Beyond Biofeedback Book

Beyond Biofeedback The Four Levels of Intuitive Intuiti ve Training By Logan Christopher

DISCLAIMER The exercises and advice contained within this book may be too strenuous or dangerous for some people, and the reader should consult with a physician before engagin e ngaging g in them. The author and publisher of this book are not responsible in any manner whatsoever for the use, misuse or dis-use of the information presented here.

Beyond Biofeedback: The Four Levels of Intuitive Training All Rights Reserved. Original Copyright Copyright © 2011 by Logan Christopher No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher p ublisher.. Manufactured in the United States of America Published by: Logan Christopher Medford, Oregon www.legendarystrength.com

Table of Contents Introduction

2

The Gym Movement Protocol Protocol

3

Starting with Biofeedback

4

Other Forms of Biofeedback Training

5

How I Moved Beyond Testing

7

The Benefits of Biofeedback Training Training

8

Beliefs

10

What is Intuition?

12

The Levels of Competency

14

The Four Levels of Intuitive Intuitive Training

17

Level 1 - Beginner

18

Level 2 - Testing

20

How to Test Correctly

22

Testing Movements

25

What to Think About During Testing

26

Even More Test Options

27

Verify the Testing

28

Level 3 - Feeling

29

Level 4 - Knowing

32

Timelines

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www.LegendaryStrength.com

Introduction Hi, I'm Logan Christopher and this is Beyond Biofeedback, the Four Levels of Intuitive Training. I want to give you an introduction and tell you about what we're going to cover in this manual. This manual, along with the accompanying DVD’s is for two groups of people. A lot of people that are reading this are familiar with biofeedback training and they want to take it to the next level, literally levels three and four that I’ll be talking about. Then another segment is people that have never really done the biofeedback training. They’re starting from ground zero. If you’re in this category, you’re going to learn all the steps you need to do in order to get to get started and go beyond. Either way you’ll find a lot here. Now a bit of the back story on how this system developed. I want to tell my story, how I got involved in doing the biofeedback training in the first place because it’s instructive. I first hea rd about it back in March of 2010 from Adam Glass. When I first saw it I didn’t pay much attention and dismissed it. Then a little bit later I heard more and realized wh at was going on. I started looking more deeply at it. In fact, the whole concept made intuitive sense to me. That’s important because intuition applies outside of just doing physical training. By doing these sort of skills you’re actually going to train your intuition and we’ll talk about everything that goes into that, including what it is and how that can factor into many different fields. But this idea made sense to me. Your body knows what is good for it and that by paying attention to your body’s biofeedback, the signals its giving you, then you can get better results in your training and of course in anything else that you’re doing. The method I heard about was the Gym Movement Protocol which was put together by Frankie Faires and Adam Glass has been one of the strongest proponents of it.


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The Gym Movement Protocol The Gym Movement Protocol encompasses three main different key concepts. Of course the main one is the testing. Using the biofeedback training itself to find what given exercises you should be doing. Going beyond the testing itself is what this course is all about. Another point of the Gym Movement Protocol is the Elements of Effort. This is contrary to so many of the training systems out there where you get out of your workout what you’re putting in. In other words you ha ve to work hard. Some say you have to work so hard that you’re lying on the floor after the workout. But in the Gym Movement Protocol you don’t even wa nt to go to the point of tension or to the point where your speed slows down. It makes everything you do much easier. Yet at the same time you make progress on it, in fact better progress and lessening the chance of injury. Now this flies in the face of what a lot of people know and believe about training. So it does take some adjustment for some people that have been training hard for a long time to really get this point. The basic idea is to keep things easy. There’s also the Movement Model and this is how you break down different movements for your specific goal. This includes specific, component specific, contra-specific and non specific. These three things, biofeedback testing, elements of effort and the movement model, are the main components of the Gym Movement Protocol. I have studied with Frankie and Adam and learned a whole lot from them. Much of what is here I’ve learned directly from them. And at the same time it has led me to study some of my other sources to come up with more information, in efforts to improve upon it. The important thing to know is that they’re not the first people that ever came up with the concept of biofeedback training, but what they’ve done is they’ve taken it and built it into a system. Systems are very important because people can follow systems. Few people can follow vague ideas. Fewer still can grasp big disjointed ideas and incorporate them into an a ctual system. That’s what Frankie has done with this. So a lot of credit goes to him and you should definitely check out their products as well.


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Starting with Biofeedback After learning a little bit about the system, and finding it made intuitive sense to me, I started doing the testing. However, early on it was hard for me to feel the difference in the movements. I wasn’t sure I was doing it right and it took about a month of training with this before I felt like I got it. Now what’s happening here during this time is that I was sort of disconnected from my body’s own signals. It was hard for me to read exactly what was going on, but by training for just a month I started to get better at feeling it and do it easily. Other people may pick it up immediately and other people may take even longer. Some people I believe are out there that give up because it never seems to make a difference with them. Here’s the thing, different people have different primary representational systems. This is a concept that I’ve learned from NLP. There are three primary representational systems; visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. That is people that primarily use their sense of sight, sound, or touch and feel. Of course everyone uses these to some degree but everyone has a primary sense as well. I’m a very kinesthetic person and a lot of people that do physical training and enjoy doing it are kinesthetic people. This is because they enjoy the feeling of the movements. So the thing is here that being a kinesthetic person may help because you’re going to be in tune with your body’s signals. However, if you have not listened to them for a long time, by not paying attention, you may get disconnected from those feelings. My entire life before I never really paid attention to how my body the signals my body gave me during the exercises. If you stop paying attention to signals they don’t come as easily. So it took a while for me to build them back up, through paying attention, so that I was able to get clear signals once again. I started out kinesthetically disconnected from it. With time this got hooked up so I was able to do the testing and do it very easily. And with further refinement you move beyond that level into the next levels that we’ll be talking about. There was an evolution here. I didn’t hear about testing and all of a sudden know all the secrets to it. But over time, with more study, practice, and further refinements I have improved. Nor do I think I’ve arrived at the end point, but instead there is much more to do.


