Woohoo!  After years of waiting and saving, I finally pulled the trigger and signed up for the MovNat Level 1 Certification Program in Boston last weekend, becoming Little Rhody’s only Certified MovNat Trainer!  Here’s my review of 2 days of intense learning and play!

First off, what is MovNat?  I’ve talked about it before when on Block Island, in our Movements of the Month (MOM), Warming Up our clients, and in the LbF Prescription for a healthy body and a pretty sweet life, etc.  In their words “MovNat is a physical education & fitness system based on training the full range of our natural human movement abilities.  MovNat is for everyone. It is progressive and safe, and supports physical competence and conditioning for any area of life.”  The two-day program featured lots of moving, teaching, practice and application.

Day 1 was predominately movement based.  We learned the 8 main skills in MovNat.  The 4 basics are walk, balance, lift + carry, and crawl.  The 4 advanced skills are run, jump, throw + catch, and climb.  What I loved about this program was the scalability of each skill and how the instructor, Jeff (who was awesome!), broke each down or “deconstructed” the individual moves within the skills.  He also explained where these skills would be applicable which helped with our mindset when performing the movements.  After about 9 hours of practice, we were tested on our own physical competence for the 8 skills.  We were given a score between 1-3 on a total of 17 different moves.  I got 3’s on all but one: the pivot reverse.  Here’s my redemption video:

It’s not perfect but I’m still giving it a 3!

Thankfully Day 2 was a little less taxing physically.  We all were pretty burnt and had cranky hands and feet.  I shed a little skin but overall was unscathed especially compared to some of the other blistered and torn up peeps in the group.   We spent most of our time going over the methods to teach our clients and how to scale up or scale down each movement.  This was extremely helpful and again Jeff did a great job answering our questions and showing the progressions and what to look for when teaching.  In addition we learned some sweet new ground moves and spent some quality time rocking and rolling on the floor.  We also got a chance to put our new moves into practice at a local playground!  It was a blast for those whose hands still had skin left on them!

Finally the weekend ended with a teaching evaluation and a written exam.  I felt very comfortable teaching as I’d been practicing for a couple of years now.  It was great to incorporate some of the cues and tips I had just learned, and to look for certain things I’d either been letting slide or not focused on as strictly.  When the exam came I was ready to go and passed with flying colors (or the equivalent of an A-)!

Woohoo!  This certification was a long time in the making and I’m so happy and proud to have gone through with it!  I truly believe MovNat is the best use of time spent “training” our bodies.  Ofeverything I’ve seen, read, and/or tried, MovNat makes the most sense to me!  It’s practical,useful, and FUN!

The certification also inspired the construction of our new tree traverse/peg board/trapeze apparatus!  Although I was extremely exhausted after Day 1, I could hardly sleep since I was building this thing in my head all night!  The videos below are just samples of its capabilities…repurposing an old swingset…again!

Note: we did not cover the peg traverse in the cert, and drilling the holes was actually an afterthought.  However, in my training for American Ninja Warrior next year, I will be doing mostly MovNat with some ANW-specific practice.