If you have children, no children are ever been a child, you're going to want to stay tuned for this episode of the movement movement the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting. The first is those things are your foundation where we're breaking down the propaganda mythology. Sometimes they are lies you've been told about what it takes to walk, run, hike, play to yoga, crossfit, dance dance revolution, ease in racing, whatever it is you like to do and do it effectively and efficiently and enjoy it. Did I mention effectively trick question?
I know I did because if you're not having fun, you're not going to keep it up anyway. So make sure you have a good time. I'm Stephen Sashan from zero shoes.com your host of the podcast. We call it the movement movement because we are creating a movement and I'll talk about that will be part in second about natural movement.
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The gist if you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. Okay, Brian, welcome. First of all, wait. It's very rare.
This one actually comes into the office to do this. I didn't actually expect that Brian was going to be live in a person, but here we are. So tell people who you are and what you do and then we will jump into why you're here. Well, thank you, Stephen.
Well, first of all, I appreciate your ability to improvise and adapt to me while I'm walking into your life. People don't use you to show up. So that made this happen. So I'm Brian Osuna.
The way that we met is because I own a company called Committed HP that creates and sells portable, affordable, something over there. Wait, all right. You keep talking. I'm going to go ahead and versatile fitness tools to inspire people and empower people to move and take care of themselves and wear any time.
I'm back. I'm not going to show this now. We'll come to that later. But I was not prepared well enough for your physical presence.
So this was not my fingertips. Now, the intro of this episode is if you have kids, no kids or have ever been a kid. So I know that this is something that's particularly interesting to you. First of all, you had a baby or your wife just had a baby and you just watched.
So talk to me about the fundamental thing. Before we get into the specifics about kids and natural movement, what is the guy you're interested in that to begin with? Well, before I had kids and before kids were even a thought, I've done just a lot of exploration around what kind of movement works best for me and what kind of movement is most useful for my clients. So I was a personal trainer and coach for 13 years.
I still do a little bit of that transitioning more into transformational coaching with people, but still definitely deeply invested in movement. And I think it was Tim Cook, I believe, who kind of planted this idea of looking at the developmental stages of children and kind of reusing that to reverse engineer, kind of like almost just help people heal their biomechanics and move it. So that really got me thinking about how children develop. What are the macro movement patterns and kind of like the macro patterns that children just naturally start doing and looking at how we get separated from that and just reintroducing it into our lives.
So can you talk about those different patterns, those different stages? Sure. They don't seem to always happen in the exact same chronological order, but right out the womb. Well, that's because some tilt shoulder return travel works.
Exactly. I mean, that's obvious. I love it. So breathing is the first one.
I remember when my first child, me and came out and laid him on my chest and someone said, you breathing right, teach you some how to breathe right. So children's breathing, when they come out, it's just very chaotic. There's not a ton of rhythm to it. So they're literally learning how to breathe.
So that diaphragm does naturally kick in with children, but breathing is the first movement pattern. Well, let's dive into that a little more because I know there's, oh, I don't really know the guy who's checked. Who has this whole thing about breathing and about 360 degree breathing. So it's not just what most people think I was belly breathing.
It's just expanding, but instead of just getting all of those marks to expand. And I just like on Aaron's last name, who was on the podcast because I'm horrible with names. No. Anyway, she developed a product called the Core 360 Belt.
That's just to cue you for that breathing. So do you want to talk about that and how that does something? Sure. It's a Monday.
I can't speak English. It's Monday. Yeah, we'll make it work. Yeah, there is this misconception of proper breathing being into your belly.
Right. What I perceive and what I've learned is learning to be breathing into your belly is a way to help you learn how to regulate. Right. Regulate.
Regulate your nervous system. Regulate your physical tension. So when you're directing your breath into your belly, it's helping you regulate versus just optimal breathing is just optimizing the amount that you can bring air in and out and creating space for breath and using the right muscles and biomechanics for that. So mainly your diaphragm and your intercostal muscles are what you're trying to work or utilize when for proper breathing just on everyday situations or performance.
And that breath is lateral and posterior. So your rib cage is actually stretching to the side and up and back. And then after that, you have accessory breathing muscles, which to create even more space and assistance by pulling up and those start kicking in as you start to get fatigued or you need more air moving in and out. But just on everyday level right now, if we're not too stressed out or we're not stressed, we're not doing anything intense, our diaphragm and intercostal should be just creating that natural air flow.
I found that when I started playing with this idea, it, and it's something I'm still exploring and it's still expanding pun intended is that I had to really work to find how to let those intercostal muscles. Let things expand sideways and backwards. And my favorite thing is when I do, I've had sort of chronic tension between my shoulders and I can feel that stretching as well, even though that's not what the breath is doing. But like, and I think about babies whenever I do this, because they haven't developed that chronic tension that gets in the way of doing this.
And so kind of coming back like you mentioned before, sort of reversing time, developmentally to kind of find that again is very interesting. What did you notice when you put your baby on your chest and found your baby? Did you notice that you were doing something awry or were you just like brilliant and just, you know, teaching that to the kid? You're saying when I started reflecting on how I was breathing, I noticed.