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Other Forms of Biofeedback Training In my studies I’ve realized that biofeedback training is not n ew. The Gym Movement Protocol, the specific range of motion testing that they use, is new and as I said a systemized process of it. But these concepts have been around in different formats for quite some time. Here are some examples of that. A lot of people have heard of Olympic athletes and different people at the higher levels of competition using some sort of biofeedback training. One commonly known method is testing the pulse every morning when they wake up. Once you get a baseline with this, which of course you want to write it down, then as you’re doing your training, if all of a sudden your pulse is up around 6-10 beats per minutes in the mornings, then that means you’re working too hard, that you’re overtraining. So you want to ease back at that point. That is the form of biofeedback training because you’re listening to the signals your body is giving you. There’s plenty of other methods that people use too. An old book called the Muscle Response Test (MRT) from 1979 says: “You can even use MRT to check on such intangibles as the exercise program you’re using to achieve a better physical condition. “Should you be doing pushups? Test yourself before and a fter. Are you doing too many of them? Test yourself after 10, 25, 50 or whatever the numbers in your routine. The same goes with jogging or running. Maybe one mile is what your body requires. Two miles might be fine but three too stressful at this particular time. MRT gives the answer.” The Muscle Response Test that they’re talking about is a form of applied kinesiology which comes from George Goodheart. He’s known as the founder of applied kinesiology. It’s traditionally known as a muscle test. Though I would say it’s really an energy test and we’ll talk more about that later. In the standard “muscle test” two people are required. Both are standing and the testee holds his or her arm out straight parallel to the ground. The other person then applies pressure on the wrist to find if the testee is strong or weak. This is a form of testing you can use for the exercise. The major problem with this is that it requires a second individual to use.


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You also have Joe Weider and the Instinctive Training Principle: “Eventually all bodybuilders instinctively attain the ability to construct diets, routines, cycles, intensity levels, reps and sets that work best for them.“ I was doing some research on Joe Weider and I came across this quote from Shane Giese that I really liked. “Too many problems are caused by people listening to words written down on a piece of paper instead of listening to their own body.” This is referring to following a program to the letter from a magazine, book, or DVD, rather than listening and knowing what they should be doing themselves. It’s also a sign of abdicating responsibility. You can look at those sources to get ideas to model but really the final answer should come from within. From Joe Weider in one of his books: “You have to go beyond the basic principles of bodybuilding and find out what really works for you. You must develop your own instincts just as you develop your muscles and learn to listen to them. Sure, you have to train hard, but it won’t do that much good unless you also train smart.” Joe Weider had the Instinctive Training Principle that says over time you develop your ability to know what works best for you as an individual. The truth is every single person is different so you can’t follow exactly what someone else does to get the same results. This holds true in physical training, nutrition and much else. If this individuality is not true then people would be a ble to get results a lot better because they’d look exactly at the champions program, do exactly what they did and then get the same results. It doesn’t happen that way. We’re all individuals, different things work better or worse for us. So you need to find what works best for you. Biofeedback allows you to figure that out the fastest way possible.


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How I Moved Beyond Testing Once I started doing the testing as laid out in the Gym Movement Protocol, that led me through a series of coincidences to the current mentor I’m studying under, Dr. John La Tourrette. He is a master trainer in martial arts, NLP and many different things. One of which is energy medicine, including the energy testing spoken about earlier. The important thing to note is by practicing those skills, testing other people and yourself, you are learning how your body responds. You’re building awareness. You’re training your intuition beyond just the testing. The ultimate level of this is what Doc, as he’s known to his friends, calls the Psychic Barometer. This form of testing is all done inside and it automatically happens by having a rising or falling feeling. Basically your energies are m oving up or going down, answering whether something is good for you or it is not. He has a five DVD course out on that which is a very, very good course. If you want that then contact me and I may be able to hook you up with a special deal on it. This ability must be trained in order to be accurate and effective. And you can’t start there, just like you can’t start at Level 4 in the system here. By now you should see there are parallels between this and the advanced levels of intuitive training. By learning these other “energy” secrets and a wide range of forms of testing it led to further increase my intuition and being that building strength is one of my primary aims I sough to apply it all in the gym. With practice and refinement it led to the system now in your hands. That covers an overview of everything, how I got from my start to where I’m at right now. I don’t think I’ve reached the final level. I’m not fully arrive at level four right now but there are parts of that and we’ll talk a lot about that as we get into the specific levels.


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The Benefits of Biofeedback Training Why should someone use biofeedback training? Well there are some pretty lofty promises that come with it. One is that you have faster progress. Now of course everyone that is strength training wants this. They either want to change the look of their body faster or they want to be able to hit their strength goals. Biofeedback training points you in the direction of the exercises you should be doing in order to hit your goal. It allows you to often times train the exercises more than you normally would under standard workout programs. This leads to faster progress. It also promises that you’ll get no injuries in the gym or at least dramatically reduce the chance of injuries. By only doing movements that are good f or your body at a given time, then you’ll never hurt yourself. If you’ve ever hurt yourself in the gym before you’ll realize it seems that it happened out of nowhere. However, if you were tuned into the signals your body was giving you, then you’d know you need to stop far before that happens. This isn’t full proof, but there is a huge difference. If you ended up doing an exercise that tested very poorly for you, I’m not saying you’re necessarily going to get injured but the likelihood of that is much higher than with something that happens to test really well for you. That is another key component. And of course that goes along with the faster progress because if you don’t get injured, you’re able to make faster progress. You’re not sidelined from your training for some time waiting f or an injury to heal. Another bonus of biofeedback training is that you can work much easier. You don’t have to work nearly as hard in order to hit your goals. Now some people are a little bit masochistic, they enjoy the pain of training and that can be fun for some time. There is some benefit to training that way. There is something to be said for mental toughness and so every once in a while I think that’s a good thing to do. However, overall you want to make things as easy as possible. If you work easier, that allows you to do more work which in the end means more progress. Studies have shown gains came with weights that were small fractions of max intensity, even around 10-30%. Of course, there is a point of diminishing returns if you go too easy.


