Tim Anderson - Becoming Bulletproof

Becoming Bulletproof

An Uncommon Approach to Building a Resilient Body

by

Tim Anderson

and

Mike McNiff

2011 by Tim Anderson and Mike McNiff

Photography by Rebecca Kohler Dillon

Special Thanks

We would like to thank God first. The journey that led to the writing of this book was nothing short of divine. God has had his hand in this every step of the way. For that, we are grateful and humbled. Thank you, Lord.

Thank you Geoff and Courtney Neupert for listening to us and supporting us with our ideas. We appreciate your friendship and your help.

From Mike:

I would like to thank my best friend Tim for believing in me when I had given up hope and my two daughters, Britney and Cameron, for giving me a reason to be strong.

From Tim:

Thanks to my wife, Addie, for putting up with me and listening to me for 18 wonderful years even though I drive you completely crazy. I love you.

Thanks to Mike, my new brother from another mother. It has been a great journey and it is only just beginning.

Thanks to my mentor, John Brookfield. You have been a fountain of wisdom and guidance for me, and I can never thank you enough.

Becoming Bulletproof

This book is about becoming bulletproof. We guess this is a good time to explain what we mean when we say bulletproof. The body should be capable of doing anything without limitations. We should be able to run, jump and play without sustaining nagging injuries or acquiring other movement issues. The body is made to be powerful, durable and resilient. When we are 70 years old, our bodies should still have all of these qualities. Simply put, being bulletproof means having a healthy body that allows us to enjoy life well into our golden years. It means having a body free from pain, restrictions and limitations.

This book is a collaborative effort that started from conversations Mike and I had about training. We were both searching for ways to unlock our bodies potential and overcome our own movement issues and limitations. What we found, through our conversations, research and application has further cemented the idea that we were made to be bulletproof. After all, we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

Life should be about being happy. If you really want to be happy, you need a healthy body. Being in pain and always being injured should not be the norm or the status quo. We should be able to go for a run without getting knee pain. We should be able to pick up a suitcase without hurting our backs. We should be able to grab something out of the back seat of our car without tearing a rotator cuff. We should be resilient! We were not meant to be fragile.

We believe the information in this book will truly help you press the reset button on your body and help you rebuild the body you were meant to have: a strong, flexible, powerful body capable of climbing any mountain or swimming any sea. We invite you to engage in your own journey and learn how to become resilient and unlock your full potential. Regain the body you were meant to have.

You were meant to be bulletproof.

Life is Movement

The writing has been on the wall all along. Movement is the key to becoming bulletproof. Even before we are born we start developing our brains and bodies through movement. Once we are born, we build a huge movement foundation and movement vocabulary through movement patterns like lifting our heads, rolling, creeping and crawling. At the same time these movements are developing our bodies, they are also developing our brains. In The Well Balanced Child, Ewout VanManen points out that physical movement is the basis for cognitive, social and emotional development. What does all of this have to do with becoming bulletproof? Everything! Becoming bulletproof is not just physical. Brain development is not mutually exclusive from body development. The better you move, the better your brain functions and viceversa.

Our bodies were meant to move in all possible combinations of movements and in all planes of motion. We are designed to be physically capable of anything. From the moment we are born, we begin learning and earning our movement abilities. We develop our movement foundation by exploring the world through our senses and learning how to move our bodies. Through movement, we develop our body map, our sense of self in space. This is called proprioception. Our body is filled with sensors, and proprioceptors, that feed our brain with a sense of self every time we move and experience our environment. The more we move, the more clear our body map becomes. The clearer our body map is, the better we move.

Dr. Eric Cobb, creator of the Zhealth Performance System, uses a good analogy to illustrate this. He says to imagine your brain holds a 3D map of your body. In order to have a good map, you have to have good information. If the 3D map is fuzzy, you may not have good information from your nerves, i.e., you may not move so well. If you are getting good information from all the proprioceptors in your skin, joints, tendons and muscles, your movement map will be quite clear. If you are not getting good information from your proprioceptors, your movement map may be fuzzy.

Not only does movement improve your proprioception, it actually physically changes and improves your brain! Physical activity develops brain tissue!4 Inside your brain, there are millions of nerve connections, or nerve networks. Movement improves the communication between these connections and cements new connections.5 The better you move, the more efficient your brain becomes. The more efficient your brain becomes, the better you move. Its a twoway street.

Movement truly is life. It shapes everything about us: our brains, our bodies, who we are as people, our emotions, our hormones, even our mental health.6 Movement is the key to health; every facet of health. BUT, by the age of five, we do something very unnatural; we learn to sit six to eight hours a day while we begin learning in school. Movement, the very thing that shapes our brains and our life, is halted so we can begin to shape our brains through our wonderful education process. The movements and patterns we developed as a child are suddenly put aside and we learn a new pattern: sitting. We spend years sitting: over a computer, in a car, in a chair, on the couch. We have become very, very good at sitting. We get so good at sitting we become stuck in the seated position, or the adult fetal position, because all of our flexor muscles become so tight. We are not designed to sit still for six to eight hours everyday, or any day. It is not natural.

The ironic thing is we all know we should stay fit and healthy so we go to the local fitness center that allows us to train and workout while we are sitting down! Do you want to know how to make a movement pattern stick, good or bad? Load it with weight. Yes, we go to the health club, sit down on a machine and lift a weight or ride a bike. We cement our ability to sit by exercising in the seated position, and we further lose our ability to be bulletproof!

We are made to move. Yet, most of us dont move. We sit instead. So, we lose our movement patterns, or we replace them with sitting. We slow our brain development. In some ways, our brain development regresses. This process is called neuronal fitness or neuronal pruning.7 Just as movement can shape and develop our brains, not moving can also shape our brains. Simply put, our brains prune out the nerve connections we dont need or the ones we dont use often. The neural connections in the brain are much like the movement patterns in the body: