How Injury Can Be Your Friend (how to learn from it)
For better or worse, injury has been my greatest teacher.I wish it didn't have to be that way, but that's kind of what happens when you combine:a) huge, wildly unrealistic strength goalsb) living for decades in an environment (domestication) that gives you a stiff, imbalanced, immobile bodyc) a total ignorance for progressions and proper rehabAll of these ingredients make for a whopping dose of humility, forced through the vehicle of injury.Let's use the example of the handstand. I had no concept of how long it took to achieve a skill like this, so I would jump right in and "just going for it."Then, crrrrrriiick... rrrriipppttt... snap.Ouch. What just happened?Not being prepared just happened. Not having the proper mobility, strength, skill, or body awareness happened.Also, boxes.
The Problem: You Don't Know What You Don't Know
What I didn't realize then is that aside from not paying any respect to progressions was that I was living in a box.Yes, I literally worked, lived and slept in a box. We all do.Look at the room you're in now. Unless you're reading this outside there's a 99% chance you're in a box.Boxes aren't the problem so much as what living in boxes does to our bodies.We move on flat surfaces all the time. We sit on things that are only box shaped -- that is, they are right angled. Everything we interact with is constrained in a very narrow range of motion.Rarely do we ever reach or move in a range of motion outside the height of our hips to our shoulders. Go ahead and look around. Everything is in this box. Very rarely do you ever have to reach over head or down on the ground.Boxes keep us moving in predictable ways that inevitably lead to major imbalances.
But if you don't know that this is happening (like I didn't), and you're relatively young, you might just assume you should be able to move however you want.Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on the way you look at it, this will probably lead you down a path of injury sooner or later.
Injury can be your friend (yes, I am serious... your friend)
In my opinion, the sooner you hurt yourself the better, since injury occurring earlier in your life means that you'll be more likely to investigate what caused it. Depending on the type of person you are, this can lead you down a rabbit hole of learning about how your body works, what effects captivity has on the human structure, how to properly rehab yourself and learn smart progressions toward your training goals.
Injury will either cripple you, or spiral you into a path of inquiry that in time will make you stronger.It will either be your greatest teacher and a dear friend, or it will be the nemesis you cower and collapse under.Modern, box living isn't captivity in the true sense of the word. But we are unknowingly being shaped by our environment all the time, through the process of domestication, whether we're aware of it or not.Let's bring more awareness to just exactly how domestication is making us weaker, and see how we might be able to counteract some of these problems.In the next post, I'll share with you some of the common weaknesses created by living in boxes, and how we can began to reverse them. Stay tuned. The journey continues!P.S. If you get injured enough and you decide to investigate its causes, you'll inevitably find your way back to a few missing elements.These basic movements are the foundation for strength, mobility and confidence in your body.
Uncage Your Body, Become Unbreakable
Life is movement.Natural movement = continually varying, unpredictable patterns.This creates a free moving, anti-fragile, open body capable of handling large quantities of uncertainty.Fitness routines = rigid, predictable movements which are performed in set, controllable sequences.This might be fine for the purpose of training for specific skills, especially if the practice led to free-flowing movement. If regular change in plane of motion of the exercise, your body's geometry, and shape of equipment occurred it might safeguard against the danger of predictability.However, because of this lack of freedom, expression and uncertainty, we build rigid, fragile bodies. Bodies ready to snap as soon as the first unpredictable demand is placed on it.Couple that with a life that demands little movement, environments that instill staticness, and design of space that keeps us in boxes of range of motion, and you have a body that hurts and a mind afraid to move.To change we must change the culture.We must find a way to reengineer movement and unpredictability back into our homes, workspaces, training sessions and minds. We must unspecialize our skills and decompartmentalize our lives. We must regain trust in our bodies,trust in our vehicles for physical experience.But through this, we shouldn't attempt to kill the mind and exalt the body.We need both.We can use our minds to reimagine our spaces, habits and relationships, to create a more healthy, alive and moving experience.It's up to us to break free from the templatized life of domestication.Break your patterns, or become more breakable.
