GRAY COOK

Self-Limiting Exercise

This topic is about self-limiting exercise. I If we had you run barefoot on grass on a safe
mentioned it in my book Movement and I’ve heard and non-noxious or non-painful surface, we would
the topic batted around quite a bit since publication. see a couple of things. If you had no preconceived
I used the term for a long time in my teaching, but idea, you would probably shorten your stride, strike
got re-energized about it while I was going through mid-foot and take on a more upright posture than
Christopher McDougall’s book, Born to Run. you would while wearing running shoes.
He used the term ‘self-limiting’ to describe what Running shoes allow you to stride out and
happens when we run with bare feet. almost exaggerate the walking gait, which does
Obviously footwear, specifically modern involve a heel strike, but with very little impact.
running footwear, doesn’t allow our feet to interact Efficient walking utilizes the heel strike and the
with the environment in the sensory way they were contact of ground in front of a person. Efficient
designed. Our feet, both the pressure receptors running and jogging barefoot require that your foot
and the superficial tactile receptors, are shielded strikes somewhat under your body and propels you
from the environment. The environment doesn’t forward by extending behind you.
get a chance to communicate to us how we should Walking is reaching out, grabbing ground with
interact with it. your heel and coming over it. Jogging and running
Don’t get me wrong. Gloves and shoes are are literally a controlled fall forward as you propel
absolutely great inventions. They keep us from yourself by a push from behind.
shredding our hands and feet. Our hands and Some people may try and turn this into a
feet are full of neurological endings. Aside from running biomechanics lecture, but it’s not. I’m
your face, you’re probably going to see the highest basically using barefoot running as a simplistic way
concentrations in the hands and feet. to talk about self-limiting exercise.
The point is, we interact with the environment Let me give you another concept of self-limiting
with our hands and our feet. When you develop your exercise. One of the beautiful things true coaches
entire running cadence with the sensory deprivation and teachers realize is that a self-limiting exercise
provided by a shoe, you don’t move based on sensory or activity limits volume and intensity based on
input. That’s one of the summarizing factors of my technical precision.
book, Movement. Perception is what really drives
behavior. The way we perceive a situation is usually One of my favorite examples of this is jumping
linked to the way we behave in response. rope. Most people can jog or run longer than they
can jump rope. The cardiovascular mechanism
If we deprive ourselves of perceptive quality or is largely the same. In many cases, the plyometric
if we diminish perceptive quality, wouldn’t it also be demand of jumping rope is even less. The difference
appropriate to assume that behavior is going to be is that jumping rope sometimes takes a two-foot
somehow diminished or inadequate? Think about landing and jogging takes a one-foot landing, but
that. Psychologists will adhere to ‘perception drives the loads are actually distributed better in rope
behavior.’ If you want to change someone’s behavior, jumping.
you can educate them a little, but if you truly change
perception, there’s a better opportunity to do that. However, jumping rope has an extra wrinkle
to it. The fact that the rope is going around in
Barefoot running has all kinds of mechanical revolutions requires precision and posture. You can
influences behind it. We know that with a shoe you slouch when jogging, but it’s very hard to slouch and
can run with a heel stride, but barefoot, you can’t do jump rope.
it because your heel is just too sensitive. You were
made to land on the mid-part of the forefoot.

