Blog Post Archive

Today I'm continuing the thought from last week about types of movement other than the rapid, explosive ones often fetishized in modern exercise culture. I started by talking about gathering-type movements—slow, sustained, varied, and long-duration—in contrast to quick, high-power hunting and fighting movements like running and powerlifting. This time I'm examining the hunting-movement paradigm, but recognizing the other, just as important, aspects of the practice which I don't see people developing either: the practices of both complete stillness and the appearance of stillness while in motion.

I'll begin by saying I've never done actual hunting of any sort, although it's on my list of skills to acquire. Many of these thoughts come out of my recent experience in going through a class on scouting—the art of remaining hidden for either hunting or information-gathering—while attending the Firefly Gathering.

I'd already had many years of practicing various stealth steps, thanks to an early and lasting obsession with ninja and their techniques. In hindsight I realise I was expecting the first section of the class, which focused on silent movement, to be mostly review, but I ended up learning quite a bit about several new steps and gaining a fuller understanding of the context for ones I'd done before. The step pattern I was most familiar with is typically referred to as the fox step: you touch the outside edge of the forefoot down first, then gently roll weight towards the big toe before slowly bringing the heel down last. It's my default for walking barefoot through the forest, as I can avoid committing weight to any step before I'm sure that there isn't something sharp underfoot. After I learned a few other stepping techniques, it became apparent that the fox step is most useful on softer terrain, whereas the rock step resembles a normal walk, but dialed back until you can feel the subtle change in pressure in every millimeter of skin as your weight presses into the ground. Another one I hadn't seen before was the mongoose step, which has you walking just on the ball of your foot to minimize the size of your footprint. Try it out—and if you want a real challenge, try it backward!

More than pure technique, though, what I got from this section of the class was an emphasis on slowness—extreme slowness. We played a game where one person would sit on the ground, eyes closed, with a metal water bottle placed in front of them. The rest of the group was arranged in a circle around them. Silently, the instructor would choose one person to creep up and steal the bottle without being heard. When I was in the center, everything seemed to get louder: picking up the tiniest rustle in the grass, dry as it was from the hot summer weather, was simple. The challenge was to differentiate and isolate the ambient noise from those sounds with intent. Was that just the whisper of a sudden breeze? Or the sound of a foot grazing a blade of grass? To further complicate matters, the challenge was not just to note the sound, but to point towards its source. It might sound fiendishly difficult, but the listener was most often the winner that day—even our instructor got during his first few steps towards the bottle.

As the bottle thief, I needed to move far more slowly than I ever had before—practically at a glacial pace. The only way around this was to immerse myself in the sounds around me and align faster movements with louder moments. But I didn't find an opportunity use a burst of movement underneath a layer of noise, I didn't get far at all. I was also caught within the first couple steps, despite my full attention to the nuances of each laborious step as I raised the foot up, scanned the ground visually for the patch of grass least likely to stir from contact, and gently lowered my foot, being ever-ready to pick the foot back up to re-adjust. Maybe I should have even gone even slower, at or near the speed we had practiced earlier in class—the rate necessary to not be noticed by deer, sixty-six seconds per step. Yes, per step! At that rate it you appear still, but you're certainly in motion. It's incredibly challenging to maintain that minute per step pace with your weight all on one leg and quite possibly positioned in some unusual way to avoid branches and other foliage—as capable of foiling your attempts at stealth as what is underfoot. Even practicing at that speed for a couple of steps gave me immense respect for the actual scouts doing this for half an hour, or longer.

The ninja had similar practices, and one demanding requirement of their training was the development of the capacity to freeze immediately and remain motionless until the threat had passed, whether that was thirty seconds or thirty minutes later. While it wasn't addressed in the class I took, I imagine scouts trained with similar goals in mind. That sort of training requires incredible body control and endurance to accomplish.

I don't think I've ever seen this type of movement emphasized in conventional training, except perhaps in yoga. Yet whether you're trying to round out a hunting skill set or are interested in a more holistic approach to human movement, this kind of intensely slow movement, laden with intention, is as useful as anything else.

Can't is an imposition. Can't is a grudgingly accepted duty. "I can't eat this." "I can't do that." "I can't feel what I'm feeling." I'm not allowed. I'm not supposed to. It's an order handed down from faceless authority. You fight against can't.

Don't is an act of self-mastery. Don't is a choice that's already been made. Don't is not a question. There's no decision point, no pros and cons to weigh. It becomes a piece of your identity: this is who you are and how you operate. You fight for don't.

