Episode 235: Be Bad at Many Things

Whatever activity you're doing, whether it's yoga or running or climbing or hiking or lifting, you want to be better at it, right? Maybe not. Maybe it'll be better if you've got bad at a lot of things. But we're going to be looking at that and much, much more on today's episode of the Movement Movement podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body typically starting with the feet first because those things are your foundation.

We're going to be debunking the mythology that propaganda sometimes the outright lies that people have told you about what it takes to run to walk the hike to dance to lift and do all the things you like to do and do that enjoyably, efficiently and effectively by using your body naturally. We call this movement movement because it's a movement about movement, most specifically, about natural movement again, about letting your body do what it's supposed to do. And it's a movement because it involves you. It's something that doesn't happen because I'm saying it or because I'm trying to push it's all the people who discover the value and benefits of natural movement who are making this happen creating this groundswell, this grassroots movement, trying to get people to move.

I think I said that more than a time. So if you want to be part of this, it's really easy. Go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. That's where you'll find previous episodes.

You'll find other different ways you can engage with us. You can find us of course where all you always find podcasts. And of course, do me a favor and spread the word in, share and review and give a thumbs up where that's appropriate and subscribe where that's appropriate and hit the bell on YouTube. Basically, if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe in all the ways that you can do that.

All right. So that's the intro. And now I want to introduce Mike Fitch who is here. And Mike, I don't like to tell to do intros four people.

So you get to tell people who the hell you are and why the hell you're here. Okay. Hey, I'm Mike Fitch. All right.

We're done. You may remember me from certain movies as hey, Steven. Good to see you, man. Thanks.

And by the way, before you even start about who you are, just to let people know about the timing of things right before we started, I got on and I said to Mike, hey, how was your weekend? Thinking that it was Monday, by the way, it is not Monday, today is Thursday, and which is even weird that I said how do you weekend? Because every day to me feels like a Saturday that I have to work. I don't know about you.

Yeah. And this is not the first time that we've tried this. Well, there is that we tried this last week. And then after suddenly we realized that zoom had crashed and in some way, nothing was getting recorded.

So we are this is our second time doing this, but like our fourth time trying to do this. I think even more, we've had so many hiccups along the way, just with either scheduling or the first time that we were supposed to actually do this, you had the Wi-Fi issue. So lines were down, they're trying to fix something. And so we had to reschedule and then our reschedule zoom crashed.

And then funny story, this morning, my Wi-Fi wasn't working. Oh man, it wasn't working until about an hour ago. And so I thought I was going to have to call you and say, we've got to do it again. I've got to reschedule again.

I had a situation like this where somebody else was like fifth times a charm. And they said, well, I'm taking this as a sign that we shouldn't do it. I said, that's cool. But remember, you're the one who painted the sign.

That's funny. This morning, I was thinking if I said that to you, you're going to have some comeback. I would not be able, I would not be able to think of something past it. So I'm glad that I wasn't the one that said that.

And this is someone else that previously said that you could work out. Or if I was going to do it more than this would be, you are the sign maker. So, I mean, look, everything's a sign if you want to really go that way. Yeah, for sure.

But anyways, I'm like, bitch, you created some program called animal flow, another program called the body weight athlete. And I get to teach people how to get on the floor and move around. So, before we jump into animal flow specific things, because this is the movement movement podcast, whenever I have someone on who is hip to movement and does movement things, I asked them this question. What movement do you share with our humans who are our audience?

I'm assuming they're humans, they're maybe others listening, but at least with the humans that would give them a taste of something to do and also maybe a little flavor of what you do with animal flow. Yeah, for sure. Everyone's got time at home right now. And so, while they're at home, I would like them to do two things.

And it's only going to take two minutes, although... Watch Tiger King. Oh, sorry, different. Watch as many times as possible.

But other than watch like the reunion show or whatever they've been doing since the original release. We haven't watched that one yet. Last night, we watched three identical strangers, which is a whole other completely unrelated thing. And it's only an hour and a half.

But anyway, those are my two things. So, while you're watching Tiger King or three identical strangers, while you're watching those high quality TV programs, set a timer for one minute. This is your goal. For one minute, start standing, try to get up and down from the floor as many different ways as possible.

For one minute, once the ringer goes off or the buzzer goes off, get on the floor and just crawl around. So, it doesn't matter how you do it. We're not talking about form technique. Just crawl around in as many directions as you can.

Try to do it for one minute. You can take rest if you can't do it for one minute because it can add up pretty quickly. And then you can just repeat that as many times as possible, especially if you've been sitting down watching Tiger King for hours. For however long that show is, get on the floor.

So, get up and down for one minute, then crawl around for one minute and then do that as many times as you can. There's an old song from like the mid 70s and they just pop through my head and they refrain to something like, open the door, get on the floor. Everybody do the dinosaur. So, open the door, get off the floor, get off the floor.

So, let's talk about what you said. I just want to break it down a little bit. As simple as that sounds, it's get up and down in as many different ways as possible. I love this.

I have a fondness for doing things in different ways. I cross my arms in both ways. Can you do that? I can try.

Hey, there we go. There it is. Now repeat. Good.

I think I have myself. I go through phases where I put on my pants with the other leg first. Easier to do with pants than underpants, by the way. I've gotten in the habit of putting on jackets the opposite way that I started doing it.

So, talk to me about this whole idea of as many ways as possible and you may want to get someone a pointer or two. I know like with the whole idea of barefoot running or natural running, there's some cues that you can give people that just accelerate the process of their creativity opening up. It's like if you tell them try and do X, Y, and Z, they would have discovered that on their own eventually. But by short sort of short cutting the process, it opens up more ideas.

Yeah. So, the whole concept behind that little drill is variety and variability. And so, essentially what we're trying to get people to do is break their traditional patterns. And so, you know, as human beings, we have a tendency to do going back to what your examples you were giving.

