Who Am I?
So, I’ve been leading classes and coaching for a while now. I offer advice and tips on how to better use your body. I encourage aligning your lifestyle for better health by being in accord with your true nature… But who am I? What do I know? Why would it matter what I have to say?
I figure it would be helpful to introduce myself and my journey up to now, for those who may not know me that well:
Hello. I am Patrick Hogan.
What is it I do again?
I’m a coach and movement trainer. I focus on finding health of our whole being through natural human movement and use alignment principles to help restore our bodies’ capability for that natural movement.
Where did I come from?
I grew up mostly in the Northwest - in Tacoma Washington.
What was that like?
The beauty of living in the northwest is the the culture and the environment encourage outdoor activities and exploration. So, I grew up hiking around the cascade mountains - including climbing some of the higher peaks such as Mt. Rainier, Mt. Hood, Mt. Adams, and Mt. St. Helens.
I loved downhill skiing and avidly sought out the most challenging terrain, the biggest moguls runs, and intended to further push my boundaries in freestyle skiing when I went to the University of Denver.
I was in love with rock climbing- the flexibility, strength and control that it required, as well as the mental puzzles, like a game of chess, that you had to figure out to strategize your ascent.
Triathlons merged together the three other sports (swimming, biking, running) that I regularly practiced.
And I also achieved a 1st degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do.
You may notice a trajectory forming here - an inclination to push for the extremes and testing limits. At times, I identified with being an adrenaline junkie.
The best thing about this way of life was expanding boundaries and learning to move past fear. The shadow side of that, in retrospect, is that I probably didn’t value the ordinary very much - if I wasn’t having an adventure, well that was just… boring.
I got injured quite a bit.
I never really thought I was doing anything all that radical when I got injured: just trying to catch my runaway ski (that popped off after jumping off a small cliff) by chasing it down a steep hill on one leg (then I fell and tore my ACL) ; or after doing a “spread eagle” in mid air while skiing, I landed a bit off kilter (tore the other ACL); or skiing and launching off a jump without knowing what was on the other side - turns out it was a ditch (concussion, split chin & chipped tooth) , or climbing up a wall in my college dorm (torqued my knee and tore that ACL again) , or explosively running up the stairs in a sports stadium resulting in a torn meniscus… By the end of my time at University, I had udergone SIX knee surgeries!
At the time, all these injuries felt like tragedy and left me feeling depressed. Who was I if I couldn’t push limits with extreme activities? Was I just supposed to accept that I wasn’t meant to do “great things”? What should I do now? The injuries forced me to slow down and also forced me to ask some questions.
After University, where I got my BA in Music and Latin American Studies, I attempted to answer those questions while I devoted myself to acting.
I studied in Seattle, got accepted to a theatre apprenticeship in Kentucky, and that eventually led me to move to New York.
I was drawn more toward a physical type of theatre - not dance per se, but expression through physicality. With the help of some amazing teachers, I learned how movement can tell stories and how the stories of our inner lives are told through our physicality.
At the same time, I still held a lot of tension in my body. Maybe the tension came from wanting to look and be perceived as strong and self assured, and maybe it was from that ingrained need to push harder and excel … in any case, acting helped me to get in touch with those patterns and explore other ways of moving.
That’s when I discovered yoga. The endorphin rush accompanied by the sense of peace induced from the classes kept me coming again and again. Previously, I had thought that yoga was too “soft” an activity for me, but I discovered it was actually the most challenging physical activity I’d ever done. I never sweat so much in my life as in some of those vinyasa classes and it wasn’t even hot yoga!
I had been doing odd jobs, like many do, while in pursuit of acting: temp work and lots of cater waitering. I felt miserable doing that work. And my feet hurt. So much standing. I tried many types of shoes to help - including those rounded sole shoes that were suppose to mimic walking on sand. They were like standing on mini rocking chairs. My feet still hurt in them.
At some point, I came across Christopher Mcdougall’s now famous book, Born to Run. And my eyes opened to what I intuitively knew but had ignored for a long time: our feet work better barefoot. For those who don’t know, this is a must read book which follows an epic race with the Tarahumara of Mexico who run long distances barefoot or with very minimal huarache type sandals. I found my first pair of Vibrams (the shoes that look like a glove for your feet) and I never wanted to wear anything else ever again.
My foot problems disappeared, I started to actually enjoy running again, my knees felt better, and even my neck felt better! That type of shoe was new on the scene at the time and I’d often get weird looks. But I felt better, and so I didn’t care what I looked like. I even went to auditions with those shoes on caring less and less about being fashionable. One casting director remembered me as: “You’re the guy with the weird shoes!”
About then, my wife at the time and I attended a yoga retreat in Costa Rica. She had been training to be a yoga teacher and brought me along for this marvelous experience of rustic tent living in the jungle amidst the roaming howler monkeys, surfing, and multiple yoga practices per day. All it took was a couple of the teachers remarking that I seemed pretty good at this stuff. The idea implanted and I decided I would immerse myself in yoga teacher training to become a teacher. At the time, it seemed yoga would make for a far happier and healthier side job to have while I pursued acting.