How you breathe is going to teach your child how to breathe out. What did you notice about your breathing at that time? I did notice that my go-to when I think about it is a belly breath. But when I just relax and let my body just take over my intercostal and my diaphragm kind of do the right thing.
So I've kind of conditioned myself to kind of belly breath consciously, but luckily my body kind of knows the right way. So I did notice that like if I just let my mind go to something else and then I tuned into my breathing without trying, I was kind of using that correct expansion of the rib cage versus when I was thinking about breathing and then I'd start like directing it into the belly, which isn't a bad thing, but really we want to get back to that diaphragm. So if that breathing thing is our first stage, what follows that? The way that I saw it, and we can talk about reaching and articulating with the limbs, the main thing I saw was posturing and specifically engaging and articulating the spine.
So being able to lift the head and then start to like posture up the spine either from the belly or if I was holding the child, being able to just like move and keep the spine erect. So I'm trying to think of then again for us adults who are thinking about going back in time and experimenting with these sort of developmental stages to see what we learn. How does that apply to those of us who are no longer babies? So I guess just engaging with your spine and posture in a way that's allowing you to have a dynamic and strong spine, but also what a neutral spine actually is is actually including the curves of the spine.
So a lot of people think straight spine and that's a good cue for when we're like trying to do something, but in a natural state, like a neutral spine is somewhat relaxed with the natural curves and then being able to move and articulate from that place. And what we see a lot, especially when people spend a lot of time in flexion, is they've lost that neutral spine. And now they're moving and they're initiating so much movement from a flex place, which then compromises the breathing and then it compromises the structures of the spine and it compromises the movement. And so the first thing is is like helping people almost do kinds of stuff that babies would do almost like from like a cobra or a prone position on their stomach and starting to articulate and activate some of the paraspinal muscles that have gotten weak, just so they can actually be in a neutral spine with ease.
Do you want to describe what some of those exercises are or those movement patterns are? So you're starting to say you're on your belly. Something could be as simple as lying face down with your forehead kind of touching the ground and retracting your head. So there's a difference between extending the spine and then retracting is where if you have a laser pointer coming out of your nose, that laser pointer staying on the same point on the ground.
But you're pulling your head off the ground. So there's a glide function of the spine as opposed to just extension. So trying to restore that is a huge thing. Exercise is like bird dogs where you're on hands and knees and getting your going through flexion extension of the hips and shoulders.
So then you're adding some balance and activating some different muscles in addition to those paraspinals, I believe they're multi-fidile. So really starting to just wake those muscles up that have kind of kind of just given up and turned off because we spent so much time just hanging on here and then getting that ability to retract, which even just when you do that, you start to feel those mid thoracic muscles, muscles like your rhomboids and your trapezius as well starting to kick in. And once those get stronger and more tone, you're going to be able to stay neutral a little bit better. I noticed gymnastics are very interesting that way.
So those muscles that we're talking about have problems not because they've given up, but because the most important movements in gymnastics are all pulling in the front of your body. And so gymnasts all look like their chest is kind of caved in because that's just a really important movement. And then there's a lot of tension in the lower back as well and all gymnasts have messed up shoulders after they're done. In fact, I just had a literally break for a guy here who had an injection in my bicep tendon because of gymnastics.
And I noticed that if I was just doing things like scapular retraction, just pulling your shoulder blades back and down, if you're doing that with resistance or whatever, never really did a lot for me. But one day, Lane and I moved into a place and I put a chin up bar. Our second bedroom is where we had our television. So I got a couch there, television and bathroom.
And so I put a chin up bar in the doorway to the bathroom. And any time I went to the bathroom, I would just go and do a couple of pull ups where I'm really focused on just that retraction part first before I actually bent my arms. And that made a huge difference for me. And I don't know if it was the angles or whatever it was, but just not, you know, that little bit with like a band or just with nothing doing scapular retraction is never made a difference.
But that was really helpful. And I referred that as trying to get the gymnast out of my body. It's like to get that seeding contraction in the upper body out and turn that into something like more neutral versus someone that I knew who was in the Navy. And they're constantly saying, you know, pull your shoulders down and put your chest out.
And he walked like a peacock all the time. Everything was so out of whack. And we, I mean, we were kids when I met this guy, we teased him mercilessly, of course, as we were children. But I like this idea of getting back to sort of neutral and movable rather than some imagined position that people often have a misconception about.
To just kind of expand on your point with the gymnastics, I wrestled for 15 years. Oh, yeah. So I have, you know, I don't know if any of you have seen wrestling, there's a lot of time in that flexion because it's more of a defensive position if someone's trying to attack you and just, you know, I'm just going to get back and back. And then after wrestling, I tried really hard to be good at CrossFit.
And because I'd spent so much time conditioning my spine into thoracic flexion, I just couldn't put heavy weights over my head as well. At least that might exceed. Yeah. It's important to have an excuse for any time.
You can't do it. You just have to find an excuse. You don't need to. Yeah, much had nothing to do with needing 150 pounds.
But so, and then after that, I found Spartan race, which I was much better suited for physically. But yeah, I mean, I spent a lot of time and a lot with the help of that mobile roller, which I actually created for myself. Okay. Okay.
Product plug. Let me pull it out of the box. So here, as I'm pulling out of the box, say more about how and why you created this. Yeah.