~1~
This is transcript of Gray Cook’s Self-Limiting Exercise audio lecture. If you’ve received this material,
do not own the audio lecture and would like to learn about it, visit www.movementlectures.com.
For more from Gray, visit him at graycook.com or functionalmovement.com.
 The rope is revolving around your body with kettlebell carried with a bent elbow, held upside
an axis, basically at your grip of the handles, and down with the barrel part of the kettlebell close to
this axis falls very close to your center of mass. The your chin. Then show me you can do it on the other
axis depicts any asymmetry, forward lean, backward side of your body.
lean, left lean, right lean or any unnecessary rotation Many people will have abilities with this
you have. on one side of the body, but not the other side.
If you revolve the rope anywhere but the true They want to blame it on grip strength. Using a
axis of your center, you’re going to catch the rope on dynamometer, we’ve showed them that their right
your foot and it’s going to frustrate you. Guess what? and left grip strength and the position is largely the
There’s going to be a lot of starting and stopping same, however, their attention to detail, precision,
during your jump rope session. coordination, motor control and balance are not.
This is the point. As a beginner, you can’t jump The fact that you have an inability on one side
rope enough to get shin splints or shred your legs. can only partially be related to a grip strength issue.
Yet many people who are inefficient runners will If you truly think it’s a grip strength issue, it’s easy
basically pound the ground until they have an enough to test. A grip dynamometer will expose
orthopedic issue. you to that weakness right away. You can find out if
Self-limiting exercise exposes you to a level of it’s an orthopedic issue or just a poorly trained grip
technical precision that will not let you participate on one side.
in greater levels of volume or intensity without We rarely see huge asymmetries in grip.
greater levels of precision. The greater levels of Even if you’re right-handed, we rarely see greater
precision are, in fact, protective because the greater than a 10% difference. The thing that should
levels of precision perpetuate better alignment, be compelling is bottom-up kettlebell activity.
better coordination, better motor control and better Whether you’re carrying it, pressing it overhead
attention to detail. or doing a front squat with it on one side of your
Let’s take another self-limiting exercise—a body, any asymmetry between the left and right side
bottom-up kettlebell activity. Let’s choose three. The of your body’s ability to do that should forecast a
first bottom-up kettlebell activity is simply walking. disharmony of alignment, balance, precision and
Bring the kettlebell to a bottom-up position and motor control. It simply should not be a knee-jerk
rack it so that your elbow is bent and the kettlebell reaction where you decide you have a weak grip on
is carried to the side of your body close to your chin. that side.
Get a comfortable position and just start walking. How would the activity start? Bring the kettlebell
As you shift weight from the left to the right side to the appropriate position and just walk around
of your body, you’re going to have to make small with it. If you can’t walk around with it, there’s a
adjustments—not just with your shoulder and grip, good chance you shouldn’t be pressing it. Once
but also with your core, balance and posture. you can walk around with it for an equal volume
You have two options. You can try to responsibly between the left and right side, start perfecting your
grip the kettlebell and balance it atop you through kettlebell front squat—not your press. This almost
your precision and alignment as you walk, or you acts as a heel lift so we get a little of that squat
can try to crush the living guts out of the kettlebell correction.
handle and experience what grip fatigue feels like However, holding that bottom-up kettlebell in
about a minute from now. front of you and dropping into a squat is going to
Give it the amount of tension it needs, but no keep you from forward leaning because if you do,
extra. Use your balance, precision and alignment you’re going to drop the kettlebell. It’s going to force
to create efficiency. Show me a long walk with a you to engage certain things and start your squat

~2~
This is transcript of Gray Cook’s Self-Limiting Exercise audio lecture. If you’ve received this material,
do not own the audio lecture and would like to learn about it, visit www.movementlectures.com.
For more from Gray, visit him at graycook.com or functionalmovement.com.
from a better-aligned position. As you descend into Many people don’t want to expose themselves
the squat, your low back and pelvis relationship to this type of scrutiny. They’d rather push through
changes. The angle of your hip to your pelvis is and see how many presses they can do so they can
going to change. The angle of your hip to your knee get over to their keyboards and post their superior
is going to change. The angle of your knee to your achievement on the internet for all to read. I really
ankle is going to change. hate the fact that modern fitness accomplishment
Many different fascial planes will change tension. has digressed to the fact that it doesn’t exist unless
Many different anatomy trains will change their you can blog about it or tweet it. The whole point
roles. As you go down and come back up through is that self-limiting exercise is about you and your
the squat, you’ll learn that you can adjust your own movement and precision.
shoulder and your holding power of the kettlebell I went through the MovNat experience this past
regardless of what happens in your lower body. This summer with Erwan Le Corre and his instructors,
is what we call ‘dissociation’ in sports training and Clif and Vic. Many times we’d get smoked or
rehabilitation. fatigued doing a climbing activity or a crawling
However, the fluid reciprocal action between activity. We quickly found ourselves on a balance
your upper and lower body doing almost opposite beam. The balance beam didn’t have a high-energy
things that we see when you walk and jog is what expenditure, but it required a high attention to
we consider natural movement. That’s the harmony detail.
or reciprocal action we see in dance. We see it in Instead of telling us to balance, they talked
fighting. We see it in people doing gymnastics work about breathing. They talked about slowing it down
or trapeze work. We see it and call it ‘fluid athletic and feeling what the beam wants us to do with our
form,’ but really it’s rhythmical balance. When we feet—not trying to balance by swinging the upper
move one segment of our body, we counterbalance body back and forth or holding unnecessary tone in
with another. our arms, but by using our legs both as sensory and
When it’s not present, we call it a ‘lack of motor organs to find out what’s needed and then
dissociation.’ We want the shoulders to be able to execute what’s required.
turn while the legs still do their job. When we see We’d take a step forward. We’d take a step
a lack of that, we realize you’re doing unnecessary backward. We’d close our eyes. We would deprive
support with one part of your body to achieve a ourselves of sensory information, and then move
minimal level of competence with another part. back into it. It was enlightening to see how much
This is almost what we call compensation. better people’s balance became even in the presence
The bottom-up kettlebell can expose you to of fatigue. Once again, we were bringing more
disharmonies, malalignments and motor control muscle activity and malalignment to the act of
issues. My suggestion is to do bottom-up walking balancing. Balancing, which shouldn’t be fatiguing,
in a carry position. Then equalize your amount of often was for many of us.
bottom-up front squatting. Then they reversed it. They got us fatigued and
Once done, you may want to investigate equality said, ‘Figure out how to balance in the presence of
on bottom-up kettlebell pressing. Don’t do it fast. fatigue.’ When we did, we learned to balance more
Don’t see how many you can knock out. Press it up, efficiently. The balance beam was self-limiting. It
bring it back down and cycle a breath. Ensure you’ve didn’t allow our stance and preferred posture to
regained posture, and press it up again. Going that disconnect us from the true laws of gravity and
slow may cost you a few reps, but all I’m looking for limits of stability over our base of support.
is an accurate appraisal between the right and left Climbing is a great self-limiting activity. It
sides. pits us against our body weight and uses both our

