The Tool is the Teacher: Reclaiming Movement Intelligence with Chris Chamberlin

Introduction to Movement Intelligence 0:00

There, this, gosh, I love this. This is so good. There's a spirality to that. But they get to use their own felt experience to learn the behavior. Dance in certain types of athletics that are built around body awareness and movement accuracy. Hello and welcome to another episode of Ritual Rise. My name is Dr. Emily Spickle, your host, and today we have a extremely insightful conversation with a good friend of mine where we are going to explore some concepts of body awareness, movement intelligence, fascinating conversation around spirals and rotation.

Before I bring on my guest, I just want to share a little bit about him. So in this episode, we will be speaking with Chris Chamberlain, who is the Director of Education at Wech Method, which is an exploration of art and intelligence and movement through rotation, rhythm, and intuition. Chris brings over a decade of experience teaching movement principles that challenge the linear, perfection-driven approach to training. His philosophy is The Tool is the Teacher, which centers on listening to feedback from tools, such as those of the RMT Rope, Propulse Speed Trainers, and clubs.

We'll talk about all of those to uncover your body's natural movement patterns. This conversation will dive deep into how movement can both be scientific expressive and this language that's connecting our breath rhythm and self-awareness.

Auditory Feedback and Intuitive Training 1:35

Welcome to the show Chris. Hey I'm really excited to be here Emily. Wonderful well I want to kick it off because I love this concept of movement intelligence and intuition so I wanna read something for you and then have you share some of your thoughts if that works. Okay. Okay, so movement is a form of intelligence. An athlete or individual's awareness of their body, their timing, and their breath reveals how they adapt, recover and perform. Movement begins with awareness. Can you tell me what comes to mind when you hear that?

In this latter half of my career here, I've been working with professional athletes. That's been like the primary focus I do. And I'm an educator. I use the information that I learned from working individuals at the highest level. The information I am getting is the subtleties. It's what makes them the higher subtle. and it's that natural intuitive awareness they have in themselves that trust in the behaviors that they're doing that live outside the coach's cue and the teacher's shoe and all of that.

My job is to pay attention to all those subtleties as best as I can. And something with this intuitive awareness that I've been trying to preach and build for people is I have noticed that the auditory information from the person or from tools has become this thing that we can pick up on that that shows how aware their own body is of the event and the moment that's happening. So I currently work with a lot of MMA fighters. Yeah, and in fighting, if everybody's familiar, you can imagine when somebody throws a punch or a kick or something of that nature, there's a very distinct sound that comes along with it.

There's an expression of breath, right? And that moment of sound or that expression a breath I have sort of correlated with perfection of movement a little bit. And you could also, if you're not familiar with fighting, something that's very common would be the idea of a tennis player that when they're hitting the ball, right? That moment, that event that they are pressurizing their body, they meeting the moment and they giving it everything they have. Whether the result is what they wanted exactly.

That's their ability to wield their technique and things like that. But their body was prepared to give its best shot. So that's like an entry level thing that I'm starting to sort of approach with people and the students I work with on talking about intuitive behavior and awareness and coming from a high level. and getting individuals that are not at that level to find that sound that their body wants to make when they're working optimally. Like if my dad goes to pick up a box off the floor, he kind of, like everything sort of makes the noise.

So kind one approach that I'm taking towards that sort awareness of self. Yeah, I know that's very fascinating. Do you encourage this this vocalization or just kind of encourage people to express what the body naturally wants to do where oftentimes we inhibit that or block that because we're like, well, we don't want to make noise at the gym or for lifting. And so do you push people who embrace that? I do. Yeah, absolutely. And I'll kind of touch on two things here. So the vocalization, I try to get people in environments where they can let loose a little bit and not recognize that they're making a vocalisation.

