An Easy Mobility Practice to Keep You Moving When Your Routine Gets Thrown Off

It's not easy to keep moving when life gets crazy. Travel, an unexpected move, or any number of things can test the strength of your habits.This is what saved me when I was going through a recent move:

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How to Move More Without Needing More Time

Today I want to show you how I integrate natural movement all throughout my day.The best part is that doing these things doesn't take more time because I've found ways to integrate movement without it being separate "training time."Don't get me wrong, I love training, and have dedicated space in my day for practice. But if my practice only stays in an isolated time block, then I'm not really living a lifestyle of movement.These are the primal movements I've found missing from modern life and our standard template of fitness.

Here are four ways you can move more without needing more time

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• Floor sitting and moving on the ground
• Hanging for opening the shoulders when you go through the door
• Walking on calls or meetups rather than sitting
• Squatting while watching TV, waiting for the bus, or texting on your phone

Almost everyone underestimates what the "basics" are

These movement patterns might seem super basic, but the truth is most of us are lacking in the basic, fundamental human movements. So don't knock them until you try it.If you can't squat, hang, or sit on the floor without major compensations, then you could use some more work on the foundations.You might find that they're more challenging than you would expect.Try integrating these movements throughout your day and see what kind of difference it makes in your body.Need some help rebuilding your foundations? See what online coaching with me looks like.

Three Simple Techniques to Get Flexible Faster

If you're struggling to make progress in your flexibility, I get it.Every day I would stretch, but saw little to no improvement in my range of motion. It seemed no matter what I did I felt stiff.Even something as simple as sitting on the ground was hard for me. I could barely last 30 seconds without needing to get back into a chair or put a bolster underneath me.It was pretty depressing.But luckily throughout the years of studying many different systems like Feldenkrais, Stretching Scientifically, FRC and Focused Flexibility, I've found a few simple techniques offer the most bang for your buck if you want to make the most from your flexibility training.You will still have to work hard, but at least your hard work will be resulting in measurable improvement from week to week.

Here's how the "Three T's" can help you get flexible faster

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Here's the flexibility transformation I made in 10 months using these same techniques.

Want some help with your flexibility transformation?

I currently have one more spot open in my private online coaching program. If you're interested in getting some 1-on-1 help and want to transform your body with natural movement, get in touch.Email me at jonathan[at]uncagedman.com and let me know how I might be able to help you.

You're Not Broken, Fitness Is (what actually builds healthy, strong bodies)

In the last post I talked about why mainstream fitness is broken. It's not that workouts are evil, or that moving in a gym is something to be demonized.The problem is this: we can't make up for 6 million years of human evolution moving all day in infinitely complex ways with a 45 minute workout.You wouldn't drink a green smoothie, and expect that to make up for eating fast food the rest of the day. So why do we expect this to work with our movement?The underlying culture of modern life is the problem. In order to build a naturally strong, capable body, we need more than just workouts and supplements.

Compartmentalizing fitness doesn't work, but there is something that does

It's obviously not practical to try to go back to a hunter-gatherer way of life in our modern world. We've got to find a way forward, not back.Compartmentalizing and shaming don't work either. We must start integrating and embedding movement into our lives, in a more natural way, without needing more time.The idea isn't to "train" for 12 hours a day, but slowly change our lifestyle to one that has us moving, all the time, even while sitting or doing work that would otherwise keep us still.If you're really serious about building a body capable of moving in any situation, without fear of getting injured, you need an approach that addresses your whole life.

There are five major shifts we must make to rebuild naturally strong, unbreakable bodies

These are the missing links in the mainstream fitness approach.

1. We must go from having separate fitness time, to creating sustainable habits of moving that can be integrated into our lives, without needing more time.
2. We must stop working out, trying to do things with perfect form and judgment, and start playing and exploring our bodies and environments in a curious way.
3. We must move beyond fitness being a separate thing we do, and get clear on what kind of lifestyle we want to create, and let that guide the choices we make with our bodies.
4. We must stop seeing gyms as the only places we move, and redesign our homes and workspaces to build healthier movement environments.
5. We must stop seeing the practice as a thing we only do part of the day, and instead examine how we're moving and not moving all day. This is the only way that we can better understand how we can return to a healthy, structurally sound body.

Yes, it's more work to look at your body and the results you're getting in a whole life way. But it's the only solution for creating a robust, adaptable, and strong body, ready for any situation. It's the only way to live without pain and fear of injuring yourself when you want to move.

Now, I could just say "do these five things" but that wouldn't be very useful

Because let's be honest, this is a radical transformation of the way fitness has been done up until this point. There's no clear blueprint out there to follow for how to live in harmony with your biology while living in a very unnatural world.It's taken me the last 10 years of investigating, researching and experimenting to come up with a natural approach to fitness in modern life.The good news is that you don't have to spend your whole life figuring this out. I've developed a structure that guides people through making these changes in a few weeks, not years.

So, I'm considering doing something that might seem crazy...

