How to Start a Movement Practice in 2023

Let’s start off by defining what is a Movement Practice. 

A “Movement Practice” to me is the Umbrella under which the various disciplines that we train sits beneath. 

There are no fixed rules as to what should be within your Movement Practice, it’s up to you, however I will make a few suggestions below anyway.

My goal for this article is threefold:-

1. To bring your awareness to the essential qualities worth cultivating within your movement practice;
2. To introduce you to 5 movement teachers that have inspired me that I think are worth your time studying or following;
3. To give you a sample Movement Program with video instructions so you can apply the ideas in this this article and put them into practice for yourself.  

Who am I and what do I know about Movement?

If this is your first time here then I will let you know that I have been practicing movement seriously for the past 6 years and through that immersion, I naturally started developing a deeper understanding of “movement” and for the past 2 years have been teaching others what I’ve learned. 

I got started because I was looking for a way to heal my life which was pretty miserable at the time after going through a divorce and losing the privilege of living with my two kids full time. I was also depressed, I hated my job as a lawyer and oh yeah, I was an alcoholic. 

So, movement became my lifestyle and it helped get me out of some dark times and become healthy. 

Now I love sharing what I’ve learned because I know how much it sucks to be in pain whether physically, emotionally or spiritually and since the body is where you reside, why not make it a fun and awesome place to live.  

 Goals & Intentions 

Knowing what you want from a Movement Practice is the place to start.

The only trouble with this is, you don’t know what you don’t yet know. 

Having a good Coach to teach you what you need to know is ideal, but if that’s not possible, then I will do my best to give you some guidelines below.

Basic strength training, whether for body building, weight lifting or power-lifting, has already been well documented and shared with the main-stream, so I will cover some lesser known alternatives that offer many advantages.  

I would argue that aside from Yoga, flexibility is still grossly underrepresented in mainstream fitness so I will touch on some of the non-Yoga techniques you can implement into your own practice as well.

Yoga is awesome by the way, but it’s not a complete system for “movement” because it's missing some vital elements; hanging and pulling being some of them, but that’s a topic for another conversation. 

Then there’s cardio based sports fitness and I'm all for those, but suggest the material below purely as a means to get even more from those sports if you choose to include them in your broader movement practice. 

The man who first introduced me to the concept of a Movement Practice was Ido Portal. 

The Ido Portal Method promotes generalization rather than specificity.

This was a new concept for me and a relieving one because somehow I had naturally always been attracted to different sports and movement disciplines. 

However in my youth, I was chastised for wanting to do too many things and was often told to focus and get good at just one sport.

The only problem with this, as Ido makes clear in his body of work, is that specificity leads to over use injury and ironically, poor general movement due to the narrow commitment required to be a specialist.

Consider the strained arm of the professional baseball pitcher, the worn out hip of the taekwondo Olympian or the crushed toes of an elite ballerina – whilst radical specialization can result in prize winning careers and monetization, the physical sacrifices made to acquire such positions are not healthy for a recreational athlete or just someone who wants a balanced body built for pain free longevity.  

Glory at the highest levels comes at a steep price and if you dream of podiums, professional athletic contracts and Olympic medals then by all means pay it. 

But if your dream is to simply look and feel fantastic, be well rounded, skillful, strong and pain free well into old age so you can play with your grandchildren then read on.

To achieve this, Ido encourages you to consider yourself to be a “Mover” first before any sort of specialization takes place and for this we need to cultivate some essential physical and neurological properties in a generalized sense. 

Strength 

Strength is a vital component to health and retaining muscle mass as you age helps you to keep a better quality of life when you’re older. 

But we don’t need super-physiological amounts of muscle to be extremely strong. 

Competitive Body-Builders and Super-Hero Movie stars require the assistance of performance enhancing drugs to acquire the kind of mass they need to impress in their chosen fields but this is in itself a form of specialization with potentially harmful consequences. 

Bodybuilder and former multiple time Mr. Olympia, Dorian Yates talks openly about this and upon retiring from competitive bodybuilding found that when he stopped taking steroids his own natural hormonal system could no longer support him. 

Without the steroids, growth hormone, insulin and other drugs his body reverted to that of someone who more closely resembles a regular athletic man in decent shape. Since Mr. Olympia is no longer his goal, he opts for a more balance movement practice made up of some weights, yoga and cycling. 

She shifted from a specialist to a generalist with longevity in mind. 

We all know that lifting weights helps build muscle, but it’s not the only way. 

The resurgence of calisthenics in recent years has shown us that bodyweight alone with just a few key exercises like pull ups and dips can create impressive physiques. 

More recently, thanks to CrossFit, the Gymnastic Rings have found their way into sports stores (or Amazon) and adults wanting to develop impressive upper body weight strength can now access this potent tool.

But it was Ido Portal’s “Movement Culture” that really attracted me to the Rings for Upper Body Strength for the simple reason that they were far more interesting and fun to use than basic weights.

The skill component to using rings once you can move beyond the Pull Up and the Dip is almost endless; muscles ups, rolls, levers, handstand and all the combinations in between. 