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This is transcript of Gray Cook’s Self-Limiting Exercise audio lecture. If you’ve received this material,
do not own the audio lecture and would like to learn about it, visit www.movementlectures.com.
For more from Gray, visit him at graycook.com or functionalmovement.com.
mobility and stability together. Part of the efficiency pleasurable. They’ll be able to do more and at the
in climbing is not just the pound-for-pound body same time, reduce the musculoskeletal risk of a
strength a climber possesses, but also the mobility setback injury as they’re getting in shape.
of the arms and legs, and the mobility of the trunk I gave an incomplete list of self-limiting exercise
that allows climbers to achieve optimal alignment in my book Movement. Because I get credited for
and maximize their leverage. introducing the Functional Movement Screen
Think about it. Getting into a good position (FMS) and the medical counterpart—the Selective
is probably more important than increasing your Functional Movement Assessment (SFMA)—
strength by an additional 10%. Most elite-level people defer to me for corrective strategy.
golfers work on the precision and execution of their I really have to emphasize this: I don’t want
posture and movement patterns. They know if they to put people on a path of corrective strategy for
just get the right biomechanical lines of attack as the rest of their lives. That’s not why I’m here. If
they swing, they’ll be more efficient. they’re moving at such a state of dysfunction that
That’s why they spend more time with a golf I know they’re at risk for an injury, I want them on
club working on mechanics and technical precision a corrective strategy until the movement deficiency
than doing biceps curls or kettlebell presses. They goes away.
appreciate that strengthening their body will help, Once it’s gone, I don’t want it to return.
however no amount of strength in the world is There are two ways to guarantee that. First, make
going to make you efficient if part of your strength corrective exercise a part of your life forever. That’s
is used to overcome stiffness or to work against your like supplementation. But instead, eat a healthy
own malalignment. enough diet where you don’t need to supplement
The object of efficiency is to be able to reproduce nutrition—I’m using a nutritional analogy here.
an activity with some degree of technical precision Think about it. If you corrected your movement
so as not to waste energy. If your complete training patterns and cleaned up your movement profile,
paradigm is just caloric expenditure with no regard but then adopted a different approach to exercise.
for accomplishment, then it doesn’t really matter Instead of going headstrong into your preferred
what you do. activities and then having to clean up the movement
If you take people who are morbidly obese and dysfunction in the path of your activity, why not
moving poorly and you make them move in any adopt some activities that force you to maintain your
number of ways, there will be caloric expenditure. mobility, stability and movement patterns? Even
If you do that often enough, the lack of integrity though you might train in one special direction,
and precision in movement is going to bring them the variety of activity you have in another direction
up against early fatigue where they will not really somehow naturally maintains your balance of
achieve the most of their metabolic efficiency. power.
Therefore, they will not lose weight and will not get Originally, I think this was the definition of
in shape quickly. They’ll just hit fatigue, create lactic cross training, but somehow we lost that message.
acid, go into a poor breathing state, get tired and eat. The amount of dosage it takes not to have detriment
Or, they’ll have an orthopedic issue. from your specialization should be cross training.
Either way, your quest for caloric expenditure Think about this again. Every one of us wants to
would be sidelined. Instead, even if weight loss is specialize in something. We have things we like to
the goal, go for technical precision, movement do—golf, triathlons, lifting heavy weight. It doesn’t
correction and movement efficiency whenever matter. However, your cross training, if done
possible. Make your people as efficient as possible. correctly, is a certain dosage of activity that undoes
Believe it or not, work levels will become more any of the detriments specialization may cause.

