Lost in the Wilderness

Movement IQ™ is search and rescue—and navigation—for the human body.

Most people aren't lacking information about health and fitness.

They're lost in it.

For years, I've described the average person as lost in the woods of health and fitness. But woods might actually be too tame.

This is wilderness.

Strength programs. Diets. Wearables. Supplements. Cold plunges. Fasting. Peptides. Longevity protocols. Mobility routines. Recovery technology. Experts telling you to do more. Other experts telling you to do less.

Some of it is useful. Some of it is unnecessary. Some of it is probably nonsense. And some of it can meaningfully change your health.

How are you supposed to know which direction to go?

First, find the blue dot

Nearly twenty years ago, when I was a young trainer at Equinox, my fitness manager Kevin Dineen taught me to think about assessment and program design like a GPS.

Before a GPS can give you directions, it has to locate you.

Sometimes you even have to move a little before it can determine which direction you're facing.

That analogy stuck with me.

Two decades of coaching—and plenty of time in actual wilderness with people who know how to navigate it—have expanded the metaphor for me.

Today, I think of Movement IQ as search and rescue.

If you're lost in the wilderness, the first question isn't:

Where do you want to go?

It's:

Where are you now?

Until we locate you, directions are useless.

Turn left? Keep climbing? Descend? Backtrack? Stay exactly where you are?

We don't know yet.

You are here

Movement IQ starts by locating your blue dot.

We assess. We move. We look at strength, mobility, balance, coordination and conditioning. We look for patterns and asymmetries. Sometimes we need to investigate further.

Eventually, the picture becomes clearer:

You are here.

That's not a grade.

It's not a judgment.

It's your location.

And now we can navigate.

Move. Learn. Recalibrate.

Finding the blue dot isn't something we do once.

If you've ever navigated slowly on foot or by bike, you've probably watched the GPS struggle to figure out which direction you're facing. So you move a little. Check again. Correct course. Keep going.

Movement works the same way.

Every exercise gives us information.

Maybe something we expected to work doesn't. Maybe one side behaves differently from the other. Maybe adding load improves the movement—or exposes something we couldn't see before. Maybe the route we planned simply isn't the best route today.

So we recalibrate.

Change the load. Change the stance. Change the range. Choose another progression. Move again and see what happens.

A program is a route, not a set of turn-by-turn instructions carved in stone.

Movement IQ is the process of continually checking the map against what your body is telling us:

Where are we now? Are we still moving in the right direction? What's the next intelligent step?

That's why assessment isn't something that happens before training.

Assessment is part of training.

You don't need every answer.

You don't need to solve everything at once.

You need to locate yourself, start moving, pay attention, and keep recalibrating.

Find the blue dot. Choose a direction. Move. Recalibrate. Repeat.

That's Movement IQ.