Why We Need 'Natural' Movement

[dust]

I think some of you will appreciate this, and maybe enjoy his other videos. He's not a Taoist or anything, but does have a background in various martial arts and parkour and etc, and I've found some of his more recent instructional videos entertaining and useful.

 

 

 

Disclaimer: Now, I'm not a big fan of the word 'natural', because in the widest sense of the word, everything is natural (even artificial things are made by human desire or instinct, which is itself 'natural'..); and at the same time, we can use the word 'unnatural' to describe things we simply don't like, which is rarely helpful ("___ is unnatural, so we should fight against it!") or vice versa ("___ is totally natural, so it's completely safe!"). But Rafe likes to use the term 'natural movement', and we can see why. He's referring to a more ancient/primal/wild lifestyle pattern. I think the points he makes are valid either way.

 

Perhaps this could turn into a new discussion about general human movement.

[Marblehead]

So maybe we all should move back into the trees before they are all cut down?

 

[dust]

I'd love to live in a tree. Have you seen that show with the professional treehouse builders? I saw one where they put a music recording studio up in a tree.. very impressive..

 

Anyway, I know you're joking, but in all seriousness.. I don't think going back to more primal human movement patterns requires living in the trees.. it's more about striking a balance between modern and primal lifestyles..

[Marblehead]

1 hour ago, dust said:

I'd love to live in a tree. Have you seen that show with the professional treehouse builders? I saw one where they put a music recording studio up in a tree.. very impressive..

I've watched small segments of it.  And yes, Those guys do some beautiful work.

 

1 hour ago, dust said:

 

Anyway, I know you're joking, but in all seriousness.. I don't think going back to more primal human movement patterns requires living in the trees.. it's more about striking a balance between modern and primal lifestyles..

Agree.  We just need to return to simpler values.  Consumerism is destroying humanity.

 

[CloudHands]

For the story Parkour was invented by the Yamakasi team in the city I grew up, in 1997 I was 11. Then it became a movie, then parkour, a worldwide phenomena.

 

 

 

Original Context. I won't blame you if you shut the sound.

[silent thunder]

Potent stuff!  Thanks for sharing.

And what a great idea Marbles!.. If I could, I'd live in a tree in a heartbeat.  I spent many of my best hours getting strong in trees, then napping in their shade.  Amazing beings all together.

 

Natural movement seems to be healing and strengthening simultaneously to me.  This type of movement engages the full being and encompasses true presence.  Mind and Spirit while inseparable from body, are not always engaged actively when we train indoors or move in familiar safe paths. 

 

With outdoor, natural movement the mind and spirit are naturally engaged with the body... and the body moves in ways not easily experienced in the dojo, or the gym.  Flexes, extensions, rotations, balancing while climbing a tree, or bolder hopping are movements not easily replicated in a gym or with a partner on a mat.

 

My inner teacher taught me early in life that to train in a (dojo) room with people is good.  Is useful.  Builds skill.

To train moving through nature was supreme.  Is transcendent.

 

As the world is not a square box with a flat floor, my inner teacher said often and loudly to me.  Get outside!  Engage!

Engage the whole being.  Move in nature.

 

So in the 80's I was heading out to the river lines to train, I called it bolder hopping and tree skimming, parkour wasn't in the lexicon yet.  What it really was, was a lot of fun and great training at the same time.  I suffered from some boredom in square rooms.   I'd often coax partners to come with me by asking if they wanted to 'go for a hike'.  They either got hooked or never showed up again.

 

So rather than endless forms, I opted to spend my out of school training hours intensively climbing trees, weaving in and throughout the boughs and limbs of trees at speed over and over again to exhaustion.  Pick a branch, get a running start, kick up and pull yourself into the tree and climb to the top as quickly as you are able.  Weave your way through and down, leap and roll out of the tree.  Reset and have at it again, but take a new route to the top and back.   Above all, be engaged and move with intensity and surety... engage the entire being, affect true motion and as a result use the full range of strength and flexibility inherent in a human form.

 

There is an entirely different matrix engaged when climbing a tree than standing on the floor of a dojo mat repeating steps.  This is not a knock on dojo mats as I love them and they are wonderful and necessary.  But the scope of movement on a flat floor in a room with no wind or sky or animals, is not equal to running through a tree line engaging bolders and animals and wind.

 

The mind must be engaged when climbing a tree as it is not when standing on a floor.  Mindfulness as one is constantly assessing, adapting and responding to the flow along the line of action, or falling if not.

 

That evolved into Bolder Hopping, which is where we'd run off trail through the bolders, cliffs and treelines of the river with similar intent.  Total presence.  Full engagement.  Natural movement.   The supreme was when the body was forgotten and there was just the flow, just awareness and movement, condition and response... over, around, under or through the next condition in the trail.

 

I remember this particular stretch along the St Croix river where we would train by running parkour along the cliffs/bolders and through the trees that line the river there at the Wisconsin/Minnesota border, then leap from a 15 meter cliff into the river and swim down stream to our 'starting line'.  We'd do that again and again until it was time to head home for dinner.

[dust]

56 minutes ago, CloudHands said:

For the story Parkour was invented by the Yamakasi team in the city I grew up, in 1997 I was 11. Then it became a movie, then parkour, a worldwide phenomena.

 

Yah. I am not much of a 'traceur', but I have always enjoyed watching parkour, and the most beautiful examples are from the old videos of the Yamakasi (imo, especially David Belle..)

 

1 minute ago, silent thunder said:

So rather than endless forms, I opted to spend my out of school training hours intensively climbing trees, weaving in and throughout the boughs and limbs of trees at speed over and over again to exhaustion.  Pick a branch, get a running start, kick up and pull yourself into the tree and climb to the top as quickly as you are able.  Weave your way through and down, leap and roll out of the tree.  Reset and have at it again, but take a new route to the top and back.   Above all, be engaged and move with intensity and surety... engage the entire being, affect true motion and as a result use the full range of strength and flexibility inherent in a human form.

