MovNat revisited: the Toronto clinics

Getting over the bar

This weekend, Erwan Le Corre was in town to do two one-day MovNat seminars in Oakville at Total Balance Fitness. Having had the opportunity to train with Erwan in West Virginia this summer, I was anxious to see how he would train and coach in an indoor environment. After all, I had collected enough scratches, scrapes and thorns in West Virginia to completely associate natural movement with nature in the raw. How do you take that experience inside?

Le Corre explains that natural movement is not dependent on the environment because it’s adaptive. It’s something primal. Natural movement is instinctive (children do it), universal (it’s not culturally specific) and practical. And indoors is a great place to start practicing because nature is tough — it’s rough, unpredictable, and frankly downright dangerous. You can’t scale anything (you can’t make a tree branch higher or lower or a rock smaller) and the risks are very real.

After this weekend, I learned that training inside can even be an advantage, especially for beginners, as it allows the practice of skills in a safe environment. Walking on all fours is certainly easier on a gym floor than it is on a slippery outdoor slope. But the real fun is when you add context: real or imaginary.

Kids add context all the time when they play.  They may walk on a sidewalk curb and pretend that they might fall into a pit of alligators if they lose their balance. As adults, we don’t have to add the same amount of drama, but training can still be playful. We can imagine context by pretending there is an imaginary fence that we have to cross by lifting the legs up and over, one at a time. We can bend and lean forward at the hips to clear an imaginary tree limb as we’re walking. We can lie on the ground and raise our upper body with our hands and scan our surroundings, looking backwards, sideways and looking up into the imaginary trees. We can squat as low as possible and walk, pretending that we’re going through a very narrow and low passage.  All great “warmup” exercises that are very primal and playful in nature.

Bumper plates: context for jumping skills

Other contextual possibilities inside are of course very real. Setting up a few bumper plates to land on provides some real context to training accuracy in jumping: landing perfectly with the forefoot on the plate and the heels just hanging over the edge. We can climb a monkey bar or attempt to muscle-up to be on top of it. We can practice catching medicine balls and PVC tubing, using peripheral vision (not looking directly at the object being thrown). We can lift and carry heavy objects. This past weekend had us doing all of those movements and more.

Of course, some things are suited better to outside, and Erwan took us for some outdoor training by the lake, although the December cold and wind provided some additional challenges. Erwan, being accustomed to training in harsh conditions, chose to go in shorts and without shoes. Outside, we trained running, throwing heavy stones, jumping and vaulting (park benches came in handy), and balancing skills using logs on the beach.

A barefoot Le Corre is mindful of his trainees

All in all, it was a great clinic and provided me with some great ideas for future training. It really reinforced the principles that I learned this summer, and I can’t wait to continue practicing my skills.  This is how training should be: functional, fun, challenging and free.

This spring, I will take my MovNat training further as I will be accompanying Erwan on a 9-day training retreat in Itacaré, Brazil. This is the workshop that was made famous by Chris McDougall’s article in Men’s Health, and promises to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!

The retreat is limited to 12 people. If you are interested in finding out more, please visit Erwan’s website at www.movnat.com.

Tags: Erwan Le Corre, MovNat, natural movement, training