The link for the video below shows highlights of my instructing fellow “Primal Movers” on the art of natural movement patterns, reverse engineering your drills, all in beautiful, sunny Ventura, CA, this past April, at the inaugural Primalcon, an event organized by Mark Sission from Mark’s Daily Apple. Check out his site for great tips on healthy eating, picking the right supplements and a general sharing of philosophy on being healthy humans 
August 8, 2010
Primalcon Video
June 15, 2010
Missing in Action
Hello, my fellow Actionauts.
I may have been missing at Action (Fitness, the facility) but not so much in action.
Fatherhood has been trying, rewarding and exhausting. I didn’t become apparent until I became a parent (notice the clever choice of words here?) and I had to be clever about NOT putting my foot in my mouth and actually practice what I preach when I used to talk about time management to super-busy clients who would skip their fitness priorities.
So, I am able to squeeze intelligent, total-body training sessions in short amounts of time. I may have lost a few pounds in the process of lack of sleep, but knowing the importance of balancing physical activity, sleep (for hormonal balance), nutrition and environmental factors, I was able to lessen the effects of the demands of parenthood (mostly the sleep deprivation).
In terms of time management, I not only carry a full load of clients, take classes to upgrade my knowledge but also make sure to dedicate a certain amount of time for training. My goals may have been more for maintenance, but also these days, I am learning about modalities to not only pack on mass, shed pounds with less effort and breaking personal records at every workout. The fitness protocols I have learned in Wildfitness and RKC are yielding phenomenal results amongst my clients. Clients move up to a few thousand pounds more per workout effortlessly.
Those looking to shed fat, shed it, looking to pack mass pack it on, those looking to move without pain now move without pain! Simple solutions through smart work requiring dedication!
I’ll be posting some testimonials soon of new clients and their rapid progress! If you haven’t gotten on the Philippe Train yet, come aboard! (Another clever pun)
April 18, 2010
Diary of a fit Dad
Or the latest installment in the Fletcher Chronicles
Being a new parent is like the Matrix: you cannot be told, you have to experience it to get it. Just like getting through Hell Week as a Navy SEAL, or the RKC weekend workshop, you can never underestimate how mentally unprepared you may be, even if you are physically conditioned.
Of course, all concepts related to schedule become null and void. Interestingly, some folks perceive my wife and I as big schedulers, but they fail to realize that we are quite accommodating, both working in service oriented industries. Adjusting to a new, not very flexible customer is nothing new.
WORKING IN SHIFTS
Being tired doesn’t quite cover the feeling of what it takes to be feeding, pumping breast milk (so we can take turns feeding him), cleaning him and repeating the process every couple of hours. I have the easy part, because I don’t have life force producing boobies, therefore am not privy to the industrial strength vacuum action happening at the nipple, nor the enjoyment or “machine on human” breast action caused by the pump (or robot porn).
Ever see the Seinfeld episode where Newman says “the mail never stops”? It’s like that.
So, when you say you’re tired but are not a parent, suck it up and shut up, because rest is around the corner. For us, it’s not an option. I’ll take a 12-hour all day powerlifting workshop, though the thrill and satisfaction are a bit different…
So, catnaps, splitting feeding times so one parent can meander through the day only half-dazed is the way to go. My wife usually lets me sleep through the rest of the night so long as I try to do the last feeding or two.
HORMONES
It’s all about hormones, yes, just like training. Stress management, insulin release, HGH. Fletcher had to be bottle fed before he was breast fed because of being born premature. So, to all the La Leche women who live by the breast only and frown at the bottle, it’s not easy to retrain a little kid born with a handicap and no choice. Yes, we’re proponents of the Bradley drug-free baby delivery, want to breast feed because it’s the best, cheapest method available and yes we know it’s optimal for all aspects of the baby’s development. But life has a way of throwing sticks in your spokes. I want my baby fed, I want him growing and resting and I want the same for my wife and I, so sometimes, rather than fight a kid at 2 in the AM who is not getting what he needs from the breast because he is too tired, he gets the bottle with mother’s milk in it. (It’s easier for a baby to drink from the bottle than it is to feed from the breast, in case you didn’t know, and you lose certain benefits. But until I see proof that breast-fed only babies who have grown up are all rocket scientists, super athletes and can fix our health care and are immune to all diseases, I’ll follow the 80%-20% rule of “be good 80% of the time, and the remaining 20%, try to cope so you can go back to doing the best you can”.