~4~
This is transcript of Gray Cook’s Self-Limiting Exercise audio lecture. If you’ve received this material,
do not own the audio lecture and would like to learn about it, visit www.movementlectures.com.
For more from Gray, visit him at graycook.com or functionalmovement.com.
 Some of the detriments specialization may cause One of the things I really appreciated in
are neglect of a certain movement pattern, limitation the MovNat experience was that there were not
in a movement pattern or left-right asymmetry. If we structured, anatomically correct, ergonomically
could inject natural activities alongside some of our engineered handgrips on the trees we climbed or on
favorite activities and those natural activities were the ropes we pulled. We basically had to figure out
somehow self-limiting—like jump rope, bottom-up how to grip, how to align and how to move naturally.
kettlebells, balancing—they would basically keep us Unfortunately, none of these trees were clones of
in a highly adaptable state. the other. Each was a little bit different. Each rocky
The reason specialization is sometimes path we hiked had rocks in different places, so we
detrimental is that it hurts our adaptability. Is it had to pay attention to what we were doing. We had
possible to be specialized and not lose adaptability? to be aware.
Absolutely! I can introduce you to two strength A word I like to use is that we had to be ‘engaged.’
coaches in the NFL who do this for a living. They Self-limiting exercise forces a slightly higher degree
take what their players do better than anyone else, of engagement. That degree of engagement can
and keep that from undoing them. sometimes create frustration. It can push us right
Specialization will undo you because the human up to our limits of capacity and stability.
body was made to have a variety of movements. Two books, The Talent Code and Talent is
Those movements are not just our natural birthright. Overrated, both tell us that the best of the best
They’re very restorative in nature. athletes may not be naturally talented. Their talent
I would suggest that you go to the website we may be in their ability to train at superior levels, and
dedicated to the Movement book, movementbook. they expose themselves to better feedback during
com. Look for the lecture in Chapter 3 by Dr. Ed a training session. That superior level of feedback
Thomas during which he talks about the restorative helps them hone their skills and learn at a more
nature of certain activities and the maintenance accelerated rate.
certain activities can provide. Isn’t this what self-limiting exercises do? Isn’t
Our ancestors participated in various activities the jump rope telling us we’re not doing it right?
and didn’t have all the special screening or corrective Isn’t the bottom-up kettlebell as it becomes wobbly
lingo we use today. They just seemed to know. Just telling us we’re doing something wrong? Shouldn’t
like a variety of nutritionals was probably the most we stay there and challenge ourselves in a particular
holistic diet, a variety of exercises was also good. session for a particular amount of time to explore all
It’s okay to specialize, but if your specialization our different options, or should we stop the session
diminishes your basic movement capabilities in any right there and google the answer?
way and you’re not in contention for a gold medal, Which is going to give you more inherent body
you may be taking unnecessary risks with your knowledge? Which is going to help you overcome
training. the problem? Many of our ancestors overcame
Self-limiting exercise is not something you movement problems without ever verbalizing
introduce to correct an ailment or a problem that them. They never really encapsulated or articulated
hasn’t been successfully diagnosed or identified. verbally what the problem was, yet they found
That’s not the way to do it. That’s not why we jump the solution through moving, through becoming
on a balance beam. We jump on a balance beam to efficient, through developing body mechanics and
make sure the extra strength or explosiveness we through being engaged.
just developed in our legs didn’t hurt our ability to We want a verbal answer in a movement situation
feel our environment and respond accordingly to that doesn’t work with words. Your reactions, your
challenges in balance and the limits of stability. natural movement reactions and the things you

