Movement as a life practice.
Not a program. Not a phase. A practice you return to, over years, and keep finding more in.
This page is our whole approach. Beneath it sit three essays and a practitioner's guide that go considerably deeper into the physical, biological and embodied thinking behind it. Skip ahead to them.
The method
Fit, but not free.
Plenty of people are physically active but still feel stiff, sore, and strangely limited in their own bodies. They surf, they climb, they cycle, they run, and they cannot work out why they ache. Whatever they do most has shaped their body around that one thing, and quietly narrowed how they can move.
- A cyclist builds short quads and hip flexors, and a spine that forgets how to extend.
- A climber builds a rounded upper back, tight shoulders, and far more pull than push.
- A runner builds tight hamstrings and, often, knees that pay for it.
- Even a desk builds a body: folded at the hips, rounded forward, rarely reaching overhead.
None of this means stop doing what you love. It means what you love is the top of a practice. Underneath it sits everything it needs but never builds: the opposite movements, the full ranges, the strength in the positions your life never asks for.
The same is true of how people train. Each of these is a good practice with real benefits, and each stalls in a predictable place.
- Only strength makes you strong in a narrow band of positions, and nothing ever asks you to organise it or use it.
- Only stretching gives you range you cannot hold, because nothing has given your body a reason to keep it.
- Only flow makes you smooth at what you can already do, and you keep meeting the same ceiling.
- Only play leaves you improvising around strength and range you never built.
There is nothing wrong with any of them, but there is something missing from all of them.
Build broadly, build deeply.
Totum Movement is a generalist practice. My aim is to build broadly and deeply. Broadly, so no single thing narrows you. Deeply, so that whatever you build, and whatever you do with it, stands on something solid. A body with more ways to move is freer, more capable, more adaptable, and more resilient.
The system: build, control, use.
There are three things running through everything I teach: build, control and use.
- Build
- is the physical foundation: strength and mobility developed over time.
- Control
- is what lets you organise and express that foundation: coordination, balance, timing, force and skill.
- Use
- is where those capacities become movement in the world: solving a physical problem, improvising, playing, or simply reaching for what you need without having to think about it.
These are not three stages you complete in order. They develop together, but they are not interchangeable. A smaller foundation limits what you have available to control. What you can control limits what you can express and use.
Adults are often sold skills directly. Drill the movement, repeat the pose, do more of the activity itself. But any skilful movement is simply the expression of what was built below it. Build the lower layers well and the top arrives sooner, reaches further, and lasts longer. Skip them, and you are building on sand.
- Use Movement in the world Movement games and improvisation. Surfing, hiking, the garden, the floor with your kids.
- Skills Specific things you learn to do Handstands, levers, soft acrobatics. Named movements you practise and refine.
- Control Organise what you have Locomotion, floorwork, balance, timing. Directing your body smoothly rather than simply producing force.
- Foundation The physical capacity underneath Strength and mobility you can actually control. Slow to build, and it holds.
Take the handstand.
A mover with the necessary strength and mobility can spend time in the actual position, where coordination, balance and awareness can be learned.
A mover with excellent control but without the physical capacity to support themselves upside down can practice various handstand drills to prepare, but cannot yet practise the handstand itself.
The foundation does not teach you the handstand. It makes the handstand available to learn.
How each one is trained.
- Build:
- core progressions across every strength category, held in the app, so you can see where you are, what comes next, and what you have already built.
- Control:
- locomotion and skills, which have progressions of their own but no universal path. Where you start depends on what you already move well.
- Use:
- games, partner work and improvisation. There is nothing to climb here. What you can do shows up in what you reach for.
Of the three, the foundation is the one we measure most carefully. It is built in small steps that can be easy to miss if you aren't tracking, and building it is essential to expanding what becomes possible above it.
Bent Arm Pulling
What you cannot yet do shows you what to build.
Read the pyramid downward and it becomes useful in a different way. When something higher up the pyramid, a movement, a skill or a game, does not work, it tells you something.
If you cannot get near the position at all, that points towards your physical foundation. If you have the pieces but cannot organise them, that points towards control. If you can do something in isolation but lose it when the situation changes, you need more practice using it.
The movement itself gives you information about what to develop next.
In that moment, notice, don't judge. Then find the best way to move from where you actually are.
Nobody can hand you the answer. Over time, that noticing is what separates a mover who keeps progressing from one who keeps repeating the same session.
Don't wait for the base.
There is a common reflex: if you cannot do the full expression of a movement, it feels like you should wait until the base is there. In reality, build, control and use run at once. Every movement sits on a continuum. There is somewhere to work from wherever you are.
