I wrote it all down

Most of the approach behind what I teach at Totum gets delivered in pieces, or is just part of how the sessions are structured. It comes out in a few sentences between rounds. Half an explanation while someone is upside down and focussing on keeping themselves up! A quick conversation after class.

It’s not a bad way to share it or learn it. It’s actually probably the best way. But it means the whole method has never existed anywhere someone interested could sit down with it.

Now it does.

Why I wrote it

This style of training, like our bodies and minds, holds elements that seem to conflict: engage fully, now relax completely, feel deeply, be present, but don’t overthink.

I think of it as an organic, non-linear, dynamic system. It can appear complex, but much of the apparent complexity disappears once you understand a few underlying frameworks. The frameworks are few. The realm of exploration is vast.

Movement is one of the fundamental forces that shape us, physically and emotionally, and most fitness training does not treat it that way. I created Totum to explore how to get genuinely strong, mobile and skilled, and to treat movement as a practice at the same time.

I personally interact with movement on a lot of levels. For the enjoyment of moving. For health and longevity. For creativity and adaptability. For emotional resilience. And for what it keeps teaching me about myself.

What is there

The Practice is the approach in one 15 minute read. (The Approach is the essential 2 minute version.)

Movement as Freedom is the first principle, and everything else explains why this is true on different levels. Why we treat movement as a way of keeping possibilities open rather than only as a way of getting fitter, and what it means to have options in your own body.

The Biology of Movement is the why underneath the why. What actually happens inside a body when you ask something of it, why attention decides where you adapt, and why modern life leaves so much of you unasked for.

The Human Possibility is the part that is hardest to say in a class without sounding like I am overselling it, but that’s normal for something that can be interacted with on different levels. What a physical practice can develop beyond the physical: staying regulated when something is hard, finding another way when the first one fails, remaining curious under pressure. What is embodied learning, what is creativity and how movement helps us stay young in mind and body.

The Practitioner’s Guide is different from the rest. It’s not an essay, but more a working manual: eighteen sections on how to practically engage with the practice. What to do when something is difficult, how to find your edge, what to do when you walk into class. It is written to be returned to rather than read once and will likely evolve over time as everything does. Section 18 compresses the approach into 5 questions.

You don’t need any of this to train here. Turn up, move, feel what happens, and the understanding arrives through your body, which is how it should arrive anyway.

But if you’ve ever wondered why we train the way we do, why the games, or why I keep asking you where your weight is instead of just telling you, it is in there now.

Read it in order, or by what grabs your attention. It will still be there next year.