If your sleep patterns are off, your stress levels are out of whack. Your fitness suffers, your ability to burn fat is hindered, you produce more cortisol and your mental capacity drops. For a trainer like myself, it’s a hard reality and a tough thing to squeeze in a workout, train clients and teach a very active class at the end of the day (I am wiped out usually when the time comes). Yet somehow, we manage. The rush of endorphins from being a new dad and watching my kid for whom I’d give my life releases the endorphins that make me push through my day. I am an army of one while my wife, the Mothership, the Queen Bee ensures the rascal is alive and provided for with the best food nature produced. And on the occasion we have to compensate with formula, we are not losing sleep over it. As a matter of fact, we gain some as Fletcher tends to sleep longer then. Yes, formula also helps alleviate the hormonal yo-yo that occurs as a result of breast feeding. Small victory for formula, one battle in the breast feeding war, but still one to account.
TRAINING
My workouts are not nearly as long as they used to be. I hardly ever push to failure because it’s pointless and sets me back a day or two. But I train hard, moving high volume and weight without restriction of time other than those imposed upon myself. Usually, that is. Now, the necessity to come home after a shift and help my wife, grocery shop, do laundry, take care of bills or try to run a business with many aspects still in development takes precedence over higher performance. Maintenance and intelligence become the guidelines, biofeedback the protocol by which I decide on any given day what I will do for training. Density is my goal (meaning moving the load in as little time as possible). I’d take the normal RKC snatch test and bump the weight from 24 to 28kg. Or, I’d push for a new Deadlift personal record in under 10 total reps, warm-up included. I’ll swing a 40kg bell 100 times, thus moving 8800lb in 3 minutes or less, doing my heart, my lungs and my muscles a favor. Bottom line: I lost a few pounds, but my body is still chiseled, lean and strong.
I don’t spend time worrying about my reps, the weight I push or how I compare to another. I still have all the skills I had before I was a dad, maybe even added a few more, and I still deliver amazing results to my clients (I just helped someone lose close to 5lb of fat and gain almost 20lb of muscle in 33 days. Wanna know how? TRAIN WITH ME!!). Maybe because I’ve removed the worries, I’ve removed the stress from my performance and how I measure up and therefore make up for the negative effects of the lack of sleep. Any setbacks can be regained and if you’re not strong in times of hardship, your strength is only a weakness.
It does take a village, and Noëlle and I are very grateful for the help we received from friends who brought us meals the past 2 weeks since we took Fletcher home. He is now 3 weeks old and all 3 of us managed to still be alive
Funny thing happened with food, by the way: I’ve indulged in foods that normally only grace the shelves or pantry inside my head and haven’t paid the price for it. I don’t intend to find out how far I can push my luck, so rest assured my hearty steak tartare, raw broccoli and almonds are back on my plate! And did you know that Guinness is a great product to help produce more breast milk?
February 15, 2010
Tara Wood Wildfitness Interview
Tara Wood is the founder of Wildfitness, a company organizing fitness vacations geared at getting us reconnected with our true nature as human beings. Here’s a brief excerpt taken from the official Wildfitness site: “Tara founded Wildfitness in 2001 as the natural expression of her passion for the outdoors and belief in the potential of the human body. Tara was brought up in Kenya and found that being outdoors, active and eating well can flip your mood and boost your health like no medicine can.
Since this time Tara has been consistently developing the courses with expertise drawn from people at the forefront of the natural and evolutionary fitness field.
Tara Wood, the exuberant founder of Wildfitness
Here’s a recent interview I conducted with her. Read the Vital Juice LA article about me and Wildfitness, as a companion guide and article, as I put their senior editor through a Wildfitness oriented routine.
