, and that tends to make our behaviors within such environments more homogeneous, global, and inherently predictable. Without our awareness, we tend to automatize our mental or physical behaviors to turn them into routines we can then optimize. Change becomes our enemy, and the deviation from what we’ve accustomed ourselves to expect becomes an unwelcome challenge that we must avoid by suppressing undesired variations and variables. This is very paradoxical of the era of abundant choice we live in.

Action and adaptability create opportunity.”

—Garrison Wynn

 

The same observation applies to physical practice or training. If your environment is all square, rectangle, flat, and linear, you’re in big trouble. Your brain and body aren’t meant to live in a box. If your physical behavior is overly dictated by traditions, conventions, or programs, you also are in trouble. Your central nervous system and body are not supposed to be limited that way.

Adaptation does not take place without repetition, but adaptability does not develop out of repetitiveness in the absence of external variability. Practice wise, repetition is the replication of a pattern of position, movement, or effort. It is necessary for learning new skills, optimizing existing ones, or triggering particular physiological adaptations.

Repetitiveness starts when repetition stops producing improvement. It’s the end of progress and the death of adaptability. Although an emphasis on the same patterns and the same measurements may be desirable from a specialized-sports perspective, from a real-world capability perspective, repetitiveness is a big issue because it causes you to lose sight of everything that you’re not measuring, assessing, and preparing for. Your focus on particular adaptations blinds you to the big picture, which is adaptability.

Variety in physical training may imply ten or twenty different exercises, maybe more. Variety in Natural Movement implies dozens of techniques and several hundred movement variations. However, variety alone isn’t enough: Natural Movement involves near constant variability in the way those movements are done in terms of intensity and volume, the way they are combined and transition from one to another, and environmental complexity (surfaces, shapes, angles, distances). Including variety and variability isn’t a random thing; you can determine both with precision and follow a customized pattern until you’ve achieved the desired progress or gain. Thanks to an incredible potential for variability in movement patterns, volume, intensity, and environmental complexity, Natural Movement practice avoids ever becoming repetitive.

Set patterns, incapable of adaptability, of pliability, only offer a better cage. Truth is outside of all patterns.”

—John Wooden

 

The more you reduce exposure to variety and variability in training, the more you suppress the necessity for adaptability, which in turn shrinks your ability to become or remain adaptable. By shrinking adaptability, you narrow your comfort zone because a comfort zone that is rarely challenged does not remain at the same level; it gets smaller and smaller over time. By being overly specific, you become very comfortable with the particular movement or effort that gets all your attention and energy, but what about everything else? It doesn’t matter that you may have been active while you were growing up. After decades of physically idle adult life, you tend to resist movement activity because it instantly takes you out of your comfort zone. Although your physical comfort zone was much greater when you were a kid, it has since shrunk dramatically.

It is not balance you need but adaptability.”

—Erwin Raphael McManus

 

As your adaptability and comfort zone shrink, your freedom in life also shrinks. Because you can adapt to fewer variables, you can do less and will be less daring. You become less open to imagination and opportunities because you have become unable to handle the challenges they represent. Instead, you prefer to remain confined to the safe limits of your self-imposed, controlled routines, habits, and day-to-day context. Becoming less adaptable means you become less robust and more fragile. This statement applies to movement practice, physical training, and the way you live your life. Start thinking outside of the box when you think about movement. You’re not a machine. You’re a human animal with an extremely versatile ability to move. You’re super adaptable by nature.

Routines that cease to evolve are dead-ends, and the only way out is to go outside your comfort zone. Ancient Greek philosopher Archilochus once said, “We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” So, the closer your training is to the kind of challenges you might encounter in the real world, the greater the chance that you’ll be successful in those challenges. Knowing the incredible variety of contextual demands in the real world, you must make sure your physical practice addresses movement adaptability.

NOTE

 

Do you know how hard it is for robotic engineers to replicate some of the simplest movements humans do every day without noticing? We are capable of prodigious movements, starting with all our natural ones, and they all have an incredible ability to adapt to our environments. So why limit yourself to only the movements that you can do on an exercise machine?

 

Move in environments that encourage you to engage complex and adaptive motor skills. If you don’t have a challenging situation happening to you, simulate one. Such environments and situations can even be reproduced within controlled environments to provide the necessary scalability that will ensure you safely progress to the next levels of challenge.

The increased ability to deal effectively with environmental and situational variety, complexity, and difficulty you gain through Natural Movement practice will unlock your true human fitness, and it will carry over to all areas of your life in the form of greater self-confidence, resourcefulness, and creativity. Although you might never master your environment, you can learn to master how you move through it.

You have to understand that adaptability to environmental variety involves more than movement; it also has a physiological aspect, including adapting to changing weather conditions. Introducing Natural Movement to your daily routine might at first be a big step out of your comfort zone, but you will rapidly realize that it is a huge step toward a significantly greater comfort zone in your body and life.

The more technologically comfortable and convenient our day-to-day lives become, the more we need to reclaim the value and ability of physical and physiological adaptability through strategic lifestyle practice involving progressive discomfort and efforts, which starts with Natural Movement training. Movement adaptability is both the greatest demand and the greatest reward. Adaptable movement is the “holy grail” of Natural Movement.

The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.”

—Kakuzo Okakura