Erwan LeCorre on Free Movement in Nature
Erwan LeCorre, founder of the MovNat system, spent his childhood exploring the French countryside –sprinting through the woods, climbing trees, and jumping across creeks. In young adulthood he scaled walls and practiced free running (aka “parkour”) on the streets of Paris. Today he leads an international movement of natural movers reclaiming the techniques our ancestors used to survive in a much wilder world. MovNat is short for “natural movement” or “movement in nature” — a system of physical fitness designed to free people from the grind of modern sedentary life.
We are trained to think that freedom is mostly about what the government or other people tell us we can and cannot do, yet there is a large sphere of human action in which no one can dictate to us. Freedom of movement goes beyond simply being able to chose which state or country you travel to. It also depends on being able to actually navigate the world, with all of its complex terrain and seeming obstacle courses.
The modern medical establishment tends to prescribe patients a regimen of boring, repetitive exercise at the gym — fitting for obedient subjects to a state-run healthcare system. But whereas an exercise machine dictates exactly how you can and cannot move, the techniques explained in Erwan’s new book, The Practice of Natural Movement, can be done almost anywhere and modified to suit to the practical needs and constraints of the practitioner. Natural movement replaces artificial movement and leads those who practice it to become strong in ways that are useful in variety of real-world situations.
This show’s producer Charlie Deist spoke with Erwan about his new book and the problem of our self-imposed domestication. They discuss what it means to be a “zoo human,” and explore ways that people can incorporate natural movement into their own life. Listen now, and make 2019 the year you reclaim your health and freedom of movement.
Transcript:
Charlie Deist: Good morning and welcome to The Bob Zadek Show. I’m Charlie Deist, filling in for Bob, but don’t fear — we’ve still got your weekly dose of freedom. It’s the show of ideas, not attitude.
Today I’ll be interviewing a guest with some ideas about what freedom really means and it has little to do with what the government says we can or cannot do.
We’re talking about the freedom of movement. Usually this phrase is used in the context of immigration, i.e., the ability to choose where you live. If you don’t like the policies of California, you can always move to Texas. Sometimes authoritarian regimes like North Korea prevent their citizens from moving because they know that if they gave people the option to leave, then everyone would choose it (they wouldn’t have anyone to control anymore), but there’s actually a force in the modern world that goes beyond national boundaries that is stopping our freedom of movement.
They say that sitting is the new smoking, and people are sitting in front of computer screens for an average of eight hours everyday. That’s people in the supposedly free world. If that’s freedom, then I don’t want to know what tyranny looks like.
My guest this morning is Erwan LeCorre, the founder of a physical fitness movement called MovNat that is about recovering the natural freedom of movement that has been lost over the centuries. It’s the subject of his new book, The Practice of Natural Movement: Reclaim Power, Health and Freedom. Erwan, thank you so much for joining me,
Erwan LeCorre: Charlie. Thank you for having me.
Charlie: Before we get into the specifics of what MovNat is, I want to start with this term “zoo human,” because I think it shocks people out of their complacency. You say that humans have become domesticated. This isn’t something that we can blame on the government. It’s actually self-imposed.
What is a zoo human, and what have we lost in this process of domesticating ourselves?
Erwan LeCorre: Desmond Morris first coined the term “zoo human.” He observed our behavior from the perspective of humans being our own animal species, and he realized that despite the desire to differentiate ourselves from the animal kingdom there are way too many parallels — way too many behaviors that we’re not even aware — that display and support the idea of our behavior being based on our own “animalness.”
Then he also noticed everything we’re doing to go against that fact, which is changing the way we look. A number of behaviors are culturally-induced or even imposed by education. Everything showed that we are in many ways formatted by the culture humans have created for ourselves. It’s not necessarily a bad thing in every way. However, it does turn us into more of zoo animals — so zoo humans, rather than wild and untamed animals.