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You still do have to put in the work, you still do end up sweating and everything but it is much easier on the body. You don’t have to train to failure, you don’t have to train beyond failure. In fact if you go to failure you’re going too hard. This is what the elements of effort is all about. Of course it is not surefire. Just by doing biofeedback training you’re not automatically going achieve your goals without working. You must have the other master keys of training. You need to understand how progression works; you need to understand good exercise selection, how to do exercises, many other components on top of listening to your body in order to get the best results. Also the testing can misused. You can use the wrong tests. You can do the tests wrong. You can influence the test results even without trying to. If you do any of these you will not get the best results. We’ll talk about all that and how to make sure that you’re doing the testing in all the levels correctly and how to not have any of these problems. When you start out the testing may take a little time but soon it becomes quick and easy. Of course at the upper levels beyond the testing you’re going to save time because you’re not going to have to do the physical testing or not have to do as much of the testing. Also you’re going to have better body awareness and with that comes better body control. So once you get to primarily level four you’re going to be much more aware of your body and this is going to help not just in training but in other areas of your life. In short, the better you get at testing and the further you climb in your intuitive training ability the more benefit you’ll find.


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Beliefs Now a key point of the biofeedback training is your beliefs. Belief can both help and hinder you. If you have the right beliefs, if you believe that this is going to work, you’re going to get better results from it. I have a hypothesis that many training systems work for some people and not for other people for two reasons. One, because of the individuality that people have. That’s a given. But also because certain people believe that system works better f or them and belief is a very powerful thing. It can make dramatic changes. Pentecostal people at churches have drunk poison that should kill them but they believe it wouldn’t because they have God in them. Because they have a belief they’ll be safe, they remain unharmed. Another example that is equally crazy is in a study of people with split personality. In one such person they had a personality that had diabetes. In another personality, of this same person they did not. This is proven through testing done by doctors. One personality had diabetic level insulin problems but when the other personality was in control their blood sugar and insulin levels were normal. If the beliefs held in one personality as opposed to another can have this dramatic of a change on the body chemistry of a person, just what can they do for your training? Belief has huge impact on it, far greater than most people realize. So by believing that the system works, that it’s going to provide faster progress and it’s going to eliminate the risk of injuries and it’s going to be far easier you‘ll gain those benefits. At the same time biofeedback training works on its own. It’s not merely a placebo effect. But by h aving your belief backing it I think it will work even better. But if you don’t believe it’s going to work it won’t work for you, it may not. This is the flipside of the same coin. There are some high level trainers that when they heard about the biofeedback training they gave it a try but it didn’t work for them. Let me give you a reason why this may have been. They had secondary gains for the system failing. Secondary gains is an idea that comes from psychology that if a person is trying to do something but they have greater reason why they don’t want to achieve that, and this can be completely subconscious, then it won’t work for them.


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In this case the secondary gain is they have to change. Flip their entire training and their entire experience upside down. Change their business and what they do for clients. For these people because tha t secondary gain was so strong they needed to confirm to themselves that it didn’t work. They didn’t want it to work and for that reason it didn’t work. So for some people biofeedback training may not work but they’re stopping it from working. These techniques will work for anyone if they give it the time to work, if they actually do the steps correctly. An experienced trainer may be necessary to help out but in many cases, but most people should get it easily once they’re pointed in the right direction. So if you’re sitting on the fence about this, all I want you to do is suspend your disbelief. Just take it and put it behind you. Try the system out. Try working with it for at least a month’s time and really get into it. During that time believe that it’s going to work. You need to work with it in order for it to work for you. By doing this you’ll get far better results and the more you believe in the system I think that even greater results you’re going to get. The promises of biofeedback training are big. So you owe it to yourself to try it out and prove that they’re true for you.


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What is Intuition? We’ve been discussing intuitive training, but what is intuition? A lot of people have unclear ideas of what this actually is and so by defining the term we can give you a better idea of what it is and how you can work up to it. Intuition is likened to the sixth sense. Now we have the five primary senses, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling. And feeling can actually be split into several different parts. You have the tactile sensation of touching something. Feeling also goes along with your emotions. When it comes to the sixth sense, there’s quite a few different ways of talking about it. There’s the psychic sense where I’m picking up thoughts with telepathy. Most people have at least once in their life experienced this for themselves, often much more than once. They’ve also done studies on this that it’s proven to exist. There’s so much research out there yet many people still don’t believe it. Some scientists don’t want to look at the real data that’s out there. You can pick up information from other than your five senses. But that’s not very important for what we’re doing here today. That is part of intuition, but another part of it is that you have the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind takes in all the data around you all the time. It processes far higher amounts of information than your conscious mind can possibly handle. People under hypnosis have been able to regress to a time in their childhood and been able to describe complete details as if they were there in the moment. The subconscious mind takes that data in and it stores that there permanently. With intuition when you have someone in any sort of field, for example a doctor who does emergency operations, they have all this experience leading up through schooling and through all the different work they’ve done on patients in the past. So their intuition may tell them what they need to do at the crisis moment because they have all this subconsciously stored data. They’re able to, without consciously knowing why, to know the right step that they need to take. This data can be accessed in a split second and once again it may not be conscious at all. All of it can be done on a subconscious level but then it gives them the conscious idea of what they need to do in order to do things right. When we talk about physical training, it’s really the same thing. If you look at most of the top people, the majority of them out there they don’t necessarily train by a set routine. Instead they’re doing intuitive training. They may not have gone through all the steps as I’m going to show you here, but they’re �� 2011 Legendary Strength

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guided by their intuition. Now how is this possible? It’s because they have trained for years. They probably started off with routines that they read out of books, DVDs, got out magazines or received from a coach or trainer. They learned all these different exercises. They found out what worked for them. All this in the end is guiding their intuition. All that data is getting stored so they know what works for them. They know what works for their body and so after 20 years of training, they’re able to figure out what works best for them. This is a form of intuitive training, though it’s not nearly as exact as what I’m going to be showing you in this system here. Another part of intuition is having hunches. Basically this is when you have an idea that comes up from your subconscious. You don’t know where it came from but it gives you an idea of what you should be doing. This can apply to training too. Let’s say an idea to try a new exercise out, to try a variation out that may work out really well for you, pops into your mind. Where did it come from? Once again it’s informed by your intuition and that comes from all the previous practice you’ve done. So if you’re just starting out it’s going to be hard for you to be intuitive right from the beginning because you have no data from which to work from. But if you’ve been training for many years then you’re going to have lots of data there. Either way what you’re learning here will speed up your progress.


