Don’t Be Bamboozled, Movement Is The Answer

I don’t think there is one, but there ought to be a Law, or at least a principle that states that the more complex a system is, the easier it is to use or interface with.

For example, the internal complexity of your iPhone is absolutely staggering. For most people it would be well beyond their ability to be able to program it, even if they dedicated several years of learning coding and so on. Yet, almost everyone (mom, you’re kind of bad at it tbh) is able to very efficiently use an iPhone.

Compare that to some of the first computers I grew up with in school, where you generally had to write a program in BASIC to make it actually do anything. Those systems were exponentially less complex than an iPhone, but they were much, much harder to use.

In the tech world there is something called the OSI 7-layer model (which makes me think of cake every time.) Basically, there are layers of complexity that are abstracted away by each layer above it. Bear with me for a second. Generally speaking computers are connected with physical wires, over which binary data flows. You COULD hypothetically send an email by injecting actual ones and zeroes into the wire. You could. But if you move up the 7-layer model, it gets much easier. In fact, if you move all the way up to layer 7, there is a pretty simple english-language way to send an email. All you have to do is type these commands:

david@ddn:~/$ telnet mail.dellanave.com 25
Trying 216.58.217.179…
Connected to mail.dellanave.com.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
220 mail.dellanave.com ESMTP Postfix (Ubuntu)
mail from: david@dellanave.com
250 2.1.0 Ok
rcpt to: david@dellanave.com
250 2.1.5 Ok
data
354 End data with <CR><LF>.<CR><LF>
Subject: This is me writing a test
Hello, this is a message body
.
250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 19023E06A
quit
221 2.0.0 Bye

Really simple and easy, right!? I’m sure now that you’ve learned this you will send all your emails via raw commands sent directly to mail servers.

Probably not actually, because applications have evolved that make it ​even easier​ ​to send emails. Even attaching photos and grouping multiple emails and so on. The higher you go in these levels of abstraction, the easier it is to use, and the more complexity is hidden behind simplicity.

In other words, the more complex the system becomes, the easier it gets to use it.

What could possibly even be my point, now that I’ve taken you down this road of learning raw Simple Mail Transfer Protocol commands?

Every few years another system emerges purporting to solve a training problem which attacks the problem at one of the layers of the 21-layer cake that is the human body.

The problem is, they complicate a system that has evolved to be unbelievably easy to use by working their way down the model and trying to interface at a layer you have no business interfacing at. Like trying to send emails by tapping into the wires that connect computers.

Approaching physical training by tweaking the nervous system is no different.

Tackling movement problems by addressing the muscles is no different either.

Have you ever seen those videos of the “super-advanced” robots Boston Dynamics builds? That look more awkward than toddlers moving around in space? The smartest people on the planet are trying to figure out how to get things to move like humans and can’t even replicate it.

But you are effortlessly able to move your body any which way and do almost anything with it, without really even having to think about it – just by doing it.

Until of course a guru comes along to tell you that you’ve been doing it all wrong and you need to approach it from an infinitely more complex interface.

No, no, no. Your body already has the simplest, most evolved, easiest to use interface that has ever emerged for a complex system.

One of the core principles of training with biofeedback, and frankly the reason my gym is called The Movement, is that it really is that simple. All you need to do is move. Make sure you respond well to the movement, be creative with your movement, seek novelty with your movement, but Movement is as complicated as it needs to get.