Reclaiming Play: One-Day MovNat Fundamentals Workshop

After eight hours of MovNat yesterday, I knew I was going to be a wreck this morning. And sure enough, I woke up with soreness in places I didn't even know existed. My upper arms and knees are covered with splotchy purple bruises, and my forearms are sunburnt and flecked with small scratches. My lower back is stiff, and my shoulders are sore. And to top it all off, the bottom of my left foot is still pulsing and swollen from a bee sting. (Note to self: It turns out that bees don't like being stepped on.)

But if I had to do it all over again, would I? Hell to the yes.



I first came across MovNat back in January of 2010, when -- in the same New York Times article that introduced me to Paleo eating -- I read about Erwan Le Corre and a physical fitness system he'd created called MovNat. MovNat is short for "Mouvement Naturel" or "natural movement." Inspired by Méthode Naturelle, an approach to survival fitness pioneered at the turn of the last century by Georges Hébert (a forefather of parkour and freerunning), Le Corre developed a program that re-trains people to move according to human nature. Simply put, MovNat is about moving your body as nature intended, and doing so as efficiently, safely and practically as possible.



For a good introduction to MovNat, check out Le Corre's 2009 profile in Men's Health magazine.

MovNat is founded on three "pillars" of movement: Natural, Evolutionary, and Situational. As such, it's a system that aims to respect the environment, align with our biological heritage, and have practical application to real-world challenges. Particularly with regard to its emphasis on situational adaptiveness, MovNat overlaps to a large degree with programs like CrossFit; both, after all, focus on developing well-rounded athletes who are ready at a moment's notice to tackle a broad spectrum of physical demands.

MovNat has grown in the past couple of years, with Le Corre bringing a small handful of employees on board to teach seminars and to run much of the day-to-day operations of the business. Still, he continues to be MovNat's guru (and greatest marketing asset), and at the Ancestral Health Symposium a couple of weeks ago, he delivered a terrific presentation about the benefits of natural movement:



At the Symposium, I got the chance to meet Le Corre and his U.S.-based Master Trainer, Clifton Harski, and they encouraged me to join MovNat's one-day Fundamentals Workshop in Palo Alto. I'd been curious about MovNat for almost two years, and a "primal" fitness system sounds like something that's right up my alley, so I figured: Why not? Besides, M got invited by Clif to join, too -- and we live less than two miles from the neighborhood park where the Workshop was to be held.

Before showing up yesterday, my only in-person exposure to MovNat was at a brief movement session that Clif led at UCLA at the end of the Symposium. Out on a grassy field, we did some barefoot walking and crawling in the grass, and we practiced jumping. I found the emphasis on precision of movement to be challenging, but it's not like we ran across treetops or dangled from vines or anything. I didn't feel like a character in Avatar. "This stuff doesn't seem all that special," I thought.

I was wrong.

Almost as soon as we arrived yesterday, Clif had us dive right into climbing up poles at the park. "This isn't what we'd normally start with," he noted, "but we need to finish climbing before kids come take over the playground." (See? MovNat is adaptive!)

(Click any of the photos to enlarge)

Climbing, it turns out, is incredibly fun. Keeping our arms (relatively) relaxed, we braced ourselves against poles with our feet, walked up vertically until we were able to grab a horizontal beam, swung ourselves hand-over-hand to the other side, and then climbed back down another pole. Even if I'd walked away from the Workshop with nothing more than the personal satisfaction derived from scrambling up a pole, it would have been totally worth it. It's been years since I saw a pole and had any urge to climb it, but after yesterday, I'm not sure it'll be so easy to walk past one without pausing to consider going vertical.

Next, we invaded the kids' swing sets, taking turns to pull ourselves up and over the top beam using a series of progressions. Clif taught us to rest our forearms on the horizontal bar and then -- using rotational force -- screw our arms down and outward to engage our lats and propel ourselves up and forward.

It was kind of magical -- even though I sucked at it. Clif also showed us how to hook a leg over the bar and leverage the momentum generated by our other leg to flip over the bar. I was pretty terrible at that, too, but it was a blast.

More after the jump...

Greatest Hits

To kick off the weekend, check out this little video. It features a bunch of stuff we know and love: Paleo eating, Vibram FiveFingers, John Durant, MovNat, and Tough Mudder.

Paleo Fitness

Check out this article about Erwan Le Corre and MovNat in January's issue of Outside Magazine.

What's MovNat?

MovNat draws from some familiar sources -- CrossFit, low-carb diets, barefoot running, martial arts, mud wrestling, Quest for Fire, etc. -- but Le Corre's program occupies a space all its own. If anything, MovNat falls within the concept of "evolutionary fitness," an increasingly popular trend embraced by a loosely organized but fast-growing global community of health enthusiasts, medical professionals, and athletes. The movement is often lumped under the "paleo" rubric, but it's more than just a prehistoric way to eat and exercise.

I reallyreallyreally want to try this.

MovNat Reconsidered

I first wrote about Erwan Le Corre's MovNat a few months ago -- back before I began delving more seriously into paleo/primal concepts. I was kind of dismissive then, but am growing curiouser and curiouser about Le Corre's nature-centric philosophy of fitness and health.