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The Levels of Competency Many people have seen this, many people haven’t. These are the levels of competency, the levels of learning that everyone goes through as they’re learning new things. You have: 1. Unconscious Incompetence 2. Conscious Incompetence 3. Conscious Competence 4. Unconscious Competence This first level, unconscious incompetence means you don’t know that you don’t know. If you have been doing training but never heard of biofeedback, not aware that your body gives you signals that you can follow in order to guide your training, you’re at this level. If you’ve never done any testing before you’re at this level. You’re not aware of what you don’t know. Now this is how most people go through life in many different areas and that’s fine, because you can’t be good at everything. But this is just the starting level. It’s really easy to move to the next level. Conscious incompetence mean s you know that you don’t know. If you’ve never done any of the biofeedback before, now you at least realize that you have no clue about it. So it’s easy to jump to this level and from here it’s fairly easy with some practice to get to the next level, though this does depend on the difficulty of what you’re attempting to learn. That is conscious competence. Meaning that by working with it, by thinking about it, by doing it you’re able to get to a level where you can confidently do it. Recall that whole month period I talked about where I wasn’t able to really feel it. It took a month before I felt like I’ve gotten it. That was going from conscious incompetence to conscious competence. So it didn’t take all that long in training with it to move to the third level. Also realize that in each of the Four Levels of Intuitive Training you’ll have to go through the four levels of competency. There are several steps in the ladder you have to climb and several different ladders to climb.


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From there we go to unconscious competence. This can be likened to driving a car. When you’re first going through this you’ve never done it before, you have no clue how to actually do it. Then you start to practice at it. You’re incompetent at it, you’re making all sorts of mistakes, your parents are yelling at you because you’re doing things wrong, but then after practicing it for a while then you get it and you’re able to do it. But for awhile you’re still thinking about everything you have to do early on. With more practice it becomes completely easy to do. You don’t even need to think about it anymore. You can be doing something else entirely and you’re able to do it fine with no problem. You’re doing it unconsciously. Most people recognize this as the final level. But there is actually a level beyond that and most people aren’t aware of this. The thing is with unconscious competence, many people in the top levels they’re at this level. They’re able to do things so easily. However, it’s unconscious for them. They have no clue how they’re actually able to do it. It’s completely unconscious to the point where they can’t bring it out, they can’t tell you how they’re doing it, they can’t teach you how to do it. The level above unconscious competence is the trainer level. In unconscious competence you’re able to do it without thinking about it. It’s being done automatically by you. Above that you’re just at that skill level, but you’re conscious of your unconscious competence meaning you know the steps you took to get there. You know how you can actually teach other people. So this is a whole other level and from here you’re sort of starting over again because you can begin to expand into new realms with it. Now these aren’t just black and white zones. It’s a sliding scale of where you’re at with them. For instance, with this manual you may have conscious incompetence in all Four Levels of Intuitive Training but if you’ve never done the testing you don’t have any competence in them. Awareness without the training won’t do you much good. Plus depending on how far you drill down into the techniques you may be great at one aspect, doing it automatically, but still having trouble with another. I wanted to give you this model here because it’s important with what we’re working on. Here is a breakdown of how you may go from through the levels of competency along with the levels of intuitive training.


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1. Unconscious Incompetence - Beginner 2. Conscious Incompetence - Awareness of biofeedback training. 3. Conscious Competence - With some practice you can do testing correctly 4. Unconscious Competence - You can do testing easily, and you’re now open up to the next levels. 5. Unconscious Incompetence - Many who do biofeedback training well are unaware of these higher levels. 6. Conscious Incompetence - With this manual you have awareness of the higher levels of intuitive training. 7. Conscious Competence - With some practice you can do Level 3 correctly (Don’t worry we’ll get to that soon) 8. Unconscious Competence - You can do Level easily, and you’re now open up to Level 4. 9. And so on.


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The Four Levels of Intuitive Training Now that we’ve covered all the foundations it’s time to finally get to what the four levels of intuitive training are. I want to cover a lot of details on each one of these. This includes what they are, how you apply them, how to do them and how to get to the next level.

1. Beginner 2. Testing 3. Feeling 4. Knowing


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Level 1 - Beginner The first level is the beginning level. This is basically where you’re starting at. This is the unconscious incompetence. I also call this not testing, not feeling, not knowing. This is where you’re oblivious to everything discussed in this course. The greater amount of people out there that do physical training, this is where they’re at. We were talking about Joe Weider and his instinctive training principle earlier. Here’s a little more of his book which is important. “I have developed a technique for evaluating bodybuilding progress called the Weider Instinctive Training Principle. Essentially this principle involves gradually learning how to interpret your body, the biofeedback signals until you develop an intuitive sense, an instinct, of what is or isn’t producing good results in your body. It takes a year or more to become adept at instinctive training, but once mastered this technique will dramatically accelerate your progress rate. “In the beginning, every bodybuilder should stick pretty much to the basics. When you are starting, you can’t train according to how you feel because you have no idea what correct training feels like. That takes experience. The trick is to master the correct training techniques, get used to how working out this way feels and then you can begin to rely on feel or instinct to guide you. What will make the difference in your bodybuilding success is the degree to which you have been able to utilize your own instincts and feelings.” Of course he’s talking about bodybuilding there but it works regardless of what your physical goals are. What he’s really talking about here is going from this level to levels three and four, skipping over level two. It takes that experience we’re talking about, building up that subconscious stored data from doing different routines, feeling out your body, feeling wh at it’s like to work out. Building up your data to pull from intuitively so you know what works for you, what feels good and what doesn’t.