A zoo human, to answer your question quickly, is as a person who does not understand their animal nature — that their own biological drives are not inherently bad. These drives have to be taken into account, and in most cases understood, respected, and nurtured so that you can thrive. If you don’t acknowledge that human nature then the there are a number of consequences on your health and wellbeing, and your mental state. Then you become a zoo human.
Charlie: A lot of political theory starts off with the assumption of human beings coming out of the state of nature — when we had more of our animal nature incorporated into our daily lives — and that it was purely this savage and brutal environment that we want to get as far away from as possible.
In the process of becoming “civilized,” we’ve stuffed a lot of this stuff deep down into the recesses of our minds and in trying to suppress it we’ve ended up with some of the symptoms that you see when you look around. How is this showing up in terms of our health and overall wellbeing that we no longer acknowledge that we come from a much more wild, natural state?
Erwan LeCorre: First off, we have also to acknowledge that humans are very complex animals. We have a very large brain and amazing cognition — it’s very complex. That enables us to create a number of behaviors — good and bad.
Charlie: So the MovNat system is a method, but there is a paradox of trying to recapture a natural way of moving that is in some sense instinctual, yet we need some kind of a method in order to recover it since we have neglected this side of our nature for so long.
Explain what MovNat is and how it differs from things people might be familiar with like yoga or martial arts.
Erwan LeCorre: There’s a lot in here. First, the term MovNat stands for “moving naturally” or “moving in nature.” MovNat is a method. It’s a method to enable an efficient, natural movement. Now that’s going to lead me to explain what natural movement is.
At least 100 pages of my book are dedicated to what I call the manifesto, explaining what natural movement is, why it matters. The rest of the book is the know-how. How do you practice? How do you make it happen in your life in practical ways?
I like to say that freedom of movement is the first kind of movement we have and that we experience. When we are little kid — before any understanding whatsoever in our mind, before even forming a single thought or knowing or understanding a single word — we are already at it universally, and like you said, instinctually. That’s what we do. We start crawling, we start rolling, reaching with our arms, and trying to get stability in our head. All these are part of a developmental stage of movement and formation; movement and physical education. We start there. Natural movement is what we human beings all have in common — all of us, universally, regardless of background or ethnicity or culture of politics and religion.
Think of a wild animal and the way they then stay fit. It would sound completely absurd or even hilarious to fathom to that say a tiger or wolf — whatever animal out there in the wilderness — would have to step into the gym and try to isolate their muscles, work them out, and then do cardio, and some stretching on the side before they return to their wild environment and be able to survive there or even thrive there. Right? That would be absurd.
The question is why on earth should it be any different in us human beings? The dolphin species, the horse, the elephant, or the eagle — each species has their own natural movement: a set of skills, of movement aptitudes and physical behaviors that naturally (thanks to evolution) belong to that particular species.
Humans have their own natural movement. We have a set of skills — a set of movement behaviors that we are designed to do. In my book I talk about the diverse skills — the ground movement, the balancing, the standing and the walking, and the running, and the climbing and the jumping, and the manipulating with lifting and carrying things and on and on. We are highly versatile the way we can physically perform and what we can do with our movements. Then we have to decide if we want to reclaim that natural movement behavior in our life, and to what extent.
Charlie: People right now are setting their New Year’s resolutions or have already begun and are struggling to keep up with their commitment to go to the gym. I’ve thought in terms of the tyranny of certain forms of exercise — and it’s not to say that you can’t do all kinds of things that are good for your mind and body in a gym. But in general, if you walk into a gym you see all these different machines that, like you say, isolate a muscle group. They’re not necessarily training the whole body. They’re not a reflecting the full range of movements that humans are capable of.
You wrote in the book about these “timeless skills of human beings,” which was a phrase that jumped out at me. If someone is trying to get started with the MovNat system, where can they start? They can learn the complete system from this new book which is available on Amazon and it’s coming out on Tuesday, January 15th, but what would this look like for the average person who’s maybe just getting started and uncomfortable getting out of the outside of the box, so to speak?
Erwan LeCorre: Yeah. This book is the textbook for it. It’s not just the philosophy explained, it is also — and most importantly — the “how to.”