I'm thinking about building a whole life course on natural movement, one that is able to be integrated into a modern life in the city, in your job, in your home.This course won't be for everyone. In fact, it's only for those that are fed up and tired of doing it the old way. It's for people that have seen and felt the limited benefits of crossfit, yoga, or whatever movement discipline they might have been trying.If I build this whole life fitness course, it will address a lot of the missing links, such as:

• How to build strong movement habits that become automatic
• Your home and how it's affecting whether you're moving or not
• Increasing your body awareness and confidence in your ability to move
• The mindset and beliefs that are undermining your ability to move beyond injury and pain
• The specific primal movements and exercises we're not getting enough of in fitness culture, and how to integrate them into your day
• How to begin rehabbing your body from years of neglect, and holding static postures
• And more

This course will obviously take a lot of work to build, and it won't be for people that just want "a simple workout you can do anywhere!" that solves all your problems.Right now I'm just thinking about building this. I only want to create it if enough of you are interested in it.

So, is a Whole Life Fitness approach something you're potentially interested in?

If so, please enter your name and email below.If enough people are interested, I'll move forward with building the program.Sign up below and I'll follow up with you with updates about how the program is developing, and some free strategies you can implement immediately, even if you don't buy the course.I Want More From My Body - Send Me Updates

Why You Should Never Work Out Again (and what you should do instead)

Ah, working out.Why do we have such a love/hate relationship with it?Have you ever thought about why this is?Fitness used to mean being fit for your environment. It used to mean being hard to kill — being strong and adaptable, ready for any situation that life might present you with.How did we get so far away from that?How did we end up with this model of fitness that's divorced from real life?And why is it that fitness these days seems more designed to run your body down, leaving you feeling more broken than before, filled with shame and guilt for not "doing it right" or "training hard enough"?Well, to understand this strange predicament of compartmentalized fitness we find ourselves in, we need to zoom out a bit.To understand why "working out" comes with so much baggage, we need to look at our roots as humans.

We didn't used to workout in boxes to stay healthy

This may seem obvious to some of you, but depending on your education of anthropology, you might not realize that fitness didn't always work the way it does now.Fitness wasn't something we did to "stay healthy."We used to be fit simply by being alive.That is to say, our lives as hunter-gatherers, living in direct relationship with nature required strong bodies. Our daily tasks demanded strength, stamina, and most importantly, adaptability. As wild humans, we had no other choice but to be fit and adapted to our landscape, or we simply didn't survive.As we "progressed" (if you want to call it that) to agriculture, industrialization, and most recently, the age of the screen, we've become increasingly specialized.

How we began to compartmentalize, and distort fitness

The specialization of humans and our progressive outsourcing of movement follows a sad pattern that looks something like this:

• Hunter-gatherer life (millions of years). Robust, well-adapted to the environment. Every day is a new movement challenge. Only the strong survive.
• Farmer life (the past 10,000 years). Still lots of movement, but more specialized and repetitive. Our bodies become more rigid and susceptible to imbalances.
• Industrialized life (past 300 years). Not nearly as much movement, and it's grown even more specialized and repetitive. More time than ever is spent indoors in artificial environments. Less exposure to the sun and the elements to keep us strong and healthy.
• Modern, technological life (last 50 years). With our ability to temperature control indoor environments, the desire to stay inside increases. The rise in computer work and screens to entertain us causes us to spend even more time indoors.

As you can see, it doesn't look very good for us. What we call "progress" as a species is actually making us weaker and weaker.We've outsourced the need to move to get food machines and farmers. We've outsourced the need to protect ourselves to police. We're engineered discomfort out of our lives through temperature-controlled environments. But in this relatively short period in history—in the last 10,000 years or so—our biology hasn't changed much. That is to say, our bodies still need movement, still need to feel competent, and we still need connection with nature to feel at peace.We've tried to give our enough doses of movement to keep from falling apart by going to gyms, but it's clearly not enough.Besides, most people hate going to the gym, because doing workouts divorced from any practical purpose just feels like work.

How to find a motivation beyond shame and guilt

Without a reason to move to live, fitness becomes obscure. We do it to "stay healthy" or to "get stronger," but rarely do we ever have a clear idea of what health and strength actually is.Why do more reps? Why lift more weight or run longer?Is it just to be able to train more, and guilt your way into showing up, because you're a bad person if you don't?If you want to move beyond the mainstream fitness paradigm, ask yourself these two questions:

1. How do you really want to feel in your body?
2. What do you really want to be able to do with your body?

I encourage you to really sit with these questions and ask yourself why you want what you want.The clearer you get, the more you'll be able to create a body grounded in something deeper than shame and guilt.But that still leaves the stagnant environment we're in.How do we build a more integrated approach to fitness, in a world that seems designed to keep us from moving?

In the next post, I'll share with you the answer...

In the meantime, I want to hear from YOU.Are you absolutely done with forcing yourself to do workouts you don't care about? Why?Share your thoughts in the movement lifestyle group.