Okay. They don't feel like they are at a, what is it, a plane of fitness and they'll be quiet, you know? Like it's the, like I give them, either like You can gamify something would be one solution, just like I do a lot of stuff with what I would refer to as like task oriented training. Like technically everything's a task, but this idea, if you sort of give somebody a puzzle or a test to solve, it can sort start intuitively navigating how to solved it. and I'll come up with these mini puzzles that are more fitness training focused and a specific tool that I've been really loving and is mostly accessible

Body Awareness, Choreography, and Coiling Core 6:00

for everybody is just a med ball and performing medball tosses at walls. So it's a really simple thing that doesn't demand a lot of like technical cueing from a coach on how to do it. It has a very clear directive. Throw a ball at wall. Super simple, right? Yeah, very simple and very fun because a lotta people don't get that place in their life to express themselves like really aggressively and like throw stuff right. Yeah, throw stuff in an intense way that's not going to cause an issue. And when you get that person that hasn't done that in years or ever, and they get this opportunity to just heave something, it starts to kind of make them vocalize.

Because they try to do it. I've sort of recognized that as this way. Like I'm watching how they move when they do. And they're picking up all these movement behaviors that I teach underneath all of this sort of intuitive stuff. And I've been finding that it's like a really friendly way to invite people to move the way I'm going to ask them, which I think is like super efficient and biomechanically sound and all this stuff that we may get into today. But it has just been this really simple way of getting people involved in that in a fun way.

I love that, I loved that. So how does... I mean, this sounds like a component of body awareness, but how does body-awareness play into this? Where in my work, I talk a lot about like body schema, which is your brain's ability to map and see your body in your mind, right? This size and shape of what you are in space. Is that a components of this intuition? How do you teach that? So there's movement accuracy of limbs in-space. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So this, gosh, I love this. This is so good. There's a couple things.

I'm a coach, so in the coaching environment, what I am trying to do is I try to help somebody build a body awareness and an intuitive sense of self and some of that comes down to the Okay, so I have these tasks I'm starting to create. They're starting be able to vocalize with intensity. That is getting them to trust in positions subconsciously that they're rooting into to creating huge intensity so they are building sense of trust. Then what I do is I provide choreography or sequencing complex, whatever you want.

Let's say a med ball thing still, I'll just live on this as the example. But say I just have somebody literally take a lateral step and then step forward before they throw the ball at the wall. So there's a coordinated event here, but very simple complex AB. Now there is a sound involved with that. They're building this trust to the sound in the positions. But then also on a coaching level, if the student mixes up the choreography a little bit, I don't reprimand them. I Don't tell them wrong jet like bad move like you should have done that redo the rep.

Yes, the I asked them to make the most out of what they did. Okay. Okay. And this one for me, in most people's lives, it's not the biggest deal, but working with MMA fighters and like UFC fighters, and stuff, if they make a misstep or they miss a punch, I don't want them to just give up or I got a backtrack. There's immediate danger. So like, you can usually at least paint that in somebody's head like oh, okay, like I committed to this. I made the vocalization. My body was actually working in good form, but the result wasn't what I wanted.

And that doesn't mean that I need to backtrack and not trust in myself. So you're building all these walls. Every rep that somebody's like, oh, I messed up the choreography, they're going like a wall and a mistrust in their own ability to navigate themselves. Yeah. That would be a very low level way I would start introducing that to somebody. Yeah. The other layer to that is in WEK method and my work with David, we've sort of developed this idea of what we refer to as coiling core, which essentially is this like, I call it like an end range of rotation or like a rotational isometric sort.

Say the word again. Coiling. Coiling core. So if you could imagine the side of your body or your spine coiling up on one side. Right? So this idea that we're getting sprung up one one-side to create a release. And this is what, like I said, I've referred to as the end range of rotation. It's an opportunity to like a stillness in rotation, but it's ready to go. There's potentiation. So a lot of my early practice with an individual is to establish the individual's range of motion. And in stillness, this is where I feel like Cueing is most profound.

So as a coach, this is where I feel like information verbally can be transmitted between each other the best. The person's creating a sensation. They're working on building a position or a posture. This position, or posture, This is what I was mentioning in those vocalizations of those high intensities. But this position and posture is sort of the essence of what see when somebody is performing that vocalization at high intensity. It's the essence of it. So in the early practice, we do isometrics in this coil.

Then we perform choreography to allow the person to experience like one side versus the other and move through the two. This is something we refer to as rotational movement training when we're moving between the then we hope to get the vocalization out of them so that I can find the actual nuance, like that is where you need to be within this range of motion type thing. Yeah, no, that's fascinating. Two things that come up when you were talking is, so my background being more like the dance side.

