Bring back Public Hanging In 2014! by Tony Riddle A.K.A @theprepdoctor

Get a grip!

By Gloves Club Founder Tony Riddle.

I look to my children as my educators in movement. They never seize to amaze me, they teach me every day and I get to pass this knowledge on to others. That's right, It isn't just us, that educates them, our kids are our educators too!
They crawl, squat, jump, lift, carry, throw, balance, walk, run, hang and climb all with ease and great skill, fearlessly I would like to add.

In return, I have to encourage, not discourage their movement practice.  I have to show great examples of this too.

If I don't, who will?

Some compromised, frustrated PE teacher who has been entrusted to look after the physical health of my child, that's who!

Well not on my watch!

The irony is;   I go off and study with the best and re-learn the very things that my kids have inherited from me and are already naturally skilled at.  This is what I class as my duty as a parent and a tribal elder, if it is something I have lost. I need to go out and gain the skill to coach them.

In a world obsessed with the intellectual mind.

We of course want them to do well academically, but to take these beautiful movement systems away with "Sit down, Don't move, Absorb this, Get down from there, Come away from the edge and Be careful of that, along with the usual chorus of of fear based crap" is a bloody outrage!

If like my daughters, you were carried around in a sling you would have learnt the pushing, pulling, grabbing and extension reflexes early. If you were kept in a baby carrier, a buggy and a car seat you have had these systems taken away. Bam! that's the attachment theory right there!
We could even be so bold as to call it "the movement connection theory" or "the movement disconnection theory". depending on where your base camp is.

Movement that should come naturally to us all

A baby/toddler will learn to grab and grip earlier than anything else. They will climb earlier than many of their other locomotive skills.  Brachiation is fundamental to us; hanging, pulling, climbing are all just as fundamental to us as running. We were in fact tree dwellers and climbers before we became runners.  (if you believe in evolution like I do ) Yet most can't hang on a bar and hold their own bodyweight in their hands due to their lack of grip strength  for more than 20 seconds, and this is where reductionism has its place. You need to know the code to break the fear and build the layers and strip the movement right back. Look at the end result and be able to trace all the way back to where the individual is compromised, have the unique set of Liam Nielsen skills to select the 20% input towards the 80% of output, and not get caught up in selecting BS movements like the Lat Pull down that have no over lapping theory to that end result.

If you put your fingers out to a baby they will grab and grab on surprisingly tight and won't let go.  If you lift them up, they still won't let go, their vice like grip will remain. You can literally walk around the room with them "ATTACHED/CONNECTED" to you.  I am talking about a baby here. I am not talking about an athletic type, who can lat pull, morning, noon and night, but can't hang for shit and marvels at James bond hanging from an elevator for all of 12 floors!

In fact for a large proportion of the zoo it's like an emotional bomb going off in their head to even think they could carry out what should be natural to them. Don't forget a lot of people have been containerised for so long it would be irresponsible to coach them without the correct prep work. They have lost the "HOW TO" but it doesn't mean they don't have the desire to, or the hardwiring (inherent knowledge). It is more the case that the only perception they have had of exercise is to sit in another container pushing levers like a chimp in an experimental lab. "Push this handle 15x and you will receive 1 muscle group and a protein bar."

Shoulder injuries are just as rife as knee and lower back problems. It's time we all got a grip and started hanging around a different kind of bar! We can blame the compromising chair and footwear for a multitude of sins, but the lack of hanging and climbing is just as detrimental to our innate movement system. That's "innate" not "inept"movement system!

Time to Take The Gloves Off and Toughen UP.

Climbing specifics:

Prep the hand with specific hand and wrist  prep drills as this is where you need to recognise bodyweight. Re-educate the grip and grip strength. Prep the shoulder and the scapula from its zoo cage so that the individual who can't lift his hand higher than his shoulder to change a light bulb can then hang, can then pull with a straight arm, then pull with a bent arm, can then muscle up, can then gymnastic ring pull up and finally can learn how to climb. Yeah, who would have guessed it,  hanging on a bar is actually a micro skill of the macro skill of climbing.

Yes squat, yes go barefoot, but please don't neglect a good hang out with your mates!

