You Can Change the Way You Move

Categories: Blog Oct 18, 2015

And now, a guest post from Piers Kwan......

 

 

Everyone knows that person - they’ve never met a game they couldn’t play… and win… They pick up a racquet and can pulverise you in tennis, even though you’ve played for years. They are great soccer players, even though they only played a year in primary school, and when you’re playing touch, they seem to always be in the right place, at the right time, and they are instantly one of the best players on the field. Not only that, they see you do a movement once, and then, after thinking about it for a quarter of a second, replicate something that you’ve practised for hours, and hours, and hours.

These people are people that I would describe as having a high “Movement IQ”. Just as some people tend to pick up concepts and ideas quickly because of the agility of their brain, their giftedness (described as their intellectual quotient or IQ), so some people pick up movements and activities more quickly because their body is so well linked to their brain.

The question that people might ask relating to this could be framed in the following way:

“If I have typically been viewed as, or felt, clumsy or uncoordinated in life, is there any hope that I can shift myself up the spectrum so that I am back with the pack, or even ahead of the pack?”

The answer to this question, I believe, is, “Yes! You absolutely can shift how quickly you can learn and apply movement concepts.”

There are a few different things that make me say this, some anecdotal, and others related to conclusions others have taken from more rigorously collected evidence.

Gray Cook, the legendary founder of the Functional Movement Screen, highlighted during my CK-FMS course in 2012 that the movement patterns that we lose first, are typically the movement patterns that we learn first. This results in compromised balance, movement, and movement confidence because our foundations have eroded. This means that almost everyone who doesn’t maintain their underlying movement patterns, regardless of the quality of those patterns, will start to have the foundation of their movement eroded, and at some point start to show some negative outcomes. But what about those people who never solidified those patterns in the first place?

Todd Hargrove, in A Guide To Better Movement, suggests that we can build or rebuild neural pathways, and that we can create brand new, useful, neural connections and recreate our ‘motor sensory maps’. Basically, Todd suggests that there is hope.

Anyone who spends any time at all around me, or who speaks to me about training for a fraction of a second, will hear me mention the words, Original Strength. In my mind, and in the experience of literally hundreds of people that I have interacted with, Original Strength is an incredibly efficient, painless, and accessible system for effectively rebuilding these motor sensory maps. I have seen numerous people almost magically learn to squat, press, walk, and climb better in moments, just through the impact of the big five resets - diaphragmatic breathing, rolling, rocking, nodding, and crawling (or cross crawling / walking). Sally Goddard Blythe in the The Well Balanced Child discusses how these movements are integral for children as they develop, and how these movements can be reapplied for students to improve their academic outcomes. The question that this raised for me was: If it still works for kids, will it still work for adults? If we can achieve demonstrably better brain patterns for kids on the back of the resets, why can’t we achieve the same thing with adults.

This lead me on a journey across the world to Fuquay Varina, North Carolina, where I sought to find out two things:

1. Is the system capable of what it purports to be capable of?
2. Is the founder who he appears to be?

The answer to the first question directly relates to the topic that I’ve been covering, and the answer to second question, is yes!

The upshot of the trip, and subsequent exposures to the system and the methodology, was that I honestly believe that you don’t have to be uncoordinated. In Original Strength we have a logical, easy to follow, progressable system that can restore the movement patterns that you’ve either lost, or never learned, and that can rebuild the foundational sensory motor maps that underly every movement that you do.

Just because you’ve viewed yourself as being clumsy, or unco, as you’ve grown up, doesn’t mean that it is true or that your level of coordination is set. I’m passionate about Original Strength, because it possesses the power to fundamentally transform the way you move, and your perception of who you are as a person who moves. If you’d like to know more, I’d encourage you to read the book, Original Strength ($10 USD on kindle…), and check out the mountain of free resources available from Original Strength HQ on YouTube and at OriginalStrength.net .

I truly believe that life is meant to be awesome, and you don’t have to walk around with a false belief that you suck at movement, you were made to move, and it’s a beautiful thing.

 

Piers Kwan is the owner of Queensland Kettlebell in Australia. He is a certified OS Coach and a good friend. 

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