Philippe Til: Ever since I discovered your company and took part in your Wildfitness Coach training in London in May 2008, I’ve been “preaching the Wildfitness gospel”. Would you mind telling us, in a nutshell, the philosophy behind it and how you came to start it all up?
Tara Wood: The Philosophy in a nutshell: What is true human fitness? Look at tribal humans in nature:
“[Their] bodies are splendid, flexible, nimble, skilful, enduring, resilient and yet they have no other tutor in gymnastics but their lives in nature”. (Georges Hebert)
Wildfitness believes that looking to nature and our evolutionary origins provides the most upstream and useful guide for how to eat, move and live to achieve our natural human physical potential. Unfortunately, many of us have been separated from nature for so long we have lost our understanding of what is ‘natural’ – we no longer know how to eat, move and live in a natural way and as a result our health is suffering.
A Wildfitness course provides the physical experience, expert coaching and time to help modern city dwellers rediscover their true natural physicality and vitality. You’ll learn to choose the right foods among the dizzying array of modern food stuffs, to move skillfully and harness natural forces to get lean, flexible and injury-free and to understand the role that your body’s natural rhythms of rest and recuperation play in achieving health & vitality for life.
I started Wildfitness just after leaving university. There was no question about doing anything else – it was an expression of my passion and belief that nature knows best. Learning to live naturally I have always believed is the most sophisticated health and fitness plan the world knows. I also had the good fortune of having a family house in what I think is the most beautiful place in the world (Watamu, Kenya). Wildfitness was a way of keeping the house and sharing it and its healing qualities with lots of people.
Beach Running in Watamu, Kenya.
Besides the like-minded feeling and connection I had to train with your people, my Wildfitness training also constituted something that is very important to me: continuing education. I learned Pose, natural movement patterns, the “Wild diet” and since have become kettle bell certified (RKC, through Pavel Tsatsouline) after Lee Saxby correctly introduced me to these training systems. How do you expand the breadth of training knowledge in your system? What changes/additions do you bring to keep Wildfitness “sharp”?
Keeping Wildfitness ‘sharp’ is an ongoing process, we will never know all the answers to nature’s mysteries in full, but we get closer all the time. We are in the great position to have the best minds in evolutionary fitness to draw from: Lee Saxby, Dr Nicholas Romanov, Frank Forencich, and Erwan Le Corre. We also have our Wildfitness locations as an actual arena to test out our coaching techniques on real people whose entire experience we create over several weeks. Translating theory into practical coaching is a real art – particularly when you deal with human beings! So we are constantly re-visiting the latest insights into evolutionary wisdom and constantly getting feedback from and evolving our courses. What we find, as we get more understanding and further ‘upstream’ insights into how our bodies and nature work, is that our courses actually get simpler.
What do you look for in terms of locations for your Wildfitness vacations?
Firstly it must be Wild. It must also be accessible and safe, but above all it must be a place to experience pure nature without noise and light pollution. We look for awe-inspiring natural environments where you can challenge yourself in a variety of different ways. We chose simple but comfortable and beautiful accommodation for up to 18 people. We look for places that operate while considering the environment and there needs to be a source of local organic food nearby.
What are the biggest perceptual challenges your clients face when they start training and discover a way of moving that seems to go against 3 decades of established “gym fitness”?
Some of the biggest perceptual changes that our clients go through are:
- That being fit means so much more than looking slim or muscular. We aim to inspire people towards new fitness goals – instead of focusing on what your body looks like, focus on what it can do. Aim to have a body that is useful, skilful, efficient, resilient and that can perform the wide range of different movements which it was designed to do in nature. Appreciate the beauty of graceful movement itself and you will find a beautiful body is the natural result. The other natural results are energy, health and being able to do all sorts of useful things.
