Hello folks, welcome back and if you're a new listener, a very big welcome to the show. My name's Simon Ward and I'm your host for the High Performance Human Podcast. Today's guest is Strength Coach and author Tim Anderson, the founder of Original Strength and back to him in a moment. Before that, I'm not sure if you've picked up on this, but one thing I and other guests have mentioned, including Tim today and one of the critical elements for good human and athletic performance, as you get older, is mobility. I must admit, it took me a while to fully get the message, but for the last four years, I've spent 10 to 20 minutes every morning working through my daily mobility routine. Now, if you'd like to get started with your own routine, but you're not quite sure where to begin, I've put together a short plan, which should take no more than 10 minutes to work through and covers all the main joints, so please click on the link in the show notes to grab your copy. And to this week's guest, Tim Anderson from Original Strength is known for streamlining, complex ideas into simple and applicable information. He's passionate about helping people realise that they were created to be strong and healthy. An Original Strength provides a foundation for movement and makes achieving physical goals easier. It also helps reveal untapped strength within the body. Tim believes that by applying three key principles of human movement, we can strengthen the nervous system and reset the body. And the original strength system focuses on how the body was created and how it's affected by the nervous system, starting with the human developmental system present in every human being since birth. In the call, Tim and I chat about nasal breathing, head control, rolling, rocking and crawling. And much of these skills relate to how we start to move as babies. The parents among you, especially those with newborn babies, might recognise these movements. And after listening to Tim eloquently explain why they are so important to your own health, you might even be tempted to give them a try. So let's crack on and hear from Tim. Hey Tim, welcome to the show, eventually we had a few little hiccups on the way. No, thank you very much for having me, it's finally great to be here. You had some weather interventions last time, didn't you? I think we're waiting for a storm to come in the UK tomorrow, but it's not a hurricane, which is what you were dealing with. Yeah, so a hurricane travelled right over my city or town where I live, and it dumped a good amount of rain where we were at. And required a bit of emergency action on your behalf, right? It did expose some holes in the roof and taught me how to use buckets and mops really, really quickly. Well, the real reason I reached out to you Tim was because a previous guest of mine, Dan John, had been in the UK with you and Dan spoke very highly of you and the work you do, and I've read some of his blogs where he said that you both had a really enjoyable time. Because did you not go to Denmark as well after you'd been? We did. We were in England for about half a week, and then we went to Denmark for another four or five days. Well, did you get to try the beer in both, and which did you enjoy most? Oh, man. So yes, and I really, like, I did the beer, the food, the wine, and I had favours in both spots. The beer in England was good. I really enjoyed the food in Denmark, but I had some great meals in England as well, too. And the wine in both places, I thought it was great. Yeah, well, I don't think Denmark or England are well known for wine productions, although they probably do their own wine in Denmark as we do in the UK, but that was probably imported from elsewhere. Well, so I guess the thing was what made it so enjoyable was it didn't have any preservatives or additives to it that like so over in America, like, you know, wine, it might be good in the moment, but a few hours later, or the next day is not quite as good, whereas every day over the, over the ocean, on your side of the world, every day felt great, no matter if we had wine or not. Dude, there's a company in America that does all kind of wine without you now. Is it naked wines, I think? That does sound familiar. There's actually a few over here now because I've had, I started looking when I came back I was like, there's got to be, there's got to be some good organic wines over here. Yeah. That's the problem with all our color, isn't it? It can taste good as it's going down. And if you're in good company, it can go down far too quickly. But particularly as I've got older, I've noticed, I pay the price the next day. I think that was probably the trick too. Like I was with Dan Johnson, so the wine was probably, she's probably just seen better. Yeah, listening to Dan's stories. And of course, Dan's a big guy, so he probably carried you around the next day if you weren't feeling sick. Just throw me on his shoulder and walk around. Well, the thing I've really liked about some of the stuff I've read of yours, Tim, is this concept you've got of original strength? Now, I've not heard that before, but I guess when we get talking about it, a lot of folks will be familiar with some of your, with some of those concepts, even if they haven't heard them all joined together. So can you give us an introduction to the concept of original strength and then how you teach that to other folks? Yeah, so original strength is basically the strength we were born with. Most people don't, I mean, I think everybody knows this, but we really don't think about it very much is that we're actually designed and born to be strong and healthy throughout our entire lives. So when we're born, we're born with an original operating system or a series of movements that literally builds our brain and ties our nervous system together. The cool thing about those movements that we're born with is that we keep them forever. We don't lose them. And if we tap back into those original movements, no matter what age we are, we can rediscover our original strength. So I guess in a nutshell, our original strength is something we were born to have always. Original strength as a system is just nothing more than going back to those movements that we were born to make every day. And if we engage in our design, if we live in our design, then more than likely we're going to be as strong and healthy and feel as good as we want to be. So to me, it's a beautiful design and it's such a simple way to engage in it and just feel good no matter how old you are. So maybe some of those folks who've got young children might have observed some of those original movement patterns, but personally, I've forgotten what my movement patterns are like when I was six months old kids. So can you remind us, please, what those original movements are that we're born with? Yeah. So we call them the five resets and when we engage in these movements, we call that like pressing reset because it refreshes and restores the nervous system and it allows the nervous system to express itself more freely at the instant that we engage in them. So it is almost as fast as pressing a reset button. But anyway, those five movements are breathing the way we were designed to breathe, which is nasal breathing with our tongue on the roof of our mouth, filling our lungs up from the bottom to the top. That's the first one. The next one is having head control, moving our eyes and our head and stimulating our vestibular system like we're supposed to. That's what we were born to do. And then the third reset would be rolling around, rolling is phenomenal, ties the body together, the fourth reset would be rocking back and forth, typically done on the hands and knees, but it can be done in a lot of different positions. And then the fifth reset would be crawling or just engaging in the gate pattern. But if we do those five things, we're essentially pressing reset on our nervous system and restoring our body's ability to move well, feel well, and taking really users, literally taking the breaks off or the inhibitions off of your body, allowing it to express itself. Let's go back to number one, then. I've had a couple of folks on the show who have talked specifically about nasal breathing. One was Patrick McEwen, who wrote the book Oxygen Advantage. And then I chatted with a chap who's a researcher out in America. I can't remember what university was at, but he did write to me the other day, telling me about, he's just published a book on this topic called George Dallam. And George came to my attention because he's worked with a couple of professional triathletes. And we got talking about nose breathing and training intensities. Are you familiar with Dr. Phil Mathetone? I am. So Phil and I have had several podcast conversations and he talks about nasal breathing as a way of controlling your effort. George Dallam takes it one step further and says, "You can actually work at a threshold intensity level and nasal breathe if you are practised at it." I've tried that and to be honest, I feel like