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He said it takes a year or more of training and of course this is going to depend on how consistent you are with training. It also depends on if you have an eye towards developing that intuitive sense or if you’re just going through your workouts. This is also what all those top people that do intuitive training are doing. They’re going from the beginner level to feeling and knowing, skipping over level two. However, testing is a way to fast track this progress and it’s a way to get better in touch with everything here. You’re able to get faster results doing it. So you don’t need to begin with just doing training routines that are written as people have them, but by using the testing you can develop your own and fast track this intuitive sense. Frankie Faires calls the biofeedback training in the Gym Movement Protocol a way of informing your intuition. You’re building your ability to go to these higher levels by doing testing. By building in that experience, you’re able to go to the higher levels if you want, but testing is the faster way to get there. However, there is an important point that you may have to take into account before you go onto these other levels. If you do years of training and do it in an opposite manner of what we’re talking about, like all those people out that train really hard, now we’re showing a way to do it much more easily. To quote Yoda in Star Wars, “You must unlearn what you have learned.” So all that experience can lead you in one direction when maybe the better answer is in another direction. The same thing happens frequently with science. People go off the wrong hypothesis, a wrong theory from far back and they can get pretty far with that, but at that point they’re just really discounting other data because they don’t want to get rid of this hollowed theory that they had in the past which actually turns out to be wrong. Same sort of thing can happen here. So sometime you have to unlearn some of your experience in order to make better progress in the long run. It’s easy to jump right into the next level just by deciding to do so. Once you learn how you can move to Level 2 instantly.


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Level 2 - Testing Now let’s move on to level two, testing. First I’m going to talk about why the testing works. Generally the testing that’s used, wha t’s advocated in the Gym Movement Protocol, is some form of range of motion test and we’re going to get into the different variations of that you can use in a moment. The basic idea is that all movement is tied together. So if you’re doing one exercise that’s going to affect your movement, becau se everything in your body is connected physically, neurologically, energetically and everything, that one movement with a completely different part of the body can affect the movement of another body part. When I say good movements this means movements that will help you, that are good for your body at that given time and day. This can change from day to day. They can also stay the same, depending on many factors. What happens is when you’re doing good movements what this does is it basically opens your body up, it makes all your movement better. So your range of motion, testing flexibility, not extended range of f lexible but getting to the point where there’s tension, that improves after a good movement. By doing good movement it opens you up. Contrast that to a bad movement. What this is going to do is it’s going to constrict your body, it’s going to tighten you up. The reason it does this is for protection. By going into the fetal position for instance which people sometimes go into when they get really frightened or are hurt, they’re in this completely constricted position. They’re not opened up, but they’re closing in over those important points of the body. Their body is protecting itself by contracting the movement. So if you do a bad movement, something that’s not good for you to do at that time, your body is going to want to contract. It’s going to slow down the movement that it has. This is the idea on how and why the testing works. Of course you may be thinking you want to get stronger with the different exercise that you’re doing. What does increased f lexibility have to do with that? So you may want to use a strength test and we talked about the muscle testing that is traditionally done. But there is a correlation between the different tests.


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A good exercise is going to leave you strong a s well as having a greater range of motion. If you’re doing exercise that makes you weak it’s going to also constrict your range of motion. I’m not talking about doing exercise until you have nothing left and then can’t hold your arm up. That’s not what I’m talking about. By doing something as simple as the movement patterns of an exercise a couple of times and if it’s a good movement for you, you’ll test strong. If it’s not, you’ll test weak. If it’s a good movement for you, you’ll have greater range of motion. If it’s not, you’ll have lesser range of motion. If you do the tests properly the results will match up. Plus every movement affects the body globally, meaning all over. So it doesn’t matter wh at form of testing you use, it’s going to have the same correlation. Another key point is that the body is trained to give signals and this may be why it’s hard to do in the beginning. It can also be trained out of yourself through neglect. But by practicing the biofeedback training, by practicing the testing, by believing that it’s going to work for you, by really wanting your body to give you better signals, I believe that the signals are actually going to improve. You increase your awareness and confidence in the testing because you get better at it. There are some people that when they try the testing out they complain that they’re getting no difference. It may take some time in training the body to give a better signal to you through the testing and this will come with practice, time and believing that it will work. Once again it may take a little time to get there but really put in that time and you’ll get great rewards from doing so. Wh ile I said it can be trained to become better and more clear its also the natural order of what the body does. Unfortunately testing isn’t full proof. It can also be thrown off and there’s a lot of things that can do that. I’m going to show you all the different ways of testing, how to do it right, what to avoid and the different things you want to test and more.


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How to Test Correctly Now the most common form of testing that is used as proposed by the Gym Movement Protocol is the range of motion tests. The most common ones of these you’ll see are the toe touch and the shoulder reach. The toe touch is where you bend over and see how far you can go. In the shoulder reach, you stand and reach up and back until you feel the tension in the shoulder. Now the key point of this is that you are going to the point of tension. You’re not going to your complete range of motion and this is what screws up many people in the beginning. Some people don’t feel it right away. It took me about a month to get used to it. Part of it was this reason. Am I really feeling the tension yet? Is that it? If you’re disconnected from knowing where tension is in your body and this may happen a lot if you practice of high tension techniques. Or that could possibly helped you because then you’re more aware of the tension. Different factors can come into play of knowing where that point of tension is and this isn’t something that’s not always so easy for people to feel right away. It does take a little practice. Only by experiencing it with awareness do you realize your levels of tension and where you feel them. Another important point is that you need to do the test the same every single time. If you do it differently, if you h ave different body positions, different breathing, then you are effectively doing a different test. By doing so you’re going to get a different test result and thus its inaccurate. There are many different ways you can play with this. It doesn’t really matter how exactly you do it except that you do it consistently for yourself. I will explain what I do exactly. My preferred range of motion test is the toe touch, because it’s the one I’ve done the longest. I get my feet touching each other. If you test with feet touching one time and a foot apart another you’re going to have different points where you first feel the tension. I keep the knees loosely locked. They’re not locked out straight and rigid and they’re not bent. You’re going to get very much a different test if you have them locked versus if you have them bent. You feel tension completely differently so just make sure you do it the same each time.