We take the path of least resistance because it's more efficient for our system. You know, if we learn to do something in a particular way, we tend to have, we tend to lean into doing that same thing the same way every single time. And especially when we're walking around, we're sitting down, we're going throughout our day, our variability in our overall motion. So, if we look at our spectrum of available motion, then we look at the amount of motion that we're actually getting in.

It's usually just a slice. Yeah. So, the whole concept is by us getting up and down in as many different ways as possible, we're adding variety into that pattern of how we would typically get up and down and variety our body thrives on. And so, we want to make these really resilient bodies.

And that means not only in how we experience them, but also how the tissue adapts and we could go down that road, but we're not going to yet. So, we'll just say the more that we can experience the different loads. When I say loads, that just basically means how gravity is affecting our system and as many different angles as possible. Then now we're starting to encourage an adaptation process, which is, again, being forced on by all these different angles versus us just always moving in the same planes.

So, that's the concept of getting up and down. And then, a tip that you can add on top of that is exactly what you said, which is if you have a tendency to always go down to a right kneeling position when you try to make your way into the floor and try doing it from the opposite side. So, start trying to identify maybe some of those patterns that you would typically lean on because they feel stronger or more coordinated. And the other thing is just allowing yourself to feel goofy and to not feel coordinated and to be exposed a little bit.

Be bad at just getting up and down. That's it, man. Be bad at it. Because again, that's where the learning process takes place.

And our bodies are adaptation machines. They love new challenges. They want to figure out how to be more efficient at new challenges, i.e. lazy at new challenges.

So, the more that we can go out and experience new stimulus, the better our body will hopefully adapt to these new challenges. I think there's probably a line between the interesting variety in something novel and the existing neural pathways that have us wanting to do the exact same thing over and over. Because I know that when you're trying to learn something like a really new movement pattern, something significantly different, especially using barefoot running as an example, many people say, oh, I tried it. It was really frustrating.

Let's reframe what that means. Frustrating with air quotes around it is your experience of trying to lay down new neural pathways, getting out of a groove and laying down neural pathways. And like you said about being bad is how you don't know how you said about learning. But what people forget is that the learning happens after a bout of discomfort and feeling awkward and all the rest.

And then while you're resting, you're getting these neural pathways to make it a little easier the next time and a little easier and a little easier. If people would reframe that frustration as learning, it would be a whole different thing. Yeah, you know, and that's the way our body adapts, right? So if the stressor, our body adapts to stress and load all the time, right?

And so it doesn't in a way by either becoming stronger, having a better cardiovascular system, becoming more resilient, becoming more efficient. But we have to give that stressor first. And the thing is if it's not enough, then our body is not stimulated to adapt. It's too much that we may break down or we may not be able to adapt to such a high stimulus.

So it has to be in that kind of sweet spot. And it's not going to be comfortable. You're not going to feel good when you're doing it because it's way outside of your comfort zone. And I think most people have a tendency to again, go towards the things that make them feel successful, feel comfortable, feel good.

Successor, they expect the discomfort. And so if I go into workout, I know that hopefully if I do my workout to the best of my ability, it's not going to feel awesome the entire time. I'm going to be in points or phases of discomfort. And that's part of the growth process.

Well, there's also again that balance between the discomfort part and the enjoyable, fun opening up thing that makes you want to do it again. Because obviously it's just painful. You're not going to do it. But there's definitely intermittent reinforcement part of, hey, it's good.

And hey, there's something that's a little tricky. That's a holy grail because we respond to intermittent reinforcement. That's why how Vegas works every now and then. Actually, my real joke, that's how child rearing works.

It's 23 hours a day, pulling your hair out in 60 minutes of heart opening. Hey, that's wonderful. And that's why we don't eat them. So you reminded me of something that I remember seeing in high school on TV.

It was like a PBS during one of the PBS fundraising things where they have someone who's teaching something and then selling a course. I don't remember who it was, what he was teaching or what he was selling. But his line was, he asked the audience, what's the fundamental purpose of thinking? And everyone came up with all these answers.

I don't know what they were. Because the fundamental purpose of thinking is to learn to stop thinking. Sorry, learn how to stop thinking. Can you even say it in English?

And people are like, what? Because thinking is a process of taking incoming information and developing a pattern of heuristic so that when you see something similar to that, again, you don't need to figure it out. It just goes right in and you crock it immediately. The problem is we're really good at coming up with these patterns, weird design painters.

We paint signs where they don't necessarily exist and we come up with these patterns that aren't necessarily effective or efficient. Because it's just the fastest and most efficient thing is to come up with a pattern. That doesn't have the right pattern is not necessarily the most efficient thing. And I had a sneaking suspicion that leads into what you do with animal flow.

Am I correct? Of course. Success. So talk about what animal flow is and how you got to it slash developed it.

Okay. Yeah. And just to be clear for anyone that's listening, when I say when I said discomfort earlier, I didn't mean pain. So I just want to make that clear distinction between the two.

So this is not always going to feel awesome. It's awkward. It might be a little bit awkward. So just the thing of cross your arms and then switch the other side, that's going to feel awkward.

It's not unpleasant. It's not painful. But it's definitely going to make your brain fritz a little bit or putting it on. If you put your jacket on right arm first and left arm behind you, then switching around is going to feel weird as crap for a while.

Yeah. And I think fritz is a really nice word. We'll just go with that one. So let's say make your brain fritz as much as possible all the time.

That's where the magic is. Some people argue themselves. Some people would argue that my fondness for brain frittzing is why my hair looks like this. It's just right in my brain.

Yeah. I think you're right. Yeah. I think we might be on to it.

Anyway, back to your frittzing them. Clearly, I have no frittzing. Fritzing and frittzing. Those are two.

They're very, very late. One was a cat and one is what soda does. That's an obscure set of references. Well, fizzy sodas easy.

Fritzing cat. A lot of people don't know fritts the cat. Are you too young to not know fritts the cat? No, I do know fritts the cat.

I was just trying to remember where fritts the cat is from. Was that a comic strip? Yes. Yes.

Yes. Okay. Back to animal flow. Okay.