We're starting to figure out how to open the box. There we go. After wrestling. Yeah.
I was pretty much a mess in many different ways, but mainly physically. The most screaming, screaming the obvious issue was my neck. Just severe neck pain. But after 20 different professionals telling me it's actually not your neck.
It's actually your thoracic spine and your next trying to figure out what like how to move now because your thoracic spine is such a mess. I was like, okay, well, I need to fix my thoracic spine. And it was at the same time I was learning about self-mountain fashion release. And I was the guy with all of the phone rolling tools in the gym.
So whole bag, you know, I had the regular phone roller. I did the two tennis balls take together at the lower cost ball. It was like pretty firm phone ball about this bag. And I would just rotate between them all.
And finally I was like, I need one thing if it exists and it didn't exist. So I made that. Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun. For people not watching here, I'll let you describe this because I can think of a number of ways of describing it that are not politically correct.
So here I will let you hold and describe. And for people who are watching this will be screaming. We obviously, you know, you're looking at it. A huge reason it's got popular is because of all the political interactments that came with it.
I usually didn't say anything. I just smiled and said any publicity is going to be seen. I have no problem being politically correct, but it's more fun if someone else is doing it rather than just me. I mean, look, if I didn't, if I wanted to see you, this company, I'd be fired for an HR violation a couple of times a day.
So I just say things that, you know, it's probably not appropriate for work. I don't know what that means. I mean, actually different like their friends. Let's go back to the prototype and the first few models.
These balls were blue. So the jokes, the jokes were in. Okay. So to be clear, we have a stick with two balls on it that are, you know, like the size of a softball and there's more to it than that.
But they're red. And but yes, if they were too big, blue balls, I don't need to do the jokes. I think everyone else can do them pretty effortlessly. Yeah.
So here, all right. So I'm going to do it. The issue is you can use this as long as you want, but you never feel totally satisfied with that. If you can use this as much as you want, but you never felt totally satisfied when the balls were blue.
This is true. There's something missing. Okay. Okay.
So we have dense, resilient foam balls. Similar give as lacrosse ball, but a little bit more of that memory foam would best give. So two balls and they're kind of impaled by a stick, which is also wrapped in a foam. So these balls adjust out.
The initial idea came from the two tennis balls take together, which seems conceptually to be awesome, but press on my spine and also didn't get a lot of the locations on my body that I wanted. So I just wanted the function of being able to adjust the balls out. And then I played with the ball sizes and it seemed like in between a lacrosse ball and a softball was like a sweet spot that got like 95% of what we needed to do. So that's about the sizing of the balls just a little bit smaller than a softball and then just out in width.
So if you want them all the way together, that's great for getting the muscles right next to the spine. It's also great for putting your calf on, then you have either side of the gastrocnemius. So for those of you that don't know, the main muscle in your calf is the gastrocnemius and it's split into two. Similar concept deliberately.
That's the way they come. Yeah. Similar concept with the hamstring or if you want to be more efficient in getting two sides of the body, you can space the balls out. Now you sit your butt on there and you get both sides of the glutes.
You can do both sides of the hamstrings, all kinds of things. The stick is padded. So throwing your foot on there is really great for just getting the foot the first thing in the morning or you can hold the stick like this, put it behind you and not going to just sit here and just kind of manipulate it around or move it around with the handle. So that's the short and sweet, but the cool thing is is giving it to someone who's been a massage therapist for like 40 years and be like, show me all your creativity and they're all like people come up with stuff that even I haven't thought of.
Oh, that's great. So I will come back to that. So this was a bit of a tangent from stages and we went into neutral spine that led to stories about your back, your neck, et cetera. So where are we next in the stage development change?
Whatever the word is on the court. Again, Monday. I can't think of words. So your excuse is Monday.
My excuse is two kids. Oh, yeah. And I will say this Monday on any day of the week if I have to. Yeah.
So having two kids and being home with them all the time every day is just, it's all the way to the level of the world. And you don't look at the calendar until you have a medium of someone and let me make it and then you show up at their office on expectedly. Yeah. That's a great plan.
Yeah. Keep people in their toes. So after posture, posturing would be crawling. So crawling can look in a lot of, can start emerging in a lot of different ways.
My first son more did more like a army crawl at first. So that was fun to see because that wasn't something that I had really thought up at least when I was like exploring this process without having a kid, but then army crawling came in. And it's, yeah, just starting to look at like, contralateral coordination. That's just coordinating like your right hand with your left leg and vice versa and starting to engage some of those.
Bachel slings and different things that allow you to do kind of more full body dynamic movement patterns. And then you're, you're reinforcing that posture that you've developed and starting to engage your senses a lot more because now you're moving around. Again, so for adults, we're going back to the stage. What does that look like?
So that bird dog is a great segue because then you're being able to kind of balance and engage on arm and opposite leg. So to describe that here, I'll let you do it. So you're on hands and knees. Oh, by the way, I could have done this.
I actually could, but I'm letting you do it. You could have done it. Well, that could have done the description, but you know, this is one of those things where it's like, it could have sounded like I was handing it off to you because I didn't know how, but I could have done this. I'm just letting it know.
We don't have a little cartoon we can put in there. If you knew anything of me as a cartoon, but no, so back to your description. So arm and opposite leg are going to be coming off the ground at the same time in the same range. So on all fours.
