Frank Forencich, Exuberant Animal

Had an extremely cool conversation with Frank Forencich the other day. Frank is a physical educator and the chief creative officer of "Exuberant Animal," through which he offers workshops, presentations, and custom health and fitness programs. Though self-proclaimed fitness experts talk about what our bodies "were designed to do" and "evolved to do" all the time, as if they just stepped off the time machine, Frank's a guy who's really looked into it: not only is he an avid student of evolutionary biology, but he's took the time to look into how we lived during our six million years of evolution, journeying to Africa on numerous occasions to investigate, among other things, the physical habits of indigenous people in the habitats which are as similar as possible to what we would have encountered way back in the day.

Frank's conclusion? We didn't sit a lot. We walked great distances. We had lots of variation, not specialization: though he's all in favor of bike racing and other physical activities we might happen to find pleasurable, he advocates forms of exercise that would have been available to us in the formative years of our species, and those that increase dance-like qualities like balance, timing, grace, skill.

Strength and cardio, in the traditional sense, have a place in his programs, but his programs resist the idea of repetitive movement. He likes working in groups, and emphasizing group play and community, because, of course, community and connection are an essential part of how our species survived.

The warm-up below is a great example: Frank hits everything you'd hit in a thorough functional warm-up of the kind you'd see in a Mike Boyle or Eric Cressey DVD, and yet his warm-up is much more, well, dynamic. It's integrated: lower body and upper body work together. Shoulders and hips working as one. Each of the six movement patterns he demonstrates have a theme, but none is rigid--they're all exploratory, improvisational, spontaneous.

Okay, some of it looks silly--perhaps sillier than what you'd like to be caught doing in the aerobic room during peak hours at 24 Hour Fitness (I'm weird in that I JUST DON'T CARE--my kids have long since gotten me over my fear of looking like a bozo in public). But it occurred to me watching this video that the movement patterns you see in a typical gym--angular, direct, forceful, freighted with intention--are devoid of fun. They're devoid of a sense of pleasure in movement. There's no sense of play, exploration, spontaneity, indeed, sensuality in those movements.

It's as if we've banished those qualities from the gym, and are only "allowed" to exercise with a grim sense of purpose. We only feel normal and right doing highly controlled, linear movements, over and over and over again. Ironically, it's those very qualities--playfulness, to sum it up--which have the potential to make exercise FUN and not drudgery.

Is it any wonder that the vast majority of people don't enjoy "getting fit" as it's currently sold to us? Moreover, is it any wonder that we lose, say, mobility in our thoracic spine, poor control of our scapulae, lousy control of our spines in general? Could it be that we just NEVER move our spines, hips, scapulae, rib cages, for fear of looking foolish?

You know who has excellent spinal awareness and control? Dancers: men and women whose JOB it is to be as expressive as possible with their bodies. Food for thought.

Check out Frank's video below, and his website. If you've got a few minutes, check out his video on Body-Centered Curriculum.  Great stuff. Comments welcome.