I'm out of breath. But he assured me that that was just like a practice, but I feel like if you observe humans walking around, nasal breathing is something that's been forgotten by a lot of people. And most people you see, or not most people, a lot of people you see are mouth breathers just habitually. Yeah. So we were born nasal breathers, obligate nasal breathers, which means that when the first three months of your life, a child just basically breathes in and out of his nose only unless it's crying or being vocal. And then, but somewhere along the way, a lot of us, we can move into compensations or we change our breathing pattern. And sometimes that happens because of trauma or fear or anxiety. And we start to get in the game of repetitions. So we're born nasal breathers, but if we get in enough repetitions of mouth breathing, we can flip our default way of breathing into being more being mouth breathers instead of nasal breathers. So basically, it's the, you know, what your nervous systems use it or lose it, but it's also use it or do it and build it, which is the same thing. So if we get in more, you know, reps of mouth breathing, we can, we just change our way of breathing over. Anyway, that's how like a, most of a lot of adults are mouth breathers, but that's not the design. Now it's a, it's a design compensation, but we're not supposed to live in compensations. We're supposed to go back to our default way of being after whatever the emergency is or the issue is or the injury is once we heal in that compensation has served as purpose, we're supposed to go back to our, our, our default state of being. And how do you feel about this theory of nasal breathing while you're exercising? Do you think that's a sound theory or do you feel like there is a point where it's probably more effective to breathe through the mouth? Cause George, George would have you believe that actually we're not, we're not short of oxygen by breathing through our nose, even at high intensity exercise. I tend to, tend to swim in the same pool that George does. I believe that whether you're running an all out sprint as hard as you can go, you should be able to nasal breathe, whatever it is you're doing, um, minus swimming, swimming would be the caveat. But but we, we are designed to, to breathe under, under pressure, under load in and out through our nose as well. It is harder, but if you live there is not hard at all, but if you're a mouth breather and you try to do it for the first time, it's going to seem like an impossibility probably. The thing that I've experienced, I think where it puts most people off is when you first start the, the, the nasal cavities get irritated a little bit by the constant nose breathing. So then you've got all this sort of snot coming out and then that gums up your nose. So it makes breathing through your nose difficult, but I think you've got to stick with it and move past that point, haven't you? The other, yes, but the other thing is too is like we forget as adults that everything is a process. Mm hmm. And a lot of times we want to jump from zero to a hundred kilometers an hour at the snap of a finger, right? But but we need to be, we need to take approach everything like a child does, um, and just show up and gradually get there, right? So instead of somebody trying to go on a run nasal breathing, what if they just practice nasal breathing first while they're sitting and then when they go for walks, what if they practice nasal breathing? Then when they were really good at that, what if they practice just running a little bit nasal breathing instead of trying to do the whole thing, you know, right off the get go. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's humans, right? They want to go from the start to the finish in one step. We do. We're impatient. We're, we, you know, the same used to be where we were in a microwave society. But now we're in a, an internet instantaneous society, microwave is too slow. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. That's one of my favorite morning practices is to, to get my strength work done and then go for a walk and try and make sure I practice that habit of nasal breathing all the way through, you know, really breathing deeply. And it's actually, I've talked a lot about with clients with, with guests about meditation as well and mindful meditation and moving meditation. I feel like you can combine a whole lot of practices here. You can go, you can go for a gentle walk in the woods while your nays are breathing and while you, and without any distraction, headphones. So you can be aware of nature, you get the, you get the, um, the, uh, forest bathing impact as well. So there's, there's a whole load of sensory improvements that you can get from, uh, just a gentle walk in the woods. It doesn't have to be a threshold run to kick your day off. Well, and that can, it can literally be a moving meditation, but like the walking is so powerful, especially like practicing these breathing while you do it because it, it, it restores and refreshes your brain and it helps a lot of times for many people. It just helps anxieties just melt away. Um, total, it's a great way to, to, to walk the world, the stress of the world off of your body. Let's talk about the next couple of things then, cause particularly head control, um, I think most people won't probably be consciously aware of that. So can you explain a little bit more? So when a child is born, this is, to me, this is the ingenious of the design, um, like, so when a baby's born, their head is massive compared to the size of their body. It weighs 33% as much as their, their, their entire body does an easy way to, uh, for an adult to think about that is say you only say you weighed a hundred, uh, column, uh, what is it kilograms? Yeah. 100 kilograms. Yeah. 100 kilograms, that'd be like you, you would be walking around with a 33 kilogram head. Wow. That's massively heavy. I have a, I have one of those, um, heavy, heavy, uh, D balls that's 30 kilos. I mean, that, that, that's like the size of a pumpkin. And yes. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I've got a 24 K kettle bell down here. I wouldn't like one of those on my shoulders. So and that's, that's where the brilliance comes in is because that child's head is so massively big compared to the size of his body, but it's also so heavy. Um, now the child is born with a, uh, reflex called the writing reflex. And the job of that reflex is is to get that child's head up level with the horizon. So every day after that child is born that child, cause it's got nowhere else to go, nothing else to do that writing reflex is begging it to write its head level with the horizon. So while the child is on its belly or on its back to one tummy time or whatever, it's always trying to lift that head up. Now imagine if you, if you weighed a hundred kilograms and you're laying on your belly, but your head weighed 33 kilograms, the amount of strength and power it would take to get that head level with the horizon, but then keep it there and a child can hold its head on the horizon once it, once it strengthens itself and gets, it gets good at it and then it can hold it there forever. So we're in, and also inside the child's head and inside your head is your vestibular system. And your vestibular system, it's, it's your balance system, but it's also your information crossroads system. It's like, it's kind of like the most important sensory system we have every bit of information you receive and generate travels to your vestibular system before it enters your brain and your vestibular system and your writing reflex are, well, I mean, kind of there together, right? So, so by getting the head on the horizon and always moving its eyes and head, the child is always activating and stimulating the vestibular system. So that's also how the child builds a spring, the stimulation and activation of vestibular system. Anyway, the child builds a massive amount of strength in its center through that writing reflex, getting the head on the eyes and the head on the horizon. And then eventually it learns how to crawl. So now it's pushing the earth away, still keeping that head on the horizon. Now it's building just in the musculature around the back, the abdominal strength, didn't it learns how to, it learns how to also learns how to sit, learns how to stand, and now it's walking around balancing that head over the body and moving the body underneath that head. And that's where a child becomes ridiculously strong and resilient. That's why, you know, you see a children, they fall down, they pop right back up, you know, maybe they want a little bit, but they're okay. They're extremely resilient, extremely strong, but it's because they develop head control. Now it's not a choice for them, they have to. As adults, we're supposed to keep and maintain head control, we are supposed to constantly be moving our eyes and our head that activates our vestibular system. There's a child psychologist who wrote a book called