Yeah. Yeah. Knees and toes on the ground, hands on the ground. So arms basically going up in the air to horizontal, you know, in parallel with the spine and then the opposite leg is basically doing the same at the same time.
And that's starting to develop certain muscles that are important for these contralateral movements, like arm and opposite leg. So now you're stabilizing on the arm and opposite leg that's on the ground. And so that's a really great exercise and then literally just getting people to initially shuffle. So as opposed to like a beast or a bear crawl where your knees are off the ground and you're then having to support yourself additionally more and more on the limbs that are touching with points that are touching versus getting people to coordinate right arm left leg sliding forward like a shuffle and then left arm right leg.
So they're almost just like shuffling, baby shuffling. And then once they can do that, knees are off the ground. You can try that with your knees like hovering off the ground or you can kind of stick your butt high into the air kind of like a bear crawl. Honestly, trying to get people to have fun with it is really more important to me than like being super strict about doing it perfectly.
But if we can start to see like a kind of a natural like that, like again, that contralateral pattern just kind of emerging or at least like a really balanced natural way to move around on hands and feet or hands and knees, that's the main thing we're looking at. And then with that starts, you know, the tissue is going to have to adapt, you know, oftentimes your toes are tucked under oftentimes the hips, the wrists, those types of things that are in new positions are having to stretch a little bit. And sometimes that's something we have to re-adapt to. So I have the sense that we're eventually going to get to standing what's in between here and there if anything.
Getting up, all right. Let's talk about getting up. So I mean, a huge, I tell people just spend more time in the ground, like period, because naturally, hopefully if you spend more time in the ground, you're getting up and down more. One would hope.
But sometimes you do have to teach people that part as well. But I believe there's some research actually done on your ability to get up and down off the ground. Once you lose that, your likelihood of early age mortality or yes, your time span, your lifespan from that point where you lose it goes down in dramatic. There are a couple.
One is your ability to get up and it's not even getting up and down. And without your hands, even a bigger one. And similarly, walking the speed. I don't know what the threshold is, but if you're walking at something slower than feeling the blanket on what it is, then the probability that you'll be dead within five years is through the roof.
And I would contend that a lot of that happens because people have been either wearing shoes for a long time and don't have much feedback from their feet to their brain and back. But then as they start to lose that, then people dumb doctors, not saying all doctors are dumb, but the dumb ones will put them in even bigger, thicker, stiffer shoes. And so they're just shuddling because they're trying to make sure they stay balanced and the irony is that makes them less balanced. So I think there's some research going on right now that happily they're using our shoes that might demonstrate an alternative that would save insurance companies billions of dollars and keep people from dying excessively prematurely.
So fingers crossed on that. Yeah, the third one that I definitely heard about was that. So for anyone, for anyone who is thinking about this whole getting up and down thing, especially with no hands, the other fun part, the other fun thing to do is see how many different ways you can do it. I love that.
Yeah. And that one's blast. And I don't, I'm sure if I want to give any hints about ways to explore that. The obvious one, you know, because our eyes are in front of our head, the obvious thing we do is always forward.
So let's just say if that's the obvious thing, what other directions can you explore to get up and down from? Do you want to get like really creative with it? Oh, yeah. Well, when I was playing with this, like I definitely practiced.
So I always tried to start from the same position. So which is what just seeded with my legs crossed. Okay. I mean, I can uncross from there, but rolling over my shoulder kind of like if you're familiar with who can he just the art of falling, which incorporates a lot of rolling kind of park or is largely based on who can he, but so kind of like doing a reverse who can he roll over my shoulder and then using that momentum to get up.
Another would be kind of doing like a gymnastic, taller body rock back than using that momentum forward. And from that one, you can get up like six different ways depending on how you plant your feet. You can do like a symmetrical squat. You can do like a, like lay your on the side of one leg.
You can even go into a cross leg and like spin up like spiral up. So there's all kinds of fun ways, but usually the easiest is to just lay one leg down on its side from that kind of momentum part and then the other leg, the other leg plants put flat and drives up kind of into like a lunge kind of like a modified lunge. So that's a fun one, you know, to just play around with to see how many different ways. Okay, here's one.
Yeah. So when I was somewhere where they came up this experiment and the thing that I always do is I try to look for the thing that no one's doing. So I remember what the thing was, but it was some class words like figure out how many ways you could do whatever. And I realized that no one had left the room.
So I just like literally walked out the room and did whatever it was. But in this one, so you're sitting down and then you kind of roll over. So your face, face towards the ground, put your head on the ground and then scoot your knees and your feet up. And so your heads on the ground for as long as you can and then roll back to squatting.
So it's just using your head as a third point of contact with no one had, I didn't see anyone using their heads on that one. Should we make a video later about all the ridiculous ways you would happen? Hey, they're not ridiculous. These are things that will keep you from dying.
We already have that. They are fun. It's entertaining. It's like I talk about this a lot.
I always think about any pattern that I have. How can I try something different? So if you put your pants on left, like first try right, like first, if you brush your teeth through the right hand, try using your left hand. There's some things that I'm again, HR violation, not allowed to say, but that's the gist.
