When I was a kid I never had any video game systems of my own, but I remember fondly how you could fix problems with games by mashing the reset button several times, or blowing into the cartridge. Now days most people fix their computer issues by turning it off and on again, or by smashing it with a hammer if they want to fix it permanently.
What if you could press a reset button for your body that would clear out whatever had gone wrong and let you start fresh again?
That’s the promise of Original Strength, and I was excited to take their Pressing Reset workshop this weekend outside of PA. I’ve heard good things, and Jen attended earlier this year. Plus, after flying half-way around the world to be the teacher last weekend, it was nice to just be the student.
So the idea of OS is that by using simple, fundamental movement patterns you can reset the nervous system to a better state, and by doing that you can feel and perform better.
The meat of the workshop is taking you through a logical progression, starting from basic breathing movements on the ground, through rolling and crawling, all the way up to standing/marching. In working through these movements you’ll figure out which ones work best for you, and which ones don’t work at all. In OS parlance, you’ll see which resets are best for YOU. The progression of the movements is great, and honestly most of the time it just feels good to work on fundamental movement patterns you probably never do in your training or daily life.
How do you know which ones are best? Drumroll please.
Biofeedback. That’s right, at the beginning of the workshop you choose a baseline movement that you refer back to after trying the resets. If your movement quantity or quality improves, then that reset is said to work well for you. It could be something like a goblet squat checking for range of motion, depth, and ease of movement, it could be a maximal effort overhead press seeing it in unlocks further capacity, or it could be as simple as a toe touch in the fashion that I teach most often. Whichever the case, you are using the movement as a form of biofeedback to see how you responded to the resets.
Here’s where I disagree with the OS premise. I don’t think there’s any such thing as a reset, and I don’t think there is anything special about the movement patterns used as resets. Don’t get me wrong, they’re great movements and I would suggest digging into their material or going to a workshop to work through the progressions alone. But I think that this mechanistic application of the idea that you can reset the body the same way you reset a computer is misleading. You can make the body’s state better or worse, but you can’t reset it. If it were simply a matter of semantics it would be pretty easy to let go.
But the idea that these movements “reset” the body misses a bigger picture, and a much bigger idea. This was the big insight that Frankie Faires had many years ago and introduced me to.
If you can these movements, or resets, then why can’t you test any movement? If you can test every movement (spoiler: you can) why wouldn’t you?
If a reset makes you better or worse, by way of noticing changes in range of motion or quality of movement, then couldn’t any movement do the same thing?
And if you could tell that, why wouldn’t you simply do all the things that make you better and none of the ones that make you worse?
This is not a subtle point folks. The body responds to stimulus. The ability or inability to respond to the stimulus is what makes it eustressful or distressful. If the response to the stimulus can easily be resolved then it’s eustress and you get to move happily along instantly better than before. If the body can’t resolve the stress, or can’t resolve it easily, then it’s distress and you’ll adapt to it in time, or you’ll break. One of the things I spend a lot of time on in my workshops is teaching people how to find more ways to make their movements better for them.
But all movements can be tested. Not just special ones.
To give one last nod to OS, because I appreciate the system they’ve come up: Just because no movements are special doesn’t mean you couldn’t stand to flex your thinking outside of the box of squat, deadlift, press. Most people spend way too much time moving in way too few ways, and the simple, primal movement patterns that OS focuses on are really great. Something that has been “sticky” for me recently is any kind of spinal rotation, so getting down on the ground and just moving through articulations I may not have thought of was great.
tl;dr: You probably can’t reset the body, but you can definitely make it better and worse. You can tell which of those you’re doing using biofeedback. Moving better helps you move better.
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