Move Like Joe by Tony Riddle A.K.A @theprepdoctor

 by Tony Riddle, Gloves Club founder

To understand one religion you must go away and study them all.

Understanding the system of body weight is one of the biggest pearls I have been given (thank you Dr Nicholas Romanov). It is an amazing coaching cue and depending on how deeply you want to look into it, will change the way you move and approach any exercise. If you understand and are mindful of your own weight and where it is in connection to the earth, be it through your hands, feet, backside etc., you can carry out the correct balance between muscles on or off and understand how our system is stacked much more efficiently. It's a system of support and action. This is my support and now my mind can now carry out the right action. Without the understanding of the support the action will be flawed. Education into body weight has been and still is being taught by modern great minds of movement: Dr Romanov, Lee Saxby, Kenny Weldon, Ido Portal, and Erwan le Corre to name but a few.

Support-Action-Equilibrium

I was first introduced into the concept of body weight by Dr Romanov and from then my perception of coaching has changed forever. Working side by side for many years with the world's best barefoot coach Lee Saxby has meant I have had access to some great knowledge. He has been another great inspiration to me and many pearls of wisdom gained - for me this one was huge: Dudley Morton



New York City 1936, the same time Joseph Pilates was kicking around the Big Apple, Dudley Morton broke the code to the human foot. He broke the foot down into units of body weight. For those who are not familiar with the importance of body weight, body weight recognition is at the top of the hierarchy. If you don't understand where your weight is, sadly your movement will be grossly compromised.


This is where practitioners go wrong and end up obsessing over making tiny adjustments. "Contract this, pull in that, tense this and tuck in this" and not a hint of this in the classical content of Return to Life Through Contrology. If you really want to "ape the animals" you should have an understanding of your body weight in both hands and feet. I can't imagine cats and dogs running around pulling their belly button in and tensing their glutes. These should really occur naturally and not to be forced.



There's text in Return to Life Through Contrology that refers to correct standing posture and where your body weight should be poised (the ball of the foot). This is exactly where Dudley suggests body weight to be in standing posture, yet broken down through looking at the evolution of the human foot. The big toe and ball of the foot should be the loaded point in stance and has huge leverage capability.



Every practitioner who teaches movement that involves the conversion into becoming an upright being should have an understanding of where the body weight should be in the human foot. It is no coincidence that Joseph Pilates had invented toe-correction equipment and exercises, he had a great mind and like Morton understood the importance of good foot mechanics. I wouldn't be surprised if the two great minds had met.



It is through Dudley Morton that we know the human foot to be one of the most complex and neglected parts of the human body. It has points of leverage, points of balance, three rocking actions each with specific changes in speed. 70% of the information from our proprioceptive system comes from the base of our support when upright, enabling us to make the correct subconscious judgement between muscle action and tendon action. And yet most have no understanding of the sensation of where their weight is when standing let alone carrying out basic fundamental movements, walking and running.

If you don’t understand the mechanics of the foot and have no understanding of where your weight is, then the ankle joint can’t function correctly, from the ankle joint, to the knee joint, to the hip, to the pelvis, to the lumbar to the thoracic spine. With a combination of seated posture and all these mechanical movements out of kilter you will be recruiting from all kinds of systems that are not designed for the actions you desire, resulting in the same annoying procedure of "tense this, pull in that, tighten this and tuck in that". Muscle tension is then created and this is where practitioners generally get it wrong. Instead of looking at the mechanical movement, they look at strengthening and stretching for the areas they perceive as weak or tight. If you don't sort out the structures from the base of support you will keep having to offer the same strength and stretch model and this is what I would call symptom relief, nothing more. This still doesn't equip you with the tools to move like Joe - you only become strong at the exercise you are being offered. As soon as you stand up and walk across to the car park from your class of "Classic Pilates" the system reverts back to the same position you walked in the door to your session with.

Neck endurance

It is my personal mission to go in search of what inspired the Joseph Pilates movement system, the one that can be read about in his bible Return to Life Through Contrology. Surely we owe him that much. Remember, to understand one religion you must go away and study them all. Well to move-like-Joe, you have to go away and study them all. The move-like-Joe-movement system: head wrestling, boxing, hand balancing, gymnastics, running, quadrupedal, circus performance. From a purely selfish standpoint as a man, these are far more attractive disciplines from Joseph Pilates past.