The manifesto will inspire you. It will give you all the insights into what natural movement is, why it matters, why it’s always been around, why it’s beneficial, and what are diverse principles. I’ve designated 12 principles that define a natural movement.
Then there’s the “how to,” explaining the principles that make movement efficient. So before we explain each technique in detail — and there are so many techniques that are covered in this book — we have to understand why it has to be progressive, how you ensure safety, what are the diverse strategies you can use to add movement in your life, and to make your practice effective and safe. Everything is in the book.
You were talking about gym — the diverse methods, diverse programs (I would rather call them programs or modalities rather than the methods) — and we go to the gym because we’ve been led to believe that our physical salvation depends on it. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s actually extremely commendable to ensure at least a form of physical activity in your life. It’s a beautiful thing. I would never say otherwise.
If you have some kind of physical activity already, and it makes you happy, and keeps you in shape, and keeps you moving — it’s a beautiful thing. But think about this: When you enter a gym, you enter an environment that is completely artificial that has been been designed for you to perform artificial movements. An artificial movement, for instance, is when you use what’s called “an exercise machine.”
An exercise machine is going to fully dictate — and that word “dictate” is not something the lovers of liberty enjoy hearing — how you can move and how you cannot move. It will tell you exactly the mechanistic, limited range of motion that you can afford. Then you have to count your reps before you switch and go sit on another machine that will also isolate and shape a given movement that’s very limited. To me, it’s dictatorship, plain and simple.
This is not a, a natural human, physical behavior. It was designed by some people who thought it was a good idea to put you in there as if you were some kind of organic matter that needs to be tamed and controlled. No less than that. That’s what happens in the gym to people who — because they do not have that kind of perception — have been led to believe that’s the right thing to do. They also have not been told about the amazing potential they have for natural movement that would give them actual freedom in their lives. My whole vision is about bringing back into modern society the awareness of the potential of natural movement and then the experience of real freedom of movement, starting with all the movement skills that are universally human and that have been neglected in modern society.
Charlie: I wanted to tell a story about how I first encountered MovNat, and the role that it played in my personal development. I’ve always had strong opinions about politics and felt that the government applies too heavy a hand in a lot of areas. I was at a time in my life when I was very frustrated with the political system and found myself in a funk. I just kind of lost that lust for life.
I had some sort of symptoms that the doctor couldn’t quite diagnose. He thought maybe it was mononucleosis, but said that in his experience patients who had a sickness that that led them to become more sedentary would get into this self-perpetuating cycle, and he characterized it as “losing the will to live.”
That also kind of shocked me out of my complacency. His recommendation — doctor’s orders — were to gradually build more physical activity into my life and just push myself a little bit more at a time. I found that I was unable to do any long distance running, but there were certain workouts that I could do that took just a shorter amount of time involving more intense bursts. So just sprinting down the streets, for example.
This plays a role in the MovNat system, where we are trying to mimic what might have been more adaptive for our ancestors in their environment. There are things that our environment called for, such as running, jumping, balancing, lifting and crawling — much like a wolf needs to sprint in a hunt.
Why would we look to evolution as the guide for bringing us closer to health, and what is the evolutionary principle at play in these specific movements?
Erwan LeCorre: Well, simply because those movement come from millions of years as hominids. Homo sapiens and homo habilis is less [time] but still hundreds of thousands of years. It’s a very, very long time for physical behavior to be passed on down the line through our genes and through our selves. The power of evolution — of memory — it gives you not only an instinctual drive to move, but also an instinctual drive to move in particular ways.
Look at us men and women on any continent and in any culture, and what babies do. It starts on the ground and we crawl, we crawl on all fours — on our knees and elbows or arms, feet, and then we stand up and then we start to balance, because standing in an act of balancing.
Then we walk, and then we will run, and start to jump.
We will pass over or under obstacles.
We will climb.
We’ll pick things up and carry them, and throw them, and catch them and so forth.