I always like to see what things are habitual and then try to mess with that. Right. So we've gotten up or we get still getting up. We're in the process of getting up.
Another tangent that we can go on another time because I know we've limited time. Time is infinite. It's just now that I have kids is like almost all of my natural, not all, but the majority of my natural movement practice is legitimate play. And something never resonated with me when I would go to gyms that were like movement culture gyms.
I absolutely loved the style of movement, but so often they were so serious. We have to train these things. It's in serious face. There's so many teachers and modalities out there that touch up that teach amazing and beautiful movement, but they're so serious.
And I just like now that I have kids, like I try to be as ridiculous and silly and laughy when I'm doing my movement, but I'll do my flips, handstands, rolls, all of my monkey ape stuff with my kids. And that's truly the best way to do it now that I realize it. But taking movement too seriously is something that I did for way too long. And now I'm trying to have a blast with it.
I was at an event a couple years ago for footwear CEOs. And it was an all day event and by like foreign the afternoon, it was all like I do not to yell. Now, granted, we think what we do is life changing. But what they were doing, they were acting like this was going to save the world if they decided to take an L.A.T.L.
and make it a half an inch bigger or have some other color pattern that was like, you guys are taking yourself way too seriously. It happens in many places. I happily was at this event a couple weeks ago and maybe I'm just lucky I ended up at a table with people who did not take any of it at all seriously. And in fact, I'll give you this story.
At dinner at the end of the event, Tommy Hilfiger and his wife, Dee, did a little talk while we were having our salad. And it was all kind of silly and we were teasing a little just at our own table. And then I thought of the perfect question to ask and I didn't like to not come to me. But accidentally as I went to the bathroom, I bumped into Tommy Hilfiger and I said, hey, I got a question for you.
And if your answer is yes, I promise I won't tell anyone. And he goes, oh, what's that? I go, give me a slip into a pair of JC Penny's sweats and hoodie. He just goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and then ended that, was all we ille.
I guess just videotaping themselves squat. And describe how you want them to, what you hope to see, or what you would, if they're squatting well, or just squatting badly and have limited hip mobility. Well, videotape yourself from the front and the side. As you're like, skating down to about the level of your knees, oftentimes what you're gonna see is, you basically just start flexing your spine forward.
And if your hips don't have good enough internal rotation, your basically hips are gonna start to stop flexing, or they're gonna start deviating in a certain direction. Usually, let's say I guess that would be out if there's limited internal rotation. So in other words, if I can do a little translation to English for some people, if you want your hips to get a little past the level of your knees, you might start seeing that your knees start to cave in, your knees start to go out, you might feel some tension in your feet, wanting to go in or out, all of these. And by the way, when you start the squat, where do you want your feet to be?
For the test? Yeah, I believe it's parallel at shoulder width. I've got something I haven't done at all really. That's okay.
But that's an interesting thing to experiment with, to see what happens if they're in opposition, or if your feet are a little wider and pointed out, or even pointed in. So all of a sudden imagine your things that would, if you start to feel something where you can't get like, ass to the brass, then you know, you've got something going on in hip mobility. It's either gonna be hip or ankle. So very often people will feel like a literal like, hinge or like stop like locking sensation in their hips.
And they try to continue the squat by dropping like their head in their upper body. And so you'll see them start to go into spinal flexions that they're going lower into a squat, but their butt's not actually going lower. So people with ankle restriction, you'll see that their knees won't progress any further forward and then they kind of start sitting back. And similar stuff starts happening.
But usually you can tell that it's because their knees aren't able to go forward anymore without their heels coming off the ground. So from there, if you can't tell with it's your ankle or hips, there's other ways to kind of play around with that. You can do like ankle mobility tests. But long story short, hip mobility is something that a lot of people lose as they get older and it's really important for that kind of functional bit of getting up and down.
I'm hanging out with a sprinting coach who I really like who mostly deals with high school kids and college kids. And he has some hip mobility tests that many of them are failing. So you don't get that old to have this become problematic. Yeah.
And that's one of the, one of the things that people don't realize about sport that requires specific adaptation. Sometimes it's a beautiful sport, but people aren't getting taught how to then take care of their body after they have these very specific adaptations. Over decades, like a pitcher, a sprinter who's really refining and optimizing power through a very specific range of motion and not using more. And I think there's a lot more awareness to it now.
And I think a really good strength and conditioning coach is aware of that and can help kind of minimize the risk of injury. But that's something that one of many things I did not get taught as a high level athlete that when you're done, you're going to want to take care of your body and help return your body to these natural ways of moving, which I figured, luckily figured out a moment. There's a guy, another sprint coach that I know, his whole theory about the weight room is you're not using the weight room to get scrunter as a sprinter, using the weight room to get things back in place that you got all out of weight and sprinting. He's like, that's clever.
Yeah, that's one way to look at it. But I love that concept of creating extra range in space so that you don't hear limitations during your sport. OK, so we're standing up. We talked about mobility.
What was next? I haven't heard other people look at it this way, but I really like to look at the actual process of getting back down. And what I included in that is jumping off of things. Because very often we see kids jump off of things before jumping on.
Well, definitely, because as soon as you take jumping off of things, I have flashbacks to what I did where I could easily jump off of this thing. But if I could jump onto my 10-foot roof, that would have been miraculous. But I remember bringing the dirty laundry out, making a pile of dirty laundry, climbing onto the roof and jumping off the roof. Amazing.
