Building a foundation
Inside of you is a master manipulator.
You used to be a master at manipulating and moving your own body weight.
From infancy, you were able to position yourself into rolling and crawling positions, easily supporting your body weight on your hands, knees, elbows, and hips throughout the day. It came natural to you. You were flexible, adaptable, strong, and healthy. And you built your entire adult body on a foundation of body weight movements.
Your car, your body
If you’re like most American adults, you neglect to maintain the foundation you so carefully built when you were young. You sit, you stand, you walk, you sleep, but you don’t often revisit the foundational movements that built you up to where you are now. Outside of walking, you’re not very good at maneuvering your own body weight.
If you treated your car like you treat your body, you’d have a rickety old vehicle. The foundational maintenance of oil changes, tire rotations, and coolant flushes goes a long way toward keeping your car healthy.
The same is true for your body. If you don’t want it to break down, you must keep up with the basic foundational maintenance.
Lifting weights is not the answer
Most people mistakenly substitute performance movements for foundational movements. An example of a performance movement is weight lifting with barbells, dumbbells, etc. These can be helpful and have their place, but, make no mistake, you won’t build your foundation by lifting weights.
If you want to feel better, move better, improve your flexibility, you absolutely must use body weight exercises and movements. As they say, you should dance with the one that brought you.
Important takeaways
- Supporting your own body weight, with and without movement, is how you built your physical foundation and learned to move.
- If you’re in pain, body weight exercises are superior to lifting weights.