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.

When I was on my back from Manila, which was an absolutely fantastic trip that I’ll talk more about at another time, I posted an Instagram story of people dutifully walking into the body scanners at the airport and literally throwing their hands up to submit to the scan. It felt to me like an awfully apt metaphor for the way we’ve pretty much given up standing against authority in the face of eroding freedom. I’ve opted out of the body scanner ever since Jen turned me on to the option many years ago.

Naturally, this generated a lot of questions. The easy one is “can you really opt out, and how?” Simple, you just tell them you opt-out (or as I like to think of it, opt-in for the pat down lovin) and they will escort you around the machine where you’ll get a begrudging pat-down by the nice TSA officer. I’m always very nice because they probably hate the pat-down as much as I actually do.

The harder question is “Why? Aren’t they harmless?” and of course one in four respondents quoted back to me the common refrain they’ve been sold which is “Isn’t the radiation less than you’d get on the actual flight?”

Before I tackle the specifics of the body scanners, I think this is a great example to demonstrate the precautionary principle.

The precautionary principle is the idea that, given unknown but potentially great harm, you should avoid the risky action whenever possible and that the burden of proof lies on those making the decision or applying the harm to prove that it’s harmless.

Another way to think of this is in terms of cost and benefit.

If something has a (potentially) extremely high cost, but provides very little benefit, we should be exceptionally cautious in using it.

The big idea of cost is something I’ve written about extensively and is an idea that is woven into how I live my life. For example, when it comes to biofeedback training one of the things I teach is that you can always do movements that don’t test well, but you may pay a higher cost. That might not be worthwhile on a training day, but if it doesn’t test well on meet day maybe it’s worth going for broke. The important thing is that you recognize the cost, weigh the benefit, and make an informed decision.

One of the most common examples of the precautionary principle being invoked (or not being invoked) is when it comes to Genetically Modified Organisms. The fact is, despite a modicum of studies being done in infinitesimally small parts of an incomprehensibly complex system, we don’t really know everything that happens when you splice part of the genome from one living thing into another (note that GMO is not the same as traditional cross-breeding like we do with dogs and apples [not at the same time, you can’t breed a dog and an apple]). It could be totally harmless, or it could be the butterfly effect that destroys the entire planet’s ecosystem. Big shrug emoji because not only do we not know, it’s almost impossible to know. So the precautionary principle would say we should be exceedingly careful how we proceed, because the risk of harm is so great.

But, you say, David there is great benefit from GMO we are able to feed a starving planet. Fine, let’s pretend for a second that’s true then maybe it’s worth it.

Going back to the body scanners, there’s a very simple cost-benefit. You get almost no benefit by participating, and it potentially exposes you to great harm. The extra 3 minutes it takes to get a pat-down isn’t worth it.

It’s entirely possible that the radiation you get from having a cell phone in your pocket all day is many times worse, but the benefits are so (ok, arguably) great that you could say it’s worth the potential harm.

What harm? Glad you asked. The general consensus in the U.S. (I’ll let you figure out the motivations) has been that any radiation that is non-ionizing (anything lower frequency than ultraviolet) is basically harmless. But the WHO and the International Agency for Research in Cancer actually classifies non-ionizing radiation as potentially carcinogenic. Several European countries have ditched the body scanners completely because they don’t think they’re harmless AND they found that the false alarm rate was so high they were nearly useless. So much for the benefit side of the equation.

So what about the claim that you get more radiation from the flight itself. On the face of it, this is true. Looking at the raw exposure numbers it’s true that you get several times more radiation just being at the higher altitude during the plane ride. But as explained by several UCSF faculty in biophysics and biochemistry in a letter to Obama (actually to his asst. for science and tech) in 2010, the exposure on a plane ride is distributed over the entirety of your body. In a body scanner, the radiation is focused on a millimeter layer of skin. Which means that the actual exposure for that tissue is many times higher than it would be if it were distributed across the whole body.

But that’s not all. As a single example, one study showed that indeed non-ionizing radiation can cause genetic damage. I quote: “Hence, this project confirmed the existence of THz genotoxicity, but it remains unclear under which specific conditions such effects occur.”

Which is a perfect summary because it conveys the limitations of science in this regard. When it comes to something that is potentially very harmful, you need to test the exact specific conditions, not extrapolate and hope for the best.

When it comes to the body scanners I certainly don’t care what you personally decide to do.

But knowing and understanding what the precautionary principle is will serve you greatly.

 

You take a bite of your pasta that tastes like wet cardboard layered with white glue. Giving up, you unwrap the brownie and chomp down only to wonder what they used to color it brown, because it certainly isn’t chocolate. Your travel experience, whether the purpose is to get from point A to point B or to enjoy the sights along the way vary as much as people’s feelings about travel. I know people who won’t get on a plane under any circumstances and folks who would drop anything and walk out the door given a free ticket. Over the years and miles I’ve learned a few things that have made travel immensely more pleasurable and something I look forward to regardless of the circumstances.

Packing

When you’re packing or preparing, remember that if you bring your ID (or passport if international), a form of payment like a credit card, and your cell phone you can take care of pretty much anything you forget or any issue that might come up. People drive themselves crazy trying to make sure they didn’t forget anything. While it’s certainly annoying to forget your swimsuit or USB battery pack these are things you can pretty easily replace. Focus your attention on remembering these three things, and chill about everything else.

Leaving Home

Leave your house cleaned up and your bed made. Normally I’m fine with a bit of a messy house and I basically never make the bed. Trust me when I say I’ve experienced this both ways. I’ve come home to a messy house plenty of times, and I’ve come home to a clean house a bunch of times. It feels remarkably better to come home to a clean house and especially a made (preferably with fresh sheets the night before you leave) bed. Even more so if you get home late in the day or evening. Before I leave I look around and say “do I want to see that exactly as I left it when I get home?

Time

Leave more time. It sucks to get up early, it sucks to spend more time at the airport than necessary, it sucks to sit around waiting. But what sucks even more is missing the boat. Time, even more than money, is the currency of travel. Give yourself extra “spending money.” You can always buy things you forgot, but in a lot of cases you can’t buy more time. When you’re stuck on the freeway in a totally unexpected traffic jam there is no amount of money that is going to get you there faster.

You won’t regret getting there too early, but you’ll always regret not having left enough time for the unexpected.

Change Your Mind

Finally, adjust your mindset so that you look at travel as truly about the journey, not the destination. This is harder to do when you’re traveling for work or a very specific purpose, but it’s still good to do. Realizing that whatever happens, even if it seems like an inconvenience or a bad thing, is part and parcel of the adventure of travel. The more you embrace it, the more you’re going to enjoy your travel and the more you’re going to get out of it.

This final point relates to time being the currency of travel as well. Modern travel is nothing short of magic. That you can wake up in Rome, have a cornetto and a cappuccino, and then lay your head on a pillow in New York City is beyond anything that should even be possible. Which is to say that if you planned to fly in at 9am for an 11am meeting and you’re not going to make it that’s on you, not the fault of the unexpected three-hour delay. The fact that you didn’t get dysentery and die on your voyage is a miracle.

Like Louis CK says: “everything’s amazing and nobody is happy.” Relax and enjoy the ride.