So let me tell you how I got into animal flow or how what my journey was to get to animal flow, I should say. So I was, I began as a personal trainer in New York City when I was 19 years old and I did everything. So I really, I was getting something and really go all the way into it. So over the years that I was training, this was from the time I was 19 until I turned 30, I ran the gamut and at that point it was, you know, getting into Olympic lifting, getting into kettlebell training, getting into sports specific training.

I came a medical exercise specialist. So I worked with physios and physical therapists for pre-empost rehabilitation. And then I eventually found myself where I think most guys do who are in that world of personal training, I just wanted to get jacked and I want to lift really heavy things. And I was about, I don't know, maybe 30 pounds heavier than I am now, maybe 40 pounds and felt awful all the time.

And I want to say, I want to make this very clear. I'm not saying that being big and strong is bad at all. I'm just saying that there's some message intuitively in my system that kept speaking louder and louder, which was you are only honoring one of your abilities. And that's to be strong and to grow muscle, right?

And so I just turned 30 years old and I said, you know what, I'm going to listen to that message. And I'm just going to see what this takes me. So I decided to do the exact opposite of what I was doing and decided to go be really bad at a lot of things. So I decided to put down the weights 100% and just explore body weight movements disciplines.

And so give me an example of what you decided to do that. Give me an example of something that you were really bad at. Well, all of them. But I started with gymnastics, which was I was not only the oldest person in the class, but I was by far the worst person in the class.

I thought, well, man, if I'm this bad at this, maybe I can be bad at other things. So I went and I started break dancing, super bad at that, started parkour. I was bad at that. I got much better quickly.

But anyways, I was experiencing all these different things. And I was being very consistent with it and realizing, wow, there's so much here that my clients can certainly benefit from, but they're never going to go join an adult gymnastics class or join break dancing class. So what can I do to help bring some of these inspirations in? And with parkour, that was the first time I was introduced to animal locomotion as a way of warming up the system and preparing the body to move.

And then break dancing, I figured out what we call or experience, what we call movement window. So if my arms here, my legs here, that's an opportunity for me to move through that window that I've created. It's just a lot of inspiration. I thought, okay, well, how do I put this together in a way that my clients could enjoy it or could benefit from it?

And so I just started spending hours and hours and hours a day on the ground figuring out the puzzle of how can I take these inspirations and these things that have been so pivotal in my growth at that time. And so I just started creating a program and started creating a program around it that had a language that we use, had all these rules and different technique cues. And it was just such an interesting thing. It took me about three months to put the outline of the program together.

And I just started using it with my clients. And so I started integrating it to their one-on-one sessions. And then I also started offering classes for the other clients in the gym. And people really enjoyed it.

And I was like, wow, there's something here. And so then eventually created certification around it and put a DVD out first. The response was really good. And so then I was like, wow, I'll see how far I can go with this.

And so created certification around it and then spent years training other people to teach it. And we now have about 10,000 instructors globally. Holy smokes. That's awesome.

I want to come back to that because the whole idea of creating, we're talking about creating a movement, that what you just described is creating a movement. And I want to hear more about the management of that or the evolution of that. Because that's the kind of thing that most people will never do. And some people want to do and don't have to do.

But for both of those, it's interesting. I want to come back to just what animal flow is and what people experience from it, why they come to it, what they get from that. So let's jump in. It's not just trying to move like a donkey, whatever that would mean.

If you just say to someone, I do this thing called animal flow, what do they think that you're due? Well, wait, hold on. You tell me and then I'll tell you my guess. Sometimes we get so is that goat yoga?

I was going way past that. I was going for are you an animal urologist? Oh, no, I haven't gotten that yet. So well, I'm not supposed to help ferrets with kidney problems.

Next life, but goat yoga, that's good. And what do you say? Somebody asked me that. I would have to riff on that and just pretend the answer is yes.

Well, here's something funny. We so I thought it works out the first certification I taught here in Boulder. I taught that Colorado Athletic Club. And it happened to be the same weekend they were doing a special event that had a goat yoga session.

So imagine how confused the front desk must have been that day. That's brilliant. The fact that there is a thing called goat yoga is more it says more than the fact of goat yoga. Yes.

Yeah. Just one day someone thought it was going to happen and then it became an actual thing. That's crazy. Yeah.

So anyways, okay. So typically if someone asked me, what is animal flow? I'll say, all right, well, if you were to see someone practicing it, it would look like yoga meets break dancing meets modern dance or gymnastics. Again, people can associate very easily.

And so at least if you give them something visual, they can start to put together a concept of what this may look like. And in that way, whenever they see someone on the ground doing it, they're like, okay, yeah, I can conceptualize that. But I also then go on usually to tell them there is some animal components to it. So there are some animal locomotive patterns that we use, but it's not about finding your spirit animal.

It's not about acting like a donkey for an hour or roaring like a lion. It's really about the human animal. So it's really about improving the communication connection and function of the human animal. And one of the best ways that we found to do that, at least in animal flow, is by putting both hands and feet in contact with the ground.

And then having the participant figure out this movement to puzzle of these animal flow moves. And so that's one of the main underlying concepts is get people back inside their bodies, because with all the stimulus that we have externally, now, especially with tablets, phones, stress at work, the COVID, everything's going on, it's very easy for people to be thinking of everything else except for managing their own system. And most often people will go into the gym and then they think about moving objects from point A to point B, or I'm going to run from here to here. And so they're still putting their focus outside of their system.

But when you put someone on the floor, hands and feet in contact with the ground, and you ask them to move all of their limbs in different directions and in different ways, then now it's very, very tough at them to be thinking about the stress at work or what they're going to do when they get home, because they have to be where we're gently forcing them inside of their body and making them accountable for how they move their vessel and navigate it across the floor. And so that's... Interesting. I like it.

It reminds me, actually, when we were talking about the movement and suggestion you gave people the beginning thinking about, thanks for getting up and down a bunch of times crawling. The first thought I have, whenever I'm in some sort of group and there's some instruction for doing something, where my brain goes is, okay, how are most people going to do this? And what's the opposite of that? And so what immediately occurred to me is if I were crawling, which I can't do right now, the first thing I would do for an unusual way of crawling is try to crawl along a wall.