So what is the meaning? Before we go to school, before we can even talk with our parents, or even form a thought — why is it so important to develop ourselves physically and to acquire these movement skills before anything else? Well, that’s because of survival — because an animal that can’t move in nature will die and it’s a primal instinct to become self reliant, as rapidly as we possibly can — that we become able to do our own moves.
Those skills have to do with survival before they have to do with our ability to thrive and survive. What do we have to do to survive? We have to first avoid threats and then we have to take whatever opportunity that presents itself to us.
In order to do that in an original world of wilderness, we need to go over distances — slow, fast, short or long — passing obstacles on the way. We have to jump over obstacles. We have to climb up and climb down for a diversity of reasons and in a variety of contexts. We have to be capable physically of navigating — to escape, to reach and chase and grasp, so we can eat and so we can avoid predators.
The question is, today do we need to do all of that? And the answer is no. We don’t. We don’t need to, but we still do it.
So there’s a paradox there. What is the reason that we don’t? We don’t because on a daily basis we stand up in the morning, and then we walk a few steps to the next seat, and then we sit there, and then we’re going to stand up again, we’re going to get up, and then we’re going to go find another seat somewhere else. That’s the behavior of most people on the day-to-day basis. Some standing, a lot of sitting, and then some some walking. There’s very, very little variety in this. It’s very impoverished from a physical behavior perspective — extremely impoverished compared to what we are able to do, and compared to what our ancestors did to live.
It’s not just cultural restrictions or conventions that limit us. It also has to do with the fact that we just don’t need it because of technologies and because of the ease of life today — the comfort of life. It’s not all relaxation — of course everybody’s got to work and it can be very stressful. But today’s technology enables us to order a pizza that’s going to be delivered to your desk in just a few clicks.
So you don’t need physical action any longer. That’s what’s killing us, is the fact that there’s nothing that really makes movement mandatory in your life. You are not compelled. You’re not obliged. It’s not a condition for you to stay alive and to eat and to make a living. Therefore, all movement pretty much has become optional, and because it’s optional, well, most people will just simply make the easy choice of not doing movement.
That’s the situation most modern people are in, which is that they are left with very poor, very limited movement and behavior. At a physiological and biological level, it’s killing us. This is why it is not optional to move — we are going to pay the price. We will be suffering.
So just just to finish on this: no, we do not need it in one sense — natural movement has become optional in today’s life thanks to technology and the conveniences of the modern world, but yes, we still and always will need natural movement to thrive physiologically. To be healthy and high energy, we will always need that movement behavior to happen.
Charlie: This was definitely my experience, where the advice from doctors had been for months just to “Get rest, get rest.” But the paradox seems to be in the modern world, we have more of the option to simply rest throughout our life. Then that results in a general kind of weakness and lethargy. Whereas when we push ourselves, when we subject ourselves to certain stresses, this actually makes us stronger and more vital. It gives us more energy. There’s a quote that I want to read, which I think also recaps what we’ve been talking about, which is finding a way to incorporate movement into our lives that’s not just a compartment of exercise, but that actually treats us as a whole human being. You write:
“[R]emember the “Evolutionary” principle:
Our bodies — and minds, for that matter — are designed for Natural Movement in nature, and both expect us to move and physically behave like our wild ancestors did. Although it is socially acceptable for an adult to “work out” on an exercise machine, it would be considered strange for an adult to move like children do, to move like wild humans do — that is, to run, jump, balance, crawl, climb, and so on — especially in places that are not “officially” designed for fitness activities. We have become, to a significant degree, domesticated creatures. Unfortunately, the process of domestication involves repression, diversion, distraction, subversion, and suppression of important natural behaviors.”
And to come back one more time to this period in my life when I was feeling lethargic and sick and couldn’t figure it out. One thing that really helped me along in my recovery was the discovery of this big log up near a track and field. I realized that lifting up one end of the log and pushing it over my head was similar in some ways to the machines that you might find at a gym, but it involved a little bit more coordination and a little bit more balance, and suddenly it just triggered something in me. I don’t know if it’s some sort of switch in my DNA that got triggered from that, or if it’s just a subconscious mental phenomenon, but there is something to these natural movements that really does change us at a deep level.