One Paleo Toe in the Canadian Olympic Lifting Grave by Tony Riddle A.K.A @theprepdoctor

by Tony Riddle, Gloves Club founder

Wow, what an interesting week for me at Gloves Boxing Club, and it all started with Batman!

After sitting through 2hrs 40mins of special affects and my senses becoming over stimulated beyond belief, who should be waiting to greet me at the office? Nope not the Joker, but it may as well have been...It was the female Canadian Olympic lifting coach.

I had been looking forward to this moment for quite some time, thinking that I might be inspired and have the chance to trade some knowledge with an actual Olympic coach. To make me even more excited, there had also been some talk of a possible foot in the door with NIKE!

The meeting didn’t take long...and by not long, I mean the time it took for me to agree for the coach to look at my Olympic lift and for me to repay her with the kind offer of a barefoot session. As soon as I mentioned “barefoot” the room went dead and the only lifting I got to see was from her Canadian brow! Had I known this was going to be smugly shrugged off with “I don’t think so” I would have spent more time digesting the Dark Knight Rises.

Arguments in bare feet

The most amazing thing about the coach's visit was the unwillingness to accept anything beyond her own knowledge/experiences. We basically got to a point in a discussion where the temperature rose uncomfortably and unfortunately, acceptance did not rise with the challenge. Instead a huge wall built, one that seemed too high to hurdle.

The zoo foot: image of a "shod"
foot from a 1905 study

To start with the mention of barefoot provoked a bizarre reaction that it was only about feet and how if you have a misshapen zoo foot with a short Achilles heel then you can’t barefoot run. Not a mention of why the Achilles might be short or how it became misshapen. Yes - one could say because of the title Barefoot running, an uneducated coach might be forgiven for making that statement. But for someone that had been apparently working with the guys at Nike on the Nike free shoe, it's inexcusable to have no understanding that the shape of the foot and the load of the foot are bi-products of a compromised organism.

When I first mention that posture is at the top of the hierarchy in movement and say "surely you must understand that from an Olympic lifting perspective", I get hit with a big fat "No it's all about your feet."

To which I reply, "Your base of support is important, but if all your segments are out then this is going to alter the areas of your feet you choose to load thus affecting the resulting technique."

This gets rubbished by another "Nope it's all to do with the feet," and "We are never going to agree on this."

Morton's Toe

I begin to explain that feet - of course - play a role in this, in that it is a relationship between posture and the foot. Seated posture affects our upright posture and our natural bipedal state. Dudley Morton in 1936 introduced us to Morton's toe: a great discovery that essentially helps us understand that the human foot has a loading element and a balance element. The big toe and ball of foot are there to deal with the load whilst the lateral part of the foot is there to take care of balance. 

Image of habitually bare feet taken
from a study performed almost 100years ago,
published 1905 in the American Journal of Orthopedic Surgery

It is important as a skilled biped to not mix the two - unskilled bipeds are primates, they are quadrupeds and gain support from the outside  of their feet. They don't recognise their big toe as we recognise ours. The big toe of the primate is medial (towards the midline of the body). As an unskilled biped we too will spend time supporting from the outside of our feet. This is called supra-nation: when in locomotion, this creates supranation then pronation. The more this occurs the less support I can find from my big toe and over time my foot mechanics will change. Combine this with modern zoo footwear and hey presto - the zoo foot!

Most clients I see have the first signs of bunion growth, but why?

The bunion is essentially the unskilled biped looking for the gorilla toe and the role of devolution having its way.

If I lock my foot in a shoe, that shoe will mould my foot. It will change the shape of my foot, until it no longer looks or operates in a way a natural foot should. If I then sit down all day and get locked in the hip or the thoracic spine, my segments will no longer be aligned. The more my head drops forward of my hip, the more my foot will land ahead of me, changing my loading time. This will result in my base of support changing to one that would better suit the quadrupedal posture of a primate.

