To move freely is our birth-right; To be able to move without pain and play with our children on their turf
What is needed is a movement culture, or at minimum a small shift in the way we engage with movement
There’s a growing disability permeating through society, and it’s our inability to move naturally. We’ve created an artificial environment around us to cater for our limited range of movements, and it’s becoming detrimental for our health. Our natural movement ability, the way we are made to move, is not utilized.
Look at children. They have a natural creativity and playful way of interacting with their environment. They will balance, climb, hang, crawl and examine their surroundings on the way to wherever they are going. At some stage we introduce ”efficiency”. We indoctrinate our youngsters that it’s not efficient to run in circles or stop to climb a tree. Sure, there’s some truth to it, but at the same time we’ve negated true efficiency in our own movements. We’ve limited ourselves to a range of movements that is severely lacking in diversity.
We also focus on conditioning rather than techniques, making our “fitness” kind of redundant. Sure, defined muscles look nice, but does it function in real life application? Even if I do 1000 pull ups, will I actually be able to traverse a wall, get over a fence or climb up a tree?
The earlier we start to getting back to a natural movement pattern the better, but it’s never too late. My father in law started practicing yoga at 60, and it made a big difference. Simply being able to get up and down of the floor, without too much strain, enabled him to vastly increase his life capabilities when it came to playing with grandkids and even improved his hunting skills.
I see it’s paramount that we have good movement capability. That doesn’t mean you have to be able to do the most advanced yoga posture or be able to do the spits, but it means that in a survival situation you ought to be able to carry another body, crawl under obstacles, climb where necessary and jump and land safely. Just hearing about old people who fall and can’t get up give me chills. A simple increase of movement capability could make such a difference.
Here are a few of the basics movements that everyone needs proficiency in:
We walk around objects rather than jump over or crawl under them. We move in a way that we believe “suit” our bodies, but we’re forgetting that it’s only suitable because our natural conditioning is lost.
One can argue that it won’t matter as long as we have the luxuries of chairs, elevators, air-conditioning and so on, but from a survival point of view we are totally screwed.
“I believe that at a minimum everybody ought to be able to squat, balance on an obstacle, jump and land safely, pull their own bodyweight and get up and down off the floor. Everything else is a bonus.”
Movement itself isn’t everything
Breath and mindfulness are the two aspects that makes everything come together. Luckily both have had more of a spotlight recently and it’s become more “accepted” to meditate without being labelled a hippie, and Wimhof himself has to get credit for making breathing more mainstream.
Check out his Wimhof method here.
Leaders, successful business people, athletes and actors have all shown the benefits of mindfulness practice, so I’m not gonna try to convince you here. If you’re a yogi, great, you’ll have most of it covered already.
Add to it a playful curiosity about the world and objects you can interact with, and you’ll start experiencing the world differently.