- That fitness is not in reality split into the categories that gyms split it into: speed, endurance, strength, co-ordination, flexibility etc. Natural movement contains elements of all these qualities and by doing a variety of natural movements you gain the ability to be fast, to endure, to be strong, to be skillful and agile all when you need them. Indeed, to do a movement effectively you always need all the elements of fitness at the same time in varying degrees. A good example of this is that your ability to lift something heavy is about your speed, flexibility, co-ordination and speed, more than it is about your muscular strength.
- The other major perceptual change is that moving is fun! If you train in a punishing way, you actually don’t get the results. Rest is the other half of fitness, there isn’t a linear relationship between exertion and how fit you become. Sleep, fun, inspiration, and balance are vital to getting fit. We see many of our clients getting in such good shape (often having failed to before) by building in rest to the day as religiously as building in movement.
Swimming in the turquoise Kenyan sea...
What is perceived as exercise today is actually counterproductive in many ways to how we’re supposed to move, but the media continue to promote the “establishment”. At the same time, at every corner, a new fitness gimmick seems to pop (at least in the USA, I don’t know about the UK). How would you argue that Wildfitness is not an ephemeral trend?
We don't need to buy into more plastic junk!
Are our teachings a fad? Well yes, in a way. Many of the things we do, believe in and live by are temporary. We are continuing to evolve, continuing to understand who we are, where we came from, how we should live. To say we have answered these questions, for anyone to say they have answered these questions is labeling yourself as limited and a bit silly. But I do believe that looking to nature, looking to what we know of our origins is a rich and lasting place to look for these answers. And I also believe that looking to nature and our evolutionary origins is a philosophy that gives a fruitful focus, more so than scientific enquiry that tries to make sense of our physiology and biomechanics outside of this context. Our techniques will change, but what separates us from ‘gimmicks’ is that our philosophy does not. Fundamentally our philosophy is a search for the real nature of ourselves and our world.
Thank you so much for your time! I believe you’re in Kenya right now for a Wildfitness Convention, correct? What’s the best way to get in touch with you or any member of your organization?
Yes, the whole Wildfitness team were out in Kenya at the beginning of the year discussing all things Wild. Contact us on info@wildfitness.com or our website is www.wildfitness.com .
Thanks Philippe – I hope you will come and join the tribe out here again soon! We hope to have a location nearer to the States sometime soon, until then keep spreading the Wild messages over there across the pond. Thanks!
Stretching at Sunset. Peaceful nature...
(All photos were taken from the Wildfitness web site Kenya Gallery. For more pictures and additional Wildfitness locations, please click here. You can also download a free “mini-workout” which acts as a teaser/warmup, but engages your body in one of the many ways to get fit through Wildfitness modalities by visiting Exercise TV.)
January 11, 2010
Glad I screwed up!
Today, as I was thinking of the theme for my next series of “pillar” articles (translation: procrastinating with writer’s block and “blog mastermind” homework), I redirected my attention to a home project instead.
A good blogger is supposed to publish content daily, or almost. Since there are so many of us out there, I didn’t want to spam the Web with extra stuff just for the sake of blogging. But, like Archimedes dropping his soap, or an apple falling on Newton’s head, I had my own “Eureka!” moment! Stay with me, it’ll make sense and relate to fitness quite obviously!
How lack of focus can take you off track:
In preparation for the arrival of our first baby in May, my wife and I are finally getting some grown-up furniture and organizing the place we moved into 16 months ago. Today, I started to build our new bedroom furniture. Towards the end, upon screwing in the back panel of a dresser, I realized the top panel was facing the wrong way. At first, like any red-blooded male, I was going to jam the sucker in, figuring all “ready to assemble” furniture is cockeyed anyway. The mistake occurred when I looked at my watch and was going to beat the 90 minute mark some other guy had as his record (based on his review of the dresser online, which took him 2-3 hours alone, 90 minutes with his wife’s help). My focus shifted to the record time, instead of the work. Well, undoing my work and fixing it took an extra 30 minutes. And, there was no way around it, I HAD to step backwards.