So it was the variety and depth available on the rings that appealed to me which is why I endorse the rings for the recreational athlete. In the sample program below I have several exercises for you to try on the rings to help you start. 

The barbell is still King when it comes to lower body development, but not crucial. Many people simply don’t like the barbell or don’t have access to one. 

“Never skip leg day” as they say, so I have also included a few challenging leg drills in the sample program using simply body weight. I think you’ll be surprised how challenging these are.

Weights tend to train strength primarily in linear ranges, so you can take an athlete with an impressive bench press and find they can struggle with a bodyweight lizard crawl because this exercise takes them off axis and into directional planes they don’t train in.

I mention the lizard crawl because it’s a very humbling strength exercise, far more complex and demanding than pushups and bench press because of the way it redistributes weight unevenly through the body. I have an entire Lizard Crawl guide with 13 different progressions you can download for free and I will leave a link to that below. 

Life is off axis.

When you bend over to pick up a child (or the keys you just dropped), you rarely use correct squat technique (it’s inefficient as a human being). You’ll bend from the hips and round the spine because it’s a naturally quicker pattern to execute, so unless you train in this range with exercises like the Jefferson Curl (I’ve included this in my sample program below), you’re body weight barbell squat might not save you from a lower back injury. 

Food for thought.  

Mobility 

Christopher Sommer, former National USA Gymnastics Coach and founder of the Gymnastics Bodies Program has said that in his experience, most untrained adults require twice as much attention on mobility than they do strength. 

For so many of us (myself included 6 years ago) the modern comforts of almost constant sitting from the time we wake up to the time we go to bed have robbed us of the natural postures we were given as children and should retain as adults. 

The resting squat, the hang and simply touching your toes are functional positions we should all have access to. 

Six years ago when I first tested my resting squat, I could not get down below parallel without falling (yet with a barbell and my own bodyweight on my back, I could squat to parallel quite easily), I couldn’t touch my toes and although I could hang, if you asked me to lift my arms up above my head in the open I could only get them to about 75 degrees without having to compensate by lifting my whole chest towards the sky. 

Picture: This was after 6 months of training and as far as I could open my shoulders back then. We all start somewhere.

Now, we don’t all need dancer level splits or contortionist back bends, but we should all be aiming to make the low squat a comfortable resting positing, the hang a daily part of our life and exploring more aspects of flexibility by being on the floor more. 

There are many ways to address mobility, but I am a fan of loaded mobility drills because you get two birds with one stone, stronger and more flexible. 

I have included several examples of loaded mobility exercises in the sample program for you to try. 

While strength might stroke the ego and yes, more defined muscles help to make you look better, mobility is so underrated for making you “feel” better.

Having a body that is supple and mobile just feels better to be in than a rigid tight limited one and it helps prevent injury too. 

Plus, once you start getting results, it kinda gets addictive just like strength training and you can start to see it in the same light. 

Fluidity 

When I first saw Ido Portal practising “floreio” a solo slow form of capoeira (I’ll put a link below to it), I was mesmerized. 

He had a great muscular physique and was very flexible but the way he moved had another quality I craved. 

At first it was hard for me to even identify.

So I took one of the easier looking moves and tried to copy it. I filmed myself for comparison and was horrified at how stiff and robotic I looked. 

Yet I was placing my hands and feet in the right places, so how could he look so smooth and graceful while I looked like the Tin Man?

I realized I had only ever trained in linear planes and I never practiced softer movements like dance or tai chi. 

My movement consisted of basic gross motor skills but when it came to softer more subtle ones, I felt like a baby learning to walk again.

I soon discovered that one could learn this fluidity through practicing “locomotion” and although extremely awkward at first, I was drawn to the animal patterns and combinations of flowing body weight crawls, rolls and inversions because it seemed to be a way to express my strength & mobility but somehow cultivate a sense of flow, fluidity and smoothness, something that was completely absent from the way I moved. 

It was also still in the realm of my own delicate sensibilities, I was not yet ready for full blown contemporary dance or kundalini yoga, so it felt like a safer distance to travel from basic bodyweight strength and mobility training. 

I fell in love with Locomotion so much I released my own course teaching others how to practice it.

Now I don’t have a lifetime of Capoeira to move like Ido, but I was an out of shape stiff depressed guy not long ago who overcame all this to move with more freedom and confidence in my body than ever so in my course Locomotion Flow 2.0 I share dozens of skills and hundreds of flow combinations so others can learn to in the convenience of their how home.

Locomotion might not be for everyone, but in my opinion it’s massive bang for your buck and you don’t need any equipment which is a bonus. 

It just feels more interesting to me than doing ordinary squats, lunges, push ups or presses and achieves all those results plus cultivates those more subtle energetic internal qualities (ie. flow). 

Balance

I was 35 when I did my first handstand. Yes, it sucked. 

But when the qualities of the handstand were explained to me and there was a deeper sense of the “middle” or the “way” as they say in Toaism, I was hooked. 

