The Mental Benefits you get from Natural Movement

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Mental capabilities you can use in your life

By adopting a more Foresighted lifestyle, you will become more resourceful, results-driven, tough, adaptable, resilient, efficient, innovative, creative and confident. Yes, all that. It’s hard to see how that would fail to improve your performance at work or academically, and even in your personal relationships.

Mental Toughness

Mental Toughness is very powerful, as illustrated by its central place in Special Operations Forces training, but is often misunderstood for persistence, which is only part of it. It forms the backbone of what it takes for US Navy Seals (USNS) candidates to go through the BUD/s selection course.

Movnat training as part of a foresighted lifestyle is, in my opinion, the best way for regular persons like you and me to develop and increase our Mental Toughness.

Mental Toughness is a combination of attributes comprising at least:

  • being results-driven: you will do whatever it take to accomplish your goal. Expressed as “you will not quit” in USNS parlance, it ’s expressing the fact they will rather die than quit and not accomplishing their mission, which in the selection course is to graduate.
  • ignoring discomfort: part of what makes someone results-driven is learning to ignore and tune out all the discomforts that are real but only details compared to the mission. faced with those, you can either be brought down and quit or just carry on with a “F*ck that!” attitude (more politely expressed as “And so what?”).
  • persistence: persevering in the face of unending pain is a precious skill. You can cultivate it through physical training and it will carry on to other domains. USNS cherish the phrase: “The only easy day was yesterday.” When you go to sleep at night, think of it, and be ready to attack the day in the morning knowing that, no, it won’t be easy.
  • resilience: resilience is different from persistence because it gets you back up from unplanned challenges. Persistence gets you through the pain of completing an ultra-marathon: you know going in you will face a lot of pain if you want to finish it. Resilience gets you through the unexpected challenges life throws at you. What do you do when negative surprises keep happening? You dig deep and “embrace the suck”. Physical training is an excellent way to be faced with situations where you either embrace the suck or you quit.

Movnat training is the best physical activity in order to develop Mental Toughness. Why? Go read this article.

Resourceful

Movnat emphasizes training outdoors using urban equipments and natural elements. No access to gym equipment during these session, so you have to use your knowledge of movements and what your body can do to train efficiently with what you have.

Mental skill: you do not get blocked by the imperfections and inadequacies of what you have to achieve a goal. Instead, you do what you have to do to achieve your goal.

Adaptable

Training outdoors also means training in uncontrolled environments where you have to constantly adapt to slightly different features. When climbing a wall, no two walls are identical. Some textures are grippy, some are slippery, some are painful to hold, etc. Same with tree branches: thin, thick, slanted, smooth, or abrasive tree bark, etc.

Mental skill: you learn to adapt to the situation at hands and are not thrown away when it’s not the exact situation you were expecting.

Innovative & Creative

Living a Foresighted lifestyle means using both Opportunistic Training and Simultaneous Training. Both forms of training will lead you to train in situations where it’s not commonplace (within social norms) to train: playgrounds, waiting for your kids’ activities, commutes to work, etc. That will lead to a choice: either you abide by those norms and don’t train, or you break free and you train.

Mental skill: you learn to be comfortable operating outside of the socially accepted “normal” because you want to achieve more.

Confidence from practical skills

Movnat is structured entirely on practical skills simply because it emulates a lifestyle where physical activity was made up entirely of practical activities. It teaches you to climb on top of a wall or a large tree branch. How to roll to break a fall or balance up high. Knowing you can quickly get over a high wall, walk balancing on top of it, jump down from up high and roll before sprinting away from a potential threat is deeply empowering.

Mental Skill: you know you have skills that most people don’t have. Even faced with an intimidating situation at work or at home, you can draw on this knowledge and drive up your confidence. I you can do this, you can face that!

Confidence from body composition

In addition to practical skills, body composition does boost your confidence as well. Movnat does get you a good-looking body. It’s not the primary goal but rather a nice side product of practicing it. And unlike many sports, since we focus on being excellent generalists, you’ll develop an harmonious and balanced good-looking.

Mental Skill: being in shape boosts your confidence when interacting with others.

Non-competitive, meditative

Movnat practice is well suited as a meditative practice, without competitive or aggressive aspects. Think of it as similar to yoga or slackline balancing.

Time efficiency

A Foresighted Lifestyle allows you to train more by seizing opportunities in a tight schedule. Those opportunities are there, but they’re not that frequent either. Everyone has a couple of 10 mins gaps in their schedules, but you may not have many more. Waste one and you’ve wasted half of your training potential for today.

Mental Skill: you learn to act with a sense of urgency, making the most of every occasion and not being complacent about your time.

Picture of Julien Le Nestour
Julien Le Nestour
Behavioral scientist and natural movement fan. The founder of Foresighted, I help people realise it's easier than they think to shift their lifestyle towards a healthier, more sustainable one.

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