I've always had trouble sticking to positive morning routines. I've experimented with many different ideas for morning habits and how to structure that first hour or so of the day, but rarely stuck to them for more than two weeks. The one habit that has stuck and cemented over the past two years, is to wake up, make a cup of tea (usually), and sit down with my journal. I love how writing helps me process my thoughts, setting the track and tone for the rest of the day. It also tends to lift my mood, especially now that the first task I set for myself is to write out three things I'm grateful for from yesterday—a good way to stack the habits of journaling and gratitude together, especially when I don't have much time.

But on the physical side of things, that means a lot of my mornings have been looking like this: wake up, roll out bed and amble into the kitchen for tea (or just stay in bed), grab my pen and notebook, then sit down on the bed to write, sometimes for quite a while. Not a whole lot of movement going on.

About two months ago, I listened to an excellent interview with Shawn Stevenson about sleep. One point that caught my attention was his mention of how spending time in movement soon after waking up, teamed with exposure to outdoor light, could improve sleep and the physical recovery processes during it. It was then time for an experiment. The movement didn't have to be strenuous, and walking was suggested, but I wanted to create a habit that develops some skill or capacity I haven't worked on near as much as I'd prefer—as nice as it'd be to walk in the nearby forest every morning.

After more pondering, I realized I could combine a low-impact morning movement routine with meditation, an elusive habit I've never got to stick. I chose a movement from t'ai chi called silk reeling, which I'd been practicing off-and-on for the past year. It's proving to be a wonderful choice, as it's a meditative breath-focused movement that grows with me—I'm by no means an expert at it, and it's a deep and nuanced skill that teaches me more every time I practice.

I began the habit by heading out to the secluded deck just outside my bedroom and doing one to three minutes of silk reeling before heading back inside for tea and journaling. After several months, that time has lengthened to average over five minutes, sometimes stretching past ten (about twelve in the video below). I'd like to get to a point where I can maintain this practice without fatigue for about twenty minutes.

In addition to the possible benefits to sleep and recovery, it's simply something I enjoy doing. It starts me off with movement and breathing, and puts me into a more meditative mindset before attending to the day ahead. It's also low impact and brief enough (if I choose) that I can easily stack it with more movement, whether that's mobility, light conditioning, or otherwise. I may refine this routine in the future, but for now this beginning suits me well.

While I was listening to a podcast by Katy Bowman recently, my attention was especially caught by her discussion of the semantics of fitness. She observed the tendency to think of both movement and the fitness of our body in terms that focus on a hunting theme—on pursuit and battle. We favor intensity, pushing heart rates up, running as fast as we can to break our previous best, and in general straining towards our physiological breaking points to improve.

Important? Of course. Possessing the necessary the ability to sprint or express strength explosively can be a matter of life or death. So too can the capacity to move continuously for hours at the edges of your physical ability, carry considerable loads for distance, or move heavy objects be enormously useful in the right circumstances. However, our ancestors were not running all-out for their lives or their dinner literally every time they moved. That narrow focus has led to undervaluing other ways of moving.

For an example, as Katy points out, there's little emphasis on movements that resemble our ancestral methods of gathering and foraging. Would you consider going out to the forest to pick berries and small plants—balancing and picking your way over rocks and roots, scanning your surroundings, stooping, squatting, and using your hands in finely dexterous ways—to be improving your fitness or movement? Probably not. You'd be going out for fun, to explore, or to gather nourishment. While I'd say that's a better way to look at it anyway, it's also helpful to recognize that this slower, often longer duration, movement is as valuable to us and to our health as the intense stuff is. It's a different sort of training: one that requires and develops attentiveness, precision and sustained effort.

The intensity within the hunt encompasses only a fraction of the total time our ancestors spent moving. I believe we need to recognize and value these other, often less eye-catching or (apparently) physically strenuous, modes of moving. They're just as important for a healthy movement practice and active life.

I pressed my foot down on the clutch and guided the heavy gearshift into the spot for the lower gear, then eased my foot up, trying to be as smooth as possible. The engine had been rumbling along like normal, but all of a sudden the friendly rumblings stopped. This wasn't the first time the engine had died on me. The tractor was the first manual-transmission vehicle I'd ever driven, and I was still in the learning curve; the engine would often cut out if I mistimed the release of the clutch. This time, though, it was on a steep hill.

