Your Secret Movement Abilities Hidden By Nature
Nature Holds the Key to Limitless Movement
While you have been endlessly searching for ways of moving better, nature has been hiding it from you, right in plain sight!
Find Your Hidden Reserves Right Here
Exercise. It’s supposed to be good for you, right? Then how come so many people who prioritise exercise end up with aches, pains and niggly little injuries for their efforts?
It seems that the more you exercise, the more creaky your body gets!
Feeling this way starts the process of trying to find a way of unravelling the tightness and oiling the joints, so out come the foam rollers, flossing bands (or whatever other gadget seems to be on trend at the time), or we tie ourselves in knots at the local Yoga studio in the pursuit of our freedom of movement.
Thankfully, Nature came up with a way of helping us to move well without much effort and it all begins with a change of outlook . . .
Animal First, Human Second
It was Cesar Millan, the ‘Dog Whisperer’ from the TV show on Nat Geo Wild that first introduced me to the idea that humans see the world around them in a totally different way to animals, yet we are animals too.
Millan rehabilitates dogs by dealing with their needs in this order:
1. Animal, 2. Species, 3. Breed and 4. Name/Personality
He recognises that as humans we view the world and each other totally the opposite way round:
1. Name/Personality, 2. Breed/Nationality/Gender 3. Species (Human)
but very rarely do we ever recognise ourselves as animals.
All animals share common features like a skeleton, muscles, organs, nervous system etc but we also share instincts such as play, fear, protection and survival.
Movement is one key feature that ALL animals are capable of doing as soon as they are born and depending on their immediate need, some will be more capable than others right away. For example, a baby giraffe will stand up independently a few minutes after it is born but a human baby can take up to 12 months to achieve this. That doesn’t mean that the human baby isn’t capable of movement straight away — crying requires facial movements and eye movement is one of the first things to develop.
If I asked you to describe a human, it is most likely that you would firstly describe what one looks like and if probed deeper, you may then describe what a human is made up of (muscles, bones, etc.). It is unlikely that your first thought would be to describe the instincts a human is born with, but these instincts drive everything a human thinks, how it reacts and what it does. These instincts are what I consider to be the animal inside us and although it may seem like an insignificant change in viewpoint, changing your exercise habits to fulfil these instincts will lead to huge gains in fitness, movement capabilities and recovery times.
Nature Doesn’t Worry About What Science Knows
As humans we love investigating new things and understanding why. This has lead to some amazing discoveries in science but it would seem that rather than developing our understanding of, human movement for example, science has almost become a hinderance to many people’s progress simply due to a slight shift in thinking.
Rather than doing what they feel is right and using science to supplement their instinctual knowledge, many people nowadays have totally lost their instinctual knowledge and are wholly reliant on science, gadgets, times/distances, coaches and other external sources to know whether what they are doing is on the right path or not.
Admittedly, if you’re trying to achieve a qualifying time for a race, or win a weightlifting competition, you do need to know what pace you’re at or what weight you’re lifting, but the feedback that will make most sense to you is the feedback you get from your own body. Practicing how it feels to run at a variety of paces will help you to instinctively know whether you’re on target or not, then a quick glance at a watch will either confirm it or not.
The same is true for mobility training, many tools on the market these days rely on you knowing a bit about anatomy, the technique you’re applying and how to do it correctly and often the pain created gives a false sense of working on the right bit. Just having the ability to FEEL where your body is stuck will help you progress much quicker and dealing with those areas in a way that makes sense to your animal instinct will help your efforts be much longer lasting.
To learn more about understanding your own body and natural ways to improve your own movement visit mostmotion.com and try my FREE 12 Week Wiggle Challenge.
Human Thinking Limits Your Capabilities
We are often so caught up in solving problems and understanding more about a subject that we limit our own capabilities. Let me give you an example;
If I asked you to count to ten you would, but you’d also stop at ten because you followed the instruction and did what was required of you. You and I both know that you’re much more capable than that, you can count way past ten and you might even be able to count to ten in a few different languages but the task set limited you.
Let’s say now, that you play racquet sports and you’ve had a pain in your knee for a few months. You’re on court and a shot comes in that you’d have to bend quickly to reach. If your body has only had the experience of pain when you bend down, you will believe that you can’t reach that shot and either you won’t attempt it, or you’ll try another way of reaching it.
It may well be that your knee would have been fine moving in that particular way, but because of the belief you hold, you are limited in your capabilities as a player.
If you had been investigating in what directions your knee can move and how far it can move without pain you would have been teaching your brain that your knee is far more capable than you first thought, and given the original shot again, your reaction may have been very different.
Many people that exercise regularly are limited by their beliefs and many withdraw from their chosen activity due to their ‘bad’ knee/shoulder/back etc.
Simply changing your thoughts from ‘I can’t’ to ‘I wonder if I can’ will help you to stay as active as you can for as long as you can.
Thinking Stops Movement
Not only does thinking limit your overall capabilities, it can actually, physically stop you moving!
Let’s face it, nobody ever thinks about how they move in daily life. You don’t think about how you get out of bed in a morning, how you get into the car or how you carry your shopping to and from the car. The only time we seem to think about movement is when we are exercising.
Moving is such a natural phenomenon that it happens too fast for the brain to be consciously computing and as such, when it needs thinking about (like learning a new physical skill) it slows our movement down, sometimes to the point of stopping. Let’s use a squat for example;
If I asked you to sit down onto a chair, you would just bend your knees and sit down, but if I asked you to perform a squat in the ‘correct’ way, your head would be full of the teaching points: hips back and down, chest up, knees out, back straight etc. Given the freedom of your brain to compute that one simple instruction — sit down, your movement would be much, MUCH faster than performing a ‘squat’. It’s even possible that you would have done the same movement in each situation. People worry too much about doing it ‘right’ which can be very limiting as they stop listening to the natural feedback their own body is telling them.
The fitness industry is full of these cluttered instructions and this can lead to a confusing and sometimes overwhelming amount of information about technique and ‘good’ movement.
To clear away all the clutter and get back to simple, clear information to help you do what’s right for YOU, visit mostmotion.com and check out my 12 FREE videos!
Restricted Movement Causes Anxiety
If you ever needed a reason to get started right now with your mobility training then this has to be it.
Bodies can deal with minor restrictions as long as they can find an alternative, but a total lack of movement creates anxiety and stress.
Let’s take the example of handcuffs; placing both wrists in the handcuffs in front of your body is restrictive but not so much so that it causes stress. You still have quite a large capability of movement despite the restriction; you can still walk down the street, stand up, sit down, move your arms and more. If you had your hands pinned to the sides of your body, however, this would be much more stressful as the level of restriction is higher.
There are many joints in the body and it is more than likely that quite a few of yours are restricted in someway right now. While this may not be causing you an amount of anxiety or stress that you’re aware of, you may also be under pressure at work, or home life might be quite hectic and all of these factors can contribute to injury as your muscle tightness increases as your anxiety increases.
Movement is something your animal instinct recognises as a good thing to do and therefore can help relieve some of this stress but if you move in a natural way that also helps to unlock your joint restrictions, your stress levels will just melt away!
You can examples of these movements and more ways to get you started over at mostmotion.com.
What are you waiting for? Come on over and join in!