Humble Yourself to Get Stronger
We all want the badass, fancy stuff. We want the double bodyweight squat, the 10 foot jump, the slow muscleup.It's easy to get sucked into the sexiness of impressive movement skills and abilities.It's much harder to go back to the basics and focus on the fundamentals.How far you go back is really a complex issue with a lot of variables. Past injuries, muscle imbalances, and poor mechanics are just a few of the challenges that might make you scrap your planche work and go back to mastering pushups.The greater the heights you want to reach with your body, the wider the foundation will need to be.In this podcast, I chat with my friend Galo about the importance of humility if you want to go far with your training.It's far from perfect. The audio isn't the greatest and we take about five minutes to warm up.But I think you'll get some value out of it. And please let me know if you do. We're considering making this a regular thing if enough people are interested.Check it out, and get humble...
Why You Don't Have Time to Move
"I don't have enough time."This is the biggest excuse of anyone wanting to make any kind of change these days.The time copout is convenient, seeing as there are always things demanding our attention and pulling us in a million different directions.Yet the same people that make the time excuse are often watching hours of television, checking email too much and too many other activities where their precious life energy is being sucked into a screen to never return again.Time. Our most precious resource, yet we all seem to be so poor in it.I'm not going to spend this article talking about why we're all so poor in time (working too much to buy things that don't make us happy), but instead I want to take a different approach.Let's assume that you are currently wasting zero time (highly unlikely, but I'll play along) and you really don't have an extra hour a day for movement.You might not realize it, but this is actually the perfect situation.Why? Because your only choices right now are to either accept sedentary life, or find a way to make a lifestyle of movement integrated in your other activities, which is actually the whole point of movement anyway.If you must integrate movement, and not compartmentalize it into a box in your day, you'll have to find ways to get more movement with the circumstances and environments you find yourself in.In order to do this, we have to make a paradigm shift: movement is not just about our typical definition of exercise or what we might experience in a gym or yoga class.Movement is the continual feeding of your body new inputs through a change in position.So, let's assuming you're doing the 30 day squat challenge right now.You basically have two options:
- Try to fit your squat into a designated period for exercise (likely at a gym or something)
- Find a way to integrate squatting into the things you're already doing
The former option is the paradigm of fitness, the latter is the paradigm of a lifestyle.We all know that when we try to force ourselves to do things in unnatural ways it rarely sticks. Diets hardly ever work in the long term, and neither do promises to stick to an awkward, robot-like gym routine.So, assuming you're going to choose the second option, how would you integrate at least 10 minutes of squatting into your day?Well, you might squat...
- While cutting vegetables for dinner
- Brushing your teeth
- Working on your laptop (you'll need a low table like a coffee table for this)
- Waiting for the bus
- Texting a friend (your knees in the squat happen to the perfect platform for holding your smart phone, the antidote for "text neck")
- Playing with your toddler
- Folding laundry
- Mopping the floor (like a ninja)
- Pulling weeds in the garden
- Mapping out your next project on the floor with index cards
- Eating your oatmeal
- During your morning meditation
- Saying your evening prayers
- Reading a book
- Putting away your groceries
These are just all the possibilities I came up with in the last five minutes of thinking about it. I'm sure you can come up with even more.Multi-tasking has gotten a bad rap these days. And I do think that constant task switching is a good way to kill your progress in your work. But, maybe there is a way we can benefit from the mindset of integration.After all, Bruce Lee was known to be doing dumbbell curls while working on his side splits, reading a book and eating breakfast.If the primal movement movement was happening in his day I bet he'd have been squatting too.Maybe he was on to something.So, integrate and stop compartmentalizing. Of course, the problem with this is that you no longer have any excuses.How can YOU integrate more movement into your life without needing more time?Share with us your ideas for squatting more in the comments. photo credit: LOLCLOCK
Why Your Squat Sucks and How to Fix It
The squat is a dynamic posture and resting position every human should be able to do. The only problem is most of us haven't squatted much since age five or six at best.Funny, that's about the age when we're introduced to... sitting all day.Rehabbing your squat is a process that takes time and diligence, but how do you know how to fix it if you can't figure out what part of your squat needs fixing?In this video I explain the three most common problems with peoples squats and specific corrective stretches for how to fix them.Your squat doesn't have to suck. But it's not going to get any better unless you do something about it.Now you have no excuse.