I'd like to attend a MovNat workshop someday. Richard Nikoley just did it a week ago, and wrote all about it on Free the Animal. Melissa McEwen was there the week before. And Robb Wolf is just finishing up his 5 days of MovNat today, and also has great things to say about the experience.

MovNat looks fun -- and this is coming from a guy who hasn't been camping in years and thinks it's not worth trying to win $1 million on "Survivor" because it would mean going without a toilet for a month.

Yabba Dabba Doo Time

In the Comments section, Ben pointed me to this video of John Durant's appearance on “The Colbert Report”:

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Durant, as you might recall from this post, was featured in a recent New York Times piece about modern cavemen -- strict adherents to the Paleo Diet whose exercise routines emphasize natural movement.

(I especially enjoyed Durant’s jokey description of the perfect girl to share his cave: A meat-eating, lactose intolerant girl with celiac disease. And by the way, did you notice that Durant is wearing Vibram FiveFingers?)

It’s easy to dismiss Durant as just another attention-craving New York hipster glomming onto an obscure fad for the sake of getting noticed. But if you can get past all that, there’s some really interesting stuff beneath the surface. Even if you’re never going to give up eating grilled cheese sandwiches and don’t plan on running through a jungle and pole-vaulting onto a bunch of boulders, we can all learn a little something from the caveman lifestyle.

First, let's start with the article that generated the current mainstream interest in Durant and his fellow modern cavemen: "The New Age Cavemen and the City."

The article quotes Loren Cordain, a professor at Colorado State University and the author of “The Paleo Diet,” who discusses the source of the caveman movement to a 25-year-old New England Journal of Medicine article, which stated that the "diet of our remote ancestors may be a reference standard for modern human nutrition." Cordain offers quite a bit of information on this approach to nutrition on his website, and he's also written a number of books on this subject, including "The Paleo Diet for Athletes," which may be of particular interest to you hardcore P90Xers. In it, he describes "the essential dietary principles for the Paleo Diet for Athletes":

You can eat as much lean meat, poultry, seafood, fresh fruit, and veggies as you like. Foods that are not part of the modern-day Paleolithic fare include cereal grains, dairy products, high-glycemic fruits and vegetables, legumes, alcohol, salty foods, fatty meats, refined sugars, and nearly all processed foods.

There are a number of crucial exceptions to these fundamental rules ... Case in point: Immediately before, during, and after a workout or competition, certain non-Paleo foods should be eaten to promote a quick recovery. During all other times, meals that closely follow the 21st-century Paleolithic diet ... will encourage comprehensive long-term recovery and allow you to attain your maximal performance potential.

Wikipedia features a lengthy article about the paleolithic diet, too.

The New York Times article also mentions Erwan Le Corre, one of the "patriarchs of the paleo movement," who has been called "one of the most all-around physically fit men on the planet." Le Corre is the founder of a survival-based physical discipline called MovNat. Here's a video of Le Corre doing his thing:



Last year, Le Corre was profiled in Men's Health magazine by Christopher McDougall. The article, entitled "A Wild Workout for the Real World," is an engrossing read. McDougall, who's best known for writing the bestselling "Born to Run" (the book that first got me and just about everyone else hooked on barefoot running), visited Le Corre's training base in the Brazilian rainforest, and after three days, ran a 12-station obstacle course in the jungle, "springing up into trees, contorting through the branches, and shinnying down 15-foot poles."

[Le Corre] has us hoisting heavy logs on end and flipping them, top over bottom, up a hill. He has us crawling around stakes in the ground and snaking on our bellies beneath an overturned dugout canoe mounted a few inches off the ground. Even a small cabin comes into play: He has us vaulting through one window and out the other.

As I approach the end of my second lap, I have only two obstacles left -- a leap from the porch and then a quick climb up a 20-foot pole braced between the ground and a branch high in a tree. I'm trying not to show it, but I'm on the verge of grinning with pride. Two days ago, my heart was in my throat before every jump. Now, after just 72 hours, I feel unstoppable.

As McDougall's article points out, Le Corre's MovNat is based on Méthode Naturelle, an approach to survival fitness pioneered by Georges Hébert at the turn of the last century. Hébert's teachings greatly influenced the development of parkour and freerunning.

And to tie all of this back to P90X, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that Mark Sisson -- the P90X supplement creator who pops up in those post-workout commercials for overpriced Beachbody supplements -- is the author of "The Primal Blueprint," a diet book rooted in paleo concepts. You can read more about it on Sisson's blog.

Some think that eating and running like our prehistoric ancestors is stupid and weird. To them, it's just a fad -- a momentary, knee-jerk throwback that ignores all the progress we've made as a species. But clearly, there are those who believe that technology -- including processed foods (even grains) and highly-engineered footwear -- are getting in the way of true human potential.

I, for one, am not about to ditch grains and dairy altogether (although I'm largely abstemious of both already). Plus, I'm naturally risk-averse, and you won't find me heaving large rocks while balancing on a tree branch. But I am considering whether to reasonably fit some paleo concepts (e.g., limiting intake of grains and dairy, focusing on functional exercise, etc.) into my diet and fitness routine.