And we were just talking about stuff like that this morning with my friends about what stuff we used to do as kids that kids don't really do anymore or that parents don't let their kids do. And I haven't come to any conclusions. It'll be kind of like we'll see what happens. But there's definitely some things that really allowed us to become resilient and robust that we did.
And there's other things I'm sure that were just down right where you're stupid. I used to climb the trees in my backyard. They were 70 feet high. And my parents did not approve.
So I didn't when they weren't home. So getting back down. So let's talk about the ways of doing that. Now you've got a baby.
We just got a dog a year ago. And my favorite thing is watching his usual way of getting down, which is just falling over. Because he's not very high off the ground. So he literally just tips over, which I think is hysterical.
So I had initially, speaking of falling over, initially theorized learning how to fall properly, was incorporating that and getting back down. I haven't yet seen kids really learn that gracefully yet. But that's something that I think is super valuable. And there's even a quote.
I don't know who said it. The most important thing in life is learning how to fall. And I think that's literally a metaphorically, right? The idea of learning how to fail, learning how to get back up after you fall, or fail in a way that's graceful.
Well, look, you know this wrestling, I know it from gymnastics is the only way you get better is doing it wrong thousands of times. Because you hone in on doing it better. But you also know on those rare times where something goes wrong, you've been there before. You know how to adjust or save yourself.
To the extent you can. More than my share of times where something went awry and I'm just 10 feet in the air going, I could die when this ends. Let's see what happens. So happily I did not as far as I can tell.
But a lot of it is just doing it wrong over and over and over. And for my gymnastics coach is doing it wrong and not going good. Because if you do that and some meat when you do it wrong, you'll make those same noises. And that's not good.
Practice how you want to compete, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So so so other than just going to fall and go around your side. What have we got?
Getting back down. You know, that's not one that I expanded a lot, but it was an interesting concept. Because I did notice that there's, you know, there are specific patterns of getting back down. But usually when training it, like making sure that the eccentric phase of like a lunge in a squat has the range of motion and the stability to get you all the way on the ground.
And ultimately you're looking at a lot of the same stuff as getting up. But there are also a lot of unique and fun ways to get down into fall. And I'm sure we could do a whole podcast on that. But that's one thing that I firmly believe that three getting kids the space and the safety, both physically and emotionally, to explore their bodies, they figure out all this stuff on their own.
But that is the one of all of them that I'm in addition to running, where I'm like a little bit of instruction or a little intervention can be really valuable. Again, you're going to be flashback after flashback for things I literally haven't thought about in decades. So I got really good at doing stunt falls, where it looked like I tripped on something and then just face planted. And so I met an event with a number of friends.
And I do one of these and it's like a convention. And I do one of these. And it just happened. There was like a security guy right in front of me.
And he's freaking out thing that I actually, because what I do, I fall on my face and then point back at the carpet and then if I tripped on that thing. And so he freaks out and immediately calls the guys running this event. And they're ready for me to sue the crap out of them, because this thing on the carpet that did not exist. And so I tried to calm him down and tell him, it's just a stunt fall.
And he really didn't get it. And then we thought, this is a bunch of marketers, we thought we should write a book called Soongro Rich. Just and it's all like all these fake ways of doing something like that. Not because we believe that you should sue people and get rich, but because we thought if we did it right, we could get Oprah by taking it seriously.
Which I think would have been really fun, but we never pulled it off. When satire gets taken seriously. Yeah, well, there was a guy, there's a guy, oh, Abel is this last name, I can remember his first name. Alan, maybe there's a documentary about him.
He did a whole thing. He created an organization that was all about putting clothes on animals, because they don't like being naked. And people took it totally seriously. And after like five years of this, he and the other people doing it, we can't keep this up.
I mean, there's no way out of this. So people completely believed it. So yeah, there's always people who believe. I'm probably gonna totally butcher this, but I know there was a couple guys that created almost satire research just to test the peer review process.
And they passed through peer review process. Complete gibberish. No, there's another one. There's two guys called the Yes Man.
And I don't know if there's the first thing, definitely not the first thing they did. One thing they did is they put up a fake World Health Organization website. And then they got invited to come to us talk because some of that was a real WOA website. So they did.
And it was all like the most ridiculous stuff ever. There's a couple of movies from the Yes Man. One of the first things they did is they took a whole bunch of Barbie dolls from a toy store. A whole bunch of talking Barbie dolls and talking GI Jodals.
And switched the voice boxes. So Barbie would say, what's wrong? And GI Jodals said, something goes shopping. I mean, they put them back on the shelf and people bought these.
It was just hysterical. So look up the Yes Man movie and other opportunity for that. All right, we're so. We got back down.
We got back down. So I incorporated jumping off of things as that specific development of taking on more impact in East Century load seems to really help develop in a certain way. And it's really awesome because I just watched my son make a quantum leap of only being able to jump off like low curves. And within like a span of a week now, he's jumping on the curves and he's jumping off of like three foot high rock.