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Another factor is the speed of your movement. If you go into this movement very fast you’re not likely to feel the first sign of tension until you’re used to it. Once you’re used to testing you’re going to be able to do the testing more efficiently, more easily for you and to get correct results, but when you’re starting out, slow it down. You have to keep the same stance and body posture. Where you look can change up the test as well. I prefer to keep my head and eyes neutral as I do the test. If you’re looking at where you reach to you can throw off the test if you want it to be better or worse. Best to keep it as blind as you can. In fact closing your eyes can assist in your feeling the tension better. Close off some stimuli so you can focus more on another. And the last thing you want to look at is your breathing. If you h old your breath you’ll not go as far because you tighten up when you hold your breath. To recap here are the main points: 

Feet touching

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Knees loosely locked

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Slow speed of movement at first

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Breath out before the test

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Head and eyes in neutral position

And understand you don’t have to do them exactly like this. There are reasons for some like the breathing and head position, but others are purely arbitrary. As long as you’re consistent from test to test you should get accurate results. You stop when you hit your first sign of tension. Notice where your hands are in relation to your legs. Remember that point. If you have a hard time remembering you can use chalk and mark yourself. The first time you test you get what is known as the base line. This is your base line range of motion. From here you can either tell if exercises are going to be better or worse for you. If an exercise gives you a further range of motion it’s better for you. If you have the same level or worse then it’s not that great of an exercise to do. If the exercise is really good you’ll get a larger range of motion increase or a larger range of motion decrease if it’s really bad for you.


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Understand that this only applies at the given time of the test. It could change in a day, or even a hour, depending on what else you do. Let’s discuss the other range of motion tests like the shoulder flexion. For this one, you’re going to want to stand on the same point on the ground every time. When you test you notice the point where your hand is pointing compared to what is around you. For example where it is in relation to the roof. With a good test you’ll have an extended range of motion with your hand pointing further back. With a bad test you won’t reach as far. Some of the other range of motion tests you can do is a shoulder extension. In your normal standing position with the arms hanging to your sides the shoulder is in extension, but to test extension you’ll reach further back. Here you’ll notice you don’t have a lot of range of motion before you feel the tension. You also have shoulder abduction where you’re raising the arm out to the side and again you’d want to follow the same sort of steps here. Now, choose one of these tests and work with that as your primary one. Any of them should work and you can play around to find the one you like using the most. If you have some sort of injuries or something with your body that prohibits you from doing any one of these tests, then you’re not going to want to use that test, but use one of the other ones instead. You may find that you get better results with a certain one of these tests for whatever reason than the other ones. So in that case you’ll definitely want to stick with it.


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Testing Movements Now that you know how to do testing its time to put it into practice along with exercises. Not only can you test movements but any variations of them as well. To start with I do the basic movement pattern. I do this without a weight. Just doing the movement of the exercise, even without weight, is enough for the body to feel the movement, and then change the results of the test. Of course, you may not feel this right away, so if you feel the need to use a light weight at first then do so. I will say it is a bit trickier when you’re doing ballistic movements like kettlebell swings. Having that same sort of feeling with the movement without having some sort of load there doesn’t quite carry over. For that reason I like to use the kettlebell when I’m actually testing out the swings. And you only need to do a couple reps of the movement in order to test it out. Here are the steps to follow: 

Get your baseline test.

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Test major movement patterns.

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Test variations within those movement patterns including tools.

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Test small variations within those movement patterns.

Here is an example of that process. To start with its good to test the four major exercise groups of the body, that is some sort of squats, deadlifts, presses and pulls. Let’s say from that group presses test best. Now you can test major variations of presses, for instance: pushups, military press, side press, cable pressout, bench press, etc. Let’s say the military press is testing best. You can test whether a barbell, two kettlebells, or two dumbbells is best. Here the barbell tests best. Then you can do small variations of the movement. For instance, the normal military press has both legs together but it may test better to have the right leg in front, left leg in front, a closer or narrower stance. And that’s just the feet. Perhaps looking up, looking down, or even looking to the side works better. As you can see you can go very far with this.


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What to Think About During Testing Let’s talk about where should your mind be as you’re doing these tests. If you’ve just done the exercise, then step back and test it, that is good enough and in that case you’re going to want to dissociate. Don’t even think about the exercise, don’t think about the test or anything else for that matter. Just do the motion while being completely dissociated emotionally and mentally from what you’ve just done. That seems to work out really well. Another option you can do is think about doing the exercise. Don’t just think about the exercise, but think about doing the exercise. Run a mental movie over in your mind. In this case you can actually do the test even if it’s prolonged a little bit and it seems to work out fine as well because your body is running that program subconsciously of what it feels like to do that exercise and then you can get the accurate test from that. Now of course I’m not saying you can just think of the exercise and know whether it will test well or not. How an exercise tests changes from one day to the next, so you’ll need to have at least recently done it. At least in the beginning. At the higher levels I think you could do just that, but you need to feel how that exercise is working for you right know in order to be able to get the results from doing it. So either dissociate right after doing the movement or think about it during the test. By doing either one I think you’re going to increase your chances of getting an accurate test. By thinking of anything else it can result in an inaccurate test. It is important to know that your beliefs can also throw off the testing too. Especially as we move on to the next levels, three and four, if you really want something to test well, if you just think of the exercise and you like that exercise, that can throw off the testing. But with practice, you’re going to get more clear results. You’re going to know when you’re doing the right thing, whether if you just had a false positive because you liked that exercise versus it actually testing out well. Belief can throw you off on any of these levels, but there are steps you can take to make sure that that’s not happening.