I know you're maybe athletes on a field or an MMA fighter, but in dance and certain types of athletics that are built around body awareness and movement accuracy,

Rotation, Spirals, and Torsion 12:40

using a mirror is very important because you are seeing Kind of how your arm is moving, the lines, right? Just the subtle details of it. So what are your thoughts on using a mirror? And then the second one, which is kind of what this vocalization and sound side makes me think about, is music. Those two sides. Do you use those? What are you thoughts about that? Do play with it? Yeah, yeah, cool, so I love that you brought up dancers. So I do have a lot of experience with dance and things like that.

And I would traditionally use the idea of like, like not thinking, I don't know if you can envision this, but like you, there are a of amazing dancers and there's dancers that can dance the choreography perfectly. Then there're dancers who use their intuition to dance choreography. And there is an aura to it, right? There's a beauty to that. There is something that the room can feel, even if the two dancers were technically doing the same movements. And I'm after that one. I want that aura. Like, I don't care about the movement.

That's mechanical. It's the innards. The self-awareness to make the line a little cleaner, or this. And a lot of that for me, I'm a trainer, working in the gym for the 60-minute session. I am trying to root my ballerina into this, be mechanical a little bit about it in a gym, so that when we get to that environment, that I can trust in all of the rootedness to express my intuition and my art and all that. So, after that, Yeah, so in regards to mirrors, I actually don't use mirrors. I haven't used mirrors in years.

And I do see value in seeing yourself. That can be helpful. There can also be some level of criticalness that can come from that. OK. One time I did a dance workshop. The individual was dancing for us. They said, OK, like I want you to dance how I felt. Like just dance, you dance how I felt doing that. And that was sort of the constraint. Like, okay, what were they feeling? How do I move in that feeling, right? So like, I like to try to, the isometrics I do with people, it's meant to create a sensation in the body and it gives them room to think about the sensation, The feeling.

and then when I go to the choreography, that two step throw, three step, throw whatever it be, Again, that was the example we used. I try to tell them to feel what we felt. And my cueing, instead of being like, put your foot here, and step there, this and that, I literally, touch their side and I say, feel here. Feel here! Feel the feeling you felt, like it's just about feel. Like that's the only cue. Trust this! And I give them maybe a tactile sense as a coach. Yeah. – I have felt that mirror, processing of information coming back in, is behind.

So in the stillness, yes, but in a movement, no. So like still this, maybe yes. Like I can stop and I see what a line looks like. I experience what the line feels like, I could close my eyes to program it maybe, take a breath with it, create something to build it in. And then, then I want to move in space. We don't have a mirror, unfortunately, right? And I need to be able to sense this and find things that I trust within it. And just because we're talking about dance, I get a lot, I actually get surprising amount of dancers come to my workshops, which I'm always really like amazing.

That means a lots to me because I know traditionally dancers would not like steer towards fitness education. It tends to be something that doesn't excite them. They don't feel like it benefits them and what I, what, get, a, lot from them is they recognize that shape. I make, make this very elegant shape, it'll look like a of the postures that we make in ballet and a a like that side bend, right? It's very, elegant. I'm calling it the underage of rotation. It's a form, it's where we spin from. So like when we're creating turns and such, this is that sort of, I call it like a structural wall.

Like something in you that can't move further, but you can move about it. So it's this very special thing that I get a lot of b-boys and I got a ballerinas that come to my things. Because guys that stick postures in the air, they hit this. Oh, I could see that. Yeah. I show it on my manuals and stuff. Those poses, when they get their poses they're just folding into that coiled posture I'm referencing in their own way. and then the spinning. So that's like an immediate kind of like, you can get it.

And then musicality, like I'm not huge on music, but I love, what I loved about music is there's a tempo. There's something we can track and aligning movement to that, the eight count is valuable for somebody that is like innate in us to sort of move with sound. In my intro you kind mentioned tools of the teacher. And ultimately, in all of this stuff I'm talking about right now, ultimately what I am navigating is trying to find tools that provide the feedbacks that I want that, I don't have to use my mouth to tell somebody what i'm trying get them to do.