And it's cool to see like both at an actual physical growth level and a developmental level kids make these quantum leaps. And then there was, I heard about this research done where this woman actually showed that kids very often don't grow, don't grow. And then they make these quantum leaps of like an inch in like a matter of a day or two or three. Yeah, to be clear that didn't happen to you or I.
What? All right. So I always tell people I was supposed to be between six to six four, but I lived in the time of low fat diet. My mom was all in on it.
I did gymnastics and that's something and I was definitely supposed to be like six, one, six. And you ended up what? And you ended up where? I don't like five, five and three, four.
Yeah, I was, you know, I looked at a spine like for recently and I've got a couple of spine things going on. I did just be five, six. Yes. That's never gonna happen again.
So yeah, I have no excuse for that. Well, I was just six week preemie. That'll be my excuse. And it's Monday.
So that's my other excuse for everything. Here we go. We're back on. Oh, on jumping though.
A thing to pay attention to is, you know, don't jump off something to bigger than you are. And then if you can videotape it, watch what happens in your knees when you land. So, because your knees cave in and then it good. And so that's the thing where, I just see what people are landing.
It's like, oh, don't do that. Start lower and pay attention. Like in a mirror, watch where your knees are going. You want them to track like parallel or slightly, depending what you're doing too.
Cause that one could be messy. Totally. So, I mean, this is where the kind of whole chronological thing kind of varies. So I definitely saw some of Liam's friends or friends of our sweet kids, like kids were jumping, some kids were jumping on stuff.
Like just after two, just blew my blowing. And then like Liam is three and a half and he just started jumping on stuff. But he developed other things much earlier. And he's doing your taxes.
He's doing, he's already better at doing taxes. So let's see, where are we standing? We did getting up and getting down. So now, kind of a, there's a whole pool of things that happen, like I said, out of chrono, no necessary chronological order, just picking things up.
Or we had to say walking and walking. We kind of jumped over balance. Yeah, yeah. And I always went back and forth with like balance.
Like what is balance? That's not as much of a motor pattern as it is like, a learning of the nervous system, how to equilibrate and adjust. But that's not one that I necessarily included, but it was all, it seemed to be essential for pretty much all of these things. The development of all of these things is learning how to balance.
So then walking and gate, many of you may know that a walking gate in a running gate is different. So walking and it's going to come before. And usually kids aren't going to start running. Very often you'll see kids skipping or doing some sort of a gallop thing when they're trying to run before they learn a proper running gate.
So we got walking and then around the similar time, we start seeing them running to pick things up off the ground. Well, at least up with some real weight substance. From standing position, Liam has his own little 9-pound kettle that way. She looked a little, that was super cute.
Halloween is however many months away. That's the thing I remember up picking stuff up, because the rule was if you could pick it up, you can take it. And so there's all these pictures of me, my sister, like going for stuff that is, you know, it looked like a strong man competition in miniature. Meaning if you can literally just, you can literally pull it.
Physically pick it up off the ground and hold it, then you can bring that one home. It was a blast. So we're talking about pumpkins? Yeah.
OK. Right. First, I thought you were talking about candy. I was like, you know, you couldn't carry it, then you couldn't eat it.
But no, it's picking up pumpkins. And that's when you start seeing how creative it can actually be. If you can pick it up, then you can have it with candy. Oh, you'll see some creative stuff.
Well, my creative thing for candy was, whenever there was always a house in someone's neighborhood where they said the person there is like a horrible witchy person, and they don't like kids or whatever it is, we're sitting down some dark alleyway and no one goes there. It's like, so that's where I went. And invariably, that's where you end up getting a bag full of full-size candy bars, no one showed up. So luckily, I recently read and maybe it's not up to date.
So I need to look, read again. But it is an urban legend or a myth that people used to put things in. Yeah, completely never happened. Yeah, absolutely never happened.
Although I had a joke. This was not for kids. It was an adult joke. It was like, I would put out a bag of razor blades and bag of apples saying it's a DIY project.
So. Amazing. So walking, running, gait, picking things up, parrying things of wheat or different, I guess, size and dimension. And then the last would be climbing up front of things.
We don't back up to the caring things. And again, to my looking for patterns, I noticed this one yesterday. So I had to, the track that I'd only go to had some football stuff going on. So I had to go to a different track where I had to park about 200 yards away.
And my bag had some extra stuff, my bag. And I realized I always carry my bag and my red shoulder. So I went, oh, look at that. So I put it on my left shoulder.
It's like, huh, it's a really interesting unusual feeling. So again, looking for those habits, those things that you've gotten used to without paying attention. It's an interesting thing to explore. It is.
It is an interesting to explore. I never really incorporated this into my training. Though very often as trainers, we tried so hard to be perfectly symmetrical. We're not going to be symmetrical beans.
But that hasn't really made its way into, or at least that I know of, into traditional fitness training of how to actually honor our actual asymmetries. Yeah, I can get close to the thing I was doing dumbbell stuff instead of barbell stuff. But even that's a different game. Yeah.
So all right. So now we're climbing on the things, which, of course, is again, for me, what led to jumping off of things. So like I said, to a degree, I mean, many kids start climbing up stuff before they start walking. Right.
My son started climbing up the stairs before he started walking. Some kids wait quite a while before climbing up on stuff. So that's one of those things that it's very dependent on the kid. But now my son is climbing on climbing walls and he's climbing up on vertical structures and different things at the playground, which is pretty fun to see and jumping off of stuff.