The Well-Ballots Child, her name's Sally Goddard Blythe, and in her book, she says that mastering head control is essential to having balanced posture and coordination. What she's really saying is, is if you don't have head control, you don't have balanced posture and coordination. And if you don't have balanced posture and coordination, you're really not living a healthy happy life. So mastering head controlling, having it, is essential to being strong and healthy. She's dead on right. So the consequence of being an adult, especially in our inner, instantaneous world, is we don't have to move our eyes and head a lot anymore. We're not keeping our eyes and head level with the horizon, we're not scanning our environment, we're people like us, we may live in glasses our whole lives and only move our eyes inside of our frame of reference, but never move them through their full range of motion, which is so important to do. And as a consequence, we don't keep our vestibular system healthy, which means we lose balanced posture and coordination as we age. And we don't lose it because we age, we're just losing it because we're not engaging in the design that we're designed to engage in, which is costing vestibular system activation. Yeah, I'm just thinking of when I'm walking down the street and I'm seeing people, he says, they're not even moving their eyes, they're just staring straight down at the phone. So the posture's poor, their eyes are glued to the phone. So if the phone was to move, the head would probably, we should probably invent something that gets the phone to move to get the rest of the body to move. So you're absolutely right, but the biggest problem with that is that we're not designed to live here, we're designed to live here. But the body's designed to follow the head, and what that means is when the head goes in the flexion, the body's designed to go into flexion, when the head goes into extension, the body wants to open up, when the head rotates, the body easily wants to rotate. But if we live with our head here, we are essentially training and teaching our body to remain in flexion, so then everything gets short, everything gets tight. It's ordered to breathe, we learn how to, now it's way more comfortable to breathe up in our chest, not down into our belly. It's way more easier to breathe through our mouth because there's less restriction through that big one big hole versus the two small holes. So we essentially weaken our ability to breathe like we're supposed to, and we get stuck in this flexion pattern, and we get old really fast. I've spoken with quite a few running coaches, and what's really interesting is, and these are high-level running coaches working with elite athletes, they all say, "I'm not really a running coach, I'm a movement coach. I teach people how to move better, and if they move better, they run better." And one of the first things is about making sure all the vertebrae and joints are stacked on top of the other, and that involves your head position looking at the horizon. With your eyes maybe looking down 10, eight to 10 metres in front so you can scan what's coming on the ground and make sure you pick your feet up high enough. But the number of people that I see running, they look down, they have their head tilting down, and so what that does as well, and this is something else that we might get into. I didn't mention it in the topics, but it's the role of the fascia in the body and having normal tension in the fascia, and so you talked about flexion there. If you're in a flexion, then the fascia on the front of your body is relaxed, and the fascia on the back of your body is overtight, which means that then you don't get the normal input of the fascia, which acts like a spring and helps you to move forward comfortably. And that's why the best running coaches help people to improve their movement so they can utilise the action of the fascia on the body and on the skeletal system. So again, the drive to running faster is all centred around VO2, max threshold, running cadence, and none of this basic engineering, if you like. Well, if you can't move well, all those stuff doesn't matter, and it's going to be harder to get to get to that level with that other stuff, like you're reaching for the cart before the horse on that one. And when you get tired, your posture goes anyway, and so then that's when every step becomes a bit more difficult when breathing becomes a bit more laboured and there's a downward spiraling in your performance. Yeah, but now if we were smart, we would try to slow down and recover when that downward spiral happens, but we still reach too far. So a lot of us will try to run through that with the, as the carts lying off the rails, we're still trying to go for it. Well, so there's a chap called George Galloway, not George Galloway, who really promotes this idea of the run walk theory, and he's worked with people who've run marathons in under three hours by running a little bit of, let's see, one of his interval patterns, he's run for eight minutes, walk for two, but that walking for two gives you a chance to recover so that you can run the eight minutes faster than if you, you know, that the eight minutes plus the two minutes run and walk is faster than the 10 minutes, just shuffling along. And that little reset allows you to do that, allows you to regain your posture, it allows you to get control of your breathing and then go again. But the problem I have with most triathletes and runners is they'll say, well, I'm doing a marathon run, so I'm not supposed to walk. And you know, it's about running. You're not really running if you're doing this. Well, in my mind, if you're a coach, he's about getting to the finish line as effectively and as fast as possible. So you choose what the best way is. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Like, it's about the client and you, you, you term that correctly, that walk is the reset that it, that's the gate pattern, right? And it's the, it's the, the recovery part of that gate pattern to that. It restores and refreshes the nervous system, but it also gives the tissues a little bit of time and the heart rate to come down a little bit. And so it gives the body the ability to now dig deep again and perform for that next eight minutes. That's brilliant. It's the difficulty. I think as coaches is we're asking people to really roll back quite a long way and almost it's like reversing out of a dead end, isn't it? You know that to start with your performance might suffer a little bit, but in order to get to a better performance, you've got to go out of that dead end and maneuver and then move forwards. I think that's why Maffetton was well met with so much resistance in the beginning because he was asking people to do something so easy, but so much easier compared to what they thought they could do or what they knew they could do. You know, well, that's, that's not hard enough. Yeah. And my heart rate's not high enough. And, you know, but it's brilliant. Well, I had some, I had some people, I got all of the athletes that are in my little tribe to try this. And those that stuck with it have actually come back and said, you know what, I've had the best seasons running ever. I haven't got injured because, you know, I'm not putting as much stress on my body. And my running techniques improved and my performances have improved, but I also got some pushback from some people who said, when can I get on with the proper running? When can I stop doing all this easy stuff and get on with some proper running? Right. What exactly is proper running then? Some, well, you know, some people believe that things have to hurt or be difficult for them to be affected or to be, to be doing it correctly, but that's just not true. Sometimes things should feel good and feel much easier to be doing them correctly because they're more efficient. Yeah. Well, when you watch something, I don't know whether you probably were being interested in human performance were rooted and riveted on the Olympics. I love watching the best performers, making world records and gold medal performances. Actually, I know they're trying hard, but they make it look a lot easier than it is because their technique is so good because they've got all of these little boxes ticked that we're talking about. It looks like it's just something they call Tuesday when they're, you know, they look yeah, it's beautiful. It's graceful. It's fluid. It's effortless. Absolutely. And years of practice in it, right? It takes a lot of hard work to make it look easy. Correct. Let's move on to rolling then. And I love this going back because I forgotten the name of the movement thing now. There's a guy in California that there's a whole load of movement stuff. I think of the name soon, but I really like all of these fundamental movement concepts. So let's talk about rolling then. So rolling is further a vestibular system activation. That's when we're going from our belly to back, back to belly to our side all over the