Today’s episode features writer and personal trainer Tim Anderson.

Tim has been a personal trainer for over 20 years.  He has written and co-written many books on the subject of primal bodyweight movements, including The Becoming Bulletproof Project, Habitual Strength, Pressing RESET, and Original Strength Performance. When it comes down to it, his message is simple yet powerful: We were created to feel good and be strong throughout life.

Several years ago, I bought one of Tim’s books on Kindle, and was totally floored with the simple, but powerful concept of crawling as an essential athletic, and human performance tool.  As an athlete who has lost a significant amount of my innate speed and power ability through my late 20’s and early 30’s, despite lifting more weights than ever, I have always been on the search for ways to reclaim the inner power and movement ability of my youth.  One thing that I’ve found to be a cornerstone in this reflexive or innate strength has been taking on the training methods of Tim Anderson and Original Strength.

Today’s podcast is about just that: helping athletes to reclaim their reflexive strength.  Tim gives his take on how he first got interested in crawling and acquiring reflexive strength, the basics of crawl-based training, guidelines on breathing and rolling, and how learning “Original Strength” has changed Tim’s view of corrective exercise and addressing movement dysfunction (and why we should shy away from those terms).

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.  

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Key Points

How Tim got into crawl training

The basics of “reflexive strength”

How Tim’s relationship with traditional barbell oriented training has changed as he has gone through reflexive and crawl based training methods

How Tim starts his clients in their training program

Tim’s take on common crawl variations and add-ons

Ideas on working with athletes who have a lot of lateral “sway” while crawling

Tim’s take on the learning process in athletic movement

Basic guidelines in Tim’s process for getting athlete’s breathing back on track

Ideas on using crawling as a preferential mode of conditioning

Rolling as the foundation of our gait pattern

How original strength means have changed Tim’s view of “corrective” exercise

Tim Anderson Quotes

“(Crawling) was almost like an elixir”

“What I noticed that (after crawling) I was so much stronger at all the other stuff I was doing (weight training)”

“Reflexive strength is the strength we are all designed to have that is supposed to be our foundation, it is both reactive strength and proactive strength; where your body is able to respond when something happens to it, but it is also able to anticipate the need to move before something happens to it… it is supposed to be extremely fast and without thought”

“Crawling ties the body together in such a way, that it connects everything about you and gives you a great foundation of reflexive strength”

“To me, strength is the ability to live your life the way you want to and do what you want to do, without strength you don’t have health”

“There are huge gaps in traditional strength training (in terms of transfer to movement quality on the field)”

“Probably 90% of what I do is original strength, pressing reset through crawling and the other resets”

“So when I’m talking about looking to see if they have their reflexive strength, it is about how beautifully, and how easily and how pretty they can move”

“I don’t even worry about how long they can crawl, it’s more about can they crawl pretty, does it look good? does it look like poetry?  If it looks anything less than that, we got some work to do”

“The core is instinctual, and intuitive and reactive, and it knows what to do.