The 5th MovNat Principle: Vital
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Moving Naturally. It is Vital.
In the last entry, we covered the 4th MovNat principle, Practical, and explained that true self-confidence stems from real-world physical competency. As a matter of fact, the ability to effectively and efficiently perform practical physical actions is not only useful in day-to-day life, it can prove to be of vital importance, i.e. useful in extreme or life-threatening circumstances. Therefore, the 5th principle, Vital, is a direct extension of the Practical principle.
Indeed, the practicality of our universal, human-species-specific movement aptitudes is so essential that it can potentially save your life and the lives of others. The vital nature of such a competency is timeless.
Strong to be useful.
Fitness as Survival Ability
From a biological standpoint, fitness is the ability to reproduce. But you won’t propagate your genes if you cannot survive long enough to do so. You need fitness first for the primal, fundamental purpose of survival.
Survival goes both ways.
From a modern standpoint, however, fitness is mostly about looks. It is no wonder that biological fitness is diminishing in modern populations.
In a world where modern comforts are slowly but surely making even walking optional, you may wonder why you should bother practicing the evolutionary movement skills, like jumping, climbing, carrying heavy objects or even crawling.
You practice, because even a hi-tech world like ours is not devoid of danger and it can strike at any time.
In times of danger, you will never hear “Play ping-pong for your life,” but you may very well hear “Run for your life!” You may have to jump, climb, crawl or swim for your life, even fight for your life … or do all of those things and more to help save the lives of others.
“So, you’re telling me that I need to what? To move naturally?” (Courtesy of Disney-Pixar)
The fitness industry wants to help you to be “beach-ready.” At MovNat, we want you to become beach-ready, as well, but from a MovNat standpoint.
‘You are not “beach-ready” just because your body shape looks good. You are “beach ready” when you can run, swim, and carry someone out of the water to rescue them from drowning.’
At MovNat, we want you to be strong physically and mentally. We want you to exercise the mental qualities for action – to be prepared, alert, responsive, self-controlled, brave, and ready and willing to help.
“I am so very beach-ready, Sugar…”
Or maybe not!!!
Clearly, the real meaning of “beach readiness.”
Train for Life!
We want you to embrace a realistic, no-nonsense, situational mindset in your physical training. We want you to leave behind the learned helplessness and self-imposed limitations and acquire indestructible self-confidence.
One of the most effective ways to accomplish this is to train for optimal physical competence. This includes training broad movement skills and the conditioning associated with them, as well as acquiring a certain level of situational intelligence.
We want you to see the big picture, which is that, ultimately, exercise, working out, fitness training – you name it – has a more meaningful and noble purpose than improving your looks or breaking a push-up record. Fitness goes beyond your “total.”
‘Ultimately, physical training is all about being life-ready.’
I couldn’t have said it better!
Ultimate fitness goal and achievement?
It will always be the case that some people just want to show off their ‘big guns’ and that’s fine, if that’s the kind of fitness they are satisfied with. But how do you show off real-life movement skills?
You don’t.
Join the MovNat community and become a helpful and useful athlete. Train for life!
Erwan Le Corre
Founder of MovNat and Master Instructor
Have you ever found yourself in a life-threatening situation? Do you keep in mind such a possibility when you train? Does your training help improve your overall physical competence, and to what extent is your training applicable to real life?
Copyright © 2012 MovNat
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Dear Erwan,
Vital is a very important point. Till now you have not spoken about injuries during the training. Indeed, we train useful to get out of a possible life-threatening situation, but if you injured your-self during this same training, you will have limited capabilities to overcome this hard time. Moreover, without any injuries, just after training one should be exhausted, so here again your are weaker physically and mentally to solve any suddenly issue.
How far do you take this point into account within the 10 MovNat Principles?
I looking forward to your reply.
Train Safe!
This is a MovNat team member responding: That is where physical conditioning comes in. With good conditioning one’s chance of injury is reduced. Also knowing and acting within our safe limits is critical in the practice of MovNat or any physical activity. We talk about this in more detail in our workshops.
The prevention of injury is a very important concern in the MovNat methodology. It relies on:
*Establishing movement quality and efficiency first, which is the outcome of learning both technique (the physical aspect of movement quality and efficiency) and mindfulness (the mental aspect of movement quality and efficiency).
*Properly conditioning through individualized and safe training progression(s) in term of intensity, volume ad complexity.
*Using the risk/danger ratio when dealing with environmental complexity: is there a danger, and what’s the nature of it? What is my skill & conditioning level, and current physical and mental state, in relation of this danger?
The question of injury-prevention will be answered in a future blog entry, as well as in the MovNat book, to be released January 2013.