But they get to used their own felt experience to learn the behavior. So it's my job to be the master of tools to recognize which ones provide feedback i am looking for. But it's ultimately up to that individual to learn from it and then use my subtle cueing to guide them through it at first. And then for me to not get in their way when they're experiencing things and building walls on them because I believe their shapes weren't right or their movement wasn't correct. but rather let their body navigate that environment.

Because we're training. It's safe. There's no danger. We're not in the ring and we are not getting chased by a lion. Like, we okay. Were at 24 hour fitness or something. You know, like it doesn't... We are okay! Yeah. Oh, my God. I love that, Chris. And I feel that so much of what you're saying actually crosses into these other facets of a person's life and how when we feel our body in movement and the intuition of movement is also trusting your emotions and you feel in different experiences in the outside world.

One, perfect for the podcast because all of our conversations cross into this movement and emotional side. So it's so powerful. I love the gift of how you are articulating that. It's really powerful Thank you. Yeah. And then that crossover to the real world is what I'm after. Like, I, love movement. A lot of movement culture. like fitness, but I don't even look at myself as a fitness guy realistically. Like I'm a person. I want to live my life and I wanna express intensity. like I care about that personally.

And I, I cared about giving people avenues to do that. But ultimately I am a dad and like, that's all I wanted to, to spend time with my son. and i wanna live life, and work on my hobbies, work with hands, build things and focus on the people around me. But I know when my son was like, before he was born and I knew he's coming, like at the time I probably had like a four to five hour practice a day physically. And in my head, I'm like man, this is gonna be like I have to change this in order to be a father and I want that like I care more about that but I don't want to lose my prowess either like this is a part of my emotional well-being and my mentality to able to train at a certain intensity and that was sort of at the culmination of me meeting David and getting involved in WEC method and sort learning the basis of what he was after.

And me having a rigorous want and need to find efficiency to move at the level I was and progress, but also find more time for the things that mattered in my life. And that's like what I'm after, you know what mean? And I want that for everybody. Yeah, this crossover of building a sense of self, trusting sense self. Moving well so you can perform well or just live well and bring that to all facets of your life and not be scared of picking up things if you want to. Absolutely. I could not agree with you more.

So I do want switch gears a little bit and I know it's a topic you love to talk about which is rotation or really the spirality so spirals to me it's fascinating that the way that we even come out of the birth canal when we're born, we are rotating, right? There's a spirality to that. Our bones spiral within themselves. Many of our tendons, like our Achilles tendon, our post-hip tendon. They spiral on themselves, so what are some of your thoughts on rotation or spirallity? Or if you have another word that resonates with you about...

I'll dig it, I guess. I believe, first of all, everything is rotation. So I'm trying to help change the narrative on the idea that there is not rotating. We are organisms and we rotate everything in us, spindles, the way we talk about the posterior and interior chain. And I don't even use that language anymore. Okay. He's like an old French strongman and he talks about something called torsion. So he refers to the tissue of the body as torque or torgium. Yes. Yeah, he referred to external and internal and I've adopted that language.

I really appreciate Julian's work on all that and how I've taken it with David. This idea that we're intertwined, the combination of the two, and there are essentially for me to, for now, this is always a what if, but this was a good thread that I have been putting myself on, is that there's an internal torque, an external torque. Internal for him, which is listening would be the idea you're you would be enveloping somebody in a hug we can all imagine that that embrace that sense of gather like bringing in okay this is a when somebody's riding that engine a lot I run into this a MMA but like if I have a grappler they're a very internally torqued athlete.

They're constantly gathering things in, right? So you can see how their tissue lines, their body shapes, they have certain build. You could pick out the guy in the lineup or the girl in lineup that is a fighter. Then there's this externally torque, this very expressive Superman position, right? The place that you would see it, it's just undulation in the spine. If you can imagine you throwing your sheet over your bed right now and you do that big express up, that opening of the body before closing off to drop it.

That's that external torque. It's a spiraling of tissue through your body. And that would be like the tissue lines that we would reference a little bit and like, the top level wording I would talk about it because my job is to not be overly sciencey and too nitty gritty on stuff because I want my grandmother to be able to do this and I wanna be a talk to her, you know what I mean? So that's like a top-level layer of it. It stems from the idea of the spinal engine theory, if anybody's heard of Gratzkowitski.

