Timon, MovNat & more

Timon & Bonobo Gym

I first met Timon Wilkinson when he and business partner James Hardaker approached me to bounce some ideas off for a new kind of gym they were opening in Lyall Bay, Wellington (New Zealand) called Bonobo. The gym focuses on play-based movement and strength and I think they’d heard about my interest in circus and parkour from my triathlon coach at the time.

We chatted and I was immediately enthusiastic about the concept - it was exactly what I’d been looking for. I’d just retired from triathlon training and completed a year of parkour classes and the timing was perfect to build on the agility I’d gained from parkour. I enjoyed the weekly agility and strength classes with Timon for the last year of my time in Wellington - I learnt new movements, challenged myself in different ways to the traditional gym, for example more hanging movement and different ways of lifting heavy objects that weren’t barbells, and the element of play and games incorporated meant class was fun.

Over the year Timon introduced me to a world of new movement and agility influences, from Ido Portal, to the Body of Knowledge podcast to Fighting Monkey and MovNat.

Fighting Monkey

By coincidence I realised I would be in Melbourne the same weekend in late 2017 as a Fighting Monkey workshop was on, and jumped at the opportunity to experience one. I didn’t know that much about Fighting Monkey going in, but was curious to experience it after Timon had enthused about what they do. Essentially the workshops are about responding to 'movement situations', sequences and interactive obstacle games that test how creative and adaptive you are in complex situations on a physical level.

There were across-floor sequences with complex foot patterning, rhythms, jumping and arm movements to copy. This felt great to do as well as working the whole body especially with pumping music, I felt really alive and invigorated doing these. Also, there were partner games with tennis balls on strings that made us move our spines in multi-dimensions, and movement challenges using Jenga blocks. Sometimes I think participants didn’t know quite what was going on and it wasn’t always explained, you just kind of followed, but I think that was deliberate and part of exploring how you adapt.

I used to love doing contemporary dance as a teenager and some of the floor sequences we learnt by copying the instructors gradually adding more movements were almost dance-like but also a bit improvisational as they were constantly changing slightly. Fighting Monkey aims to help you evolve your body to be more elastic and resilient.

It was a highly stimulating experience and also interesting to meet other people from across Australisa interested in movement and agility-based fitness. I met people who had done MovNat with the same instructor I was about to in a few months time, Matt Rutley, and also found out about Katy Bowman, biomechanist and author of Move Your DNA whose work and thinking I’ve also started to absorb.

MovNat

A few months after attending Fighting Monkey, I returned to Melbourne to complete MovNat Level 1 & 2 coaching training. MovNat is about developing a solid foundation of movement skills that have real-world application, such as types of crawling, jumping, balancing, lifting, throwing, catching and climbing. The aim of MovNat is to enable you to move adaptively in the environmental context you are in and ‘be strong to be useful’.

MovNat’s philosophy is that anyone can gain from improving their movement, from elite athletes to those quite out of shape and it emphasises movement competence over conditioning with the view that you develop your fitness through performing the movements effectively and efficiently.

I had become aware of MovNat when I did a year of parkour classes in Wellington, partly to help prepare for an offroad triathlon which involved an obstacle course in the run, and also out of general interest. The parkour instructors were MovNat-trained and I enjoyed learning and practicing movement fundamentals such as vaulting over obstacles that I hadn’t done much of since school, and never really been formally ‘taught’ how to do properly. MovNat teaches you to understand concepts such as the point of support, centre of gravity, and helps you to understand and feel how shifting bodyweight affects these, and how to use these principles to generate momentum in movements such as jumping. I was keen to learn more.

Timon completed MovNat Level 1 in mid-2017 in Brisbane and returned super enthusiastic about the experience. This inspired me to do it too and I enrolled on a course in April 2018 in Melbourne.

There aren’t many MovNat courses in Australasia, and from a travel perspective it made some kind of sense to at least attempt the Level 1 and 2 courses together over five days. This was no mean feat from a physical stamina perspective and a reasonable amount of training and preparation is needed to be ready for the courses. Three months before the course I got a job offer to move to Tauranga at the same time as I was finishing my personal training course and associated final project, so with needing to move cities and finish my studies (and work full time in IT) it wasn’t possible for me to prepare as well as I would have liked.

The course was taught by Matt Rutley of Stage 6 Fitness in Brisbane, who had also taught Timon for his Level 1. It was an incredible learning experience and I met some amazing people. I had a fair amount of competence to develop to make even level 1 standard, but you have three months after the course to practice any movements you needed to work on and submit videos. I put a lot of effort into working on my skills following the course and passed level 1 and a fair amount level 2 skills in this time, but had a few skills that I still needed to develop in.

For all the hard work I’d put in, I was given a spot on the Auckland course in November 2018, being taught by Kimberly Alexander (@coachkbmoves) so I could redo level 2, and I decided to do the online coaching MovNat offer to help me prepare, particularly with the movements I was finding the most difficult, which were the popup, the clean and jerk, and the front vault. After the Melbourne course I had started following the MovNat women’s facebook group and found the coach Melissa Sher’s posts helpful, and also her instagram posts @makestufftough, so I started the online coaching with Melissa.

Melissa Sher

Melissa set me a program for several sessions a week over three months and I videoed the movements and uploaded them into the online coaching platform for feedback. Melissa was great at making really specific, helpful feedback, often drawing lines onto images of me doing something to point out an adjustment or making a video clip of her performing a movement to help me understand it better and enable me to play it in slow motion to see what was happening. I think for me as well it really helped to have a female coach as a role model and to see coaching videos of women performing these movements, because a lot of the images on the MovNat website are only of men.

Within a week a single piece of feedback about keeping my arms straight on the swing up movement - where you hang off a bar, swing one leg over, swing the other leg and use momentum to ‘swing up’ onto the top of the bar - enabled me to master this movement and make it fluid.

I worked hard at the training, most lunchtimes at the gym as well as the time spent cutting and uploading the video clips, and commenting on any sticking points etc. It was hard work and a lot of effort. But I stayed determined and slowly but surely I got stronger and more competent and finally, a couple of weeks or so before the Auckland Level 2 course, I got the pop up. The popup involves hanging from a bar, pulling yourself up to hang from your forearms then initiating a vertical movement with your legs and engaging your lats to ‘pop up’ onto the top of the bar.

On the course I passed everything apart from the front vault, which compared with where I had been in April, was a massive improvement. I did another month of coaching after the course focused on the front vault, and finally cracked it.

Breakfree Movement

On the MovNat course in Melbourne, I met Elaine Hong and Imelda Yong from Malaysia who went on to create Breakfree Movement, MovNat-inspired classes focused around movement, efficiency and play in Kuala Lumpur. Each week they have a focus for classes and have been featured in Malaysian Tatler magazine.

I’ve been following their instagram @breakfree.mvmt and facebook page and classes look great - here’s an example video from a class. I wish I could go! They have also been to a Fighting Monkey workshop and you can see this influence too. I would love to create something like this in Tauranga.