Bodyweight movement training has been around for a long time now, however over the last 6-12 months there has been an increased level of this being taught and performed by people ranging from the every day exercise enthusiast to the professional sports person. What I find interesting is that we are now moving towards training movement patterns that we all grew up performing with ease, but gradually lose the ability to perform over time. We are now even seeing a change in how our commercial gyms are being developed with a lot less equipment that has typically filled our gym floor space for isolated muscle training to facilities that are literally a large room with a mix of equipment such as monkey bars and other accessories that can be used to overload the individual when they perform these movement patterns.

When I talk about bodyweight training, I am talking about exercises that involve us rolling, crawling, squatting, hip hinge/deadlift, lunging and push and pull movements. For those of you who have kids and take them down to the playground, these little toddlers and children are doing all of these movements across a variety of different ways that involve them using their entire body in a many variable movement patterns. When you look at them, they are pretty much just playing around and enjoying themselves. Yet, ask an adult to perform these movements and often they are left in a pool of sweat trying to perform what our little kids do with a big fat grin on their face.

Educators such as Gray Cook of FMS, Kolar of DNS, Gary Gray of the Gray Institute and Janda and many others have been stressing the importance of assessing and teaching these movements and asking the health professional (osteopath, physio and chiro) to incorporate them into their assessment and training strategies. More recently we are seeing this approach cross over into the mainstream health and fitness industry as we are now seeing educators such as Ido Portal, Zuu, Animal Flow, Move Nat, Primal Move and others introduce this in a variety of formats that focus on mobility, strength and general all around conditioning.

For those of who are interested in introducing some of these approaches to your assessment and movement training, I have incorporated a number of great youtube links below that highlight what I am talking about.

If you would like to find out more about movement based body weight training and would like to incorporate this into your everyday workout, please contact us at Principle Four Osteopathy to arrange an appointment. Principle Four Osteopathy is located in the heart of the Melbourne City and Docklands.

Taking a look at some of the leading movement based educators.

Move Nat

www.movnat.com/