A reminder of the importance of natural body movements

For the past couple months, I had been making good progress getting back to the one arm pullup using main workout that involved alternative negative chins (two arms up, one arm down slow) and a high rep burnout set after to promote blood flow and to increase the range of stimuli on the muscle. I was progressing fine with no injuries until I had to go and throw in some heavy shoulder external rotations for no good reason. Suffice it to say, I am recovering from some shoulder pains.

Similar situation occurred with my squatting. I was making good progress with my back squats in the gym so after about a month of doing them, I started doing maximal vertical box jumps. Suffice it to say, I am recovering from some foot pains.

I am determined to be intelligently conservative with what exercises I will do. In addition to starting any new exercises slowly (at least three months of habituation at light to moderate effort), I will choose only to perform functional movements which I can foresee evolutionary ancestors having performed. Because they are movements that our ancestors most likely performed regularly, they would have evolutionarily selected for anatomical robustness or resistance to injury. I usually picture these not exercises but activities, for instance:

• Rock climbing
• Running and jumping
• Quadrapedal movements
• Deadlift and carry variations

I think that even with these constraints some people may experience exercise related injuries due to individual physiological and anatomical variations, though I suspect most of these movements probably have lower risks of injury compared to repetitive unvarying exercises. To make these even more in line with natural functional activities I will reduce predesignated rep-set-day schemes to qualitative feels. Rather than counting the number of repetitions I will keep track of time and exertion and adjust the workload according to how my body is responding.