Channelling Our Original Strength
I recently spent a weekend in the Midlands on the floor rocking, rolling and crawling. No, I wasn’t just suffering from too many pints of lager. Rather I was participating in two workshops, Pressing Reset and Becoming Bulletproof run by the folks at Original Strength. OS describe themselves as ‘a human movement education company teaching health and fitness professionals around the world to Press RESET. By teaching how to help people move the way we were designed to move, we can help them restore reflexive strength and stability. When we have our reflexive strength, we have a solid foundation enabling us to live life better.’ What this entails is going back to how we originally developed our strength and motor control as babies and young children, teaching our adult minds and bodies how to reset poor motor patterns and allow us to perform physically (and mentally) as we should be able to.
Tim Anderson, one of the founders of OS, is someone whose videos I have watched on YouTube for a couple of years now, so I was pleased that he was running the course. He is a warm, passionate instructor with a gentle southern drawl, and made the weekend extremely enjoyable and informative. He began by introducing the concept of reflexive strength, one of the key components of the system. He describes this as the body’s ability to anticipate and respond to movement before and as it happens and stability and mobility in harmony with one another.
The focus of the first day’s workshop is what Tim refers to as ‘pressing reset’, essentially engaging the original operating system preprogrammed inside every individual’s nervous system. Engaging this can be likened to pressing the reset button on a video game, rebooting (or refreshing) the central nervous system to build new neural connections, restore old ones, and make existing ones more efficient. The result is a healthier brain and nervous system which leads to a healthier body able to utilise the mobility, stability and strength it is designed for.
According to the OS philosophy, there are five big resets:
- Diaphragmatic breathing
- Head Control
- Rolling
- Rocking
- Crawling (or other contralateral, midline crossing movements)
Those of you familiar with the work we do at Backs Etc will know that we already incorporate these into our therapy and training programmes, so this course was a natural fit for me.
Proper breathing is where it all begins as, without a stable core, our brains will not allow our bodies to achieve the stability and mobility they are capable of, so the initial portion of the workshop is focused on developing good nasal diaphragmatic breathing techniques in a variety of positions.
We then moved on to the oh-so-important vestibular system. The OS system focuses on mastering head control to reset and strengthen this, so we did a number of head flexion, extension and rotational exercises, again in a variety of positions, supine, prone and quadruped.
The third big reset, rolling, is a fun one. Rolling is the beginning of the human gait cycle, and helps connecting the opposite shoulders to the opposite hips. There is also a lot of head control involved, bringing the vestibular system into the equation. There are a variety of different rolling patterns, some forward to back, but most moving laterally, driven by either the upper or lower body.
Then it was time to rock out. Rocking on hands and knees is a primal movement pattern that helps children build strength, mobility and posture. By modifying foot position we can also use rocking to improve our ankle mobility, or start on our elbows instead of hands to further mobilise the thoracic spine and build upper body strength.
The last big reset, which ultimately ties everything together, is crawling. There are a myriad of variations of crawling, all effective in improving contralateral coordination, developing neural connections and building strength. We started with variations on the classic dying bug and bird dog exercises, progressing to commando crawling, hands and knees crawling, and ultimately leopard crawling (sometimes referred to as bear crawling or beast crawling in other methods). People who haven’t tried crawling may not realise what a tremendous workout it can be. Crawling across the length of the gym floor as slow as we possibly could, for 5 minutes, left every participant in the workshop huffing, puffing and sweating profusely. I routinely train my clients to crawl in a box pattern (forwards, sideways, backward and sideways the other direction) for two minutes, which often feels like an entire workout compressed into a tiny period of time. Good stuff!
The workshop on the second day, Becoming Bulletproof, was designed to take these resets we learned and advance them in ways that make them more fun, more challenging and incorporate various other fitness tools that we may have at our disposal. For instance, lifting one’s knees off the ground whilst rocking really fires up the lower body musculature and provides a great little full body workout.
Variations on crawling including axis crawling, a brilliant exercise one can do in a hotel room, for instance, that requires no space or equipment; crawling sideways with the feet pressed up against a wall is an awesome core burner that again requires no equipment. If you do have access to some gym gear, you can try exercises such as crawling pulling a chain or kettlebell.
We also played around with battling ropes and upside-down kettlebell carries, both tremendous workouts. One of the wackiest exercises we performed involved using a cup to scoop water out of one bucket and use it to fill another, all whilst holding a plank or elevated crawling position, showing that exercise does not need to be boring or mindless. In fact, putting play and fun into fitness was one of the big messages of this course.