For the people who are listening to this and maybe don’t see themselves going out into nature and trying these movements in that radical of a way, I think that there is something else that they can get from the MovNat philosophy — which is the ability to move more gracefully.
One of the beauties of modern life is that there are new activities, whether it’s a particular sport (I want to get into a discussion a about sailing if we have time) or some other activity now available that our ancient ancestors didn’t have access to, but where we can still apply some of these principles. The non-specialized nature of human movement allows us to do all these things. So, even if you are a technician of some kind who needs to crawl into tight spaces or is working with your hands and your body — do you ever work with people who are trying to incorporate these things into their occupation or into particular sports?
Erwan LeCorre: All the time, all the time. I have trained MMA athletes to help them improve areas of their game, but also special forces. So clearly you’re talking about highly practical applications here. This is, in fact, pretty much everybody who starts training MovNat is looking for the practical application. You mentioned how you were doing those movements and something clicked and you could see some parallels to what you do in the gym, except that what clicked was the actual freedom of movement that you enjoyed. Number one is that you could actually modify these movements at anytime you wanted, but then you also had the freedom to modify it to achieve a practical goal.
When you are exercising with certain things in mind like, “My shoulders are going to be a little stronger… My thighs are going to be a little stronger… Hopefully I’m going to lose some weight… I’m hopefully going to look a little better… I’ll be in shape… People will compliment me on that.” There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s a very indirect outcome that you’re pursuing. It’s a delayed effect where you’re like, “Okay, later I will have some compensation for the effort that I invest right now in drills, and exercises that feel like chores and that I don’t really enjoy.” Right?
Whereas when you do natural movement, you’re doing practical movements. When you are jumping, you actually clear obstacles. When you are lifting, when you’re carrying, when you are balancing, you are understanding the practical nature — the usefulness of the movements you do — in a direct, tangible way. And that in itself is very refreshing. That’s an important difference, in that when you practice MovNat you want to become physically competent — you want capability in your movement — whereas at the gym you just want to work out.
What it is to be free?
What is freedom? Isn’t it the ability to think the way you want, but also to do what you want the *way* you want?
To have the ability to achieve in your life what you want? What is the foundation for that?
What do you need to do? You need to have skills. You need to learn how to do that.
Freedom is not something that’s given to you and then you do whatever you want while being ignorant. You have got to learn. You have got to acquire knowledge so that you can actually experience that freedom to the best of your ability, and it goes also for the physical aspect of our lives — of our reality. When you learn MovNat, you become physically capable in the real world. Whereas in the gym, you just do a workout hoping to look a little better and and burn some calories, right?
It’s a tremendous difference in mindset to begin with, but also in outcome — because with the MovNat practice the outcome will be that you don’t need the gym anymore. You don’t need the machines anymore. You don’t need the coach anymore. Eventually you have capability. You have acquired a set of skills that have become part of who you are, for you to enjoy your physical freedom. And if you can enjoy the physical freedom more and better than you will enjoy the freedom of your life. So it goes beyond the physical — to acquire physical competency is to acquire more freedom.
Charlie: I think 2019 for a lot of people can be the year that they really do this and as the subtitle of the book says, “Reclaim Power, Health and Freedom. I’m talking with Erwan LeCorre who is the founder of the MovNat system and the author of The Practice of Natural Movement, which is available on Amazon.
This is a guide for people who are maybe dissatisfied with their limited variety of movements or just with their level of health and are looking for a sustainable exercise routine. Even calling it an exercise routine I think is part of the problem, where we’ve compartmentalized exercise into its own category, whereas it used to be a necessity for survival. Now the survival aspect is not quite as strong, but we still need to find ways to incorporate movement into our daily lives.