This is why footwear is not the answer, it is simply a piece of the puzzle. This is also why I founded PilatesRunning, because we can coach in movements that return you back to being and operating as nature intended - an upright biped.

Despite what the conventional model tells us, foot mechanics and posture can be corrected

We can change and with that change we can Barefoot walk, Barefoot run, Barefoot lift, Barefoot swim, Barefoot carry, Barefoot throw, Barefoot jump, Barefoot climb, Barefoot defend and Barefoot quarapedal move to our heart's content. All of the above are skills, but skills that have to be coached.

So to all those budding new Olympians and for the Canadian Olympic lifting team: with the correct posture and the realignment of the all important Paleo Toe, you too can be a barefoot athlete!

What does it mean to become a movement coach? - by Tony Riddle A.K.A @theprepdoctor

Most days of the week, I find myself presenting on the subject of injury free movement, motor skill milestones, and the 10 natural movements of man to coaches, clients and the members within our club (Gloves Boxing Club).  Personally, I see this as an education that is valuable to all humans - not just the people who practice - as these subjects are of course all entwined. In fact all movement is, it just depends on how it is performed.

Without the understanding of the fundamentals of human movement you are simply teaching movement for movement’s sake - great for the T-shirt muscles and mirror performers, but completely useless for strong, fit and healthy athletic individuals.

For some reason the health and fitness industry went off on a bit of a tangent towards the use of seated equipment to train leverage into the system. To me this has always seemed absurd: sit down all day and then go to the gym and make yourself even stronger at being seated! But luckily we are starting to see a shift in that paradigm. I would say, and this is only my opinion, that the current education in the health industry, is more midstream than downstream.  Rightly so as only the dead fish go down stream!

No "workout of the day" here, with
Ben Medder

Movement has changed of late and we are now bombarded with terms like core stability, functional movement, kettle bells, Cross Fit, barefoot running and TRX, to name just a few. TRX for instance shows a real likeness to gymnastics, and even the Pilates tower. TRX has become a bridge or even a transition to understanding some of the natural movement we can offer, and helps you understand bodyweight, but still applies the unnecessary muscular action that we have been so indoctrinated with. Cross Fit workouts have high repetition/volume and “work out of the day” - great if your coach hasn’t his own mind and can’t configure a routine that is specific to your own requirements and needs. But don't get me wrong, if the TRX or the Cross Fit coach understands how to teach correct technique, these methods are certainly better than static seated machines and a "repetition counting" Personal Trainer.

Climbing - an essential movement,
with Ben Medder

 The problem is that these systems of movement are just part of an even larger system, the same as we are a system within an even larger system. The system I’m referring to is the 10 natural movements of man and the evolution of man and where that sits in our social system, ecosystem, solar system etc etc. We have a tendency as a species to apply reductionism to everything we can lay our intellectual minds on, but only nature has the answers and the knowledge of the Natural Laws in movement is essential for the modern day coach to learn to become an upstream thinker.

Barefoot running, a favourite of mine, has now been accepted by the performance market. But without coaching the individual back into becoming a barefoot runner and how nature had intended with the correct posture, rhythm and technical ability, the participant usually gains an injury along the way. This can be said for all movement. If you look at the discipline you are looking to coach and have the knowledge of the natural laws as your filter to analyze and prescribe, you will create a skilled being. 

The hierarchy in all movement is posture and the understanding of this is fundamental for the coach. You will understand how to make movement efficient and injury free for your client. Most clients will come to you with the desire to lose weight and get fit/fitter, but without the fundamentals in place, you heighten the risk of your client picking up an injury and with the injury comes the inability to train or the fear of movement. Not quite the desired effect the client was looking for!

If your client doesn’t look good, you won’t look good, and believe me this isn’t the best way to build a business within a very competitive market.

It can a sneeze to create an avalanche by Tony Riddle A.K.A @theprepdoctor

It Can Take a Sneeze to Create an Avalanche

by Tony Riddle, Gloves Club Founder, with contributions by Ben Medder

Tony Riddle, Gloves Club Coach

Having been a movement specialist for 15 years, I have seen some great and sometimes bizarre developments within the industry, but nothing can compare to the huge shift in paradigms that barefoot running created. 