When I started, my overhead mobility was so poor, the only way I could balance upside down for just a few seconds was in this weird banana back bench press type position. 

I was on the wall for many months learning various balance concepts and the fascination of just how many parts there are into build a human tower out of your own joints in order to balance efficiently can easily become an obsession. 

The straight line handstand, when unlocked, really is a resting position. You have learned the middle once before, when you learned to stand on your feet.

You can stand on two feet with very minimal adjustment because you have through pure functional necessity developed an acute sense of vertical upright balance. 

Initially as a toddler, your little ankles, knees and hips could not tolerate the load of standing for long, but over time and with endless repetition, your joints adapted. 

The same process applies for learning handstands. The joints take time to adapt, the ligaments, tendons and skeletal materials take much longer than muscle tissue to cope, so handstands require a degree of patience physiologically.

Yet the internal satisfaction of even the shortest balance hold in the beginning is immense. 

The static handstand has several basic shapes can be practiced early on; straight, tuck and straddle. 

A fine goal to aspire to is a 60 second straight line hold. 

From there you can start to learn press to handstands, stalder presses and eventually, where I am just getting to now….one arm handstands. 

The depth of handstand training alone is immense and again helps to develop strength & mobility while cultivating balance.

I have included several beginner handstand drills in the sample program for you to try. 

Speed, Power & Explosiveness 

What good is it being smooth and graceful if you can’t also be fast and powerful? 

Now, you can train plyometrics by jumping on boxes or in straight lines, you can do sprints or throw medicine balls, but another super fun and endless creative discipline to consider is acrobatics. 

Jumping and hopping for their own sake can for some become boring but when hidden in the pursuit of a flip or a combination of flips, things get interesting. 

Now you don’t have to start off with standing backflips on the ground and risk breaking your neck, like everything else there are sensible way to progress into flips. 

For example, the Macaco (or the Monkey Flip) is a safer starting point to play with than a standing backflip but it will teach you much of the mechanics needed to advance into full back tucks. 

You can also start learning the Monkey Flip with a slightly easier progression called the Chapea De Couro (the Monkey Kick).

I have included the monkey kick in the sample program for you try.

Some of my favorite practitioners blend flips and softer acrobatics (like the Macaco) into flowing dance like combinations which to me represents an aesthetically pleasing display of physicality, rhythm, strength and timing. 

I highly recommend playing with some form of explosive movement to ensure that your body is able to move quickly when it needs to.

Inspiring Movement Teachers 

Here are 5 of my favorite Movement Teachers for you to check out for some inspiration:

No.1: Ido Portal 

The God Father of Movement Culture himself, a truly impressive mover and teacher, a real virtuoso and deeply philosophical figure head in the world of movement. He gave me permission to play, but to play seriously and to embrace my natural desire for many disciplines within a practice. Thank you Ido.

No.2 Tom Weksler 

I've never met or trained with Tom in person but the artistic and technical prowess of his acrobatic flows is truly inspiring. The way he can move inspires me to not just become more technically precise with my own acrobatics and locomotion, but in the way these fields can merge together to create…..songs almost from the way we move.

No.3 Harry Williams 

Harry is my favorite handstand teacher and I have had the good fortunate to attend several workshops of his. He makes learning handstands for adults who have no gymnastics backgrounds very practical having learned as an adult himself. He inspires me to pursue the one arm handstand and has also taught me that most injuries can be worked around or overcome.

No. 4 Marcello Pallozo 

Again I've not studied under Marcello or attended any of his workshops as yet (it’s on my bucket list and maybe now the world has opened up again after the Pandemic it might happen), but this guy is so well rounded and unorthodox. His focus on elasticity & bounce can be seen in his incredible parkour feats, then he’ll be in the pool demonstrating physicality underwater, then doing flips…this guy has to be seen to be believed. 

No.5 Sam Kojo 

This guy got me into tricking (unorthodox flips and combinations). You’ll need to watch some of his spins in slow motion as he bends what you might think is even humanly possible while in the air off one jump. He also built an incredible learning resource Kojos Trick Lab which is excellent for learning more about tricking. 

Sample Program

As promised, the link to download my sample movement program is at the bottom of this page. Just pop in your email details and it will be sent to you (just be sure to check junk or spam folders in case it ends up there...but it is not junk I can assure you!). 

This sample program gives you a little bit of everything to have a play with these qualities. 

If you like the sample exercises and would like to take things a step further, I am currently offering an online coaching deal which you can find out all about here:

https://www.aarongriffiths.com.au/one-decision-to-change-your-life-copy-1 

I also have another free guide which is all around the Lizard Crawl and how you can use this instead of push ups and my guide as 13 difference variations, link to that here: 

https://www.aarongriffiths.com.au/ultimate-lizard-guide 

You can also check out my paid online Locomotion course here which is very comprehensive:

https://aaron-griffiths-b25a.mykajabi.com/sales-page 

Reference Materials

Ido Portal Floreio Demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwF1mUa8c5E