So I try and get vertical instead of just being hard. I start thinking about the vertical component and not just the horizontal component. And so... And there's a lot of that in parkour training.

And there's a lot of, again, crawling up and then crawling across railing or a thinner wall or whatever it might be. So yeah, so again, the inspiration certainly came from parkour, definitely. But to go back to those underlying concepts, the first one is reconnecting the system. The second one is filling in the deficits.

And so if we look at this kind of spectrum or line of physical attributes or abilities, if you have, let's say, a CrossFit athlete, and he or she is usually expressing their abilities to be strong, powerful, to have good endurance in the way that they train. If you look at a yoga practitioner, they're on this other side of the spectrum where they're more working on their mobility, flexibility, stability. And so we like to use animal flow as a bridge between those two sides of the spectrum. Because we believe that you can elicit all those responses for our physical attributes by using this modality.

And so if you have someone who's a CrossFit athlete, this will really allow them to use a dynamic approach to mobility, flexibility, stability. If you have someone who's already expressing those, this is a nice bridge into more strength, power, endurance, speed. And so it kills in the void, it fills in the deficits. And if you have someone who's not doing any workouts or hobbies, it's a nice introduction to exercising those attributes or those abilities.

I'm reminded of a friend of mine who is one of the smartest people that I know, and he was dating someone who kept complaining that he was just in his head. And on the one hand, I said to him, yeah, that's what you do. Shut up and leave her. On the other hand, she's telling you that you're wrong for being exactly what you're amazing at.

That's a problem. But at the same time, he was really curious about finding movement things that were different than what he'd done. He was a really accomplished lung distance runner, but he felt like that was very linear, literally, and not really getting his whole body doing what he wanted to do. So he was trying to find that bridge between his sort of intellectual strength, if you will, and his body, flexibility, mobility, etc.

And I don't know what he's doing now. I got a double check. But that's another version of things I imagine for people who just aren't familiar with what that thing is below their neck, that this might give him away in. Is he still with a girl?

No, no, happily that ended. And he found someone who loved him for being super, super bringing. Yeah, it was great. So yes, so to go with that, he invites people back to their body and lets them experience their body in all these different ways.

And so it really encourages them to be strong, to be stable, to have mobility, to express their ability to be powerful, and have good endurance, etc. And of course, coordination. So one thing I'm just going to prompt you for it, because I remembered it from the first time that we tried this, which was really the fourth time that we tried this conversation, talking to me about this way, it was ABCs or ABCs. Yes, so the ABCs of animal locomotion.

The ABCs of animal locomotion. That just sounds like a good kid's book, other than, except it would involve a train, it somehow transformed into a gorilla. I think we're on something here. That's ABCs of animal locomotives.

That was good. Yeah. So with the ABCs, and again, these are the traveling forms, we call them traveling forms. They're just one component of the overall program, but we do call them the ABCs of traveling forms.

And so A stands for eight. If you were to think about what that looks like, it just begins in like a deep squat. So if you're to see someone deep as squat, they can go, that's our beginning position for our eight travels. Our beast is like a, like almost like a baby crawl.

So it would be, it would look similar to a baby crawl except for the knees would be about an inch off the ground and the toes would be tucked under versus tops of the feet on the ground. And then also we have our C, which is our crab position. So crab would essentially, and most people would have done crab, maybe in gym class when they were younger, but essentially we were to look at the side of a crab. It would be, it would look like a capital letter M, except for the outside lines, just slightly angled.

And but would be off the ground, fingers pointing behind us. And so those three movements are the, what we call base positions in animal flow. You do anything upside down as far as inversions go or hanging inversions. I'm thinking as a former all American gymnast, one of the things that pops into my head on a not infrequent basis is man, I got to be upside down.

And I don't hear people doing that very often. And unless you're familiar with that experience, it wouldn't cross your mind for most people. Is that something that comes into animal flow? So hand balancing is a big part in animal flow.

So we do a lot of inversions and we typically will. So in gymnastics, you would typically do hollow body handstands, so vertical handstands. In animal flow, we typically use what would be tuck balances. So basically the knees are pulled towards the chest.

And that allows us to transition through the balance a lot easier versus going all the way up into a vertical handstand and coming down. Right. But we do even the beginning levels or even as someone's beginning their animal flow journey, we use variations of tuck balances to just get them comfortable with being inverted. So it doesn't mean they're trying to hit the tuck balance like right away, but we're just getting them comfortable with being upside down, which again is great for so many systems in their body.

Yeah, it always strikes me as a really interesting one that so few people have any experience being comfortable being upside down. Or when you look at people learning gymnastics, I don't know if this was your experience, when someone's learning to do like a standing back flip, the thing that they typically try to do is jump backwards, instead of really basically jumping up. And similarly, they do the exact opposite of their laying a front flip. They try to throw their body down instead of actually what you try to do, which is again, jump up.

And all you're the only thing that's different between a front flip and a back flip is just which direction your hips are going, because it's the hips that drive the flip, not everything else is basically vertical. But it's such an unusual thing. It's so counterintuitive. People's head if you want to do a back flip, you got to jump backwards front flip, you got to initiate the movement by dropping down.

And really what you want to do, the exact opposite. So same thing with getting comfortable being upside down. It's such a weird thing. Or the other thing I'm thinking about with early gymnastics training is doing the same motion in both directions, like a cartwheel where you put your right hand down, I said put your right hand down first and I have my left hand going down.

A cartwheel where you put your left hand down first and a cartwheel doing your right hand first. And one will feel, you know, normally awkward at first, but the other will feel impossible at first. And getting used to just doing things bi-directionally is another total brainfritzer. Yeah.

And you know, our human balance system is pretty much made up of three subsystems. And so we have our vestibular system, which you think about as like inner ear, you have your ocular system and so vision, and then we have our proprioceptive system. So our body's sense and awareness of where we are in space in relation to other objects. And it's the combination of those three subsystems which give us overall global, when I say global, I mean, full body balance.