Barefoot running, once seen as a weird cult of long haired tree huggers has been flipped and has stamped it’s presence on the industry. It’s the new trend, bizarrely a new trend that has of course been around since the days of persistence hunting, but a trend all the same. I’d like to thank Chris McDougal for this shift.  His book ‘Born to Run’ has put the running back into jogging.

Lydiard would be proud, although he is, of course, the father of jogging, which for those that are not “in the know” originally meant slow running. This means the same running technique and cadence, but at a slower speed, un-recognisable from today’s hybrid movement known as jogging, which we can thank Mr Bowerman (ed: Bill Bowerman, founder of Nike) and the first conventional running shoe for. To be honest he is not entirely to blame, foot wear is just a small piece of the puzzle, unlike what Chris McDougal’s picture has lead us to believe.

It is actually a romantic idea to think you can kick off your shoes and run barefoot. The running posture that old-school legendary coaches such as Lydiard and Percy Cerutty had the experience of coaching, can only been seen in the Kenyan runners today and yes, that is what I would put their great success down to.  The Kenyans are not being subjected to 80% of their day confined to a desk or slumped on the sofa yet even conditioned athletes in the West are compromised by the devil’s work. But yet barefoot running is just just a small portion of  of man’s movement birthright. We are ‘Born to Run’, but we are born to do so much more. There are in fact 13 natural movements, that man/woman should be able to carry out and when I say carry out, I mean how nature had intended you to, with the correct posture, allowing you to apply the laws of nature and remain injury free.  I would now like to introduce you to what is known as ‘natural movement’ and for some, this is where you might experience the same emotional response that others before you experienced with the barefoot running brigade, but please take the time to read on.

What is natural movement?

It has been well discussed by many, particularly in evolutionary medicine, that our genetic makeup is still that of the hunter-gatherer. Our current “software” or way of thinking that has led to many modern inventions is still housed in our Paleolithic “hardware”. To cut a long story short – in prehistory, most humans knew how to move well through their environments naturally. Only the most agile and strong humans could catch their prey, or escape from predators – it was essential to have certain human movement capacities to survive. Our ancestors were strong, agile, coordinated and had good spatial awareness, flexibility etc. These attributes can still be seen in surviving indigenous tribes today with not a yoga/Pilates studio in sight. Many practitioners from the past and present recognised the physical prowess of the hunter gatherer, but some, can and should be recognised as the grandfathers of natural movement; Georges Hébert is one of those grandfathers

Georges Hébert creater of "the natural method"

Georges Hébert was an officer in the French navy, who served all over the world prior to World War I and later became a teacher of physical education. Travelling the world, he became particularly inspired by the natural athleticism of indigenous peoples in Africa and elsewhere – “Their bodies were splendid, flexible, nimble, skilful, enduring, and resistant and yet they had no other tutor in gymnastics but their lives in Nature.” Whilst stationed on a Caribbean island in 1902, Hébert coordinated the rescue of island natives from a devastating volcanic eruption. Despite saving hundreds, many still perished due to being unable to save themselves. He came to the conclusion that the average human of the time, was ill equipped to survive such catastrophes. They had become detached from their roots as hunter-gatherers, from a time when humans were strong, capable and able to help themselves, and most importantly others, if the need arose.

He realised the weight training regime used by the military was building muscle for muscles sake, (similar to body building movements of the present day) without promoting dexterity and speed and essentially had little ‘real world’ usefulness. In its place he developed ‘Le Méthode Naturelle, or “the Natural Method.”

The 10 fundamental movements of man

The essence of Herbet’s Method Naturelle is to teach 10 fundamental movements that humans should posses and was essential to a hunter-gatherer’s survival.  They are: walking, running, jumping, quadrupedal movement (crawling), climbing, balancing, throwing, lifting, defending and swimming.
To return man to his birthright, as Georges had intended, requires a skill, and each one of the 10 movements is a skill in itself. Just as we have now discovered with running, these need to be coached back in to make the necessary change: we have the hardware to execute the 10 movements; we just need to change the software. If you like, we can refer to all 10 movements as “the macro skill” and each one component as “the micro skill”. If we could perform all 10 movements, we would be connected on a physiological and psychological level, true mind and body. We can see Georges Hebert’s work in modern day Parkour, Freerunning, MovNat.

