Went on an hour plus hike this afternoon. Followed it up with ten minutes of 2×4 balance challenge with a focus on deep squat positions. After my last client, my left knee started feeling a bit achy, a chronic little nagging area left over from meniscal surgery last year.
I’ve been feeling strong and motivated after quiet reflections leading into a new year. Which means I’ve been pushing my body a bit harder. I went into this session without an agenda, exploring how my body flows and where tension restricts the flow. I found a few spots where the movement (left knee and right elbow) was on the borderline of pain, got the foam roller out, and turned it into a little torture session (the kind that actually feels good). Finished with some dead hang play.
I felt much better after this session, like a shot of caffeine or adrenaline running through my veins, with reduced knee pain and improved shoulder and elbow movements.
If you have any questions about what I’m doing or why, feel free to post them in the comments.
This is Movement Restoration. It is what I teach. You can learn more about it here
It is important to have a designated space for your movement practice. Moving more is about creating the opportunities for movement. Any barriers to movement will make movement less likely to happen. Moving furniture or having equipment out of site in a closet or behind the couch creates small obstacles which makes movement a little less likely. If you have a designated space just for moving, you will be more likely to engage in movement more frequently.
Climbing is a huge part of human evolution and experience, and we have relegated it to kids playgrounds. As adults, we often need to rediscover these movements.
What are the steps to leading a pain-free life? Believe it or not, they don’t include lying around waiting for the pain to end. There’s no pill, magic formula, injection, or surgery that can take the place of healthy movement. Pain often stems from immobility or lack of movement. I find that most cases of chronic pain can be solved by learning how to move the body and developing a daily intentional movement practice. In this workshop, I’ll be sharing some easy-to-implement, daily exercises for restoring lost movement patterns to reduce pain and improve your life. Bring a mat if you have one, and be sure to wear clothes you can move in.
Contrary to popular opinion, balance is not about maintaining a static position, such as standing on one leg for a long period of time. To feel steady on your feet and avoid falling well into advanced age, you must develop dynamic balancing skills. After a fall, our tendency is to go into a state of fear, caving into ourselves, becoming rigid, and afraid to move. This state actually increases the likelihood of another fall. Instead of moving in fear, you need to challenge your balance in order to re-calibrate your nervous system. Join us for a workshop that will improve your overall balance, reduce falling, and even provide strategies for a safer fall! Bring a mat if you have one, and be sure to wear clothes you can move in.
When I had the idea for this series, my primary goal was to introduce you to some amazing movement coaches from around the world. My hope was that you would learn from them about movement, philosophy, and life in general, as well as get a feel for what kind of qualities to look for in a movement coach, personal trainer, physical therapist, Yogi, etc. More importantly, I want you to be as inspired by their stories to move more, move often, and move well. The coaches I already have or plan to profile are colleagues and friends who I following socially and have been learning from for years. What I am finding, as a profound secondary benefit for myself, is how much 
Most of the movement coaches I follow have very similar movement philosophies. However, we all have a very different perspective, language, experience, and education from which we derive our philosophies. Gavin has a highly intellectual understanding of human movement. He has a movement language that can shoot over the brow of many movement coaches as well as any laymen movers, but the essence of his movement philosophy is quite simple, yet incredibly meaty. He sums it up this way: 
Being a profound nature lover, Gavin tends to gravitate towards the rural and urban landscape. His philosophy is squarely rooted in randomness, variability, and volatility, which requires that he seeks out those locations and “equipment” (trees, rocks, walls, fences) that manifest those very characteristics.
I am thrilled to introduce Astrid Boesser, the plotter, sister, and sarge to a super fun tribe of free, multi-talented monkeys. She is the owner of 
“Train every aspect” is equally important. Walk into most gyms and you will see people training within a state of neutral. Everything has to be aligned the “right” way. However, nothing in life happens in this state of “neutral”. Your neutral squat and deadlift may look perfect in the gym, but how do they help you move a couch down three flights of stairs? If you don’t specifically train your body out of neutral, you are not preparing your body for the practical experiences that take place in life. You may be getting stronger at your lift, but this doesn’t exactly translate into getting stronger at life!
When she’s ready to move, she turns to the natural playgrounds around her city: forest, river, lake, station, dunes – using whatever she can find like walls, logs, sand, and tires. Occasionally she brings along toys like sandbags, practice balls (Fighting monkey), sticks, rings, or rope. In locations like the lake or dunes, with their vast reservoir of sand, she practices tumbling or plays with sandbags. Whereas the forest and river inspire her to climb, vault, crawl, balance, and perform jumps across the water.
She enjoys watching as her tribe become happier, healthier, and more self-confident. Seeing their awareness of the positive changes in life. Sharing in their excitement as both physical abilities and body composition and appearance improve. The best part is witnessing how much they get back to loving themselves.
Grateful for learning from grandparents (plant lore, love of nature), parents (tree lore, fishing, adventurous spirit, self-reliance), competitive cross country skiing (discipline, grit, patience), TaekwonDo (hardness, physics, tolerating pain, managing emotions), Wing Chun (elasticity, whiplash effect), fast pitch softball (coordination, throwing, catching, batting, pitching, teamwork). She studied agricultural sciences (ecology), self-taught: herbal medicine, nutrition sciences, mythology.
For my first Movement Coach Profile, I’d love to introduce you to Eric Brown, 
Eric doesn’t spend much time in the traditional gym. If he has to be in a closed-space, he prefers an open floor plan studio to a gym (a throwback to his martial arts upbringing). For the past several years, his main training areas have been the woods, parks, and home. He is in the process of setting up a training facility for the MovNat Dallas and 
As a movement coach Eric Brown’s goals for clients involve more holistic metrics than typical personal training goals. For Eric’s clients, the number one hurdle is slowing down. He works with each individual to keep them from jumping too high or too far, or from trying to lift too much to fast. He wants them to see and feel the power of what is available within their body. That they develop ownership of these skills so that, when they are needed in real life situations, they can have trust and confidence of their body to respond well. He tells his clients, “Patiently persistent practice produces proper practical progression,” because who doesn’t love alliteration. But more importantly, if you begin with small steps, and put in the time, you will achieve mastery. 
Eric Brown is a former U.S. Navy SEAL, Master Training Specialist and Naval Special Warfare Center Instructor of the Year. Having trained and instructed in a variety of physical and mental disciplines — e.g. obstacle courses, calisthenics, rescue swimming, ROPES challenge courses, combative arts, neuro-associative conditioning — Eric has experienced a wide breath of life lessons that have brought him to a deeper understanding of his role in life and society. A family man, he enjoys moving with his wife and young son, fulling expressing his “NATM – Never Afraid to Move” way of life. As a Level 3 MovNat Certified Trainer, his mission is to increase the quality of life for the young and old. Letting those open to the training know that consistency is the key to moving and feeling better. As he often says, “P
We sit in our cars, desks, and couches. We don’t squat to work, climb, crawl or otherwise use our bodies the way they were designed to move. Engaging in these natural human movements provide movement balance. If you aren’t moving in these other ways, your body will adapt and compensate to the ways you do move. This creates the secondary problem of overuse. Overuse is a symptom, not the problem. 
Something I tell clients during the initial consultation is, “I don’t treat pain. I treat movement.” It is out of my scope of practice to treat your pain, plus I believe that attempting to do so will render less beneficial results. Instead, I look at how you move, and more importantly, how you don’t move. My focus is on bringing back all the movements you’ve lost in order to bring balance back to the entire movement system. My assumption is that if you move well, with balance throughout the spectrum of human movement, you will probably experience less pain. I call this Movement Restoration.