place. Rolling is when a child learns how to get from A to B. So not only does a child learn how to travel across the floor from A to B, rolling is really the foundation of our gate pattern. Even before, you know, you always heard you have to crawl before you walk, like crawling is foundation of the gate pattern. Yes, but you could call rolling the foundation of crawling if you wanted to. And if you watch somebody roll, if they were lying on the floor and they did a proper roll, a segmental roll, if you were standing over them, it would look like they're walking or in the running position because it is literally the gate pattern in the nervous system expressing itself. But what it really does also is it activates to vestibular system, but it also stimulates your largest tactile organ, your skin and your fascia and your muscles and your joints and all those mechanoreceptors that are all throughout your body, flood through your vestibular system and go into your brain and tell your brain where everything's at. So rolling is like walking into a dark room and turning on all the light. So the brain can clearly see where everything in the body is at. So it ties your proprioceptive system to your vestibular system and gives your body a great movement map for where everything's at. The cool thing about that is when the brain can see where everything's at, well, there's no threat. The brain feels safe. It allows the body to more fluidly express itself. So the better the movement map, the better you can express yourself. Okay. So sorry if I've just not picked up on that. Can you give me an example? If somebody came to your center and you were in a teaching to roll, give me an example of an exercise that they would do. Well, so when a child first learns to roll, it looks like an accident because it basically is. And a lot of times the nervous system's not mature yet. So that first roll is a log roll. So the whole body turns over as one piece. You've probably seen adults roll log roll. It looks like effort. Maybe they turn red. Maybe they go and they go from their back to their belly. That is a immature nervous system, but it's a lot of physical effort because you can even hear the effort. You see their face turn red, you go. So there's rolling and it's okay to look like an accident. But as the child really learns to roll and its body gets tied together because it's now turning all the license and nervous systems getting stronger and healthier, the nervous system matures and there's less physical effort involved in the roll. So then when the child rolls, it doesn't look like an accident. It looks like a beautiful fluid, ocean way and that's the segmental roll. So for an adult, it depends on with pressing reset. The most beautiful thing about pressing reset is you start where the body is. So wherever a person's at, that's where you start. If a person moves well, maybe they may be able to do a fluid segmental roll. Maybe we start there, but chances are they don't move well. So we start in small little rolls to teach them how to activate the vestibular system and stimulate, you know, start getting some appropriate set of information into their brain. So it might be that we lay them on their back and let them grab their shins and we call this an egg roll and we teach them how to move their eyes, move their head and then roll their body because remember the body follows the head and by moving the eyes and the head we're activating the vestibular system and then we get the body to follow it. Now we're integrating the pattern that we're designed to live in and we're getting rotation in the eyes and then the head. So we're getting rotation in the vertebrae of the neck and then as the body follows while they're holding their legs, we're getting a little bit of thoracic rotation also and then we move the eyes and the head back to the right and we roll the body to the right. So we use these little small rolls, what they we call egg rolls or windshield wipers but non-complicated rolls that don't take a very mature nervous system yet to start getting the nervous system ready to do the more complicated things and it may be that the person needs to work on those egg rolls per a week or two before they can get more expressive or it may be that their nervous system only needed a few reps to learn how to open up and do a little bit more complicated rolls but the good news is is rolling is rolling and even if a person can't roll well, if they do what the child did and just show up every day and roll throughout the day, a little bit here, a little bit there, eventually they're going to look, they're going to roll beautifully like poetry and the beautiful thing about rolling is when you roll very fluidly and you look beautiful while you're rolling, chances are when you're up on two feet, you're going to look beautiful while you're walking. Wow, we're really taking, we're winding the clock back for most people then they probably want to remember rolling and the next thing which is rocking that we're going to talk about. Yeah, and so rocking further, so rocking is a cool, cool movement as well. That is when the child gets strong enough to push the world away. So, you know, the biggest thing that helps the human body and what we are literally designed for is gravity and how we can control the body against the pull of gravity. So, matter of fact, your vestibular system is designed for gravity. If we were out and out of space, there'd be no gravity, there'd be no pull in the vestibular system, you wouldn't know up and down, left and right or anything and your body would immediately start getting rid of bone and muscle because there's no pull, you don't need bone and muscle when there's no gravity. So, it's crazy. But anyway, when we get on all fours, the child pushes the world away, is on its hands and knees, that big giant watermelon of a head is up on the horizon and it starts to rock back and forth. That is such a beautiful movement of integration. That is when the hips, the shoulders, the knees, the ankles, the toes, the wrist and the spine, all those separate joints become one joint. The body learns how to move together. It's like taking the instruments, just musical instruments and putting them into a symphony and teaching everybody how to play together and make beautiful music. What it also does, though, is it teaches your stabilizers like your rotator cuffs and your hip rotators and all the other stabilizers around your joints, it teaches them how to hold the joints so that the movers learn how to move the joints. So, rolling integrates stability and mobility. And they're the same thing because if you don't have stability, you don't have mobility. If you don't have mobility, you don't have stability. Especially as your ability to express it goes. If you see somebody that's tight, really tight and rigid, it's because they lack stability. But they're tight and rigid, so they have stability. No, they're tight and rigid because their prime movers are having to do compensate and do something they're not designed to do because the stabilizers aren't doing their job. So, it's so neat how it works. But anyway, rocking is where we teach the stabilizers how to do their job and the movers how to do their job. So, not only do the joints become one joint, all the muscles learn their roles and tasks too. But now we've got opposite limbs doing the same things, right? So, this right shoulder is mirroring this left hip, this left shoulder is mirroring this right hip. So, now we're also stimulating and getting the brain effective at communicating with itself. So, we're combining, we're joining the hemispheres of the brain together and creating neural connections across the two hemispheres. So, we're making our brain a bit more healthier, more efficient, which makes the body healthier and more efficient. To show you listening to right now and all of my others that provide you with amazing real life advice and guidance from top coaches, athletes and successful humans, well, making it takes me a lot of time. But I feel it's well worth it. And all in the name of helping you to improve your health, longevity and performance. And all I ask in return is this, please send a link to this podcast to somebody you know who you think will benefit. And if you haven't done so already, please click, follow this podcast on whatever platform you're listening to right now, so that you don't miss any of our future episodes. Thank you. Let's get back to the show. I think I've seen one of your videos where you go from a movement that effectively starts off like a cat cow in that position, arm straight, thighs at 90 degrees to knees, and then you go back into like a child's pose, and then you come forward almost into a press upon your knees and then you go backwards between those two positions. Is that what you're talking about by rocking there? That is rocking. You're just simply rocking back and forth your eyes, but you keep your eyes and head on the horizon the whole time and you keep your chest up the whole time. Because that's one. Here's the beautiful thing about this too. When a child gets on its hands and knees and starts rocking, that's where we develop our posture from. That's that's what sets the curves in our spine. That's where we get our cervical curve and our lumbar curve. As an adult, that is where you can restore your posture by getting on your hands and knees, putting your head on the horizon and rocking back and forth. It's also where you restore your hip mobility and your knee mobility and your shoulder mobility because you're restoring their stability. Anyway, yes, it is simply rocking back and forth. You're pushing your butt back over your feet towards your feet and then you're rocking back and forward where your shoulders go over your hands. That's it while you try to keep your head and chest up. I've had a couple of injuries in my life, which have caused me to realize just how much stability and strength I have in various joints, but not realize it. I broke this collarbone and it was immobilized for a proper snap and it was immobilized for six weeks. I had a sling for six weeks, but I couldn't really lift anything for another seven or eight weeks until the bone had formed into a big, big callus. Before I was even able to go back in the pool and start swimming, the physio said, "You need to get some strength and stability." I had to do four-point kneeling and just touching my hand up there. As soon as I took all the weight on my right arm, the amount of wobbling I was doing, I mean, I wasn't in a press position. I was kneeling, so there didn't feel to be a great deal of weight, but this arm felt so weak. The first time I went into the pool, it was like a just a little tire and I saw it's wreck's arm coming around. I had no strength there. I had no space of awareness of where my arm was in space. Then just recently, I sound like medical, my own medical record has been dictated here. I ruptured my ACL back in February while I was skiing and again, knee in a brace for six weeks, starting out, tightness, lack of range of motion, but lack of stability as well around ankle and hip and knee. I did try to keep the ankle stability and balance a little bit by doing some one-legged stance, but of course, when you're wearing a brace, that's not particularly sensible thing to do. I think once you get injured, you realize what you had and how much has been taken away when you're trying to restore just the basics of movement. I have a saying that it was like a no-brainer thing, but once I started saying it, I was like, "Well, yeah, that's absolutely right." I say it feels good to feel good, which is so simple and everybody knows it, but you don't really appreciate it until you're not feeling good. Then you're like, "Oh, yeah, it really feels good to feel good." Yeah, so moving well, you can't live a healthy, happy life if you don't have freedom of movement. Freedom and ease of movement is life because it lends itself for you to go do anything and everything it is that you want to do out in the world. When you're not bound up and you're not imprisoned in your own body, you're happier and you give yourself to the world so much easier and better. But when you have an injury or something's wrong or you're not moving as well as you should, well, then everything, remember, everything's tied together. When your body's not moving well, your thoughts aren't thinking well, your emotions aren't, they're not where they should be. So if the body is stuck in flexion, your thoughts are going to be stuck in negativity because that's flexion and your emotions are going to be down and you're going to feel sad or depressed or anxious because these are the postures of sad, depressed and anxious. Your body is an expression suit. Whatever's going on in here, you're expressing it out through here. That is the two-way street. So if my body is moving well, feeling well, then my emotions and my thoughts are also moving well and feeling well. They're expressing themselves optimally and vice versa. If I have a thought of negativity or fear in my mind, my body knows it. You've never had a thought that your body doesn't know about. So if I'm thinking something that's fearful or negative, I'm going to start expressing it. So yeah, like freedom of movement is that's the essence of life. It lends itself to having the life you want to have. Well, a lot of this has become way more to the front of my conscience in the last few years because I turned 60 in February. And so you see people around you that don't look their age and don't act their age and you see people that look looking at and move way older than they are. And when you actually sort of examine why that is, a lot of it starts with the basic movement patterns and postures. Maybe they do have pain in their hip or their knee because of osteoarthritis or previous injuries. Maybe it's just poor posture that's caused that tightness. But again, you talk about when people roll and you can hear them grown. You notice that as folks get older, when they get up from chairs, they're like, oh, oh, so they start making noise out loud. They start making noise and say, oh, that hurts. Oh, my back's tight. And it's caused me to think that perhaps the most important thing to manage my longevity and keep doing all the other things that I like doing is to make sure that my movement skills are intact and as young as they could be. So that daily movement practice, which took a long while for me to get older, has actually become probably a fundamental of my day now, is to keep moving and things like this desk I'm standing up at this desk rather than sitting down just because it means I can maintain it. Maybe my desk could be higher to maintain a better posture, but I feel like it's much better for me than sitting down for the hour and a half that we took. Yeah, it's super simple, but simple doesn't necessarily mean easy to do. But if you live in your design, if you breathe the way you're designed to breathe, move your eyes and head the way you're designed to walk the way you're designed to. Chances are you are going to age very well. You'll be young as long as always until you leave the world. We are designed to be strong and healthy throughout our entire lives. We're not designed to break down and get old. After we're at the age of 25, that's stupid. If everybody knows this, but nobody thinks about it, but if the human is designed to live 80, 90, 100 years old, 120 years old, why would we start breaking down after the first 25 years? That doesn't make any sense. The first fourth of your life are the good years and then the next three fourths of your life, everything falls apart. That makes no sense at all. Now, that might be normal because of our world and what we're not doing anymore, but that doesn't mean that's the way it's supposed to be. I don't know if you've seen a documentary about the Blue Zones. Yes, I'm familiar with the Blue Zones. In that documentary, they go to Costa Rica, I think. The presenters meeting this guy who's on his horse and he's a cowboy, and he's been out in the morning doing all the work. He comes back in the day because it gets too hot, so he sleeps during the day. He's saying, "How old are you?" He said, "I'm 95." And yet, you watch him moving, you watch him chopping wood, and you watch him getting on and off his horse. And he's moving like a guy who's in his forties. But I guess he's a bit like the Bumblebee. Nobody told him he shouldn't be doing that when he's 95, so he's just carried on. He stayed moving. That's the secret. So I used to be a firefighter, and it taught me a lot. Most of the calls we went on would be emergency medical calls. Sometimes we would go on calls where a person had fallen and they couldn't get off the floor. Maybe they were there for two or three days when somebody finally found them. And that was very sobering, because when you see stuff like that, you're like, "I don't want to end up like that." And how did they get there? And then sometimes you'd go to a call and you'd go to a rest home, and it would be somebody that maybe they were in their 60s, but they're already in a rest home or an assisted living facility. And then sometimes, though, I would go to a call where it was an independent 90-year-old living in their house by themselves with stairs, and they could bound up and down their stairs and do, you know, and they were so vibrant. And I'm like, "That's it. That's how it should be, and that's how I want to be." Well, at that point you made about being stuck on the floor, that was my father passed away last year, and that he, in the last 20 years of his life, didn't really do any exercise. He did used to exercise a lot, maybe not as much as you or I might be used to, but he used to work in the garden and he would cut the grass by Holland, and, you know, he would be active doing the IY, but he just seemed to go downhill, and he used to sleep on his sofa, which was quite low to the ground, and so if he would try to sit up off that, his hips would be below his knees, and he didn't