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Even More Test Options Of course there are other ways you can test yourself as well. We talked about the general indicator test that’s used in muscle testing where you hold out your arm and someone else pushes down on that. That seems to work. The problem is that you need another person in order to do that one. So it’s generally not recommended. If you work out with other people you a nd want to use that go ahead. Another great thing about the range of motion tests besides being self-sufficient is you tend to have some sort of measuring stick. There is that along with any of the strength tests, but it is a little more complicated in order to be able to do it. You need to have more experience with it in order to be able to feel the differences between something that’s really strong and that’s something that’s not quite as strong. Or measure it on a scale of 1 to 10 which is more time consuming. But when something is weak you’re able to feel that. There are ways you can do the strength or muscle test yourself. There is one that I like to use for other reasons, but I don’t use often with the exercises because I prefer to go with the range of motion test. You can do this sitting or standing. Hold your leg up and press down right over the knee with the same side hand. Normally you should be quite strong because the leg is stronger than the arm. But if you do a movement that’s not testing well you’ll be weak and the leg will fall. Another thing the Gym Movement Protocol recommends if you have access to it is the hand dynamometer. This is a gripping tool that gives you a measured rating as you crush down on it. Most people don’t have access to this tool, but if you do or want to get one, it will work for these purposes. You’ll have more strength, and thus a higher rating, after a good testing movement. Here is something that you should keep into consideration for a variety of reasons that the movement of the test itself may not be that good for you. Most of these are simple and shouldn’t be a problem for most people, but tha t might not be the case so take it into consideration. You don’t want to use something that doesn’t work well because you’ll get inaccurate results. There are many more ways that you can test. You can work on developing your own as long as you’re getting consistent an d accurate results from it, it’s going to work out for you. So go forward with it. Or just stick to the basics.


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Verify the Testing As I mentioned before you want to stop at the first sign of tension. That’s how you get an accurate result from the range of motion test, but as I also mentioned when you’re starting out, that first sign the tension may be a little difficult to come by. So what I recommend is two things. First is you can retest. Any time you’re not clear or think you may have done it wrong go ahead and do the exercise again and then retest it. The second option is to verify the testing. How do you do this? With another test. Yes it’s going to take a little more time but its worth it. This is something I did in the beginning to make sure that I was honing in on getting accurate results, that my testing was being correct. What I would do is do one test an d then do another after doing an exercise. So you’re using two different tests on one movement pattern. Usually I’d use the toe touch test and the shoulder flexion test and get comparable results with the two. If I didn’t get similar results in both tests then I would try the exercise again and see what was going on with the test. It could be that one of your tests is off, that you’re doing it wrong. It could also be that you just messed up that one time, but by going back again you then get accurate results. There’s a bunch of different things here that could screw up the result in any test. But by testing, verifying your own testing an d retesting if necessary you’re going to get more accurate results till you get a better feel for what is the first sign of tension and how do these exercises feel for me? Once you get there then it becomes much easier to do.


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Level 3 - Feeling Now it’s time to move on to level three, feeling. How I arrived at this level was just doing the biofeedback training and going through the testing. I started to realize when I was doing the exercises themselves that I would basically have a sense of whether these exercises were going to test well or not. This was occurring when I was doing the movements themselves. Normally when I’m doing the testing I’ll do the exercise with a completely unweighted, unloaded movement pattern. While doing this I could feel whether it felt good versus when it didn’t and then I would do the testing and it would verify those things. This is how I arrived at this level. I call it feeling because you’re feeling the movements out as you do them. The idea is that all the movement is tied together as we talked about when earlier. So when you’re doing an exercise it’s going to affect the different movement of your body. I really like Frankie Faires’ model of the attributes of fitness. Strength is movement against resistance. Endurance is repetitive movement. Stability is resistance to movement. Flexibility is extended range of movement. Everything can be tied into some form of movement and just like that they all correlated to one another. So if one gets better the other tends to get better as well. With the testing what you’re doing, you’re using the test as a form of a measuring stick. That’s an apt analogy because with the range of motion you have a degree of whether it’s better or worse and by how much, just like a measuring stick. And as we showed you, there are variations, different tests you can use. You can use virtually any movement you want as this measuring stick, because all movement is tied together. So by a small leap of logic, if all the movement is tied together, you can use the actual subject of the test, as the test result itself. This means when you do an exercise so that you can test it, you also are using the exercise as the test. This has worked out very well for me and that’s what level three is all about. But what are you looking for as you do the movement? There are a number of principles that will show a good test versus a bad test:


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

Does it feel fast?

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Does it feel strong?

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Does it feel fluid?

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Does it feel easy?

If you feel these traits, fast, strong, fluid and easy while you’re doing the movement those are your test results. That is saying that it is a good movement to do. Contrast to bad test results which are merely the opposites of these: 

Does it feel slow?

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Does it feel weak?

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Does it feel stiff?

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Does it feel hard?

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Does it feel painful? (And not just pain but the potential for pain is there.)

If you have any of these then it’s saying no, this is not a good exercise to do. You’re using basically the same principles of the range of motion tests except just taking some other aspects of movement. Fast versus slow. That’s speed. Strong versus weak. Whether you’re actually going to be strong in the exercise or not. Fluid versus stiff, this is a mobile, flexible sort of thing along with speed. Usually fluid and speed are correlated. And easy versus hard. Once again you always want to make things easy so if the movement feels easy then you’re green lighted to go with it. Then pain and sensation free versus having pain or the potential for pain. These are the things you want to look at. By paying attention to your movements this is quite easy to do. When you’re starting out, what you want to do is you just do the movement and feel it out. Where do you think it’s going to test? You don’t need to a ctually think, okay I’m probably going to get exactly two inches below mid sh in, but do you think it’s going to test well or test poorly? That’s all that really matters.


