Your Universal Training Tool

Weekly Wisdom

Episode 44

Do you want to be fit for life? And by fit, I mean strong, mobile, and resilient to injury.

If so, there is one essential training tool. And the good news is that you already have it.

Today, I would like to introduce you to the miraculous power of the best fitness tool ever: The Floor.

I know that this is hard to believe. If the floor is so great, why aren’t there ads everywhere promoting its efficacy: “Buy yours today and enjoy your full body transformation or your money back!”

You guessed it, there’s no money to be made by telling folks how to get fit at home without spending a dime. To survive, the fitness industry needs to sell you products, programs, and services. If you stop believing in us, we’ll disappear like Tinker Bell in the Peter Pan story.

But the mission here is empowerment, so here is a quick primer on how to use your floor to best effect:

Spinal Restoration

How many years of sitting have you subjected your body to? All those postural misalignments, all that tension and pain. Say hello to Dr. Floor. Because yes, lying on the floor is step number one to correcting all of that.

I stopped sleeping on mattresses a couple of decades ago due to hip and back issues. My body likes nothing better than a good, hard floor to sleep on. And no, depending on your circumstances, you may not yet be able to sleep on a floor, but it is something worth working towards. You were built to do so. From a historical perspective, mattresses are a very recent invention. Throughout most of history, human beings have slept on the ground or on floors. Reclaim the floor, reclaim your humanity.

Hip Restoration

And all that sitting has wrecked your hips too. But what if you could rebuild your hip range of motion by just sitting on the floor? No, it's not a new idea. Kelly Starrett has talked about it for decades. It’s a great cure for what ails you.

We lost hip mobility when we stopped sitting on the floor.

Bonus training tool: Chair

When sitting on the floor is not an option, here are some creative chair-sitting solutions to preserve your health:

Mobility Training

Want to take it to the next level? We can train your mobility using the floor. Tim Anderson’s Original Strength program is effective and is almost entirely floor-based. Here’s an example of just one game-changing exercise from his incredible movement library:

But he’s not the only one. Gold Medal Bodies has a 4-minute ground based warm up. 4 exercises, 1 minute each, full body prep for whatever you want to do. But he’s not the only one:

The squat is a foundational movement. Want to master it? 90 seconds a day with only one tool: the floor.

Strength Training

Barbells are fun, but the foundation of real strength begins on the floor. You can start with a basic push-up and progress from there:

Crawling is tragically underrated for developing strength and bullet-proofing your body against injury. A crawl a day keeps injuries away.

You can even use it for conditioning:

But if I could only train one movement for full-body strength, the movement I would choose is the get-up.

Getting up and down off the ground uses every joint and muscle in your body and demands a level of strength and mobility most folks take for granted until it is gone. And okay, I’m going to cheat a bit here because once you have a strong unloaded get-up, I am going to add load so now we’re talking floor plus something else. I like sandbags, but really anything will do. 200lb anchor chain, anyone? Because being able to get up and down off the floor with a heavy load is a demonstration of full-body strength that cannot be matched by feats performed with a barbell.

Athletic Training

Oh sure, I know it all looks very pedestrian. Nothing too athletic or challenging about floor training, right? Think again. You can level up your floor training as much as you want. Handstands, headstands, cartwheels, kip ups, back flips. Don’t sleep on the athleticism required by floor routines. Athleticism built in the real world that transfers to the real world much better than most in-gym exercises.

Now, unless you have a big house, you might need to get outside for some conditioning work but once again, the ground rules. Yes, running is one option but don’t feel limited by that. Jumping, skipping and bounding are highly effective, fun and equipment-free:

Your Feet Need the Floor Too

You can’t build on a bad foundation. Posture and strength are built from the ground up. It is your feet that connect you to the Earth. Unfortunately, years of bad footwear have deformed your feet, weakened their muscles, killed the nerve endings and robbed you of strength, mobility and proper postural mechanics. Sure, there’s lots of brands of “barefoot” shoes, I own several, but the best brand of barefoot shoe is just your good old bare feet. If you want to be strong and healthy, your feet need to get floor training too.

https://ciss-journal.org/article/view/12213

So, there it is. Your primer on how to begin utilizing the original gym, the most effective fitness tool ever designed. No monthly payments, no membership required. Everything you need for a strong, healthy, balanced body right there at your feet.