quite have the strength, so what would happen is he'd just slide off the edge of the sofa, and then all of a sudden he'd be sat on the floor. But he got to the point where he couldn't get up off the floor. He couldn't, I don't know why, whether he didn't have the mindset to roll onto his front and push him up in the way we've discussed, or whether he just didn't have the strength, but he couldn't get up off the floor, and I think that's probably something else we're going to talk about in a minute, is that fundamental skill of getting up off the floor, but he was there for, I think he was there for 48 hours before the carers came around on the next visit and found him there. Now he was, he said he was perfectly okay, and he didn't need to go to hospital, but, you know, it kept happening more and more. And again, like you, I thought, you know, I don't want to be in that position. He didn't, he had an upstairs in his house, and the stairs weren't particularly steep, but he didn't go up there for, for probably three years, because he fell down halfway down them once, and it just scared him. So he just thought, well, I don't need to go up there. So then, you know, his living area was shrinking more and more until he was in this one room, and it's just to really, it seems like a really sad way to finish off your life, really. It is, and it's hard to watch, especially watch somebody love when their world's shrinking, but honestly, it's hard to watch anybody's world shrink too, because that's not what we're main for. Like, you know, it doesn't have to be that way for most of us. Most of us lose our world just because we don't engage in it, you know, and we had this wonderful body that's so capable doing so many amazing things, but we don't engage in it. We don't take advantage of it. And, and like I said earlier, it is use it or lose it, but the, that's the most beautiful thing about it is, is because that means it is use it to build it and use it to keep it. And so you get to be a co-creator of your own nervous system by how you engage in your design, right? So, so if you want to be able to do something, you start engaging in the process to lay the framework literally, like new neural connections, new, new, new, new tissue to be able to get, to be able to do the thing or express yourself the way you want to do it, you know? And so it's beautiful, like, and we're not, we're not just bystanders in that. We get to actively participate in how our body functions as we age through life, you know, so I don't know. I think there's hope in that. That means, you know, we're not a victim of our genetics. We're not necessarily a victim of our environment. Yes, they are factors. But the ultimate factor is, is how we choose to, to live in our own skin. Yeah, so that the bottom line from that, for me, Tim, is just ignore what everybody says about you shouldn't be doing that at your age. Just carry on and live a bit disgracefully for your age. Yes, don't let anybody else give you parameters for what you, how you live. That's the norm. That's the, the, the thing is, is well, like normalcy fallacy, right? Like, well, that's normal to have diabetes now in the world. Yeah, that doesn't mean that's the way it's supposed to be. Well, I mean, I still, you know, we did a, we did a gravel bite ride at the weekend, which was sort of took us about nearly six hours and there was, there was several thousand feet of climbing and people will say to me, occasionally, have you not retired from all that stuff? Yeah, you're not too old for that. Like, that's, that's when life starts to go downhill when you believe that nonsense. Yeah, that's buying the lies. Like, so it's all information, right? And that's why, that's why it's very important to protect, to protect your heart from what you see and what you hear. Because if that stuff seeps into you, it can take root. You don't want that either. Let's talk about number five of you resets the crawling part. So I guess that's just the next stage, right? Yeah, so now after, after a child learns how to rot, typically they learn how to crawl, I will go ahead and say that not all children crawl. But there's usually reasons for that. You know, child number two might see child number one up walking around and stuff and they want to get up to their feet sooner. Maybe their parents or germaphobes and they don't want to put their child on the ground or maybe they put them in those fancy little walking wheel things to try to teach them to walk sooner, you know, just out of a, for whatever reason, they don't know any better. But not all children necessarily crawl. But that doesn't mean the crawling pattern doesn't live in the child's nervous system. So anyway, crawling is the miracle movement. It ties your left and right hemisphere of your brain together. It ties your right shoulder to your left tip, your left shoulder to your right hip, ties your center together, makes your center very strong. Strength happens from the inside out. It also helps you develop your hand eye coordination and ties your visual system to your vestibular system. It helps you develop depth perception. Like it does all these things you would never think about. But the other thing it does for you is it helps you get up on two feet and explore and conquer your work. Now crawling takes four limbs so you're coordinating all four limbs together. And that's what keeps the brain very healthy. Which means when we walk, the best way to keep the brain very healthy is to coordinate all four limbs together. So if crawling is the foundation of the gate pattern, that means the gate pattern is intended to have four limbs moving in coordination together. And that's what keeps keeps the brain very healthy. So you can even look at walking as we're designed as crawling, standing up. Either way, it is a phenomenal movement that can help the body heal from injury, from from disastrous injury. Like if a person gets brain damage or from a traumatic injury or from a stroke, crawling may be able to help the brain rebuild itself and repair itself so that that person can get functioned back. I've seen that firsthand. And people that skip crawling, there's research that shows that they have higher incidences of ADD, ADHD, dyslexia, and other learning disorders. But if they engage in crawling as an adult or as a bigger child, they can help turn back those disorders and reverse them as well. So crawling is great for developing focus, memory retention, emotional regulation. It just does so many super things beyond just the physical movement of crawling. So when you say crawling, I think most people would imagine being on your hands and knees touching the floor. Are you talking about that plus the some of the movements that we see other folks like you prescribing like bear crawling and crab walks and that sort of stuff, are they more advanced types of crawling? I yes to all of the above. I am talking about hands and knees crawling. When I'm talking about what a child would do, crawling on the hands and knees. You can crawl on your hands and feet and children do that as well, but they're typically stronger by the time they do that. They don't start out there. So an adult, though, can't enjoy crawling on the hands and knees always, and it will always work and do what it's intended to do because it is the movement you were born to do, which means you don't have to make it harder just for the sake of making it harder. You don't have to crawl on the hands and feet and elevate the knees off the ground just for the sake of doing it unless you want to because you're trying to add more tension to your body for a strength training purpose. Maybe you're trying to learn how to run a marathon while nasal breathing. So you use that method to learn how to work under stress and tension to learn how to master your breathing that way because that is like running a marathon because it's hard, but you never have to do it just for the sake of being hard. It still works. It's beautiful, wonderful, miraculous results just from staying on the hands and knees. Just like walking is always good for you, and you don't have to make it hard by running. Walking is always going to be good for your brain and your nervous system if you engage in it the way it's intended. What always amuses me, interests me is that we talk about running now as this thing that we should do and that people have read the book "Born to Run" and that's caused a lot of people to run and learn to run barefoot with disastrous consequences for a lot of people. But actually when you look back further into the documented literature about hunter-gatherers they didn't really run a great deal. That was why they could out hunt animals, wasn't it, because they could keep going walking for long periods of time, run when they're needed to to chase after something or to run away from something. But mostly it was all about parambulating and walking. And yet I feel, again, as a human, I'm going to skip that bit and I'm just going to go straight to running. I'm not going to learn to walk efficiently. Yeah, you're absolutely right. So yes, we were born to run, but the truth is, is we're really born to walk and we're born to sprint. So that run you said the run when they needed to was a fast run. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, they weren't jogging like they were doing a marathon. They were running for their lives, weren't they, or they were running for their food? It was fast, intense, and extreme. And the body is designed to do that and it's designed to wall. Yeah, but so I'm with you. And I love all the stuff that "Born to Run" brought to the forefront, like being barefooted, getting your feet stronger. All of those things can be good things, but then taking to the extreme or reaching too far, they can not be good things as well, too. Too much of anything can be a problem. But yeah, no, we're both definitely born to walk. And that's when everything comes together, right? So if we're walking properly, we're swinging our arms opposite of our hips, everything's mirroring each other, our eyes and our head are on the horizon. We're scanning the horizon. We're constantly taking in the world. We're activating our vestibular system, where our lips are shut. We're breathing in and out through our nose. Our tongue is on the roof of our mouth. We're filling our lungs up from the bottom to the top, and we're alive. Like we are doing what we are designed to do. And that is the key to staying young as long as you're here, right there. That keeps your brain healthy, keeps your body healthy, keeps your heart healthy, keeps your lungs healthy, keeps your tissues healthy, keeps your all of you, keeps you healthy. I was just thinking about when you were talking about sprinting. I think it might have been Phil Maffertone that says, "People tell me they can't sprint." Well, I say, put yourself in front of an angry dog that hasn't eaten for a couple of days. And you'll suddenly rediscover that ability to sprint. When he had to think about it, he'll just do it. I was going to ask you about movement practice and what we... Because clearly, most of us have got out the habit of even practicing some of these basic sort of resets, the movements that you talk about. Do we need to have some deliberate time set aside for this? Or can we work all of these five skills into our normal everyday life? Absolutely. And the easiest answer is it depends on who you are. If you need a schedule and you need a routine, the easiest thing in the world to do is get up in the morning, spend two minutes practicing your breathing, two minutes practicing your head and eye movements, two minutes practicing rolling, two minutes practicing, rocking, two minutes practicing crawling. There's your 10 minutes. Go have a nice day. If that's ridiculously easy and you want to do it again later today, absolutely do it again. Otherwise, whether you're driving in your car, sitting at your office, you can practice keeping your tongue in the roof of your mouth, breathing in and out through your nose. You can practice taking movement snack breaks and moving your eyes and head around, moving beyond your glasses frames, moving your head up and down every 20, 15, 30 minutes, depending on how mindful you are to do that. You can rock back and forth in your chair. Now we're activating our vestibular system, keeping our eyes and head on the horizon. So many ways to press reset and keep your body healthy even in today's world. But the most important thing and what makes it work is is you show up often, you're consistent, you do it often, doesn't have to be hard, just has to be a lot, because that's the design. We're designed to do it. So here's a crazy thing. Every breath should be a reset. Every time you move your eyes and your head, it should restore and refresh your nervous system. Every time you take a step to go check your mail or to go outside and go down to the supermarket, each step should be a reset. Every breath and step and movement you make should refresh and restore your nervous system, because that is actually what it's designed to do. Wow, I think there'll be a lot of people listening to this thinking that's way too easy, of course, because it sounds easy, but I'm just thinking there when you're talking about head control, I ride my bike a lot. In the UK, we ride on the left side of the road. So I find that one of the things that keeps me safe is looking over my shoulder regularly. When we go riding, if I come to ride in America, I'm riding on the right hand side of the road, I can definitely tell that my neck and my eye control is not quite as well developed. So I can look and turn my head half away and get a little look out of my eyes and see where there's a vehicle or a car behind me and I pick it up straight away because I do that regularly. If I do the same sort of head movements, I can see behind me, but it takes me a little longer or a little bit more of a turn to register that there's a vehicle there, because my sensors just aren't as tuned in on that side. And every time I go to Spain or to Europe, which is where I tend to ride overseas most, I have to, I've spent a few days beforehand practicing looking over my left shoulder to retrain that sort of part of my movement skill. That's the build it, the use it and build it part, right? It's specific adaptation to impose demand. You're ridiculously get it going only because that's what you do and how you live daily, whereas the other way is foreign. So it's just not as crystal sharp as the other way is. But we're talking about these skills as if they're specific skills we need to develop to be an athlete. But actually, when you're driving your car in the States, you need to look over your left shoulder. You should do. If you can't look over your shoulder and you do see people that haven't physically turned their whole body, which means that now they're probably less in control of the car, they just struggle with that. They're probably tight around the neck and they don't have that basic movement skill. So then that becomes a danger to themselves and everybody else. So there's a big of repercussions out of not being able to move well. Absolutely. So like you said earlier, your world does shrink when you lose your ability to move. And so your ability to move can also therefore save your life. And it makes navigating through the world much safer when you can rotate around and look and see if there's cars coming up on your side before you change your lane. It makes your world safer when you can easily go up and down the steps. And if you trip, you easily catch yourself before you fall. That's reflexive strength, right? Having that ability to react fast enough or there's no big deal. The absence of not being able to react fast enough is when it's disastrous. That's when your head hits the ground and you get a concussion or a brain injury or worse. Yeah. Well, on that point, that was one of the things my father had. A couple of years before he passed away, he had to go to the hospital for a scam. And ironically, they told him a few days later, there was nothing untoward. But as he was walking out of the hospital, he had tight two diabetes. So there's another sort of lifestyle modification. So he didn't have much feeling in his feet. And he couldn't tie shoelaces because he couldn't bend over. So he put slip-ons on or wear slippers. He was shuffling out of the hospital and the little runners where the electric doors slide, he caught his foot on that. And down he went, head first, hit the ground. I've got a photograph of him, which looks like he's been mugged his whole face, his bruised, he's broken his nose, he's got two black eyes. And, you know, one, he didn't pick his feet up, two, he didn't have the reflexes to save himself. And three, he didn't have the strength, even if he hadn't been able to save himself to put his foot out in front and then stay upright. You know, so sad, sad, but good examples of exactly what you've mentioned there, really. It is. So, and again, everybody thinks, because the way of the world in this normal, that as you age, you lose your stability, you lose your balance, you lose your speed and your efficiency, right? So you get, you start to stand wider, you start to hunch over and you start to move slower. But that only happens because we're not engaging in the design because it is use it or lose it. So when somebody retires, if they start to sit down in a recliner or a couch or a sofa and they start to learn how to watch TV for hours a day or sitting on their computer for hours a day, they're essentially asking their body to erode an age because they're not using it. And the brain wants to be efficient and it wants to give you exactly what you ask it for. So if you ask it to be sedentary, you don't need balance. You don't need stability. You don't need your fascia to be elastic. You don't need all these things that takes resources and precious energy to maintain. And because all you need to do is sit there. So your brain gets rid of all these things that you once enjoyed