Conditioning Research

Superb  (thanks to Keith Lee from Twitter)

Although it looks a bit warmer, this is much like t he seminar I attended with the great Erwan Le Core back in December 2010 . By the way if you are wondering how this fits with my Hillfit approach, I think High Intensity Training, resistance training can quickly get you the strength that you need in order to practice MovNat Skills.  Without basic strength you will never get far in terms of climbing etc.  I do not discount all these skills, and I think there is value in becoming expert in them.....but strength.....exercise is something else.

Erwan Le Corre would like this: Food is advertised rather than hunted for... Irene at Human Groove wrote about this in a good post    Indeed it led her on to more thoughts at this later post which has some more exciting movements, with a child having some great fun. Child’s Play and The Void So often we coddle and “baby” our kids, telling them things like, “that’s dangerous”…..”be careful”…..”you’ll hurt yourself”. These statements, over time (can) make it such that a new little human being starts to distrust their own instincts and movement skills. I’ve watched many infants crawl to ledges of staircases and various drop-offs, and if you let them sense the void and distance below them, they’ll back off. Of course there are moments in an infant’s development when you need to set a few boundaries and offer a little guidance, but more often than not, kids, infants especially, can sense danger. They feel it in their insides. Their guts tell them when something is...

Todd Hargrove posted this amazing video the other day and I just wanted to call attention to it and the things that it teaches.  Todd's own material on learning how to move is definitely worth buying and learning from, taking some of these basic principles and influenced very much by Feldenkrais. Note that Todd didn't do this video - it was created by Irene Gutteridge, a Feldenkrais practitioner and filmmaker . In the session I had with Erwan Le Corre last year there was a section on rolling and perceiving your weight and points of contact with the ground.  All this is very MovNat .  Watching this I can see where many of the ideas in Becoming Bulletproof came from.  They are big on rolling and crawling as foundational moves which also have profound impact on the brain. More and more recently I am becoming fascinated by the brain, neuroplasticity and its role in our movement, health and perception.  There is more to come on this.

I saw this ebook by Tim Anderson and Mike McNiff mentioned in a post by Dan John   I have great respect for Dan so I stumped up the $7 via Paypal and got myself a copy of Becoming Bulletproof.   Somes I get a bit fed up by the macho rhetoric that can be applied to training books - they want us all to be renegade....tactical.....warriors.....men among men......but in this case bulletproof just means resilient, maintaining function. I am very impressed .  It is a relatively quick read but there is a lot of material in here.  It ties in some ideas from several sources that I have pointed to over the years and binds them together around some simple concepts and movements. If you have followed some of the people and concepts that I have pointed to over the years you will recognise much of the ideas, but there were new things to me and the basic simple set of moves that they recommend are almost obvious given the conceptual framework that they build. There are el...

Just thought I would point out a couple of interviews that have been posted recently with Erwan Le Corre of MovNat.  I did a workshop with Erwan last year and it is always good to hear him speak.  I also interviewed him here . Anyway check out Hank's interview with Erwan Le Corre Jimmy Moore interviews Erwan Le Corre

It has been fasciting and inspiring over the last couple of weeks to read Jamie's updates from New Zealand.   He has been living through the massive earthquake in Christchurch and the subsequent aftermath.  I wanted to highlight something he wrote today: ....that said however, as I reflect on the events of that and subsequent days, I can see a degree of capacity there that many didn't have.  T here was a lot of sprinting, lifting, and digging going on.  I truly believe, that had I been anywhere in town that had required me to move objects, climb, jump, run, dodge, or weave, to get out alive, I would have backed myself to the hilt to give it the best go I could, simply because the training I do gives me that capacity.  Several buildings had their stairwells separate from the building itself (some catastrophically). Could I have got myself down a couple of floors if I had to?  Yes I think I could. I can jump gaps, lift objects getting on for twice my own...

They are doing scientific studies on the Wii .     Bloody.  Hell. Findings suggest that the Wii Fit™ can be used as an effective activity for promoting physical health in this population. I have another suggestion. ....or two

Anthony (Dream) Johnson has posted this excellent video from Doug (I interviewed him here ) He makes some interesting points which relate to the issue I mentioned yesterday  -   skills vs strength.  Skill based movements are inappropriate for developing strength.    For strength you need effort not technique.  However, there is still value in developing appropriate skills....which gets me back to MovNat .....and developing useful survival skills - running, climbing, fighting etc  Doug explains that fighting, self defence is a skill set.....best trained fresh to best train the skills.   Which interestingly is the opposite of the Krav classes where we get beasted first and then train the skills! The talks from Mark Sisson and Drew Baye are also worth watching.....

