week 5

GET UP STAND UP

Since you have already spent the past week challenging yourself to find 10 different ways to sit and stand throughout your day...you have right? This weeks resolution/challenge/life changer should slot right in nicely.

When you sit on the floor (or in a chair or on someones lap) try and sit down and stand up without using your hands. This simple but surprisingly tricky task will serve to help maintain mobility and flexibility in several joints in the body (hips, spine, ankles, etc.) over time.

There are many many many ways to practice transitioning from floor/chair/lap to standing and back down again and I would recommend taking a look at some of the MovNat challenges for inspiration.

NO HANDS to stand and sit is a golden rule in our house....although my husband to be is a rebel and rule breaker so I will be making sure he gets this memo too.

Thanks to Dr Andreo Spina for the inspiration and to Bob Marley for EVERYTHING. 

MovNat

"We’re a mess. So the question has to be why, and the simple answer is that we live in a time and a place where we no longer need to use our bodies in order to make sure we are fed, clothed, and sheltered. Instead we live in a time and a place where we earn money to buy what we need, work primarily in static positions (hey look! I’m doing it right now!), and segregate our movement only to the small portion of time we may spend exercising. This lack of natural human movement is causing a plague of chronic pain and physical dysfunction, as well as contributing hugely to the disease processes of contemporary. culture. In short: it’s a big problem."

-- Brooke Thomas (BreakingMuscle)

Founder of MovNat, Erwan Le Corre's  passion for re-establishing healthy movement habits and building natural strength based on our innate human abilities is contagious. Or at least it is for me. After reading multiple interviews and following along with the workouts that come on a weekly newsletter (sign-up here), I decided a MovNat workshop is on my list of things to do for 2015! 

The following is a list of the basic principles and skills and if that floats your boat then I would recommend getting a copy of the Exploring Functional Movement DVD Erwan has created with Gray Cook of Functional Movement Systems.

The 10 principles that underlie the MovNat approach:

1. 
   Evolutionary
2. Instinctual
3. Universal
4. Practical
5. Vital
6. Unspecialized
7. Efficient
8. Adaptive
9. Cooperative
10. Environmental

The 13 movement skills are:

1. Running
2. Balancing
3. Jumping
4. Crawling and Rolling
5. Climbing
6. Lifting
7. Carrying
8. Catching
9. Walking
10. Swimming
11. Throwing
12. Grappling
13. Striking

I think I'm only regularly ticking 9 of those boxes so far...

Exploring functional movement

Just added this DVD from Erwan Le Corre (founder of MovNat) and Gray Cook (founder of Functional Movement Systems and author of Movement) to my ever growing online shopping basket because of this post from Brooke Thomas.

"We’re a mess. So the question has to be why, and the simple answer is that we live in a time and a place where we no longer need to use our bodies in order to make sure we are fed, clothed, and sheltered. Instead we live in a time and a place where we earn money to buy what we need, work primarily in static positions (hey look! I’m doing it right now!), and segregate our movement only to the small portion of time we may spend exercising. This lack of natural human movement is causing a plague of chronic pain and physical dysfunction, as well as contributing hugely to the disease processes of contemporary. culture. In short: it’s a big problem."

Click here to read more...if it tickles your fancy...