...

That evolved into Bolder Hopping, which is where we'd run off trail through the bolders, cliffs and treelines of the river with similar intent.  Total presence.  Full engagement.  Natural movement.   The supreme was when the body was forgotten and there was just the flow, just awareness and movement, condition and response... over, around, under or through the next condition in the trail.

 

I remember this particular stretch along the St Croix river where we would train by running parkour along the cliffs/bolders and through the trees that line the river there at the Wisconsin/Minnesota border, then leap from a 15 meter cliff into the river and swim down stream to our 'starting line'.  We'd do that again and again until it was time to head home for dinner.

 

Wow

 

I remember playing in the woods, though not quite like that. I was always too afraid to play quite like you describe.. bad with heights.

 

Where I grew up (as with many of us in the 20th Century) parks and playgrounds were more accessible. England has some beautiful country, but your American expanses are something to envy, I think. The woods near where I grew up total only a few acres, not continuous; and any large forests here are generally National Parks, which means few live in them and get to experience them so well. 65% of land here is farms, and only about 10% woodland (more in Wales and Scotland). Perhaps someone has different experience, but as I see it, the majority of English kids just don't have the opportunity to get out right into the wild every day and play..

 

On the other hand, like I said, we do have parks and playgrounds, and there is woodland if you go look for it. I had some good times playing here and there as a kid. And though I do see kids in the parks now too, I saw a very notable increase in kids outside when Pokemon Go was released...

[dust]

Oh.. with regard to playgrounds,

 

https://www.aaastateofplay.com/history-of-playgrounds/

 

The history is quite interesting. It's not something I'd considered until recently.. but of course, they started somewhere! and the modern versions are something we probably want to look at with regard to inspiring play and promoting more primal human movement patterns, especially in city-dwelling kids. Are they good enough these days? Too safe? Too small? Too few?

[silent thunder]

Yea Minnesota is pretty magical, if you don't mind massive clouds of flies and mosquitoes :).  The Pine forests in MN were just out the back door of my Dad's place.  The Midwest in general is still covered in much forest we are blessed.  I'm always struck when I go back 'home' and take my first breaths coming out of the plane.  It's amazing all the moisture and the quality of the air.  I can taste the trees in the air.  

 

In Brooklyn the forests were an hour or more upstate by train, but Parkour has skillfully proven that cities are rife with structures useful for natural movement.  For the seven years I lived there, I used Prospect Park and a few other city features for that training then.  The park was amazing and had a myriad of trees for skimming and some of the building features, pagodas, stepped terraces in amphiteaters, foot bridges were great for training natural movements.

 

Golden years for sure.

 

 

 

 

[silent thunder]

7 minutes ago, dust said:

Oh.. with regard to playgrounds,

 

https://www.aaastateofplay.com/history-of-playgrounds/

 

The history is quite interesting. It's not something I'd considered until recently.. but of course, they started somewhere! and the modern versions are something we probably want to look at with regard to inspiring play and promoting more primal human movement patterns, especially in city-dwelling kids. Are they good enough these days? Too safe? Too small? Too few?

Interesting, I hadn't ever thought of the first playground.  I sure love em though.  My son being 11 I've spent the last years really relishing them.  Some of the features now are incredible too.  I recall an unplanned stop we had to make, to go explore a playground we were driving past... it had a full viking ship surrounded by forts, all made of wood, painted, incredible.  I had as much fun as my son.

 

We have three parks within a short walk/bike ride from our place and each have some cool features.  One has three full on rock climbing walls, another has a three story rocket ship, and the third features a series of rope bridges and a water fall.   Just incredible for a city kid to get some good climbing, tumbling fun.

 

In the Southwest they've taken to making many of the features out of plastics which don't heat up so much in the summer sun, which helps a bit, otherwise for the hot months these things are only useful at night.

 

I sure appreciate how they've developed the new soft mulched recycled rubber material they ground the places with, to protect tiny noggins and bodies from damage when inevitably tumbling.

[dust]

It's nice to hear positive words about modern playgrounds. A few articles and online comments I've read recently have just looked back with nostalgia to the massive (dangerous!) structures of the early 1900s and asked why everything is so safe these days.

 

Interesting also to note your parkour background. What about gymnastics?

[silent thunder]

My son studies gymnastics, I never did. 

 

He has no interest in kung fu or fighting forms at this time, so rather than push that, I enrolled him in gymnastics for flexibility and strength training instead. 

 

Their facility is amazing.  Spring boards launching into foam ball pits, wall to wall padded floors, multiple trampolines, rope swings tethered to their twenty foot ceilings.  Stackable foam blocks for who knows what purpose... 

 

Every Friday night, enrolled students can bring a friend and go hang out in the gym for a few hours and just play on the equipment as they want, no study or instructor drills.

 

 

 

 

[dust]

Yeah. Gymnastics is one of the things I wish I'd pursued as a kid. Been thinking about going to classes now as an adult -- the idea of foam pits and trampolines is hard to ignore...

 

Makes me wonder, though, about the idea of 'natural' movement. Pretty confident that gymnastics isn't something our ancient ancestors practiced on the plains or in the trees (planching, backflips, handstands, parallel bars..?) so wouldn't call it 'natural' in that sense, but it's obviously a set of very fun tools to have, and most of it can be applied to other scenarios and activities.

[dust]

This MovNat playlist is pretty cool. Lots of short videos with isolated movement patterns, which could serve as suggestions for extra 'workout' accessories or be used as a basis for building a fuller movement practice.

 

 

Edited September 15, 2017 by dust