This idea that the spine drives movement, it's in to out. So I'm very obsessive over the ideas like this, what I would say is the proximal core outward to the extremities. And then vice versa, the extremities back to core. and the core having sort of these, It sort of has like very distinct things it can do, right? It can go to one side, to the front. It could go one to side to back. And then it could do the same thing on the other side. So it stay there. That would be that rotational isometric.

The coil. Think about reaching over to grab something from the ground. You lock in for a moment. There's the transition from right to left, so feeling a side bend from the left to the right. So this would be what we refer to as rotational movement training, expression of the coils. Anytime the proximal core of a spinal engine is moving, And then we have what we call bilateral torsion.

Tools, Rope Practice, and Rotational Training 26:00

And this was the start of what I was learning from Julian about the external internal torus, where both sides are doing the same thing at the time. They cannot achieve the totality of the side bend in fullness. All right, so this is where people refer to like all the sagittal lifting, all this center stuff, the bilateral work as being anti-rotation or bracing of stuff. Where as I... Vertical. Yeah, but realistically, what's happening is like, I want you to imagine... I do strongman and like I talk about like...

Like the idea of like, if I'm going to envelop a stone, like a big stone or sandbag off the ground, right? I don't retain a rigidity. I have to gather or get around the object. Okay. Create a torque from both sides around that implement in order to gathered it as close to my center to be able to lift it to me lap. Right? So when you go to pick your kid off the floor, you gather around your child to pull them up. You're not getting rigid in order to perfectly like bend like a board to grab them. Right.

And that I think there's a lot of language coming out of the mouth from coaches. Like this auditory, this vocalization and communication that, I, think at first was helpful in achieving products we were after with people. But ultimately, I think it has taken over people's intuitive sense to just grab things. And I have a lot of people that come in because I'm not a huge person. I lift a really heavy sandbags, per se. When I go to lift up a bag and it's big, a 300 pound bag, and I put it on something and then I had a 250, 300-pound man next to me and he goes to pick it up and can't do it because in his head he's put up the wall that he has to do all these little things And then I give a simple task.

And this is just a simply way for everybody to think about picking something up. As I say, hey bro, can you pick this up and go put it in my car? Because I got to take it, like I'm moving. I need you to pick it up, and I really need your help to put this in the car. Because I gave him something that was beyond the task of picking it up. I need to get this to the car and then to help my friend. There was a need. And when the need came in and there was reason for the training, the exercise, right?

it became doable and he trusted in his body's natural sense to get the job done rather than over complicating the situation and not getting it done. Yeah. Is that similar when they say that if you compared like a farm boy to someone who's just in the gym, like that's the real strength is someone, who is just like lifting and throwing and moving. They're not thinking mechanically of things. Yeah, it's not the task of the lifting and throwing. It's the, I'm getting something done. You know what I mean?

And their body's looking for efficiency. I grew up as like a working man. So I, grew as a carpenter and work in land. And I grow up on property and I take care of property. Just naturally, you're sitting down and like I have to move like 12,000 pounds of lumber or something today. You start thinking efficiently and like, oh, and you just like because this has to get done or I don't make my paycheck like that you have like need for it. Right. So there's there is a sense of finding efficiency. There's a since of keeping up, getting the job done.

And then and then. Yeah, and then just having that task, the task oriented stuff just becomes so valuable for an individual because most people's journey into like movement as their health practice comes to I'm supposed to pay this monthly membership at a gym. And this many repetitions and supposed do these things to burn fat or whatever. But it's like, that's not even there's still not the through line for that individual. Like there somebody might go like I need to do this to like so I can play with my grandkids when I'm older.

That's even a through line. Like they can imagine themselves 30 years from now, like I want to be healthy for my children's children or something like that. And that could be a driving factor. It's a big thing I talk about too is the visualizations and how powerful I think that stuff is. But Yeah, I mean, like this all come into the spiral. So that's what we're talking about here, the rotational intent. And I just think that intuitive sense plays so heavily into that rotational time. This idea of looking at the body integrated and not separated the torsion stuff I learned from Julian, external, internal, or sort of my first maps on navigating how to get the to work as a unit.