There’s a system of a certifications and workshops that the MovNat organization runs that teach these movements like running, jumping, balancing, crawling, climbing and the techniques associated with them. There are also certifications that deal with aquatics, which is swimming ,and combatives, which is a form of self defense.
In my own life, I’ve been incorporating movement for the most part into sailing. Here in the Bay Area I have taken to sailing as one of my main hobbies, and I find that there are many situations on a sailboat in which you need that physical competency. If you don’t have it then you can get yourself into trouble. I wanted to ask you, because I think that you’ve spent a good amount of time around boats. Also one of the precursors to MovNat was “the natural method” or “la Methode naturelle,” which was developed by a French naval officer. I’m wondering if maybe there’s something in the DNA of MovNat that is linked with boats and sailing, or if you see a potential for crossover there?
Erwan: Hey, when you improve your movements on land — when you really acquire that whole range of natural movement and skills — then they’re going to apply in pretty much any environment. So you’re going to be on the boat and if you’ve learned to move better than you’re more comfortable on the boat, especially in terms of stability, quickness, alertness and responsiveness of your body. This is so important in sailing because you need to adjust your position depending on the boat, the weather conditions, and the sea itself — those are very complex variables. But you need to be very alert and responsive physically — not just mentally, but also physically when you sail. Natural movement will definitely help with that.
I have a little personal story: many years ago we were chartering a boat from Hawaii (it had done the Pacific Cup race) and then I helped charter it back to the Bay Area actually. We caught the tail end of the storm and we had these massive waves. We got battered for two nights and one day. At some point I was trying to finally find a way to sleep at the bottom of the boat, and all of a sudden I hear that big sound VVVVVHHHhhh and then POW! That means that basically the main sail is going into the water, and I literally stormed out of the inside of the boat, rushed onto the deck in the middle of the night with the other guy and had to start to pull the main sail so it wouldn’t get caught in the water and get much worse. It was a huge liability and we had to act extremely fast — both of us doing our best to balance ourselves on the wet and moving deck — pulling and pulling on the main sail that so heavy with all that water.
Long story short, we do that. We fold it, we do whatever we have to do. And then I realized that I made the biggest mistake that you could ever make in such conditions, which is that I didn’t clip myself. It was just in the moment. A terrible mistake, but nonetheless, I didn’t go overboard. I would say that thanks to my physical practice, I was able to stay very alert, very stable, very responsive to all of the moving conditions and changes in position of the boat while doing all of those tasks. In regular sailing conditions or in very challenging sailing conditions, it’s a tremendous help to be more capable more with your body.
Charlie: That is also a prime instance of the MovNat motto, which is “Be strong to be useful.” In that case it sounds like you were needed on deck, and there are a lot of situations — even if it’s just helping your neighbor move a mattress — in which it helps to have a variety of movement skills, and not just the kinds of strength that you’ll get from lifting weights at the gym, but actually moving and manipulating real objects.
I also wanted to come back to the precursor, Georges Hébert. Tell us a little bit about who he was and the influence that he had on your thinking.
Erwan: He was a naval officer who started his career during the time of the very last actual sail ships, before they turned to engines. While traveling the world he starts to realize the importance of movement and the unbelievable athleticism that you could get through natural movements. Imagine those large wooden ships and imagine yourself in a storm on those ships. The whole crew has to be like one man at the sound of a whistle. Then they have to jump, and run, and climb on top of crazy tall masts, and hang to ropes. They probably didn’t have any kind of protective gear. Then they have to pull or unfold the very large sails that were not made of Kevlar, but were just probably made of hemp and very heavy.
Can you imagine the strength, the balance, the coordination and basically the movement skills required to be part of a such crew and to be able to actually be effective and be operational? Those men were very athletic, except they never trained in a gym. They just were sailors.
