The Playground

Then, about the time we turned six, we were sat down and told we had to “learn”. We were taught a bunch of stuff that was supposed to help make us more productive members of society. But we stopped moving and when we stopped moving we stopped getting stronger. For many of us, after our initial period of movement at the start of our loves we never ever again spend time exploring movement and our universe. Di you know what it is called when an animal stops moving?

Death.

As children we spent a lot of time exploring our environment the only way we could – via movement. From our very first moments we used movement to learn about our body and our surroundings. From turning our head to rolling onto our stomachs, then to crawling and finally walking and running we moved and we grew stronger every day.

There’s a growing tribe of experts who believe that modern fitness has it all wrong. Fitness should be synonymous with movement. It may look impressive to be able to lift a large weight at the gym, but does your gym performance match your outside the gym abilities? Let’s imagine we have two types of strength – functional and gym. Our functional strength is our real life ability to lift, stabilise, run, jump and do any other athletic feat. Our gym strength is simply our ability to lift weight. While you may show an increase in performance inside the gym is it actually improving your abilities outside the gym in the rest of your life? Because that is what functional fitness and strength is all about. Locking ourselves into a two-legged stance and hoisting a weight up and down may make us better at functional tasks , but it may not either. Even when the numbers in the gym go up you’re still not guaranteed success outside the gym. The only thing that can give you better movement and athleticism is more movement and a higher focus on better quality movement.

Modern fitness is based on quantitative training – it’s all about how much or how fast. It should instead be focused on qualitative training – how well we move. This is why we employ a variety of training methods at Read Performance Training – no gimmicks or fads, just tools that have been around for centuries. Between the barbell, kettlebells and your own body weight we can teach you how to move better and rebuild your ability to explore. A lot of this training doesn’t look like “training” in the way modern gyms would have you believe is necessary. Much of this looks like play. Thinking back to our childhood and we learned, grew and gained strength and movement this should be no surprise. The thing is that the modern fitness world wants you to believe that you need expensive tools and gadgets to get in shape. You don’t. You were given the greatest fitness tool in the world the day you were born. using it daily is the best way to stay in shape, retain your youth and explore the world.

Remember to get out and play today.