How it obviously relates to fitness:
Most guys don’t follow directions. Once we’re on a roll, we keep at it. Had I looked carefully at the pictures in the manual, I would have avoided the error. Also, the manual advises you to read it cover to cover before assembling (something I venture to say no one does). And once you screw it up, you could keep things the way they are. The dresser would probably hold. Until it decides to collapse from the load it’s meant to carry because of the “misalignment”. Even the instruction were missing some information I had to figure out for myself (using this thing called common sense). The lack of concentration caused an error in judgment, leading to misalignment, at which point I had two choices: work with the jammed panel, like a jammed vertebra or pulled muscle, or go back, fix the issue even if it slowed me down, until everything was corrected in the “body” the the dresser I built.
Moral of the story:
Follow instructions before starting a program. Make sure your head is in it for the right reasons (here, to build a dresser, not beat some other guy’s record for assembling one!). Even instructions from a book are not 100% reliable. I’m no furniture builder, but I am a great trainer. Wanna get fit? Get a trainer, even if only to get you going. We’re not a luxury. We’re here to help so you don’t end up having to backtrack and waste time.
December 23, 2009
Part Three: Evolution of the Back and Spine
We’ve seen how our hairier, primate cousins (and I am not talking about your direct relatives) have a narrow set of hips, short legs with a straight line running from their pelvis to their ankle, and how they brachiate to swing from vine to vine. We also share something with them that evolves then devolves if we’re not careful, within our lifetime: the shape of our spine.
From knuckle dragging to upright walking.
The Spine: From C to S shape:
As we are develop in our mother’s womb, our spine is C-shaped. Slowly through our developing skills as we crawl and learn to look around, to the point that we stand, our spine develops its S-like curvature. It is designed to be mobile and is much longer than that of a primate. Our wide pelvis is also mobile and short (compare that to the tall pelvis of an ape and fixed Sacroiliac Joint on the illustration).
Hazards of Joint Misalignment:
The SacroIliac Joint (SIJ) if misaligned, can cause much damage and pain in our bodies, such as disc herniation, wear and tear of the spine, as well as hips and even affects our neural and immune systems!
Many times, the pain in our bodies is not diagnosed as SIJ Dysfunction because we look at other symptoms like stiffness due to poor posture, stiffness in neck and shoulders, misalignment of the femur, stiff hamstrings or calves and associate the cause to that area of the body. There is a plethora of tests, good and bad, to diagnose and treat SIJD, but I’ll leave that discussion to orthopedic surgeons, whose job is to fix you, or at the very minimum, a T-phase Z-health practitioner. My job is to prevent that from happening in the first place (or from recurring if you’ve already been experiencing it).
How to Prevent Bad Posture:
There is a series of exercises that one can do to help develop strength and keep proper alignment in your back and spine: cobra extension, superman extension (with legs on or off the floor depending on your desired intensity of work). An inexpensive way to get a great coach to show you is to watch babies as they begin to crawl, push themselves up and try to take in the world around them. Their brains are not tainted with misinformation yet (and they don’t charge as much as a pro!)
December 20, 2009
Limb evolution continued: the knee
In my second post, we’ll visit a very commonly injured joint: the knee.
How the Knee Works with the Hips and Ankles:
Runners (as advertised in running magazines and with no understanding of the biomechanics of their activity) learn to live with knee pain. Others limit their activities because doctors tell them to and end up making things worse (many doctors only know how to fix, not prevent, other than by keeping you stationary). The bottom line, it’s like when some irate person screams at me: it’s not me. With the knee, it’s not the knee. The knee is cool, moves only in one direction. It’s the hip (too tight, not engaged) or your ankle (not pivoting, especially when keeping your heel anchored to the ground rather than loose and mobile in many movements) that mess things up for the knee, who gets the blame for their screw-ups.
How has our Knee Evolved?
The ape leg is straight from hip to foot. As humans, we have a displaced our upper leg limb from its midline (“valgus” –look the word up-) in order to be able to place our feet under our center of mass when walking upright. Check out the shorter legs and wider stance of an ape’s skeleton by comparison. Legs, back when we were not upright walkers, served a different purpose and used a different weight distribution.