And so by doing just what you're saying, again, like trying to go do a cartwheel with the opposite arm or even just trying to do a cartwheel first place, you've done one before. It really does challenge those systems. And again, it's just, if it's a variation you're not going to hurt yourself out, it's just enough stimulus to get a positive effect from, and hopefully you're starting to get some positive adaptation by doing things just outside of how you typically do them and challenging again, just challenging those systems. I'm also thinking about part of what you're saying, especially using the thing about crawling and babies.

It's fascinating that we've lost so many of those movement patterns that we do as babies and infants and toddlers. And like in a way, it seems like we think that we've evolved and gotten past those, we don't use those. I spend a lot of time sitting on the floor just mostly like I'll come over and work, I'll make some dinner or later, we'll make some dinner, although I do it more often. And we will have dinner often in front of a television because we have little time to chill out.

And so we want to get maximum chill and sometimes I'm done in miles eating in front of the TV. And I'll do that while sitting on the floor because I don't want to spill stuff on the couch, even though it's microfiber. And we'll be totally fine. And if I spill the carpet, wait, worse, regardless, that's what I do.

And I think about how I didn't growing up, never saw anyone sitting on the floor for any extended period of time. I never saw anyone crawling to get somewhere just for the fun of it. And it's all these developmental moves that we've just, we think it's below us or beneath us. And they're really fun.

Yeah. Yeah. And you hit an L on the head by saying these patterns were so important to us in our developmental stages. And whenever baby begins to learn how to roll over, press up, reptilian crawl, just stomach crawling, and then mammalian crawling, which is usually in quadrupedal, so knees and hands on the ground, and then learning how to stand holding something, get up and down.

Like all the squatting, all those things, they're huge parts of baby's developmental processes, right? But not only physically, so not only creating these muscular synergies that will be so beneficial when they actually begin to be bipedal upright human beings, but also there's a lot of stimulation happening in the brain as well. So just by doing these cross lateral patterns, we're stimulating and organizing neurons in the brain that will be important for cognitive processes, like comprehension, memory, all these things, binocular vision, looking off of the distance in the back of the hands, strengthening communication between left and right hemisphere of the brain. Like there's a lot of stuff going on there.

And like you said, as adults, we rarely return to some of these patterns that were so important to us in our developmental stages. And a couple of years back, we had a couple of guys who were animal flow fans, and they did a study where they took these participants through four weeks of animal flow. And for the study, they called it just quadrability movement. And they found that within four weeks, there were noticeable increases in markers of cognition and joint repositioning sense.

So yeah, so stimulating the brain again, increasing cognitive markers, and then also the repositioning sense basically just means their awareness of where they were in space. That's so interesting. There are a couple things that popped in my mind. Kurt Erickson at the University of Pittsburgh years ago, in fact, it was about 10 years ago when the study came out, he had done a long term study of elderly people and walking, and just found that the ones who walk the most retained and most brain matter in their brain.

And I asked him why he thought that was. And he said, I think a lot of it's just a stimulation from walking about the movement and what you're seeing and how you have to navigate. I said, boy, imagine what it would have been like if they'd been walking barefoot and got all that extra stimulation and had to really respond. He went, oh, yeah, that's good.

But it was a nine year study that cost a lot of money. And we didn't have time for that. But so the, but the thing that I keep thinking of, especially when I think about people in shoes where they're making it so their feet can't feel the ground. They're not stimulating all those nerve endings and the soles of their feet.

I think most people think of their brain as just this kind of passive thing that I don't know what they think it actually does. But back up to Kurt's study and the reason that aerobic exercise is so good is it's mostly about having your things circulating in your brain using your brain in some way creates increased blood flow creates increased activity. And so, and I just as soon as you start talking about that, I was thinking there's got to be it's not a kind of what I put this. When you don't stimulate your feet, your brain basically shuts down the part of it that is supposed to be getting that information because it's not getting information.

So it just kind of does something else barely if anything. When you're getting that stimulation, it's not just affecting that one part of your brain. It's affecting that part of your brain, which has a global impact. So feeling good is not just a thing that happens in a couple of neurons in your brain.

It's an overarching neurotransmitter process. It's a neurochemical phenomenon that is instigated by doing things that your body and brain like that feel good. And you said it, I was just imagining that just getting an overall stimulus must have some cognitive impact. It must be a must help in some way.

I love that there was an actual study that looked into that. That's super cool. Yeah, same here. And to go back to what you're saying about it because we always practice animal flow barefoot.

And one of the reasons for that is because of that sensory afferent information, that sensory feedback. And we have so many sensory receptors in our feet, in our hands and in our feet. Unfortunately, we talked earlier about the adaptation machine that is the body. If we turn those receptors off by putting on these super padded shoes and walking around, we're essentially putting our feet in sensory deprivation chambers.

And so that message is significantly turned down. Well, the difference is when you do get an isolation hand, or sensory deprivation chamber, it's relaxing and you hallucinate. But when you do that, you're with your feet, not the same. Well, not everyone relaxes in a deprivation chamber.

Oh, really? Yeah, I certainly know a couple of friends who tried float tanks and they freak out. Oh, man, not into it at all. It increased their anxiety temple.

Oh, man, it's one of my fantasies of having them. Yeah, my fantasy is to have a tank in the house or actually have a tank just outside the house because otherwise the entire house smells like Epsom salts. But oh, that's interesting. Anyway, yes, the point you were making before I interrupted with my sensory deprivation tank.

Yeah, so anyway, the same way that we can train our feet, the same way that we can train them to be more sensitive and send more information, it's very easy for us to train them out of sending information. I think it's actually probably easier to do that. It's easier to create yourself stupid. Excuse me that it is make yourself smart.

And the yeah, it's simple thing. It's user to lose it. That's the bottom line. That's the bottom line, right?

And that's how the body works. Yeah, if we don't use it. And I mentioned, I jokingly said that earlier, which is our body is lazy. And what I meant by that is not that we are lazy or that you are lazy or anyone else is lazy, but our body is always thriving, striving to be more efficient at any given task.

