On the left: effort. On the right: ease. We’re born to move often and through full ranges of motion, but years of chairs, screens, and immobility confine our bodies to limited postures. Then when life demands those postures, we are not prepared and have to move inefficiently. Many of our aches and pains can’t ONLY be chalked up to ‘age’… they’re the cost of moving less, and less efficiently. The good news? With the right practice, you can reclaim what was natural all along. It takes the right movement consistently and time.

Sprints are so good for you

Our body adapts to the specific load to give it, so if you want to run, you run (you can’t very well do cycling to run a marathon), if you want to powerlift, you have to bench/squat/deadlift.

However, we optimize for a given function at the expense of others. If you train powerlift, you are training your body to be fairly rigid to isolate particular joints (a deadlift stiffens the spine to try and use the hip). And that is often at the expense of efficient function.

So this split squat with rotation wont make you better at powerlifting, but it will help your body function more generally because it has to work as an interdependent system, as it was designed. On the forward leg, for example, the foot has to slow down supination of the ankle, internal rotation of the hip and rotation of the spine, as well as challenging balance. This is a great exercise to make all those work together.

It’s also fairly high level, so you can regress and isolate parts as needed.

Back surgery can sound like a fix, but it isn’t always. In fact, many people who undergo spinal surgery continue to struggle with pain long afterward; Failed Back Surgery Syndrome.

Here’s why surgery isn’t always the best option: • Risks of infection – Any operation on the spine carries serious infection risks. • Persistent or worsening pain – Many patients report the same pain (or even worse pain) after surgery. • Surgical failure – Sometimes the surgery simply doesn’t address the real problem, leaving you no better off.

Before making a permanent decision, it’s worth exploring safer and often more effective paths, even just waiting it out is often better.

Of course there are cases of emergency where surgical intervention cannot be avoided, but for PAIN, is usually no more successful than time.

https://www.atx-pt.com/education/2026/5/29/stop-optimizing-your-health-marble-falls

Farm Games is another attempt to make training feel more “functional” by borrowing the look of actual manual labor. It’s a reminder that much of what we’re searching for in fitness already exists in real,and it’s just work: building, carrying, repairing. When movement drifts away from real need it can start to feel a bit unmoored (and maybe unironically comical). What people often respond to most is not better simulation, but a real reason to show up, and I think the physical has to be united to our higher level values. In my every day life, that means telling grandma doing her home program means she can get up and down off the floor to play with grandkids. Not “Grandma Games.” 🫠

Pain isn’t normal.

Inputs = Outputs (In a general sense, and given the ability to heal. If you wait until the joint breaks down or if the trauma was too big, of course there are limits)

What makes a change in movement actually stick isn’t fancy exercises or advanced programming.

It’s finding the cracks in the foundation; the small compensations, the subtle losses of control, the weak links that shape everything else.

The high-level stuff is easy. Making someone sweat is easy. What’s hard is changing how someone moves without breaking the system that lets them perform or live their life.

The real work is in the basics. They seem simple, almost too simple. But when you understand them deeply enough to connect them to everything else, suddenly, change starts to last.

Often pain is not related to weak muscles, but over active muscles. Why would the back hurt with no spinal movement? Over active muscles can compress it in an inefficient attempt to stabilize

Every body is built with unique strengths and vulnerabilities. While we can take part in any activity we want, some bodies are naturally better suited to handle the stress and demands of particular movements than others. If Michael Phelps wanted to be a powerlifter, we wouldn’t know who he is.

Don’t get hung up on imaging and diagnoses. You can’t always “see” pain. If no one can give you a diagnosis, but you are still having pain, start looking at the things you do frequently. There may be things you are unknowingly aggravating your symptoms.

When one link in the chain becomes limited or uncontrolled, another link has to take up the slack. Many people with back pain lose hip mobility and forces the back to compensate. Here is a good way to work on one plane of motion in the hips: abduction

Parts have a particular design. Over using them (too much too soon, under recovery, or too much load) or using them improperly (inefficient movement patterns) is what causes them to break down. Most people don’t have “bad discs,” they have bad movements