Why understanding movement requires more than muscles, joints and exercises This one is for the Nerds. I thought I’d challenge myself to write up a weekly blog post on Mondays for the nerds. Today is a ridiculously simple question: How does the body work? It’s a question I’ve become increasingly interested in throughout my career, and unfortunately, the more I learn, the less straightforward the answer seems to become. Open an anatomy textbook and we can identify muscles, bones, joints, nerves, tendons, ligaments and organs. Open a biomechanics textbook and we can start discussing forces, moments, levers, stiffness and load transfer. Open a neuroscience textbook and suddenly we’re talking about sensory information, motor planning, cortical networks, reflexes, perception, learning and neuroplasticity. Then we could study physiology. Psychology. Pain. Fascia. Motor learning. Strength and conditioning. Skill acquisition. Behaviour. The environment. And somewhere amongst all of that… a human being moves. That is what makes movement so fascinating. And it creates the central idea behind much of what we do: The body doesn’t work in isolated parts, even though sometimes we need to study the parts to understand the whole. The Problem With Breaking Humans Into Pieces Reductionism has been extraordinarily useful for science. If something is complicated, break it into smaller pieces. Study the pieces. Understand them. Then reconstruct the system. This approach has taught us an enormous amount about human anatomy and physiology. We can identify the attachment sites of the gluteus medius. We can measure quadriceps force. We can examine tendon stiffness. We can record muscle spindle activity. We can study cortical activation during movement. We can calculate joint moments during running. All of that information matters. But there is a potential problem. Understanding every component individually doesn’t necessarily explain the behaviour of the whole system.

No need to get on and off the ground. Just using a chair, this is a nice mobility and stability 10-15minutes flow.

A nice kettlebell flow workout. This is a good stand alone conditioning circuit, or can be used as a bit of a finisher. (Be cautious with power movements like “the snatch” movement, if being used as a finisher, can remove the snatch movement and is still a great finisher).

A foundational spine corrector flow (with some spicy movements).

A full body flow session designed for mobility, control and smooth confident movement.