{"id":447,"date":"2013-10-03T08:01:14","date_gmt":"2013-10-03T07:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/helpingthebesttogetbetter.com\/?p=447"},"modified":"2013-10-03T08:10:09","modified_gmt":"2013-10-03T07:10:09","slug":"forget-natural","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helpingthebesttogetbetter.com\/?p=447","title":{"rendered":"Forget \u201cnatural\u201d."},"content":{"rendered":"

A few days ago I received a challenging question from a good friend of mine, personal trainer and coach, Jurjen Groen, and the question was: \u201cwhat is do you consider to be \u201cnatural movement\u201d ?\u201d.<\/p>\n

An interesting and intriguing question for sure. I\u2019ll share my answer with you.
\nNatural movement is clearly is misnomer, just like natural food or natural breathing. Most of the time we assume natural equals \u201cgood\u201d, \u201cpositive\u201d of \u201chealthy\u201d , conveniently forgetting the fact that natural disasters, natural diseases and natural poisons are not that good, positive or healthy for us.<\/p>\n

Or perhaps the intention of the term \u201cnatural movement \u201c was to point to self-learned movements like a baby crawls, stands up or walks, without the help of parents, teachers or coaches, without education, practice or training. Some coaches might even advocate \u201cnatural\u201d, \u201cunspoilt\u201d movements where other believe in a strictly guided, controlled way of improving movements.
\nSome coaches like to show how well young children run, jump and hit without practice or correction. <\/p>\n

\"Kid<\/a><\/p>\n

But then, we have all seen their movement patterns change \u201cnaturally\u201d as they get older, the 9 year old \u201csmooth leopard\u201d might change into a 16 year old giraffe. The 10 year old \u201cgracious gazelle\u201d changes into a 15 year old hippopotamus, caused by \u201cnatural\u201d development, and this is caused by \u201cnatural\u201d hormones.<\/p>\n

There is a tremendous difference in how people move, some of it might be due to learning the wrong patterns consciously, (\u201cmy coach always to me to \u2026..\u201d), some of it came naturally and was never corrected properly, whereas others, call them the lucky ones, were simply born\/designed to run, to swim, to jump smooth almost looking effortless.
\nWe only know that movement is one of the integral characteristics of living organisms.(and sitting will become the new smoking)<\/p>\n

Now what is a \u201cnatural\u201d movement: natural movement is very limited, walking, running, throwing (hammerthrow?), jumping (Fosbury flop?), lifting, climbing, swimming, (butterfly or backstroke? ) , not to speak about cycling, speedskating, rowing, ), hitting a ball with a bat or racket? Most forms of human movements are designed by humans and never seen in the rest of the natural world. An elephant doesn\u2019t climb trees, a giraffe doesn\u2019t bike, a bee doesn\u2019t swim, a snail doesn\u2019t jump and a human being doesn\u2019t fly like a bird does\u2026. naturally.<\/p>\n

If somebody is using the word \u201cnatural\u2019 as related to movement be prepared to hear nonsense.
\nSome of my athletes made a decision to only eat natural foods, I always pity them, for having to eat raw food only, since a cow does not rinse its food nor cooks a grass soup, a leopard doesn\u2019t fry or grill a steak of a gazelle or an antelope, and a shark doesn\u2019t make sushi.<\/p>\n

We have to accept the fact that although we are still part of our given natural environment, and that our bodies systems are largely still designed like the first humanoid species. But we try very hard to escape from our natural past. Our brain enables us to adapt to our environment , to change it around, to modify and manipulate, and even to destroy our environment for a limited, short term benefit, even at a global scale. And boy, are we getting good at it.<\/p>\n

But Jurjen also posed a second question: what is \u201chealthy\u201d exercise.
\nMy idea is that the \u201chealthy\u201d part of exercise is in the optimal form and the dosage.
\nWe know that too little exercise (hypokinesia) isn\u2019t healthy and is related to an increased risk of obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, stroke, osteoporosis, etc. We also know that too much exercise can lead to fatigue, addiction and injuries, even lethal ones like in extreme sports.<\/p>\n

Healthy exercise adds something to our heath and leaves no lasting metabolic damage of structural scars. It might increase the life span (even if it is just a little bit) and improves our quality of life.
\nAn optimal form and dosage of exercise might slow down ageing-processes, whereas too little or too much exercise might speed these up.<\/p>\n

The big problem is that we can only judge the impact of exercise on health afterwards and often after many years. It is very hard to predict if a specific form or dose of exercise for a specific individual will lead to a positive or negative contribution to his\/her health, if it was only because we have no easy and reliable ways to predict the long-term effects of it. For example: we cannot foresee the effects of jumping and bounding on joints, the long-term effects of aerobic exercise on the cardiac system, or the effects of strenuous exercise on the immune system of metabolism.<\/p>\n

The development of \u201cgenomics-based personalized exercise\u201d might open a possibility to take out at least some of the guess-work of designing exercise programs for individuals, allowing us to foresee at least some of the responses of individuals to exercise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few days ago I received a challenging question from a good friend of mine, personal trainer and coach, Jurjen Groen, and the question was: \u201cwhat is do you consider to be \u201cnatural movement\u201d ?\u201d. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helpingthebesttogetbetter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helpingthebesttogetbetter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helpingthebesttogetbetter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helpingthebesttogetbetter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helpingthebesttogetbetter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=447"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/helpingthebesttogetbetter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":451,"href":"https:\/\/helpingthebesttogetbetter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions\/451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helpingthebesttogetbetter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helpingthebesttogetbetter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helpingthebesttogetbetter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}