Movements for Life: Building Confidence Beyond the Gym

Questions that came up in the Q&A call on 12 May for Movements for Life.

One of the questions that kept coming up at the end of our Strong for Life course was, “What next?”

People had spent time learning how to strength train, they had got to grips with lifting, pressing, pulling, carrying, building bone density, working with impact, understanding progressive overload, and generally feeling more confident with the more traditional side of strength training. And that is very impressive by the way!

We are not anti-gym and we are not trying to say that structured strength training is somehow less valuable than other kinds of movement. Being able to build strength, muscle, bone density, power, and confidence in a progressive way is incredibly important.

But it is one side of the coin. The other side is the bit that can be harder to measure. The more playful, wobbly, practical, in-between stuff. The kind of movement that shows up when you are getting down to the ground and back up again, carrying something awkward, climbing over something, balancing on uneven ground, reacting to the world around you, or figuring out how to move in a way that works for your body on that particular day.

That is the side we are exploring in Movements for Life.

For us, this course has come out of years of teaching WildStrong classes, Nature Moves sessions, in-person courses, and online programmes. We know the strength work is useful. We teach it, we use it ourselves, and we keep coming back to it. But we also know there is a whole world of movement that does not always fit neatly into a workout.

It is the stuff that is difficult to programme as three sets of ten. You can do three sets of deadlifts, you can track the weight on the bar, you can write down the reps.

But how do you programme the strength to get down to a picnic blanket and back up again without feeling embarrassed? How do you train the confidence to step over a fallen branch on a muddy path? How do you rebuild the trust in your body after years of being told to be careful, brace, avoid, or only move in very particular ways?

Those are the questions this course is trying to answer. A lot of fitness starts with the assumption that there are certain movements everyone “should” be doing. Everyone should squat, should deadlift, should lunge and should move in this particular way.

Sometimes that is useful if you are learning to lift a barbell, or preparing for a particular sport, or working towards a specific strength goal, then technique and structure matter.

But when we are talking about moving through life, it gets more complicated.

Everyone arrives with a different body, a different history, and a different relationship with movement. You might have an old knee injury. You might have a shoulder that does not move the way it used to. You might be coming back after birth injuries, illness, pain, surgery, or years of not feeling especially welcome in fitness spaces. You might technically be “able” to do something, but feel frightened, awkward, or unsure.

That is why Movements for Life starts from a different place.

Instead of saying, “Here are the movements you must master,” we are more interested in asking, “What are you trying to do, and how could you find a way into it?”

Rather than beginning with form, we begin with useful tasks. Can you get down and up? Can you move from here to there? Can you get over, under, around, or out of the way of something? Can you reach, pick up, carry, throw, catch, balance, adjust, respond?

And once you start seeing movement this way, the world starts to look different.

One of the things we talked about on the call was the idea of developing “movement goggles” or affordances - once you begin looking for opportunities to move, you start seeing them everywhere. A low wall becomes a balance challenge. A bag of compost becomes a lifting task. A walk becomes a chance to play with pace, terrain, stepping, reaching, ducking, or carrying. Your garden, your local park, your living room, your stairs, your kitchen floor - they all become places where movement can happen.

This is one of the reasons gyms are useful and they make the options obvious and the programme tells you what to do next.

But outside the gym, the options are less obvious at first. You have to learn how to see them.

That is a big part of what we want this course to do - to help you notice more possibilities in the world around you, and to feel confident enough to explore them in a way that works for you.

The goal is exploration. That does not mean it will always feel easy. You will still build strength, balance, coordination, confidence, and capacity. But the route there is different. We are much more interested in giving you movement problems to solve than exercises to perform perfectly.

For example, in a gym context, progression often means adding weight, adding reps, or moving faster. Those are useful tools, but they are not the only ways to make something more challenging.

In real life, challenge can come from all sorts of places.

The ground might be wet, the object might be awkward, you might be doing something in front of other people, you might need to move quietly, carefully, or slowly. You might need to work with someone else, you might need to make a decision quickly, you might feel nervous, you might need to adapt because your knee, back, wrist, or energy level is not the same today as it was yesterday.

Those things are really important and they are exactly the things that often get stripped away when movement is reduced to neat exercises.

This is why we keep coming back to the idea that life-based strength is not better than gym strength. But it asks different questions and it develops different qualities.

Gym strength is brilliant for building a base, Life-based strength helps you use that base in a world that is messy, social, unpredictable, and full of odd-shaped objects.

The structure of the course reflects that. Each week, we will meet live and explore a new idea together. Then, during the week, you will have short pre-recorded sessions you can dip into in your own time. These are not designed to overwhelm you. They are designed to give you a way in.

You will also be able to ask questions as you go. That is really important to us, because one of the things we have learned from running live online courses is that the questions are often where the real learning happens.

Someone might say, “This movement does not feel right for me,” or, “I do not have that equipment,” or, “I can do this on one side but not the other.”

And usually, if one person is asking it, several other people are thinking it.

So we bring those questions back into the live calls. We troubleshoot them and and look at different options and help people find a version that feels appropriate.

This is not a course about mastering a fixed list of movements but rather building a toolkit.

We want you to leave with more confidence in your body, but also more confidence in your ability to adapt. To look at a movement or a situation and think, “What is a way into this for me?”

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When people are given space to explore, rather than being told exactly how they should move, they start finding their own solutions, they start laughing, they start experimenting and they start noticing that movement does not have to be a performance. It can be a conversation with your body and the world around you.

That is what Movements for Life is really about - it is the other side of the coin. The part that helps strength become useful, playful, adaptable, and connected to the life you actually want to live.

Here’s a recording we did this week answering any questions we’d be sent.

And here’s the course page - Movements for Life

Hope to see you there!