The tractor began to roll backwards, picking up speed rapidly, and was soon hurtling down the perilously narrow path, squeezed between a fenced paddock holding several horses and the ditch. It was technically an irrigation ditch, but in Iceland that meant it was more of a ravine; nearly a mini-canyon—ten feet across and more than six feet deep, enough to walk several cows down it side by side with room to spare. And there I was, mere feet from tipping this massive, careening vehicle right down into the deep gash in the earth—a possibility that could very well result in serious injury.

I felt strangely calm. The engine dying wasn't new, and I had brakes, which I'd pressed down as soon as I felt the wheels begin their backwards roll. But they weren't engaging—the tractor didn't stop or even slow down, and in the few moments that had already passed, the two-ton vehicle had gained even more momentum. I looked back to see where it was aimed: straight for the ravine. That should have been a moment for panic. Yet I remained effortlessly calm. I was oddly fascinated by this tranquil feeling, but filed that away to deal with the immediate and much more pressing problem. With only a moment to act, I focused my effort on steering the tractor back onto the dirt path, looking over my shoulder and carefully turning the wheel to follow the curve as it passed the horse fence and barn. After the path straightned out, I set the gear to neutral and turned the key to restart the engine—to no effect. Just then I remembered that the brakes could be finnicky even on flatter ground, and tried again, nearly standing on the pedal, mashing it to the floor. This time they engaged, and the tractor gave an abrupt kick and shuddered to a stop. I put it in park and jumped out, checking to make sure everything was alright, including myself. The tractor was fine, the fences were intact, and I felt no sign of the adrenaline rush that I would have expected—no shaking hands or body, normally paced heart rate, and no increase in body tempterature. I drove the tractor back up the hill to its parking spot and mentally noted the experience down as another odd case of performance under pressure.

Later, upon reflection, I postulated that my regular exposure to risk, albeit smaller and with less severe consequences for a mistake, through parkour and other movement practices is what allowed me to act so rationally under conditions with significant danger. While I understood that intuitively and had pondered and written about it in the past, it was confirmed more directly, and named, in the book Between the Hour of Dog and Wolf by John Coates—an unexpected source, as the book is focused on Wall Street traders and how their behaviors change when they're either winning or losing. The name given for the phenomenon of calmness under pressure I experienced was being "toughened." This isn't just semantics, either; Coates describes the physiological differences in individuals with this quality:

"In a toughened individual, amine [dopamine, adrenaline, noradrenaline] levels are lower at rest, rise more strongly when stressed and shut off quickly. Since this person's physiology is capable of handing the stressors being thrown at him, his homeostasis is not thrown out of balance, so he handles the stress without emotional distress [emphasis mine]. Physiological coping and emotional distress seem to be alternatives—if your body is coping, why get upset? As we saw when discussing homeostasis, emotions erupt, urging us to try alternative behaviors, when our body, left on autopilot, cannot handle a crisis on autopilot. The research into toughness has suggested that our brain silently compares the demands being made on us against the resources we can draw on (taking into account our training and skill). If our resources are sufficient we view the event as a challenge and relish it; if not we see it as a threat and shrink from it....

"What is remarkable about the research into toughening is the discovery that these amine-producing cells, like muscles, not only need a recovery period to rebuild their inventories, but can also be trained to increase their productive capacity. The greater this capacity, the less likely they are to become depleted during stress, the more likely we are to view events as challenges, and the less likely we are to draw on the more damaging cortisol response. A strong first response by amines is the sign of someone who is coping; a strong cortisol response, someone who is not."

What's fascinating to me is that the mindset of viewing novelty as a welcome challenge is echoed in the obstacles-into-opportunities narrative that underlies the philosophy and practice of parkour. I hadn’t realized it, but through my practice I was turning myself into a toughened individual.

After all, the key point about training to be toughened is frequent exposure to danger and potential failure. Parkour is a skill-based art, and every moment of practice holds the risk of failure. Between the physical nature, interacting with hard physical obstacles, and a particular part of the parkour ethos—dubbed “breaking a jump,” the act of successfully completing a jump or technique for the first time—the practice of parkour acts as an amazingly effective way to develop this resilience and toughness. There's an emphasis within parkour on seeking out opportunities to break jumps, particularly those that are at the edge of ability your or comfort zone— and it's these that will trigger the stressed state. Learning how to feel the fear and still act is what makes the practice of breaking jumps so potent and far-reaching for every other potentially stressful situation in one's life.