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Sometimes you do want to look at something tha t tests really well versus something that tests only marginally well. Generally you wan t to go with things that test really well. The same thing here. Oh, that felt really good. That felt really bad and those same things are going to be correlated to the range of motion testing. When you’re starting out to get to this level, what you want to do is you feel the movement itself, where you think it’s going to test and then you go back and verify with the range of motion tests. Do you get the same result? As you get more confident in your ability to feel out movements you can stop doing the separate testing for verification. Even at this point you don’t need to completely abandon the traditional testing. Sometimes you may not exactly get it, you’re not sure about it so then you go back and do the range of motion testing to find where it lies. It’s that testing and verification process. The same thing we did when you’re starting out with testing. You want to do one test then do a second test to verify, see if you find the same thing. Here you feel the movement and then test to verify. Now I will say this, with this feeling level is generally a lot easier to feel these different traits with gross movement patterns versus fine or more micro movement patterns. So you can start out with feeling out the general exercise and then you may want to go to testing to find the actually loads. It’s a little easier to feel because it’s not going to be as fast, as strong, as easy when you have a light weight than with a heavier weight generally. You may need to go back to the testing for that, but for at least the gross movement patterns this is really easy to do. And as you further develop along I think you’ll be able to use this level alone once you’ve spent a lot of time practicing, even with the micro changes in variations of exercise and with loads Also when you move to this level and above it is important that you continue to work with the different variations. It’s easy to get caught up in the idea that the exercise felt good, and its one you like to do so you do it, instead of even looking at variations that may test much better. I’ve mistakenly done this several times. While you can make good progress with something that tests marginally better, you are often better suited to go for an exercise which tests much better. Of course this also depends on your goals.


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Level 4 - Knowing And now it’s time for the fourth level, knowing. This is really where intuitive training completely comes to fruition, where you are relying on your intuition. Now you might already be using a part of this with your training because it has to come from somewhere where you start your testing, unless you just say I’m going to go down this list of exercises and see what tests well. That’s fine when you’re starting out, but even after you’ve done the testing a little bit you’re being informed at least partially by your intuition. Now how are you being informed by it? There are a couple of different things that you can look at. Your movement. As you’re going through your day, remember that all movement is tied together so when you get up in the morning, as you’re doing your work or what not depending on when you’re working out, when you’re moving throughout the day, you’re getting an idea of how your body is moving. All that data is going into your subconscious mind and it can inform you on how different exercises will either test poorly or test well. I’m not saying doing any sort of exercise, but just how your body is moving is going to inform you so you have a knowledge to build from for your intuition to guide you. Along with that is how does your body feel? With movement that is one thing but feeling is the sensations you feel as you’re doing movement. It can also be the state or the mood you’re in. Then your memory comes into play of what you did in your previous days. What workouts have you recently done? What exercises? What soreness do you feel now? As you’re going along with the testing, with doing your workouts, you’re going to notice certain patterns emerge. For example, I did squats yesterday and for me, at this time, I can never do squats more than once a week. That is informing my intuition. You’re going to know what you’re going to be able to do. So you know that you’re not going to go with squats today. You know that from your past, from the patterns that emerge. Perhaps from your results you notice a pattern where you did one exercise one day and you find that a lot of times you can do a different exercise that correlates to that one which always works out the next day. You’ll have all these different ideas from how you move, how you feel, what you’ve done in the past and different patterns that emerge in your training log. If you keep good data and you keep track of everything, you can go back and analyze for these different patterns. These are going to give you ideas on exactly �� 2011 Legendary Strength

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what you need to do so that you know where to start a workout. Of course with this there is a difference between knowing, actual knowing, and guessing. When you’re starting out you may be doing a little more guessing than actual knowing, but as practice it, as you further refine it, the signals you’re getting are going to be more clear and you’re going to know instead of just guessing. If you’re guessing from the get go and when I say guessing, you can completely do a mental process of guessing what might work. Or you may have some sort of feelings that are rising based on the subconscious that are informing you. You may not be 100% sure about something, but it’s an informed guess. So it’s getting one step closer to that knowing and this is fine when you’re starting out. It takes time to go through this before you know what you need to do. How do you get started on this level? When you enter the gym think about what exercises you should do? Think also about what won’t work? Then go ahead and feel or test those exercises. Does your intuition match up with the results? Once again its important you dissociate from the test results to get accurate testing. Better to have correct test results then to “prove” your intuition right. Several times I have entered the gym and knew I would be able to hit new all time maxes. This is knowing. In fact both the last two times I’ve set new deadlift PR’s for maximum intensity I knew it would happen.


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Timelines You may be wondering what level am I at. I am at level two, three and four. As I’ve said before that you may want to go back and verify. So in many cases I know what’s going to work and so I start there and from that complete intuition I’m going to feel the movement out. It’s not like I just launch right into doing an exercise with a certain weight. At an ultimate level I think you could do that, but I‘m not yet there. After feeling the movement, I may go back to testing for some of the finer points like working with load. But sometimes I can even just feel that out. So I use all the different levels. I would say my primary level if I had to pick one of these would be feeling. As I improve I’m seeking to do more knowing, more feeling, and less testing this is how it’s going to progress. You don’t really need to go back to the beginner stage on anything. Once I get to predominately feeling I’ll seek to do even more knowing and less feeling. Part of this is going to depend on your awareness. Having gone through this manual you are aware of the different levels. When I got into the testing there was an idea that maybe you could get beyond it, but there wasn’t these laid out levels that I had available. Through trial and error I started to feel it out myself. Along with this I began knowing more often. This is the level that some people through years of training get to without testing or feeling. But with this system you have a more step by step system to follow. By having the awareness of the levels, you know what you need to look for. You know what to experiment with. You know how you can work at the higher level and then verify what you’re doing. If you starting out at testing I encourage you to verify your tests with another form of testing. Once you get to a level of confidence with this you can move up. To start feeling out exercises, notice the traits of fast, easy, fluid, strong and pain-free. It you have all these traits its good to go, but verify that with testing. Start out with gross movements, but work to do it more with variations and even loads. Eventually, you can make this your primary method and largely do away with physical testing.


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