And so if you're not using a system, it can very easily start to turn down that system and or become more efficient at it. Same way you lose the ability to squat, right? Right. I'm going to suggest that your body is actually not trying to get more efficient find the most efficient way of doing something.

I think it's probably trying to figure out what to do to get to the goal. And if it finds something, it will latch onto that even if it's not the most efficient because it accomplished the goal. So this is the whole this is the dopaminergic process or the dopamine system where it's about learning and accomplishing goals. People think that it's all about reward, but it's the reward for accomplishing something that you've learned to do.

And so I'm just thinking of all these people who develop movement patterns. Actually, here's the exact thought that I had. It's someone who I know who thinks of himself as an accomplished bear for runner because he's able to run half marathons and marathons barefoot. But you look at his running form and it's like groucho marks moving faster.

It's not really running, but it's allowed him to accomplish the goal of being barefoot and covering this amount of distance. And it's and he learned it. He figured it out on his own. He didn't know, never taught him how to move this way.

It was just like I'm trying to figure out a way to be able to move barefoot and cover distance and found this crazy way of like basically walking fast like groucho. And to get him to learn to run was a Herculean task because he'd laid in not only the neural pathways of moving that way, but the idea that was really good that I had accomplished this, I've succeeded. And I imagine that when you're dealing with people in animal flow, part of what's happening is finding these patterns that they think may be effective or efficient. But when you look at them more carefully, it turned out to have detours in the road.

Sure. And when we're teaching the workshops or doing the certifications, we call those strategies. And so we say when we're observing someone and so let's say we set someone up, we're taking them through what we call our activation process. And we set up an activation in beast or craft.

So the B or the C of our ABCs. And while in that position, we start to look at them region by region. So maybe I'm just going to look at someone's shoulder blades and how they articulate with their upper spine or thoracic spine. And so we're looking at one, can they even find their shoulder blades?

Two, do they know when they're apart and do they know when they're together? And then start looking at what else is the body recruiting to try to make just that motion happen? And so you may see where someone does something really funny, like they start twitching their big toe when they try to do that, or they start shifting towards one arm when they try to do that. And again, I can't say, oh, that's your body strategy of recruiting the right psoas and your left external oblique.

All we're saying is, oh, that's interesting. Look at that. Look at the strategy that the body just came up with to complete that motor task or that goal that I've given them. And so we're just we're watching those strategies and seeing, okay, does that look like good fluid motion or does that look chunky?

Does that look like it's really hard for them to either access it or it looks very muscular, muscular driven? So it looks like I'm putting a lot of effort into making that happen. Or does it just look effortless and fluid? And so those looking for those strategies is really fun, man, because the body is so infinitely complex and cool and just observing those.

It's like, man, everybody really does have a different body. And each body is a storybook of the experiences they've had through a lifetime. Can you think of one where you saw someone doing something and the thought the pop through your head was, wow, I would have never thought about it in a million years. Sometimes people do weird things with their tongue or their eyes.

Oh, really? Yeah. So if you ask them, you know, you put them in a position, you ask them to lift, let's say they're left foot and they're right hand. And then you see them start to think really hard about it.

And then they're trying to think, first of all, what's my left? Am I right? And then during that process, you may see them start to anchor in somewhere. So maybe they start to move their jaw around, maybe like put their tongue out of the side of their mouth or they close one eye and they keep one open.

And then you ask them to do something else and then that changes. So like their strategies change, their anchors change. It's just a cool thing to watch. That's really interesting.

Yeah, I imagine one of the things that's fascinating to me is watching as people in any sport in particular, as they get better at it, how the motions do become more efficient and how there aren't those extra things like what you do with your tongue or whatever. Basically, if you were playing poker, it's a tell. And one of the things that I first clued me onto this was when I was doing gymnastics, our gymnastics coaches ex-wife, married a guy who was a professional boxer. And he used to come in and he was a really cool guy.

And he would do a thing. He'd say, I'm going to put a nickel on your head and I want you to try and keep me from grabbing the nickel. You can keep your hands, start your hands like right up by your face. Just I'm going to try and grab the nickel.

You just try to stop me. And you couldn't. And what's interesting is he wasn't moving quickly. He was doing two things.

He was moving super efficiently. There was nothing extraneous. And he wasn't telegraphing the movement in advance. So there wasn't some subtle movement that you would pick up unconsciously that told you the big movement was about to happen.

So because it only takes a quarter of a second for him to reach out and come back and it takes longer to process the visual information of the cue that he's about to do this move, those things didn't work together. And there was like no way you could block him. It was both frustrating as hell and fascinating. And I just love seeing as people get really like, I don't play golf, but you can spot a good golf swing from a bad golf swing, not perfectly.

But you can see when something looks just elegant, even if you don't, maybe something where it can be a little better or whatever. But I just love seeing that kind of, like you said before, where it just doesn't have any glitches. It's just like, man, just smooth. It's so wonderful to watch.

So that reminds me of two people that I've worked with over the years. One of them is the string coach for an NFL team. And I went in to work with some of his players. And the first thing he told me, he was like, look, these guys are elite athletes.

They're the top in their field. They're in the NFL. And he goes, it basically means they're really, really good at three patterns. The three things that they need to be in that position at their level.

And everything else, he's like, they fall apart. And again, that's a big generalization. But it was just funny to hear someone say these guys are considered the best and they're, it's because they're really good at three things. And of course, those things are going to be different.

Well, then the other thing, because I'm sorry, no, the second person knows that Dr. Spina, who has the system called functional range system, he's buddy mine. And he always says in his lectures, the better you get at sport, the worse you get at being human. I totally get it.

It's like the first time I walked into a cross-bed box, they're trying to sell me on. It's like, we're going to make you a better athlete. I said, yeah, I don't want to be a better athlete. They're like, what is I'm a competitive sprinter.