Erwan le Corre, founder of MovNat

Erwan le Corre founder of MovNat has seen a huge explosion in interest for his method which has extensive likeness to Le Méthode Naturelle. The best way to describe Erwin’s method would be “wild uninhibited movement” and for some, it again stimulates the “tree-hugger response”.  I will always remember the time whilst on Primrose Hill with Erwan Le Corre.  There were about 10 of us carrying out some of the quadrupedal movements that Erwan had demonstrated to us.

The same sense of connection to the earth started to set in that I had first experienced with running truly barefoot, but unlike running, there’s is a real connection with the people with you as you start to work as a team/tribe.  It’s like a proprioceptive feedback mecca and for at least 10 minutes I had forgotten the restrictions of society until one voice shouted across the park: “look at those idiots!” The most amazing thing about this incident was that all the children wanted to join in, but the parents were too fearful to let them.  Those same parents probably participate in large classes of hot yoga, housed in poorly lit and confined rooms, but hey the animal in captivity has to be exercised some way or another.

“Old school” boxing and natural movement

I own a gym, Gloves Boxing Club, and some find it unusual that we coach natural movement at the club, but even the old school boxing coaches had a great understanding of the natural laws.
Movement coach Ben Medder has been at the helm of the introduction of natural movement to our bodyweight principle classes and it has now become the most popular class and it is easy to see why. The class starts to perform like a tribe, their inhibitions start to leave the room after a 2 minute warm-up and the gym takes on a whole new role, from boxing club to play ground.

Bernard Hopkins, a modern day natural mover,
so efficient he'll do push-ups between rounds!

Many old school (and some modern) boxers became world champions without ever using weights and certainly not isolated bodybuilding-type exercises. The use of bodybuilding was highly discouraged as old school coaches believed it made their fighters “slow”.  After all bodybuilding creates false tempos, long levers and develops injury prone athletes.

From boxers such as the great Sugar Ray Robinson to Mike Tyson, a modern boxer by “old school standards”, when he was in his prime, you see a trend that their training was simple, yet highly effective bodyweight exercises (or calisthenics as they were often referred to back then). There were no fancy gadgets or the promise of shortcuts, that’s so common throughout today’s health and fitness industry. The heavy influence of bodybuilding culture and doctrine – such as emphasis on isolation exercises and nutrition for extreme “mirror muscles” – had not yet taken effect. Functional strength, specific strength endurance, mobility and speed were the priority. The old school boxer could easily output multiple, high rep sets of bodyweight exercises, such as push-ups, pull-ups, deep knee bends (squats) and roll-ups.

An old school boxer was, and indeed needed to be, as naturally strong for his bodyweight as possible. Runners will recognise this ideal from the term “power to weight ratio”. Their muscles could be described as “whipcord” strong – flexible, fast and powerful. They could easily go 15 or more rounds, with a much higher punch volume and output than today’s bouts. Conversely big muscles are heavy, slow and require more oxygen and energy – both of which a boxer needs to preserve to remain effective in the ring, just as a long distance runner needs to maximise their oxygen efficiency and fuel stores.

How to apply natural movement to performance sports

So is boxing a natural movement? No, it is not, but the natural laws can be applied to it to make it efficient and reduce the risk of injury. In fact one of the 13 natural movements is defense so we could consider boxing natural, but it’s the movement patterns that were taught to the boxers of old that I would consider closest to natural movement principles. This generation of boxers used movement to develop the macro skill of boxing: running, throwing and the quadrupedal movement for the understanding of bodyweight in ones hands.

This is the same rule that in my opinion can and should be applied to most performance sports. Look at the result you want to achieve and look at how the 13 natural movements overlap into the one discipline you focus on. Mountain running for instance would require: running, jumping and quadrupedal movement for vaults and moments when descents and ascents are too hardy for the biped.

So the natural movements can really be considered as foundational for each individual discipline within running or within other sports and the skill is the application of each movement to the specific demands of the sport or discipline.