Then Hebert would travel the world and go on foot on some foreign lands of Africa or Asia. We’re talking about a the end of the 19th-century, so in most countries there was no real technological development. People were still going on foot, barefoot, carrying heavy loads on long distances, and hunting with primitive tools and what not. Hebert got to observe all of that, and then compare their levels of health and physical capability and resiliency to that of contemporary men and women, who were already for the most part sedentary — living in cities and urban environments — and not being in shape already, not really being exposed to the sun or having to do physical labor, or having to do only very specific physical labor that would break their bodies rather than make them vibrant and healthy.
That’s when Hebert understood that the physical behavior was making a difference. Not only the physical behavior and the kind of movements that people would do either in nature versus the city, but also in the fact that people in the cities had no exposure to nature. The more undeveloped or uncivilized populations would also be in nature all the time — in the sun, in the rain, in the cold — barefoot. That alone also played a large role in making them capable and adaptable, whereas in the city you would be weaker — more fragile. Populations in other, more natural places were more robust — they were strong — and also had that sense of community.
Because you talked about, “Be strong to be useful,” when you are physically capable, you will not only be able to help yourself in time of need, but you will also be potentially able to help others. You have a physical response that can save lives or participate in the community that you belong to. And that’s a beautiful thing.
Charlie: These principles, even though they’re rooted in an evolutionary perspective and came out of an observation of a more “primitive” people who were much healthier than the people living in the “civilized” world today, we can still get, in some sense, the best of both worlds. We have a lot that we can learn from the past, but we don’t need to completely abandon everything that we have in our modern communities.
Talk a little bit about what you are trying to build with the MovNat organization, and how people can learn more and start to incorporate this into their own lives.
Erwan: So MovNat is the method that I have designed for natural movement, which is what I’ve been calling it for over a decade. When I started MovNat, I had to understand what it was about and I would use the term “natural movement,” which led me to have to explain what that is every time. That is, no, it isn’t a yoga or Tai Chi, it is actually the oldest natural movement skills we’ve been talking about — jumping, crawling and balancing. I had always done natural movement as a kid, and most of us have, but I really, really, really did it as a kid. I was in the woods all the time — climbing trees and jumping off rocks, from rock to rock. That was my background. Next to my house were these amazing woods and hills and large boulders. It was a fantastic playground. So I was doing that all the time.
But then when I started to do more specialized sports as a kid and learn about fitness and gyms and weightlifting and this and that, it clearly didn’t match any of those movements I was doing as a kid in the word. So that behavior that I understood was not recognized at all. It didn’t really have a place in today’s society. There was not a name for it. There wasn’t a method for it. Nobody really valued it. It didn’t have any real recognition in today’s world. That was my observation.
I kept doing even as an adult, but if there were people around they will look at me weird because they could not put a name on it because I was not a child. I was an adult. It was as if natural behaviors were reserved to only young kids, but an adult could not possibly do them, which is very, very absurd — very weird actually. We’ve been led to believe that collectively.
It became my mission and my personal vision in my life to establish mainstream awareness of natural movement — worldwide. It is that ambitious. That reality that human beings have that amazing and beautiful potential, and that it precedes all the rest.
We are not able to move naturally because we do weight lifting or stretching and yoga and some exercise in the gym or some specialized sports. As a matter of fact, all of those sports and fitness programs and physical activities were or are enabled because of that natural ability we have in the first place.
My mission entails first the communication — doing my best to be as straightforward and inspiring and explaining what natural movement is and why it’s important. But then it’s also the how-to — the practical tools you need to actually make it a reality in your life. So you can train it, you can practice it, you can be taught, it can be transmitted, etc.
Charlie: It’s definitely been an inspiring message for me, and I hope that some of our listeners will be inspired to consider the ways that they can increase their own freedom using natural movement, and finding ways that it applies to them.
I encourage everyone to check out the book on Amazon. It’s called The Practice of Natural Movement: Reclaim Power, Health and Freedom, and you can get more information at MovNat.com.
I’ve been speaking with Erwan LeCorre, the founder of the MovNat system and the author of the book and hopefully this message will reach people and will inspire them to become the humans that they were meant to be.
Thanks again for taking the time to talk with me.
Erwan: Thank you, Charlie.