We start from the core first. So I learned those isometrics to create muscular contractions and mind-body connection in the corps to make somebody associate to that as the driver of the movement. And then when they feel that, then I take them on the journey to feel the extremities. All right. Then what we do is we wield tools with our hands, right? The most, like, nerve heavy thing in our body, we learn from them, right? They're so important that the tools, I then try to funnel the work from the tool to the core.

And then we, and then the tour usually has a task. If I pick up a hammer, are meant to hit the nail. if I picked up, a kettlebell, or meant a swing aid or clean aid, press aid. Whatever you want to call the toll, it has usually a distinct goal or task behind it. and it has a distinct feeling or feedback it's providing you. So for myself, I'm after exploring as many tools as I can and downloading the feedback, download the experience, and then route into the mechanics of the rotational stuff. Like the coiling and the RMT and building an intuitive trust in those being the thing that's under everything.

And then the new experience with the tool is irrelevant. Whatever the language is of the Tool, I will master it over time because I have a language in my body I've already developed that's underneath of it. And the toolbar is a piece of what a metal probably or whatever it is, it's a creation. It's not the thing that is leading the charge here. I'm the human, and I got the brain, And I taught myself to move my Body in a way that can wield all things. Right. You're listening to the toolbox as the teacher.

Yes. Yeah. Right. And then what ends up happening is like, again, getting into these spirals as we start to notice that there are a lot of tools that don't that people are currently using that aren't maximizing the idea of moving through full rotational principles are like spirals, like, and crossing the midline and doing all this stuff. There's a lot of things stuck from maximising the attempts of it, right? Like a simple idea, somebody that can imagine doing it over at press or something with a dumbbell.

Arnold Schwarzenegger created the Arnold Press and it literally is just the, turning his hands as a press. A very simple concept, you know what I mean? But like it's coined by Arnold, right? That this idea that he's spiraling or steering, steering his hand in his elbow is creating a spindle. This idea we are moving more within the same range of motion and can tap tissue differently, or those torque lines. Where it gets more complex is a lot of people are not swinging implements anymore. Alright, so we at Wek Method, we brought up the RMT rope and the arm like clubs and idea of our intro.

And the idea swinging a rope has become a huge like phenomenon for us and giving this goodwill to the world about not jumping the rope, which is no problem jumping rope but the ideas swinging it around your body. Because it's a gentle, soft practice that allows us to cross the midline a lot, so it gets our brain ready, gets us excited about learning new information and new skills. But it also is the skill in itself that we're doing with it is allowing us steer the elbows and make the core want to like side bend and start creating sort of these figure eight or spiraling type patterns.

and start ingraining a really soft practice in the idea of rotational movement training. Is there something about, so if I just did those movements and those spirals with nothing in my hand and no awareness of a tool moving in space, I'm assuming the effect would be very different, right? So you're trying to connect that tool to it. Yeah, yeah, so tools always provide people. So I could swing anything I want. I can swing nothing. But ultimately, what we're after with that rope is, if you can imagine, like the old tin can phone you would make as a kid, right?

This is what I always talk about with the rope, is that I have the tin cans, it's on a cord, and then you could hear my voice through the other tin or sounds because there's vibration, there is connection between the tin cans and this rope is a cordage that is connecting my dominant hand with my non-dominant hand through my core, my proximal core and now my hands are interconnected to my trunk and everything is being educated at once. and I'm crossing the midline so my brain is just like downloading this information is like this is so good for me this so friendly I don't have to have a I can't even tell when I mess it up you know what I mean like and i'm not doing it perfect so I am not building those Those layers of, I'm not good enough for this.

I messed up. This is no fun. It's soft. it's easy. And I am building a very, very downright perfect practice for an individual to get started on in movement. And if you don't have a rope, which a rop is super easy, you could do with your shoelaces to be honest, or a towel or whatever. It's just certain things have better feedbacks, but I'm not gonna hold you hostage. You don' have to have rope. Go to Home Depot, buy rope and tie a knot in it. Yeah, like you just, it's tying all this together basically.

