Cultivate well-being by developing the ability to exert mental and physical pressure for challenging tasks, followed by experiencing peace from their successful expression. This balance of effort and release is key to mental and physical health, allowing for productive work and restorative recovery.
Structure your days to embrace periods of intense pressure, knowing that peace and reward will follow. This mindset allows for sustained effort and productivity, leading to a greater sense of accomplishment and subsequent relaxation.
Overcome self-consciousness to use your body for self-expression and self-discovery through movement. This approach fosters a deeper connection to your physical activity, leading to greater enjoyment, authenticity, and personal growth.
Engage in movement to discover and express your authentic self. Movement can be a transformative process that helps you reconnect with your innate abilities and personality, fostering a deeper understanding of who you are.
Build your training and approach around your unique abilities and what makes you excel. This leverages your natural strengths, fostering a deeper connection to your activity and leading to greater success.
As a coach or self-coach, focus on finding the best movement solutions for the individual, not imposing a generic ideal. This approach respects individual capabilities and leads to more effective and authentic performance.
Reconnect with the original joy and natural movement patterns that first drew you to an activity. This helps to overcome learned behaviors that may not align with your true essence, improving performance and enjoyment.
Prioritize maintaining the ability to safely express your maximal running speed as a key metric for vitality and health. This ability serves as a proxy for overall physical health, tissue capacity, coordination, and resilience.
Focus on fundamental practices like quality sleep, good nutrition, and a balanced social life for optimal performance. These foundational elements are crucial for achieving speed and overall well-being, as there are no shortcuts to true athletic development.
Incorporate skipping and striding into your weekly fitness routine. They are zero-cost, take minimal time, improve movement, posture, protect against injuries, and improve longevity.
Incorporate skipping into your routine. It taxes the coordination patterns, tissue, and joints in similar ways to high-intensity sprinting, improving tissue capacity and joint capacity.
Integrate skipping into your jogging routine by alternating 30 seconds of skipping with 30 seconds of jogging. This is an effective on-ramp to gain comfort with skipping, making you feel bouncier, lighter, more coordinated, and rhythmic, which can improve your jogging.
For a solid plyometric workout, perform maximal amplitude skips for 50 meters, walk back, and repeat 10-15 times after a warm-up. This builds speed, force, and velocity, providing significant plyometric benefits safely.
Reframe skipping as ‘plyometrics’ to overcome social stigma and recognize its value. Skipping is a simple, effective plyometric activity that builds eccentric control and coordination, crucial for longevity and injury prevention.
Actively seek opportunities to incorporate hip extension exercises into your daily routine and workouts. Maintaining and improving hip extension is crucial for efficient movement, posture, and athletic performance, as it’s easily lost with modern lifestyles.
Use skipping to improve hip extension and coordination of ankle, knee, and hip flexion/extension. This mimics sprinting mechanics, helping to maintain or regain the ability to get the knee behind the butt and improve overall coordination.
For high-intensity or sprint work, prioritize the quality of movement over simply completing the work. Quality is the governing factor for effective and safe high-intensity training, ensuring proper mechanics and reducing injury risk.
Progress through gait patterns (walk, jog, run, stride, sprint) by increasing the ‘space’ you take up and becoming more maximally expressive. This conceptualization helps to understand and achieve the desired movement quality for faster gaits.
For striding and sprinting, focus on movement happening in front of your center mass. This involves a longer eccentric phase and a shorter propulsive phase, which is characteristic of faster, more efficient running.
Allow your foot strike to be dictated by your running speed. The body naturally adjusts foot contact based on velocity (heel strike for walking, more towards toes for sprinting).
When running, focus on flat foot contact. This allows the foot to naturally adjust its strike point based on speed without conscious effort.
When running, let your torso lead the upward movement of your chin and eyes. Leading with the eyes/chin can cause hyper-extension of the spine, leading to pushing rather than bouncing.
In movements from a bent-forward to upright torso (e.g., deadlifts, squats), move the torso first and the head last. This proper sequencing of motor neurons can lead to significant strength increases and improved safety.
When deadlifting, focus on pushing your feet into the ground and driving back, rather than pulling the weight up. This approach enhances stability and can lead to greater strength and safer movement.
Incorporate unilateral (single-leg or staggered stance) exercises in your weight training. This approach is more specific to running mechanics and can improve core stability and force transmission, with bilateral exercises like trap bar deadlifts used occasionally for neural drive.
When doing exercises with an elevated foot, aim to get onto your big toe (first ray) and flex it. This strengthens the foot’s ability to bend and flex, which is crucial for dynamic movements and force transmission in running.
Prioritize full-chain, cross-body force transmission exercises in your weight training. These exercises, like those connecting the left foot to the right hand, improve functional strength and transferability to dynamic movements like sprinting.
When stretching, actively explore different body positions (rotation, side bend, hand flexion, pelvic tilt) to find what enhances the stretch for your unique body. This exploratory process helps you gain better control of your body and discover optimal, individualized stretching techniques.
Trust your body’s natural movement patterns for efficiency. Your body typically self-organizes towards the most efficient and stable mechanical solution when not overthought.
Avoid walking while looking at your phone. This practice leads to unnatural, constrained, and overly flexed posture, which is detrimental to natural movement and overall health.
Focus on core principles rather than rigid methods in your training and life. This allows for creative and flexible application of methods that suit your individual needs and preferences while adhering to fundamental truths.
When evaluating health or performance, focus on the relationships and interactions between various data points and component parts. The holistic interplay of factors is more important than individual metrics in isolation, providing a more comprehensive understanding.
Strive for fluidity and ease in your movements. The most effective and efficient athletes make their performance look effortless, indicating optimal coordination and efficiency.