So he now touched on all of the major macro movement patterns that I theorized on. And the only other one, which I didn't include from a training, adults to get back to natural movement standpoint was like the throwing shopping motion, which I think is there is a ton of value in it. Now that I explore it more. But in a modern context, not as important for like survival, as much as it was, maybe when you had a sphere chopped down your own trees for to make houses out of it.
But it is, it does develop your body in a really unique and useful way, though. And again, this is one where I actually debate in my own mind about trying whichever one is your opposite side versus just doing the whatever side you prefer. Yes. Yeah.
And I haven't really spent a lot of time trying to throw left handed. I know a sprinter, if I try to start with the opposite leg forward, it's just not correct. I mean, not that I can't do it. It's just that I don't have the same kind of power speed.
Right. So I don't do it because it has no value to get an ambolxtrous in that perspective from that use case. But that's one that I'm kind of curious about. Yeah.
Especially like chopping motions. That's intriguing to me. Well, in general, like my question or curiosity with myself with asymmetries is like, am I just not as coordinated because I haven't used this side of my body as much? Or is this actually illuminating like a true physiological deficiency?
Like pressing overhead, right? If I can't actually get my onto vertical versus this one and that's why I have my left feel so much weaker, then I'm like, OK, that's illuminating something that might actually be valuable to improve upon versus like the carrying the bag, like carrying an awkward object where you just feel better doing it on the right. That might just be that like from a neurologic neuromuscular patterning thing, like your body just isn't used to it and you would quickly catch up on that side. Yeah.
I should have served her five years ago, six years ago. And so I couldn't use my dominant arm for a couple of months. And I was really surprised. Like I got really good at writing with my left hand.
And it's like, yeah, that's pretty interesting. Can't do it now. And now I just bought a jacket made in Europe. And so the zippers on the quote, wrong side.
And it took me a good three months to get comfortable doing that. Because it was just so it's surprising how the little angles make a difference in just zipping something up. And so it literally took me a while, which I thought was pretty funny. Europeans.
Yeah, I was putting the I call it the rocket launcher when you have rotator cup surgery, they all been put to that. So it's something that has like a huge pad that keeps your arm off the body. And so I got the pleasure of being in the rocket launcher. We actually, I mean, shoulder surgery is extremely common in wrestling.
So there's even a running joke of like, we all passed on the same like rocket launcher to each other as wrestlers on our college team. But yeah, same thing. I started to get really good at doing stuff with my left hand that I never even thought to do with my left before that. Again, HR violation that I'm not doing.
So, so we've gone through all these patterns. We've gone through ways that people can explore playing with them to see what you find. And I would probably bet that the one people at least want to do is probably the one most valuable. This is my hunch and or the one that you think are the worst at probably the best one to play with and just find a way to do it.
Anything else, we got to wrap this up badly, but anything else that we need to do to kind of bring this in for a landing? Well, one big one that I do a lot of and has gotten a lot of kind of publicity and awareness around is in the, in through the context of planning up things, the hanging piece. And I'm such a huge proponent of hanging and I actually like hanging from gymnastics rings the best. So I even just like the post of like one of my favorite life hacks right now is putting gymnastics rings outside and just hanging from them and twisting and just seeing how many different things you can do, not even from the context of working out, but just like hanging and getting in different positions.
So I go back over to your house. I got to say, I'm going to go hanging is just, it's just so good for you. Even if you don't like understand why it's just so good for you, all the tissues that it stretches and the things that it opens up for you and your grip strength is directly correlated with lifespan. They're just on and on.
But if I can just end with one thing is like, sorry, hanging from things, you know, go with your kid on to the playground and hang from the bars, do the monkey bars, hang from a tree, gymnastics rings, hang like it really. So Brian, if people want to get in touch with you, find out more about what you're doing, find out about your company and the products that you have. Please let them know how to do that. So the company is committed HP.com.
So two M's and two T's and committed. People get that wrong very often. So I'm going to say that C-O-M-M-I-T-T-E-D-H-P.com. This is the mobile roller.
This is the full size, the travel size, the just shorter in length with the balls are exactly the same. Phenomenal product, just like, seems here with me. It's one of those products. Once you get on it, you're like, wow, like I'm so glad I got on this thing.
Personally, I'm comfortable giving out my one of my emails. So here's my phone number. Bryn at committed HP.com is the one you know I'm comfortable putting out there. And yeah, so I'm transitioning into transformational life coaching is the main thing that I'm focusing on as well as sound therapy.
And I'm sure we could kick out on that. But happy to still explore the movement through the context of just making yourself the best version of you you can make. Beautiful. Well, thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. It's been a total pleasure. I mean, we've been trying to make this happen for a while.
So I'm glad we did buy you storming the office. So for everyone else, a thanks, B-Reach, Dr. Bryn. I'm sure you'll get value out of that.
And C, remember, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com to find previous episodes all the way as to engage with us. And if you have any requests or suggestions, anyone you think should be on the show, whatever floats your boat, anything you want to share with me, just drop me an email. Move, M-O-V-E at jointhemovementmovement.com. And most importantly, between now and whatever is next, go out, have fun, and live life feet first.