And fun it was. Hard, too! I had major DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) for days after the weekend, even in places that I don’t normally feel it.
In conclusion, I found the OS training to be a great addition to the toolset we already use here at Backs Etc. We are huge supporters of what we call primal therapy and training in systems such as Original Strength, DNS, Animal Flow and Immaculate Dissection. If you’d like to learn more and/or start channeling your inner baby, get in touch. Let’s work together to help you reclaim your original strength!
Jack
Ankle sprains can affect the way your nervous system controls movement long after they have healed structurally. At Backs Etc, we always take them into account, as they can be the underlying cause of your hip or back pain.
New research finds that children and adolescents who spend most of their time barefoot develop motor skills differently from those who habitually wear shoes. Published in Frontiers in Pediatrics, this is the first study to assess the relevance of growing up shod vs. barefoot on jumping, balancing and sprinting motor performance during different stages of childhood and adolescence. The study shows that habitually barefoot children are noticeably better at jumping and balancing compared to habitually shod children, particularly from 6-10 years of age. While these beneficial barefoot effects diminished in older adolescents, the research nevertheless highlights the importance of barefoot exercise for motor development as children grow and mature.
In gyms all across the world, millions of people are unknowingly settling for sub-par fitness results, no matter how hard they work. It’s true that traditional fitness training delivers many benefits, but according to a recent study, movement-based training offers even better results with fewer negative effects. Movement training also has more “carry-over” when performing outside the gym (e.g. in real life).
In a recent blog post, we looked at the nature of pain and how often it is not an indication of damage in your tissues but an indication of the threat level in your nervous system (you can read that post 
Initially, this pain is likely to be in the nervous system, as we have previously discussed, but if we don’t take notice of these issues then, over time, the tightness in the joints and overuse of certain muscles can lead to wear and tear and structural damage. For example, tight hips will cause excessive wear on the joints and so in the long term result in a diagnosis of osteoarthritis; or alternatively, the inability to stabilise the spine well can lead to a disc bulge. This is why at Backs Etc we work with our clients to get to the underlying cause, ie the postural and movement pattern problem, and change that to either prevent or at least arrest any structural damage. This approach can also work in conjunction with orthopaedic surgery if your hip or back has deteriorated to the point that surgical intervention is needed. If you don’t also work to improve the control of the hip or spine then the underlying cause remains and the wear and tear will continue making further surgeries increasingly likely.
Another very familiar example of hormetic stress is exercise, in particular strength training. A challenging weights workout 
Certain foods also promote hormesis. You’ve almost certainly heard about foods rich in antioxidants. Well, antioxidants are actually hormetic stressors, which is why they are so good for you. Colorful fruits and vegetables, as well as bitter foods, tend to be high in antioxidants, so having a good amount of these types of foods in your diet can be very beneficial. 
Are you or your family mouth breathers? Teeth overcrowding and poor dental health are likely related to how we breathe, as well as what we eat. In this article, Stanford’s Paul Erlich discusses how poor breathing and the lack of chewing in our modern near-liquid diet has contributed to reduced jaw sizes in children. Undersized jaws have been linked to increased risk of heart disease, hyperactivity, sleep deprivation and other issues. Make sure your kids breathe through their noses and give them some food that needs chewing.
Our bodies (especially our skin and gut) are perfect environments for a vast range of micro-organisms. In fact, human cells make up only 43% of the body’s total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists. Because of bacteria phobia, we destroy these using anti-bacterial cleaning products and antibiotics, often without a second thought to the vast quantity of bacteria beneficial to us that are wiping out. Think of a wildflower meadow – if you covered it in pesticide, it would likely kill off most of the existing plants and that space, without some careful planting and care, would regrow with weeds. This is what happens to the microflora in our guts when we use these products, and this is intensified when we eat a diet of processed foods. Everything you eat is feeding your microflora as much as it feeds you, and we need healthy microbiome to be truly healthy.
Are you always rushing around? Take a few moments to meditate, breathe or just be alone with your own thoughts. By not giving ourselves the minutes — or hours — free of devices and distractions, we risk losing our ability to know who we are and what’s important to us, says physicist and writer Alan Lightman.
In this moving article, Marc Chernoff discusses some of the words of wisdom contained in his Grandmother’s 270 page journal. In her hospital bed, diagnosed with terminal cancer at 90, she picked out key entries she wanted her grandson to hear. Here, he shares 19 of these great truths that can help guide us all.