The rope for us, we say it ties it all together. Very clever point. Unintended. Yeah, it pulls in the rotational principles and what you'll see is the tool itself, so that one, It even has like a little flaw that I teach people and you will notice this with the stick. So its benefits outweigh some of its flaws, but if a lot of it roots from the idea of weapons training. So like if you were to get into like a bow staff, a bows staff is a very friendly weapon, I think people can envision and could relate to maybe something

Walking, Efficiency, and Everyday Movement 37:40

they would want to do. But the ideas of a bo staff like, if I'm taking a Bo staff and I keep both of my thumbs up, and i'm holding it with both hands and holding what's the Bo Staff? Just think of a broomstick. Let's go with the broom stick. All right? So I'm going to make a room stick, I've given the task that I am going make broomsticks to a figure eight in front of my body. Right? If I going do that, and I keep my thumbs double up, i'm gonna just be moving the staff from left to right. It's not going create a Figure 8 pattern.

Because it doesn't have a joint. In order to get that to happen, I have to turn my thumbs over completely in order create a figure eight cycle. Same with your hands. If you took your hand empty right now, if I asked you to make a Figure 8, you could. You could just start making these shapes. But if you have an implement, the implement demands that you turn completely. When you do it with a rope, that's one of those things that I will get somebody to learn quickly so that they get the most out of the practice, is that the rope because it has a little joint on it, it will allow you to kind of practice this behavior with the thumb up.

And you're not tapping the core in its totality, you are not spiraling in fully. So we'll, sometimes I'll throw like a hard object like that, a club or staff or something in, in order to quickly resonate with the idea that men need to turn over fully to root into that side bend and feel that contraction that I have just previously learned with my coach. And then we can accumulate just thousands and thousands of reps like within just 10 minutes that are just light and easy. And what you'll start noticing, I'll just throw this in, is that we have a motto.

It's called, we say every step stronger. Okay. We're we are after everybody taking a more profound efficient step Because you're accumulating so much volume and repetition walking that I cannot keep up with you in the gym I can if I could make that repetition every one of them just a tiny bit better right every single day and we can compound that effect and and we can teach your body how to funnel and spiral and rotate in a way that that step is more profound, then you are gonna feel super good and you're gonna come into the gym and your gonna start chasing things you want to do with yourself.

Rather than just the pain relief and the fat loss and all this stuff that are sort of just stepping stones to moving in the way you wanna move in your life. No, I could visualize that and I as a formal aerialist doing silks and straps like there's spirals everywhere in it so I can see this beautifully transition over to that. And then now I do ballroom and ball room is all spirales and different things happening in the hips and the feet and the T spine. So you did mention, so the last thing I do want to speak about, because you mentioned it ever so briefly just now, is walking.

Can you just talk about efficiency of walking, maybe the spirality in walking and just kind of that last nugget for the listeners? Yeah, of course. Yeah. So walking is one of the foundations that we do. We sort of have this idea that locomotion, swinging, throwing, and catching are sort the prime functions of we're after improving with somebody. And we very strongly believe all three of them are associated to each other. If I'm improving one, I am improving the other All right, and then the route to all of that is the idea of this spinal engine, the core, coiling core rotational movement, bilateral torsion, okay?

What I'm trying to do in the walking is if I recognize that I have these core strategies I can do, how does that affect the hip cycle as I am walking or I moving from one foot to the other? And that there becomes some strategies. So the first thing we're after is we are looking for somebody to be able to fully commit and trust in their ability to side bend and balance on one leg. Right? So take that step and feel like they could just pause at any moment. Like you own the step. There's not like I need to switch something up to balance here.

I'm taking a step, and I stop. If I take a stop, I can stop! If somebody's out of balance or they're not able to funnel through their core or if they can't get their weight to fully shift and commit to that base of support that you're creating, you'll see them fall within themselves. This is where in the small gait cycle of walking 10,000 steps a day, we don't recognize you falling between yourself. We want you to own your substantial. So that would be like a basis of stuff. Once we sort of learn that I can move the hip cycle like that, we start seeing potential of ways in which I navigate the core around that normal, I take a foot and a half step or whatever, right?