Erwan Le Corre had a quote on Twitter the other day: "Run for your life". Could be jump, crawl, climb, swim, fight etc,... for your life. Moving naturally will make you feel strongly ALIVE. That was an idea that he brought up in the clinic in Edinburgh   last month - that there are certain skills you need to develop, not for any reason other than for survival .  You may have to run for your life, jump for your life or crawl for your life. You might also need to fight for your life.    Self defence / combatives are important skills in movnat which a lot of the people involved in the movement seem to forget.  In any case it is simple fun.   So I was back to Krav Maga tonight.   I've not been training much there for a while.  Last year was busy with work and various family problems.  This year though I want to be more regular in my attendance. I could tell that I had been missing for a while.  In the warm up I had my ass kicked ...

Erwan Le Corre ( interview here and review of clinic here ) has been putting some great quotes up via twitter: "Paleo"-fitness sounds backward to me. All my ancestors are gone. What matters is my life, here and now. I am a human of today's world. "Run for your life". Could be jump, crawl, climb, swim, fight etc,... for your life. Moving naturally will make you feel strongly ALIVE. On the subject of MovNat etc, Naeem , in a testimonial from one of his clients, has some excellent thoughts on movement :  Testimonial - Iron Man Cédric Hénaux

I met Naeem at the MovNat clinic in Edinburgh in December.  His website - Running Engineer - has some good material. Here he is playing with some logs in MovNat style

More from Erwan of MovNat Log Lifting Tree Climbing Rock Jumping Barefoot Running

A new video from Erwan of MovNat.  A series of circuits..... My interview with Erwan is here A write up of a clinic with him is here .

Sorry, this is generally off topic for this blog but can't resist putting this photo up.  I got up into the Pentlands yesterday just as the sun was going down over snowy hills.  Glorious. sunset in the West over the Pentland Hills This is what it is about.  Fitnes, diet, health are all about facilitating action - that is one of the ideas I took from Erwan last week .    It is about being able to do things and for me that means getting in to the hills and seeing things like this.

Sorry that I've been posting so much on Erwan and MovNat recently, but following his clinics in Edinburgh there has been a lot to catch up on.  Rannoch has put up an excellent interview with Erwan . Erwan Le Corre – Talking tigers… This is a standout quote: An evolutionary approach is only interesting if it helps us, people of today, people that are still alive. In that sense, I am not interested in a so called “truth”, but in what we can experience today, and how understanding our past may help us improve our present lives. I am not living a caveman lifestyle, I’m sorry. I am a man of today, I’m in the here and now. I am not “sprinting and lifting heavy things” thinking that I am mimicking a caveman lifestyle. That is BULLSHIT. I am sprinting and lifting heavy things (among many other things I train) in order to be ready to do so in today’s world when the need arises. It’s about real-life preparedness and not role playing. MovNat is about connecting to reality, not to a r...

During this weekend's clinic Erwan was interviewed by the Scotsman newspaper.    The web version is here:  Interview: Erwan Le Corre, fitness guru  and there is a pdf version for download here

After Saturday's clinic Naeem  - The Running Engineer - interviewed Erwan and talked about running, particularly Pose technique.

I had mentioned a few weeks ago that this was coming up.  Having interviewed Erwan last year and watched as his profile on the internet has grown since, I was really looking forward to this clinic .   The previous week was tough - my Dad had been in hospital and I was not sure that I would be able to get back to Edinburgh to attend the clinic, but thankfully he got out and was improved enough for me to feel OK about leaving my parents and coming back north. I returned to an Edinburgh which was cloaked in snow - more snow than at any time since 1963 according to some reports.  So instead of the sunshine and tropical scenery that you normally see in Erwan's videos , this was cold! There were still classes going on at the gym when we all gathered there so  we chatted outside for a while in the snow.  Despite the weather Erwan turned up in his Vibrams!  Guys had come from all over the UK - London, York, Shropshire, Cumbria, Glasgow  (great to m...

Superb I interviewed Erwan here and look forward  to training with him in Edinburgh next week