I want to get that much faster in 100 meters. I want to take one step off of my 100 meters. That's all I want to do. But we're going to make you a better athlete.

Don't care. All I'm trying to do is beat that guy, who's next to me, by that much. And I know that it's a weird goofy thing. But it's like, you know, when I'm working out for sprinting, there's a bunch of things that I probably could or should be doing to be a more well-rounded, whatever.

But at this time in my life, I don't care. I'm just trying to get it that little bit faster before I get old enough where it's just never coming back. And so, because that's what happens for sprinters. Like once you get past about 60 plus or minus, and I'm going to be 58 soon, it starts falling off a cliff.

And the senior game is talking to a bunch of 60-year-old people. This is when I just turned 50. And they said, yeah, it's really bad when you get over 60. At that point, I got a couple 80-year-olds walk up and went, yeah, you have no idea what you're talking about.

Just wait. So that story at the end of all guys, that raises the question that popped into my head. When people, if people are runners or they are engaged in some particular thing, what benefits have you seen animal flow delivering for them for the activities that they're trying to do other than just becoming a better human being? What are you seeing as the translation or the transference of what they get from animal flow into other things?

Yeah, that kind of goes back to some of those concepts I was talking about earlier, those two main concepts, which is one, making people more aware of how their body moves through space. And so just bringing more awareness into their system makes them more accountable, or we've seen, and go to make them more accountable for how they move through the rest of their life. And so how they move through their other sports, how they move through their other hobbies, and how they move through their houses, their cleaning, or taking care of their kids, or whatever it might be. So it's again, bringing the awareness back into their system.

There's a huge translation there. And then also filling in those gaps, if you have someone who is a long distance runner, they're, again, mostly linear in the way in which they run, and then also they're experiencing one clean emotion, and then also they're expressing their ability to have great endurance. And that's, again, this little sliver of the spectrum that they're expressing. And if we get them to express emotion or experience motion in different planes of motion, let's say not in just one direction, but all directions, and not just the joints that they work during running in that direction, but also working those same joints in every direction.

So now we're making not only their joints, but also their soft tissues, more pliable, more resilient, have a better communication with all the other joints, have better communication with the nervous system. And that's, that was the concept behind cross training, which is, you know, a lot of kids, if you are, if you're, sorry, if you're in the athletic training world, so let's say you're working for a high school team, you're working with a high school team, you're working with a college team, that's the big thing as of recently, which is, you know, stay away from specialization, and so make the kids do everything. So it's not just when they're in season four football, they do football, and then nothing else. It's right, they can do all the things so that they can build these resilient bodies that don't break down so quickly from over repetition.

Somebody, I remember seeing like an infundraffic somewhere where it was showing Olympic athletes from like the 30s through the 60s, and then beyond that, and in the early time in the Olympics, most of the athletes, they all looked about the same. They were five, 10-ish, 180-ish. They were well-rounded athletes of all sorts who just picked the thing that they specialized in for some reason, but they all looked similar, and then specialization kicked in. And now you have four foot two inch female gymnasts and seven foot 10-inch basketball players, where if there was a media where they'd hit the Olympic stadium, and then many thousands of years later, someone didn't archeological dig, they would assume it was a collection of different species.

It was some sort of weird meat market, but it definitely was not a collection of human beings that all came out of the same universe. So that's, I like that, that's a really big thing. I want to move on because we don't have a whole lot of time left, and I'm talking about something that I'm just curious about. I'm always fascinated with businesses that I've never done, that I can't even conceive what it would be like to do them.

And the idea of creating a program where you then train trainers to propagate the program is one that I've thought about. It's like fascinating, and probably something I will never do. So talking about what that was like, and I'm just curious what you were, when you realized you wanted to do that, and I'm assuming you hadn't done it before, what happened in your brain, like what were you thinking, and then the technical part of doing it? Yeah.

So, you know, once we have put out our instructional DVD and we got such a great response from it, I realized that if I want to reach more people, one of the best ways to reach more people is to reach the people who affect those people. And I kept thinking, all right, well, yes, we can continue to go, and I hate to use this term, but direct to consumer, we can think about the people who are at home that might want to use this or what they call it, not Fit Pro's. Anyways, people who want to educate themselves on different training strategies, but they're not necessarily professionals. So, that was one idea from the beginning, but then I realized, you know what, I'm having so much fun teaching this.

The classes are going really well. I'm integrating into my personal training sessions, and people are loving it. Why not go after the people that affect more people? And so, we started really gearing towards personal trainers, chiropractors, body workers, anyone who was in the field of health and wellness.

And you know, the first, when we first put up the workshop, I think I had one person at the first workshop. And then after that, it just continued to build and build, and then we had people that would actually fly in to take the workshop, which was super weird for me at the time. And then I think we did it on the board. Wait, I want to pause there.

When you have the idea, okay, I want to build this out, and then one person shows up, I'm imagining it's okay, all right, that's not what I was hoping for. And then at the flip side, when people start flying in, it's okay, now I feel a certain sense of responsibility that I didn't know I was going to feel. That's what I'm imagining. Was anything like that?

Well, I can tell you, I was stoked to have one person. You're sure? I was like, yes, one person. At the time, we weren't spending anything.

I mean, we were, you know, this was 10 years ago. So 10 years ago, as far as the digital age goes, that's a long time ago. And at the time, there was only, there's basically YouTube and Facebook was being used, but wasn't really super popular yet, at least in my experience. So it wasn't Instagram.

I don't even think Twitter had come out at that point. And so we were mostly working with YouTube. And so we were putting out these different videos and put out the animal flow video. And so I was still trying to figure out what is this digital space that we're starting to play in and then looking at, wow, there's so many possibilities of reaching different people.

And just to have one person was great. And then after that, we started getting a little bit smarter with how we were marketing the workshops and the DVDs. And Karen was a big part of that who you know. So Karen's my business partner.

And Karen is crazy smart and all the things that I'm super stupid at. So it makes a good team. And I think everyone needs that person. Everyone needs to Karen.