As I learned more about the history, philosophy, and technique of yoga, I discovered it was way more than physical exercise but also proposes a path for greater happiness and self realization. As I found more classes to teach, yoga became my full time job and the acting pursuit was put on the back burner. I enjoyed the creativity of choreographing sequences of movement in a yoga class both for the purpose of deepening the experience of a particular pose and for the exploration of a philosophic theme. I loved how teaching challenged my preconceptions of the world, and I loved those moments when students discovered greater possibilities in their bodies with new ways of moving.
Proficiency on the mat, however, doesn’t always transfer to health in life. The precepts of yoga are supposed to be guideposts for a better life, but I learned you can’t just intellectually paste concepts onto your personality. The deeper patterns will surface. I still struggled emotionally, relationally and financially… And that pattern of striving and pushing was still there. It’s very tempting to want to achieve more advanced poses and to think if you work harder, you will elevate your consciousness. But I plateaued - feeling frustrated - my body wasn’t changing the way I wanted. I was imbalanced and sometimes in pain. For a time, there were classes where I hid the grimace on my face while demonstrating a painful pose- ashamed that a teacher shouldn’t be experiencing those problems. Of course I would never suggest a student do anything but play and stay within their comfort zone, but the pressure I put on myself to be “more” didn’t allow taking the same advice. I intellectually knew the right concepts, but my actions didn’t always follow suit.
I wondered if this theory vs. practice dilemma in yoga was actually quite common. Especially when yoga’s emphasis on ritual, discipline, consistency, and physical mastery all get combined with type A personalities, I observed and heard many examples of yogis injuring themselves and getting too obsessively compulsive about the practice. Instead of bringing freedom and joy, the practice seemed to make some people rigid, self flagellating and miserable.
Something wasn’t working. And I needed a change. Going further down the path of barefoot walking and running, I left my shoes behind whenever I could. I was running fully barefoot now and even walking around my neighborhood without shoes. People’s reactions went from “You’re the guy with the weird shoes” to “Oh my god! You’re barefoot!”. I think I had a reputation for being a little crazy. However, I wasn’t alone. I spotted a flyer for a barefoot running event organized by John Durant (Paleo Manifesto) and immediately signed up.
At the starting line, I was overjoyed: all these people were barefoot (or minimally shod)! I didn’t know there was a community for this and felt the sense of coming home.
During the race, I met figures like “Barefoot Ted” and Dan Lieberman (both featured in Born to Run). Then, I met the founder of Mov Nat, Erwan Le Corre. Erwan led us on an off-track course: running, jumping over obstacles, climbing trees, crawling up and tumbling down hills. This was play. This felt like freedom. I couldn’t believe people were doing this for a living. Here was a system for helping people to find physical freedom by learning to move as we were designed and to play like children again. By the following year, I completed my first certification course to teach in the Mov Nat system.
Mov Nat (generically referred to as natural human movement) is based on the simple premise that humans evolved moving in accord with their environment and in order to thrive, we humans had to crawl, walk, run, jump, climb, swim, fight, lift, carry, and throw objects, etc. These are the movements and skills needed to survive and consequently these are the movements our bodies require to be fit. Survival requires a lot of movement and energy in the wild. Fortunately, modern society developed giving us much more ease of survival and convenience. Unfortunately, the conveniences of modern society have created a very homogenous and tame environment that requires very little movement in our bodies. Therefore, just like a zoo animal kept in a cage cannot express its nature nor live as fully as in the wild, we too are like “zoo humans” living at a fraction of our full physical potential in an environment that is maladaptive to our health.
Learn More about this concept by reading Mov Nat’s article on How to Escape the Zoo Human Predicament
We’ve used exercise and sports to make up for our movement deficiencies. The issue with most sports, however, is that they build fitness specific to the movements of that sport. Cyclists are fit in pedaling with their legs, but may not have upper body strength. Soccer players have great running strength and agility, but again may not have skill and strength in the upper body. Swimmers can swim but may not be able to run, etc. In Mov Nat, the emphasis is in being generally fit for overall functionality versus specifically fit for only certain movements.
Context matters as well. Other modalities of functional fitness may employ similar movements of the body, but in Mov Nat we put the skill of that movement into an environmental context. Why would you ever need this movement? Where would you use this? In the real world (as opposed to the gym) how would you adapt your body’s movements to skillfully navigate the environment? I love the feeling of having the tools to navigate the natural environment thus enabling me to play anywhere I am.
For more on the origins of Natural Movement as a method, check out Mov Nat’s journal here.
I began to introduce natural human movements into my yoga classes. I asked questions like: What if this yoga pose wasn’t static? What about this pose might reflect a way of moving in the world? And how might the mobility and strength gained from natural human movement help deepen a yoga practice? For me, I found a new sense of freedom breaking the mold of static postures and sequences. Some people loved this approach. Others didn’t know what to make of it if they were expecting a “regular” yoga class. Defining what I was doing started to become difficult, and I felt less attached to calling it yoga.
Something was bothering me about my teaching: People would come to class and we would play and experiment with both natural movements and yoga practices. But some people, even though they were regulars in class and enjoyed practicing, never seemed to get better. They always seemed to struggle with the same things: one could never seem to stand on one leg for the balancing tree and half moon poses, another never seemed to get any better in arm strength. Shouldn’t we be improving with practice?