You attend to your base for as long as you train. You practise controlling what you have for as long as you train. And you put it to use from the first week. Nobody stands at the bottom waiting for the foundation to be finished, because it never is.
What changes is the ground you start from. Train for a while and the base rises, and everything above it gets more accessible. Training does not only make you fitter. It changes what you can learn next.
The practice
Find your edge.
We build strength through a full range of motion, so strength and mobility develop together, and you train where your body actually goes in skills and in life.
I help you find a level that is difficult but doable. Challenging enough to grow, controlled enough to perform well. If it gets sloppy you scale back. The aim is not to make every rep harder. It is to make every rep useful.
Mobility works the same way. The goal is not simply to get loose. It is to increase your range and then own it: to be strong where you are open.
Feel it first
Your job is to feel, not to fix.
Underneath the method is a simpler question: can you feel what your body is doing?
Many of us move on autopilot, completing the rep by whatever means necessary and moving on. At Totum, developing awareness of what you feel is at the core of the practice itself. When you move with real attention, the movement teaches you something.
That information matters most in the moment. If something feels restricted, painful, unstable or simply inefficient, you can change what you are doing right then. You can alter the depth, the angle, the speed, the amount of support, or choose another route entirely.
You do not have to force the movement just because that was the movement you intended to do.
This is how movement becomes smoother and more adaptable. You learn to work with the body you have today, while gradually changing what that body is capable of. As your strength and range grow, awareness lets you use more of them without having to force the change.
A mover who can feel their own body and calibrate their effort can be guided into genuinely hard things: handstands, levers, deep end-range strength. Awareness is not the soft option. It is the unlock for the hard things.
How we learn.
Feeling is a move.
Every movement you make runs the same short cycle, whether it is a heavy pull on the rings or a game with a stick and a partner.
You meet a situation. You perceive what is happening through sensation. You act. The situation changes, and the change tells you something. That information immediately changes what you do next, and the cycle begins again, several times a second, for as long as you are moving.
The pyramid describes what we build. The loop describes how we learn.
- situation the activity
- perception how it feels
- action what you do
- feedback what changed
- learning what you keep
The loop is running through every layer of the pyramid.
Over time, those small adjustments change you. They improve your control, expand what feels available, and reveal what your foundation needs next. As your foundation grows, so does the movement you can naturally express.
This is why some of what we do looks like play. Games are low-stakes places to explore, take risks and see what emerges. Something that looks easy but you cannot organise is an opportunity. If you cannot do it slowly, smoothly or with control, you have found a gap worth exploring.
It is serious practice. It is also fun. The two are not opposites.
Build, control, and use in practice
You will see these three elements in every class: Build through strength and mobility; Control through locomotion and skill practice; Use through movement puzzles, games and improvisation. They overlap and feed one another.
This is the practice: learning to sense, adapt and move well with the body you have, while continually expanding what that body can do.
With keen awareness and a wide, deep base, you build a body you can trust: one that handles the unexpected, adapts when things change, and keeps doing what you ask of it. Surfing, climbing, the long walk, getting down on the floor to play and back up again, for years longer than most expect.
You do not raise the ceiling on one skill. You open up your whole life.
What you gain
Physical freedom.
Train your spine towards the full expression of what a spine can do. Do the same for your shoulders, hips, wrists, ankles and toes. What you uncover is a fuller version of your body, with more ways to move. That is what physical freedom actually is.
Long-term health.
Ageing is not the same as decline. A body that moves well, trains intelligently, and keeps showing up does not have to follow the script most people accept. The goal is a decade from now, and the one after that.
Who you become in the process.
A quality of attention and self-knowledge grows alongside the physical changes. It shows up in how you move through difficulty, how you treat yourself when something is hard, and how you show up for other people. Movement is an unusually direct path there.
The measure
Do you leave with more energy than you came in with?
Not whether it was hard. Not whether you completed everything. Whether the practice gave, or took. A practice that reliably gives is one you return to for decades.
Go deeper
Three essays, and a guide.
- Movement as Freedom Why we treat movement as a way of keeping possibilities open, rather than as a way of getting fitter. 9 min
- The Biology of Movement What happens inside the body when you ask something of it, and why it responds the way it does. 11 min
- The Human Possibility What a physical practice can develop beyond the physical: regulation, creativity, and the ability to stay present while something is hard. 8 min
Begin where the foundation is built.
Body Prep is the recommended place to start. The app shows you where you are and what comes next.