Primal

Squat. Bend. Lunge. Push. Pull. Twist. Gait.

That is the whole vocabulary, and the claim attached to it is that almost every movement a human body performs in ordinary life is one of those seven, or a combination of them.

Test it against your day. You got out of a chair, which is a squat. You picked something off the floor, which is a bend. You went up stairs, which is a lunge. You opened a door, closed a drawer, turned to look behind you, and walked from one room to another. Seven words and you have most of it.

I want to spend this season on that idea, because it is genuinely useful and because what has been built on top of it is a good illustration of a problem this whole volume keeps meeting.

Start with what a vocabulary is for.

Before this way of thinking, exercise was overwhelmingly organised around muscles. Chest day. Biceps. Hamstrings. That organisation comes from bodybuilding, and bodybuilding organises around muscles because its goal is how individual muscles look. If your aim is appearance, a muscle-by-muscle inventory is the sensible unit.

If your aim is capability, it is a strange unit. Nothing you do outside a gym is performed by one muscle, and no situation in life asks you for your biceps. The body does not know it has a biceps. It knows it needs to pick that up, get up from here, carry this over there.

So the pattern vocabulary is a re-indexing. Instead of asking which muscles am I training, you ask which of the seven things a body does am I training, and have I left any of them out. That question has an answer, and the answer is frequently that you have left out three of them.

That is a real contribution and I want to credit it clearly before this season gets complicated.

Now, the history, because the idea did not appear from nowhere and its most famous modern packaging is not its origin.

The notion that human movement can be catalogued into a small set of fundamental categories, and that a training system should cover all of them rather than specialising, is more than a century old. Its clearest early expression came from a French naval officer who watched a city die and spent the rest of his life arguing that being physically capable is a moral obligation.

He is the subject of the next episode and he is, I think, one of the most interesting figures in either volume.

And here is why the history matters rather than being decoration.

When a good idea arrives attached to a single modern figure with a certification programme, it becomes difficult to take the idea without taking everything else that comes with it. The idea starts to feel like their property, and disagreeing with any part of the surrounding system starts to feel like rejecting the whole thing.

Knowing that the core observation is old, widely arrived at, and belongs to nobody makes it much easier to do what I think is the right thing here, which is take the useful part and leave the rest.

That is the shape of this season. Seven words, which are genuinely useful. A modern packaging, which contains real insight and also a great deal that is not established. And the question of how to separate the two without either swallowing everything or throwing it all out.

Next episode: be strong to be useful.