Oh, if it weren't married to Lena, she wouldn't have happened because she is the operations finance trying to figure out everything that could possibly go wrong and make sure that doesn't happen person. And I'm the vision product creative marketing guy who's always trying to think of the million things that we could do next. And so like my job is to build a car hers is to make sure there's gas and tires. Yeah, same thing.

Same exact thing. So if it weren't for her, I certainly would not be where I am now with animal flow. That's for sure. But so yes, she could and luckily she had, she has a doctorate in sociology.

So she worked for a nonprofit Miami for many, many years, but also she had a degree in film, which that was crucial for us at the time because we could shoot all of our own content. We could shoot our own videos. We could put out videos that we produced, we edited, et cetera. So it's it's a cost is very low, the cost is very low.

And we always had a grassroots approach trying to figure out ways that we can reach more people without putting a lot of money into advertising because we just didn't have a lot of money to drop it advertising at the time. We both had regular jobs. So she had the job at the nonprofit and then I was still working as a session trainer. So as we began to build the company animal flow and at the time we were working, we also had a company called Global Body with Training.

We, you know, it was just figured out play business. Like we always said, we were playing business. We were just stumbling along this path of, you know, let's just figure it out as we go work with people that we like. That was our number one rule don't work with shitty people.

And we just started to see it snowball. And then at one point, we, so I used to work for a company called Equinox Gems. So, so Equinox, I give them a lot of credit for my education as a trainer and they really push that they really put a lot of resources into educating their trainers and making sure that they go through different certifications. And so this is many years later after I left Equinox and I went back to them with animal flow and we ended up working with them exclusively for a year.

So they gave me the opportunity to go around to all the Equinox Gems and teach the program. And so essentially what they gave me the opportunity to do is to learn my own program and learn how to become a better teacher. Love it. Yeah, so I spent a year doing a couple workshops a week for almost an entire year and just working with trainers and figuring out how to become more effective with the way that I coached.

I communicated to them and then figured out how to help them take these tools and apply them right away with their clients out. At what point did you find yourself walking around the house or when no one had shown up yet for the workshop, I don't mean because it was either before or after an actual workshop session that you did you find yourself going, huh, check this out. This is an actual thing. Man, I still do that.

Yeah, yeah. I'm just like, what was the first time where you just really took a moment and went, holy crap. You know, when it was, I had seen someone post a video of them performing of themselves performing animal flow in Australia. And they're like on a beach in Australia, in Sydney, in Bondi, where I was at in my young 20s.

But anyways, it was just to see someone do this thing that you put together and see them do it on the other side of the world. And just think about all those connections are like, what had to happen for that person to get the video? And then once they got it, they actually took time to learn this methodology and then apply it and then video it and then I was like, wow, this, yeah, this is a real thing. We can affect people.

I had something I've had a number of these, but I had one just recently and it was like COVID or labor thing. I went into Whole Foods very quickly just to take off some bread and go. And there was a, and I was wearing a zero shoe t-shirt and there's a couple standing at the same counter. I was six feet away.

And the woman turns to me and says, Oh, do you work for zero shoes? And I didn't give the most accurate answer I could have. I just said, in fact, I do. She goes, Oh my God, they're my favorite shoes.

And she goes on and on about how much she loves her zero shoes. And she had no idea who I was. And I love it. Because my face has become so identified with a brand late and I put ourselves out there.

And like you, we started this, I was just making videos putting them on YouTube about how to make barefoot sandals and how to run, et cetera. So when someone who's come to it, who has no relationship at all to me, it makes me extremely happy. Man, same here. And sometimes, if same thing, if I'm wearing like a shirt and someone's like, Oh, I like animal floor, I've done animal floor, I will quite often not tell them that I created it or whatever.

That's great. If you try to class yet or my fantasy is to be at a dinner party sometime in the future and have someone come up to me and tell me how he helps start zero shoes and it was someone who had nothing to do with it. That's my fantasy. And then just let them play with it.

Go, Oh, cool. Tell me more about that. Yeah. How'd you do that?

Where'd you get the original idea? Kind of so neat. Where are some other people involved in the early days? I don't remember their names.

Nope, just you. I met so many people who claimed to be the first investors in Crocs. And I know who the first investors in Crocs were. And it was not these people.

And so I basically I want to have that happen at some point. I think that'd be a lot of fun. Great. Well, wrapping things up, if people want to experience this and I imagine they will and recommend that they do, how would you recommend that they take that first animal-ish step into animal flow?

I think the best way would be to go to www.animalflow.com. And from there, they can figure out what the experiences that they want. So from there, they can find out about our on-demand channels. We do have an on-demand channel and corresponding app where you can do the classes, do tutorials, do flows.

We have all of our live workshops. They're mostly for fitness professionals. However, we do allow people who want to come in and just learn more about animal flow. We're doing those now streaming, of course, because live workshops are not a thing at the moment.

So we'll have our first one this weekend, which I'm looking forward to. And then we have there, they can find our Instagram or they can find more ways or options that they can maybe work with one of our instructors remotely. So yeah, I think www.animalflow.com would be the best way. Not surprising in this.com world we live in.

Cool. Well, Mike, this has been not surprisingly a total pleasure because it is every time we chat. And so I do hope people find out more and let me know what happens. And of course, I still have some serious issues sitting for you in boxes right back there that when we can get within six feet of each other, you're going to be getting your hands on and your feet in.

I can't wait to get them in. Yeah, we'll make that happen. And in the interim, once again, thank you. Let me just do a quick sign off for everyone else.

Thank you for being here. Again, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com for previous episodes to find out all the different ways that you can engage with this content, find our Facebook page, our Instagram, et cetera, et cetera. And like I said, we're creating a movement movement. You are the people who make the movement move.

So if you want to be part of the tribe, please do subscribe. If you have any questions, drop me an email. Move at jointhemovementmovement.com or any recommendations anyone you think should be on the show, whatever it is that you want to do just drop me a line. I'm happy to respond.

And I'm usually pretty fast doing that as well. That's all I can think of. So until next time, have fun, be well, live life, feet first.