MovNat Day 3

Today started…a little late. Everyone is fairly beat up from training so we slept in until about 8:30 and then fixed an epic breakfast to fuel us through the day. After breakfast we did a very low intensity warm-up/mobility session. This was performed on the grass, in the sun and it worked the aches and pains out of my limbs remarkably well. From here we practiced more climbing, focusing on hip over’s as a means of efficiently gaining access to the top of things like a limb, bar awning. I’ve tinkered with this move in the past and felt pretty strong on this but we looked at some great ways to isolate pieces of this movement to improve performance. Some folks need some explosive pull-ups, others some integrated trunk strength but everyone found a way to tinker the move to improve performance.

Then we moved to jumping. Again. If you recall from I was feeling pretty good about the jump and lands from yesterday but this was from a moderate height to a platform beneath. Today we worked on jumping from one board to another…and I was really struggling with the move. I thought from yesterday’s improvements I’d see some improvements from my day 1 performance, but it was initially not much better. Then we did something that “should” have made the move harder: Jumping from a deep squat position, heels raised on the balls of the feet. For whatever reason, when I trained this I stuck virtually every jump. Erwan suspects that the amount of Olifting and plyometrics I’ve done has set up a reflex arc that makes it hard for me to jump and then comfortably land. This makes sense and it was nice to find a way to modify the movement such that I saw immediate progress.

We then took a field trip to a river and put that jumping to work in an alive natural setting. Erwan had several locations with rocks that were further and further apart. We had a spotter in the water in case anyone came up short but it was an impressive display all the way around. After we jumped ourselves out we did some open water swimming in a very cold river! Shrinkage was not optional! We worked with some rock climbing to get out of the water which turned into finding  a few routes that lent themselves to climbing with feet only.

We stopped at a public playground on the way back to the camp and had a ton of fun putting together potential workouts on the equipment. I will be terrorizing the kids in our neighborhood as soon as I get home! We were all knackered at this point but we had one more module led by Erwan’s assistant coach, Vic. Vic is a former French commando and has an extensive martial arts and strength & conditioning background. Vic covered some basic self defense concepts and drills that were outstanding and very applicable.

Now we are cooking dinner…then I am going to bed!

Robb Wolf

Robb Wolf, author of The Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat, is a former research biochemist and one of the world’s leading experts in Paleolithic nutrition. Wolf has transformed the lives of tens of thousands of people around the world via his top ranked iTunes podcast and wildly popular seminar series.