because you're no longer asking for them. So then if you have to get up and go somewhere, then maybe you are shorter. Maybe you are slower. Maybe you don't have any balance anymore. So maybe you do have to shuffle because you don't have to shrink to pick your legs up and stand on one foot for long periods at a time while the other leg swings through to get that next step. And the reason you don't have it is because you haven't asked for it. It's not because you're older. It's because you didn't use it. And so that's the thing like we, but if you engage in it, even if you've lost it, you've never lost it forever. You can build it back, but it takes time to build back because it took time to build it to start with. It also took time to lose it. Nobody thinks about that either. They're like, well, I used to could. Well, used to could took a while to not be. So it's okay if it takes you a minute or five minutes to rebuild it back. It's okay if it takes time. The most important thing is, though, you haven't truly lost it forever. If you want to engage in it again, all you got to do now, it's not going to be easy. It might be a struggle. That's why it's so good just to keep stuff, just keep using your body and you'll keep it. Keep that momentum going. You know, an object in motion tends to stay in motion. If you don't have to overcome inertia, you're good to go. But even if you do have to overcome inertia, you can get there. It just takes a little effort and consistency and time and patience. But as long as you start asking your brain for what you want through the use and movements that you want to have, your brain will eventually say, all right, look, he's asking me for this. He obviously wants it. I'm getting tired of, I need to develop more resources and put a supply towards his demand. He's demanding something. I'm going to make the supply because I want to be efficient at this, because now he's costing me extra energy because he's always asking me for something that he wasn't asking me before before. I got to get efficient at this because he's obviously persistent. He keeps knocking on the door every day. I got to open the door easier. And that's how it works. Tim, when I first contacted you, I thought we're going to talk about these original concepts. And then we're going to get into some, what most people say, proper strength training, throwing kettle bells around, the Dan John style. But we've had a fascinating discussion for more than an hour about some really, really simple principles. On top of those, though, are there any other movements that we need to try and including our day to maintain our movement skills or the ones that you've mentioned enough for us? So those, no, they're not. So here's the rub. Those five things, those five resets, we were born with them. We are designed to do them. They are the foundation for every other movement we're designed to make. So if we have that solid foundation in place, it is so easy to do every other movement you want to do. It's so easy to learn a skill because your body just knows how to move. You're not trying to actually learn something foreign. You're just trying to add a layer to what you already have. So if you want to be a great kettlebeller, Olympic lifter, power lifter, Olympic sprinter, Olympic swimmer, if you have your foundation in place, it is so much easier to express yourself freely with all the fluidity, all the power, all the speed, all the grace, all the energy that you want to express with. In the absence of that foundation, everything's harder. It takes longer to learn a skill. It takes longer to do things. So we don't need to deliberately practice some squatting each day. Just with our own body weight, we don't need to practice lunges. The primal movement patterns, some deliberate rotations, some getting up off the ground to a standing position, which I feel, given our discussions today is a fundamental skill that we need for health as well. So guess what? If you get down on the ground every day to breathe or all around rock, you're learning how to get up and down from the ground every time you do it. You're always practicing getting up and down from the ground. Now, remember, I said, you can start with the body's at. If you can't get on the ground right now and you're too afraid, make the bed your ground. Nobody's afraid to get on their bed. You can roll on the bed, you can rock on the bed, and then you can easily get off the bed. So you meet somebody where they're at. But you can practice those things, but you don't necessarily need to if you're living in your design, because if you're living in your design, you're always doing those things anyway. So it's just you now, if something is a skill, like say you want to learn karate, well, you got to practice that skill. If you want to be like the best Akido martial arts person in the world, you have to practice that skill. If you want to be an Olympic lifter, there's a skill set to that. But that skill set so much easier to master when you have your solid foundation of movement, because now you're not trying to overcome something you don't have, you're getting to work with something you do have, and that makes skill acquisition so much easier to obtain. I'm just thinking back to that 95 year old cowboy. I bet he didn't do any mobility every day, but getting on and off a horse, swinging your leg over, getting one foot up to the stirrup so you could pull yourself up. He was probably doing other stuff around his ranch. So he was probably bending down to pick stuff up. He was probably skipping through, walking through the woods. He was probably stooping to get under fences and picking animals up off the floor. He had a lot of habitual movements in his day, which meant that he didn't actually need to go to the gym, which sort of loops back to our forefathers who were active human beings. They walked everywhere, they did manual tasks, nothing was automated for them, so they had plenty of movements. So there was no need of gyms in those days, was there? And now we have the gym to replicate, to replace the daily exercise that we don't get, because modern society is trying to make life easier for us. People once upon a time were strong enough to build pyramids, to build things we don't understand. They didn't have machines, they didn't have bulldozers, they didn't have cranes, they had their arms, their backs, their legs, their brain, they had a brain, man, they were smart. Once upon a time, soldiers would march 20 to 25 miles a day and then fight. While they carried 30 to 60 pounds on their body, they were strong, because they lived in their world and in their design. Nobody needed a lift weight, so that's a modern day band aid to try to overcome something we're not doing. So that's where you start separating exercise from movement. We're designed to move, we're not designed for exercise. We do exercise because we don't move. We need to exercise because we don't move. However, if we live in our designing, we'd move the way we should, maybe we wouldn't need to exercise at all. And if we did, maybe it would just be for pure enjoyment versus trying to be healthier and stronger, which it doesn't do. Exercise doesn't necessarily make you healthier, but moving does. Yeah, absolutely an aim into that. Tim, it's been a fascinating discussion. Thank you. I feel like that whole phrase every day is a learning day is true for me when I have podcasts, guests are like yourself, because I learn so much. So I really appreciate you taking time out to be with us today. Thank you. Simon, thanks for having me, man. I is an honor to be here talking with you. I love, I love talking about what we're designed to do. Thank you to Tim for being my guest on the show this week. If it's your breathing, it's been a topic on this podcast several times. And it's really interesting to hear Tim talk about how it's a really fundamental part, not just for life and everyday health, but also for functional movement. So next time you go out for a run or a ride on your bike or maybe when you're just doing your morning mobility, try thinking about how you're breathing and where you're breathing into at the same time as you're doing that other activity. And then maybe you can tick off two boxes in one workout. Please make sure you check out the show notes for links to all of the topics we chatted about today, as well as links to my free daily mobility plan. Also, make sure you don't miss out on any future episodes by going to iTunes or the platform that you currently use, and search for how performance you interact on podcast and then clicking on the subscribe button. Once you've finished listening to this episode, if you could share it with just one person who you think might benefit, that would be awesome. And if you've got a couple more minutes, perhaps you could leave me a review on your chosen platform. As all for this week, I'll have another great guest in seven days time and I hope that you'll be able to join me. But for now, happy training and enjoy your week. [Music]