I also noticed the old patterns reemerge: It’s very enticing to want to push for the extremes in both Mov Nat and yoga, even if your ethos is to just play and have fun. In Mov Nat, I wanted to jump farther, lift heavier, move in more complicated ground patterns. I wanted to move like the founder, Erwan, in his now famous video.
Photo of Dharma Mittra
In Yoga, I wanted to back bend deeper, pull my foot behind me to touch the top of my head, and increase my times balancing in head and handstands.
But why wouldn’t my quadricep muscles relax? Why did my hamstrings feel so weak? Why did lifting heavy objects sometimes send a sharp pain into my sacrum and back?
What was the missing link?
During this time, I also trained in various healing arts such as Thai Massage, Reiki, and Applied Kinesiology. These helped me learn to perceive people’s imbalances and tensions and gave me some great methods for working with others. I developed a bodywork practice in addition to my coaching methods.
The answers finally started to come when another MovNat trainer friend introduced me to the work of Katy Bowman and her Nutritious Movement Institute. Katy is a biomechanist and all around wonderful person who has written numerous books, blogs and articles, produced podcasts and is teaching all over the world. Through her understanding of biomechanics (which is the science of how physical forces, ie: gravity, pressure, loads, etc, affect our biology) she uses corrective exercises to restore our body’s alignment so that it functions in a more balanced way.
However, the intention is not just to teach exercises, but to educate on both the principles and importance of alignment and how that affects the functioning of the body. The larger scope of this work is not even exercise per se. The name of the institute, Nutritious Movement, is a metaphor for the premise that movement is akin to dietary nutrition. Just like we need a full spectrum of nutrients in our food diet to be healthy, all the parts of our body (down to the cellular level) also need a variety of movements in order to thrive. Exercise, in some ways, is like taking vitamins. A vitamin will help replace a deficiency in your diet, but it cannot replace eating whole foods. Exercise can be a part of a healthy “movement diet” but it can’t fulfill the needs of your entire movement intake. By studying with Katy and the great teachers at the Nutritious Movement Institute, I learned there is so much more to understanding healthy movement, such as:
Excerpt from Move Your DNA by Katy Bowman
How the most frequent actions you take (such as sitting) are shaping the body.
How the environment in which we live is shaping us (chairs, shoes, flat sidewalks, etc).
How much of the movement we do is leaving parts of us unused and sedentary.
How movement is required for all our parts to be healthy.
How many of the ailments of modern society can be helped or prevented through understanding alignment and developing a better movement lifestyle.
How to bring a full spectrum of movement into our life again.
Through a two year program at the Nutritious Movement Institute, I became a RES (Restorative Exercise Specialist). I see better now how the movement (or non-movement) of the smaller parts of us make up the whole movement patterns in our bodies, and how it’s our habits that are largely determining our movement capabilities.
An example from my own experience:
I understand now that my hamstrings felt weak and my quadriceps never seemed to loosen up because of:
My sitting habits
My habits of jutting my hips forward while standing
My rib thrust habits (think typical advice for good posture: “lift your chest up and shoulders back”)
Too many quadricep dominated exercises such as biking and my running technique
My walking gait
No wonder my body wasn’t changing they way I wanted: an hour or two of yoga or movement will not offset the way I used my body for the rest of the hours in the day.
Becoming RES helped me to pay attention to the details of my body and to slow down. I found that practicing the foundations of good biomechanics and alignment, although often comprised of smaller movements, is as rewarding as being able to do a deep backbend or running barefoot. The foundations have brought better integrity to my body and that integrity has led me to feel better and to move better overall.
As time goes on, an effect of these practices has been the developing capacity to listen to my intuition. I feel less need to push myself hard, prove myself, or to even have a plan. Instead, I tend to listen to what I feel I need and allow my practices to adapt to what feels best in the moment. This is not to say I don’t have any goals, but only that I’m learning not to override what is true in the moment for the sake of what my ego desires - I think that is part of what led to so many injuries in the past.
Thinking back on my injuries, I still don’t think of what I was doing as extreme. I can imagine some people wanting to say: “Of course you got hurt doing those things! You need to reign it in and start being careful!”
No thanks.
I think now, that I pushed too fast and had my mind on getting a better and deeper high through physical activity. But I missed the foundation of building a practice that would have made me more stable. Training with knowledge of alignment and proficiency in skills of natural human movement may have kept the integrity of my body. Injuries will happen in any activity where there’s risk involved. Bad luck combined with unfortunate circumstances are contributing factors. However, with the knowledge and experience I now have of movement and alignment through both Mov Nat and the Nutritious Movement Institute, I believe I could’ve prevented some injuries, enjoyed my experiences more, and possibly moved past even more boundaries.
In my teaching practice now, I can help others learn the principles that will build the foundation of physical integrity so that they move with more ease and confidence in whatever activity they wish to do. I hope to inspire healthier movement lifestyles overall. My intention is to lead by example, letting go of the memes that the body is something to be conquered, and learning both to listen to and be led by our true nature.