It's not a matter of never being scared. Confronting and acknowledging fear and acting anyway is exactly how one becomes toughened. Being toughened means you react to frightening and potentially dangerous situations calmly, allowing you to make the correct decisions in the matter of a moment without panicking or losing control. It also means you avoid the problem of constant worry, which wears down the mind and body. The resultant obstacles-into-opportunities mindset makes improving one’s health, relationships, career and life a breeze; even a game—you’re less afraid to ask for the date or promotion, tackle the big project, or head off on an adventure when you’re toughened.

So what does this mean for you? How can you train your mind and body to better handle stressful situations, from small annoyances to matters of life and death? The process is surprisingly straightforward: take small risks, consider failure a badge of honor and a demonstration of the fact that you're trying, and do things that scare you every day.

Subtract, don’t add, to make positive changes. There’s a common thought in the pursuits of optimized training, diet, and lifestyle that you must always add to your routine to improve, rather than paring away the nonessential.

We tend to add more complexity, trying some new workout routine or diet plan or throwing ourselves into multiple habit changes at once. All this does is make each change more difficult for us to actually keep.

Better to simplify and remove the unnecessary first—and often you'll discover that's all you need.

During an interview on Daniel Vitalis' Rewild Yourself podcast, Tom Myers, creator of Anatomy Trains, brings up the concept of kinesthetic learning and literacy. He talks about the three modes of learning that neurolinguistic programming (NLP) can identify: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Specifically, he noted that of the three, kinesthetic is the most underused in our culture.

As I listened, it struck me that some of the processes I'd always thought of as kinesthetic learning actually weren't. Watching your teacher and trying to imitate their movement is more visual than kinesthetic. Hearing cues that describe the movement as it's seen, whether by an outside observer or by you observing your own body and position (e.g. "keep your knees over your toes," "stand straight," "bend with your back flat", etc.) is auditory, but also based on a visual orientation.

Kinesthetic awareness, by contrast, is based on your internal sense of position, without necessary reference to visual cues. It's knowing what a movement feels like, having an awareness of how your body moves, and being able to use that awareness to pick up new movement patterns and phrases.

The lack of focus on kinesthetic learning is a paradox—it's both easier and more difficult to use. To teach using kinesthetic cues, you've got to know a movement well enough to verbally cue how it should feel to the student, rather than trying to get them to visually mimic the shape or movement. Even more effective would be to physically move your student into the correct position—a powerful method, but, due to the culture in the US around touch, rarely used. Myers references the case of a Balinese dance teacher who would drape themselves over and around their student to demonstrate a new position. It shifts the mimicry from a visual, outwardly focused one, trying to translate the way the teacher looks into your own body, towards mimicry through feel, with the teacher's sense of weight and pressure conveying position and movement directly to the student.

Often, too, skills don't feel at all like they look. Yuri Marmerstein observed that learning this movement was tricky for him because the feeling from inside the movement was completely different from how it looked. I'm noticing lately that this problem is particularly common with acrobatic skills, as the combination of speed and briefer contact with the ground leaves one with limited information to go off of.

All of this means that investing more time into developing your somatic awareness will improve the speed with which you can learn new movements. Pursuing a deeper practice of body awareness enables an ease of movement that comes from an embodied feel of posture and motion.

Learning kinesthetically is a critical piece in the journey of physical mastery. Why? Because you always have those kinesthetic senses (proprioception and kinesthesia, if you want the specific terms) available to you. Visual cues are often either difficult or impossible to obtain or actively detrimental to performing the movements. A perfect example of this is how dance is typically taught: in a studio, in front of a mirror. Your reflection is both helpful and distracting. It's easier to fix subtleties of form with visual reference at first, because the internal awareness of what the ideal position or movement feels like isn't there yet. But at the same time you can't actually rely on a mirror to confirm your technique when you take that same dance to the stage or street. Moving from a visual to a kinesthetic understanding of the movement is essential to truly mastering it.

Handstands are hard.

There are many other skills I've been able to practice piecemeal, dabbling when the mood strikes me over months or years, and still seen noticeable improvements (QDR being a great example). Handstands are not one of those skills. While I've technically been practicing handstands for years, the best I'd ever had was maybe a ten second freestanding handstand, which was a total fluke and unrepeatable. In parkour there's a phrase: "once is never," thus as far as my handstand went it was never.

I've written before about the motivation for movement, making the pursuit fun and playful. For myself, at least, that's difficult to do with handstands; they just take work. Logged hours, brutal drills, and progress slow to the point of being hard to see at all, in a position that's the opposite of innate, with your feet completely out of communication with the ground...all the ingredients for a skill that's more comfortable to quit than to persevere and triumph.

