Are You Prepared to Move?

Categories: Uncategorized Nov 20, 2013

In our modern day, we have created many guidelines for how to eat, how to move, even how to think. Some of these guidelines can be useful like, "brush your teeth at least twice a day." Other guidelines can be slightly less than useful, if not harmful, like, "Follow the food pyramid to get a healthy diet. Wait, turn the pyramid upside down and now follow it. Wait, replace the butter with margarine. Oops, just kidding eat butter, not plastic..."

You see what I mean? We make all these guidelines, or rules, for how we should be and what we should do. Again, some of our "rules" or guidelines can be very helpful. However, we have the ability to take helpful rules (and harmful rules) to an extreme. We take something simple, magnify it, and then create a rigid system of life out of it. For example, have you ever met someone who believed they could not eat bread, or someone who believed the paleo diet is the only way to eat? That person may be quite the socially challenged "weirdo" at the dinner table during Thanksgiving or a late dinner with family and friends. I have been that weirdo before. I am happy to say that I am free now. Anyway, We often take our rules and build them up so great that if we break them, we end up lying in the floor twitching.

One particular rule, or guideline, we often do this with is warming-up before we exercise. Many of us have taken the simple idea of warming-up, something that should get us "ready" to train, something that should last a few minutes - if any minutes, and we have magnified the warm-up into a ritual; a ritual that cannot be broken, a ritual that may take up to 30 minutes. All in the effort to prepare ourselves to train. Many of us forward thinkers have started to call our warm-ups "movement preparation". That does sound kind of cool, and it sounds intelligent, too. But if you think about it, we are using a warm-up to "prepare to move."

Does that sound right? Should we need to prepare to move? Maybe. Maybe not. It all depends on where your body is, and whether or not you have all of your original strength.

Here, maybe this video can explain what I mean to say better:
https://youtu.be/0FQwl51uRQE

Did that make sense? My point is, we are good at taking rules, or ideas, and making rituals, or religions, out of them. The sacred warm-up is one area in which we have done this.
NOTE: I am not anti-warm-up. I believe if you want to warm-up, have at it. I also believe some people should warm-up, or prepare to move, because they spend most of their time doing the opposite.




If you would like to know more about obtaining your original strength, about being free from many of the "movement rules" we have created, check out our book, our other videos, and our workshops. You can find all of these resources somewhere strategically located on this website. ;)

---