Human and hominid/ape skeletons
Ways to Protect your Knee in Training:
The question now posed is: what do you do with that information? Well, in your training drills, you want to develop mobility and stability in your hip and ankle complex to protect your knee from rotational and adduction forces. Dr Nicholas Romanov published a great book called The Pose Method of Running, in which he breaks down proper biomechanics.
“What if I am not a runner?”
Joint mobility is still tremendously important. The lessons learned from the Pose Method of Running carryover quite easily into tennis, martial arts, cycling, swimming. Efficiency of movement, proper loading mechanics to improve your leverage is what the system is all about. I strongly suggest the book as a must read if you are looking to improve any area of fitness, not just running.
Training Resources:
Although, having been trained myself in it, I urge you to find a Pose coach near you, as there is no substitute for proper individual coaching. In an upcoming interview, I will interview Lee Saxby, one of the highest Pose coaches worldwide after Dr Romanov himself, also the fitness director at Wildfitness. Lee taught me Pose, along with other coaches in the first ever Wildfitness Coaches training in London, UK, in May 2008.
December 17, 2009
Fitness Evolution vs Human Devolution
What are Natural Movement Patterns?
The natural movement patterns in our bodies enable us to do things like running, fighting, lifting. We evolved in an environment where we needed to do intense short exertion with lots of rest or ‘active recovery’ in between. We might have hunted, fought, run away etc. and then spent the afternoon sitting under a tree or gathering berries… We’re still the same human beings we were over 200,000 years ago! It’s just that we started to farm when we became sedentary, introduced a bunch of ailments, nutritional deficiencies and more as a result for about 10,000 years, and since the industrial revolution, we became modernized, caged humans, akin to living in a zoo! (And we know how animals are meant to live in cages…). Evolution-based fitness systems teach us how to train utilizing the innate gifts nature bestowed upon us that we societally ruin by not using them (entropy). It takes us 9 months to come out perfect and a lifetime to undo it. Evolution-based fitness is about learning how to take full advantage of our movement systems, among others (which I will cover in other posts).
How to Move Pain Free:
The key to getting a lean and pain free wild body is to mimic the movements and intensity that our bodies are designed for. The movements that you do most often: standing, walking, running, or whatever sport you do e.g. biking, are those which will have most effect on your body. Doing certain stretches or isolated exercises may help to alleviate pain but you have to change your movement patterns to change the load to your structure and therefore heal or prevent injuries.
Taking Care of the Shoulder (TCS):
In today’s blog post, I want to talk about one of the most commonly affected body parts: the shoulder. Injuries there can be passive, or recurring, chronic or acute, although in my personal belief, if you take care of it and understand its design, you’re less likely to injure yourself under circumstances where you have a semblance of control over your environment (unless someone is purposely attempting to hurt you), like when you ski, climb, play sports or lift (if an accident occurs then, it’s usually a culmination of judgment errors).
Shoulder Evolution:
Our primate cousins’ shoulder girdle is designed of brachiation (picture apes swinging on vines, like Tarzan). We may not swinging on vines daily, but working on expanding our gluteal real estate hunched our desks isn’t what we’re meant to do either when movement is in mind. The majority of our shoulder injuries come from the fact that, due to the lack of brachiation in our daily movement patterns, especially certain body building movements design to “build” the shoulder, our scapula has developed a downward rotation (sagging shoulders, poor posture, tight chest from too much bench pressing…).
Shoulder Mobility:
Stretching movements (like Yoga or Superjoints, Z-Health as well as a series of “wild” or natural movement patterns) aimed at allowing more range of motion can give you the flexibility and mobility you need to open the shoulder girdle. In training, you need to learn how to compress that same joint in order to keep it stable and avoid leaking or dissipating strength by not “connecting” your shoulder, “corkscrewing” it into your torso. That leakage vs linkage, the latter very proper to the RKC system (Russian Kettlebell Certification) is what keeps you strong and injury-free.
Remedy:
Train with me or any RKC certified instructor by visiting dragondoor.com. Or go on a Wildfitness vacation in Africa (make sure to tell them I sent you), which you can find at wildfitness.com