Looking back now I'm not surprised I never invested the time to properly learn the handstand before now. It wasn't valuable to me, when compared against all the other skills I was already working on. A handstand is just a cool party trick unless you've got a purpose for it. While there are many excellent benefits to learning it from a movement intelligence perspective—better alignment, improved shoulder strength, greater body awareness, and being comfortable upside down—those benefits were only intellectually interesting to me. I didn't feel a tangible desire to learn; it was too abstract and distant at the time. It wasn't clear how it would help either my parkour or martial arts practices, and even once dancing entered the picture (where it could conceivably be useful and interesting) I still didn't feel compelled to do the work to solidify the skill.

I was curious about the handstand, at some level, but it was a passing curiosity, not sufficient to move me to commit to a consistent practice.

Then I discovered the local circus and acro yoga communities. For me, being able to balance myself on my hands, just for its own sake, wasn't enough. But if it meant being able to work on higher-level skills to try with other people, well, that was my ticket to physically desiring a better handstand.

It helps that many of the partner acrobatic skills that have you balanced while inverted are easier to hold than an actual freestanding handstand, so I was able to experience what balancing upside-down felt like. Plus, with knowledgeable folks there to correct and teach all the subtleties of the handstand position, progress has begun to feel less sluggish.

In my case, the path to enjoying the process has been to focus on making improvements towards a handstand press, which is addressing my weak point in the ability to pull the legs up from the ground while keeping them straight. Handstand line drills are still maddening, as is learning how to sense the ideal hollow position, but it's all feeling more worthwhile now that I have both a community to make use of the skill and the neccessary feedback to improve more quickly.

Once I found a purpose for the skill, backed by a community, the desire coalesced into action.

Update: but work and life has taken me further away from those specific communities, and the ideal spaces to practice, so handstands have yet again fallen by the wayside priorities wise. I'm nursing a hamstring pull right now though, so it may turn out to be a good occasion to re-introduce them along with more upper body centric skills to keep the temptation to do things which strain the hamstring at bay.

During some of my dance practice yesterday I was doing movements at the barre, working on footwork interspersed with pliers (knee bends or squats). During this practice I was challenged to go slower. Now, just a moment before I had thought I was going slow enough. I thought I had been matching my teacher's tempo. Yet he was, perplexingly, asking me to go more slowly.

As someone who's spent most of his time in movement practice working on explosive movements, whether through martial arts or parkour, this whole deliberate slowness feels unusual. Relative to what I've been used to I'm sure I felt I was going slow enough, but upon reflection that slowness was not equal throughout—there's often a suddenness to the beginnings and transitions in the movement, with the middle of the movement feeling like a fight to keep it slow enough.

That wasn't what he was looking for. Instead what I discovered was that I needed to have a relaxed control and an evenness of speed throughout the movement. Maintaining that constant speed as I moved bent my knees then also as I came back to standing straight was still quite effortful, yet it felt different. There wasn't the typical sense of strain and feeling the muscles fatiguing as the motion continued—though it was still tiring, I discovered after class that my legs felt more rubbery than expected. Instead there was a heightened awareness of the wholeness of the movement, a feeling of what each muscle was doing to hold the correct posture while moving from standing to the bottom of the plier, and then back up.

After I finished the sequence to his satisfaction my teacher said that (and I'm paraphrasing) by going slowly one can sense every detail in the movement and learn what the correct path through the movement feels like. After that class I'm excited to explore slowness in other techniques, in order to gain a greater sense of the nuances of the techniques themselves, but more importantly of how my body moves.

Play is underrated and misunderstood. I love the word, yet I find that it’s assumed to be frivolous and without a point, clearly as adults we don’t need any of that. But we do! We need play. Play is one of the best ways to learn and playing can be more then something superfluous and silly...and even if it isn't, so what? But it's often hard to give ourselves permission to play.

A trick I use to get over the resistance to playing is framing play as outcome independent experimentation. I'm playing the inquisitive scientist with a love for the process, not madly seeking progress or breakthrough—enjoying the failures as much as the successes. A question will arise or I'll have an idea wander in and instead of judging its merits I'll try it, driven by curiosity to see what happens. Sometimes this experimentation process looks quite serious: trying to solve some movement puzzle, failing over and over, and making focused adjustments to my approach until I solve it. During those times I might have that intense focused face, but I'm still deeply engaged and loving the process. At other times these experiments are ridiculous looking and its hard not to laugh after each attempt. Either way I've snuck myself into a playful mindset by donning this scientist persona.