~5~
This is transcript of Gray Cook’s Self-Limiting Exercise audio lecture. If you’ve received this material,
do not own the audio lecture and would like to learn about it, visit www.movementlectures.com.
For more from Gray, visit him at graycook.com or functionalmovement.com.
do when you’re trying to balance don’t need to be in fitness and recreation is because there’s a
converted into words as the signal comes up from limitation. You must have an authentic running
your foot. stride if you’re going to use a minimalist shoe, go
barefoot or wear a stripped-down piece of footwear.
The signal comes up from your foot and things
You really have to combine good balance with a
happen. You shift weight. You don’t know you’re
strong paddle stroke—your upper-body strength
moving forward in the sagittal plane or rotating in
and your lower-body stability—if you’re going
the transverse plane. You just do it because your
to stand on a long, floaty surfboard with a seven-
equilibrium, vision and proprioception tell you to.
foot paddle. The strongest people won’t necessarily
We have to put the people who train under us paddle the fastest. The people with the best balance
in situations where they’re actually correcting at a don’t necessarily go anywhere. You have to have a
non-verbal level. They’re moving. They’re reacting. blend of a nice technical pull on the paddle without
They’re feeling. giving up your balance on the board.
The language of movement is written in feel— I spent some time with John Brookfield this past
not in pictures and not in words. Most of us learn to summer. John revealed many of his training systems
move and even learn to walk with very little verbal to me. He advocates going back to that crawling
or visual instruction. Our need to interact with posture—not on your hands and knees, but on
the environment helped us lift our heads. It made your hands and feet, more toward bear crawling.
us roll to the left, roll to the right and push up on Learning how to move in that position creates core
our elbows once again so we could interact and see engagement automatically as you advance your
more. upper and lower limbs in a reciprocal fashion.
We eventually learned we could get from point There are two ways to change someone’s
A to point B by crawling. Crawling strengthened our movement profile and movement screen. We can
little limbs and trunks to the point where we could correct or we can delete the abundance of one
come up on our knees. That gave us an even better activity and insert something somewhat difficult.
perspective, but we weren’t satisfied there. There It’ll almost seem like a setback. It’ll almost humble us
was furniture all around, so we pulled up onto one in its natural limitations. That amount of humbling
knee and eventually stood. We fell a bunch of times creates an adaptive drive inside the brain and body,
and cracked our heads on the coffee table. We had a and we’ll come out on the other side moving a little
lot of boo-boos and made a lot of people laugh. better.
Eventually we learned that upright bipedal I’ve given you a lot of philosophy, but I want
locomotion was the most efficient thing we could you to explore some of the activities you personally
do to get from point A to point B. It also positioned do and some of those activities you suggest to
our eyes—our favorite sense in the world—to gain others. Find out how many are dependent on
the most information and the most perspective. metabolic limitations, how many are dependent
If you review the book Brain Rules, you’ll see on musculoskeletal limitations and how many are
how the brain craves sensory information. That dependent on technical precision.
sensory information drives many of our movement If a lot of the activities we do ourselves and have
behaviors. Those movement behaviors can be honed other people do are limited by technical precision—
and corrected if we limit them using natural things meaning you can’t do more of them if you don’t
in our environment. do them right—these activities would yield better
One of the reasons barefoot running, or physical specimens than those who mindlessly bang
minimalist shoe running, and stand-up paddle out extra repetitions only so they can get to their
boarding are two of the fastest-growing movements keyboards to tell people how many they did.

~6~
This is transcript of Gray Cook’s Self-Limiting Exercise audio lecture. If you’ve received this material,
do not own the audio lecture and would like to learn about it, visit www.movementlectures.com.
For more from Gray, visit him at graycook.com or functionalmovement.com.
 I would rather see you do a few correctly than a
significant number with all kinds of compensation
and substitution. I’m not trying to take anything
away from you. I’m glad you did that. What I’m
worried about is the uninformed person watching
and thinking that’s the epitome of physical
development.
Think about all of the different things you
can do. A farmer’s carry of two kettlebells is self-
limiting. See how many more exercises you can
add to the list. See if you can make your own list
before you revisit that page in the Movement book
where I provide a list of self-limiting exercises. Brett
Jones and I discuss self-limiting exercise further on
movementbook.com, in the section on Chapter 10.
I suggest you look at this video as well.
Thank you so much for your interest in this
discussion of self-limiting exercise.

~7~
This is transcript of Gray Cook’s Self-Limiting Exercise audio lecture. If you’ve received this material,
do not own the audio lecture and would like to learn about it, visit www.movementlectures.com.
For more from Gray, visit him at graycook.com or functionalmovement.com.