And that's your ability to retain a side bend as you do it. This is something we call same-side walking, same side stride for running. And where I saw it a lot growing up, and you have experienced it for sure, is I would carry plywood on one side of my body, it forced me to side bend the entire time I'm holding it. I had to get under the weight in order to manage the wait, but I still had walk 200 yards to put the plywood where it belonged. Right? So my body utilized this strategy of side bending, same side walking in order and kept the hip cycle straight.

I'm not falling over because I am side-bending. So that's a strategy we do. So then if we know that the deepest range of strategy of walking and then I can apply it on both sides, then when I'm sprinting or accelerating or running up a hill, you'll notice the individual aggressively side bends and hits those same sort of markers because the intensity demands it. And then we take that intensity and we regress it, and then, we notice, like, oh, I'm walking. I am doing the same thing, but this low-intensity environment is not turning me over.

Think of what we were talking about with the hands. It's not forcing me to commit to the fullest range when I walk, But it doesn't mean that range shouldn't be... I shouldn' t be guiding it to where that rage is. So just because the task doesn' doesn't meet the need of the range, I'm still moving through the intensity of where it goes, right? Like if I am going to spin around something, and I think about that side bend, even if don't achieve it based on the goal, that's where I try to bring it. That infinite spiral, infinite intent to drive through rotation.

And that is what we are trying to establish in the body. when we walk. For me, like when I met David and I first sort of was developing all this thought, how we were going to communicate it to normal people, I was going through rope practice and my body was very rigid at times. I power lifting, kettlebells and rings, gymnastics. And I did a lot of aerials as well. So I've done pole and silk and things like that aswell. and and i moved well in all those environments but But I wasn't, and I liked to run and was really fast, but I didn't feel good when I ran.

My transition was not to its fullest potential at the time. And when first started doing the rope practice, I did it for like five, six hours a day. I can distinctly remember this day that I was walking through Costco and walking down the aisle and all of a sudden I felt my right heel flick. just a little more than normal and it sent my weight to my other foot like aggressively. It's such a simple little change in how I was moving that had ingrained itself from just performing things with tools and these task driven movements that I started feeling this little turnout in my hip wanting to cycle and shift my way and fully connect and commit to the other side that like walking just got real comfy and real nice and like I cannot wait to go for a walk and every night when we were in Japan and after those long days at those conferences, every I went for four and a half hour walk around the city.

Wow, Chris. Every single night I was there and honestly, it was the most refreshing thing I did. It was that thing that made me feel better during that whole convention. Totally. And I was so thankful for that opportunity, because in the day-to-day life, I'm caught up. I've got to go do this with my kid. Got to do that. Like I had time for myself to literally put everything I do into the most simplest practice. It was to meander around a city and look at things and sightsee and just see and be a human and move about in space.

Yeah. So simple, but that kind of thing makes a memory for you and a joy. That's what it's about. No, I love that. I always I often speak about how I lived in New York City for 20 years and that when I would travel and teach and be on airplanes and in conferences and you're just not moving. As soon as I will get back to New york and I was just walk because it's a walking city. Yeah, i would do easily twenty thirty thousand steps a day and my body would just fall right back to where it was and like no joint pain, no low back stiffness.

My body just was, it's very fascinating how just walking is very powerful for unlocking this movement, longevity, emotionally, memories. It's so powerful. I absolutely love it. Chris, thank you so much for your time. Mind blown on this. So I highly, highly encourage them to learn more about your work, the concepts that you spoke about. Can you share where listeners could get started if you have online programming? I know you've the WEK products, but if could you just share? Yeah, so first of all, check out WekMethod.com.

We sell a lot of gear there. I teach EDU. So I teacher two certifications. we have a lotta programs on there for the general population as well. And then I also, you can find me at Eroding Weakness on Instagram. My little website with some basic programs and stuff on it aswell. and I have like a free little sign up thing that you could do to start playing around with those rotational isometrics, that coin and core idea. I do it in just a bunch of different positions. It's a very simple thing you can go through, match the shape, hold the position and get a sense of yourself.

And don't be looking for me to tell you what to do. Like look at the shake, try to imagine what I'm feeling and you find yours. I absolutely love that. Thank you again so much, Chris, and to everyone who enjoyed that episode. Remember the concept of movement intelligence, movement intuition, Movement as a language, the power of connected movement far exceeds just literally moving. It has an impact on your emotion and your entire life.