The New York Times bestseller!
Everyone cares about physical performance and the fitness industry offers an infinite number of solutions to improve it. But who has the best solution and how do we know if and how it will work for us? After over 15 years of training as an elite gymnast and over a decade of coaching, Coach Carl Paoli offers a fresh philosophy on training by connecting movement styles to fit your specific purpose, while also giving you a simple framework for mastering the basics of any human movement.
Freestyle: Maximize Your Sport and Life Performance with Four Basic Movements is an interactive way to learn how the body is designed to move through space and how to interact with our constantly changing surroundings. Using this framework and four basic movements, Paoli will help you maximize your efforts in sport and life, regardless of specialty. Despite Carl's experience as an elite gymnast and a renowned CrossFit coach, this is not a book about gymnastics, CrossFit, or any specific fitness program. Rather, it is a unique take on how Carl studies and teaches human movement and how you can better understand how to move yourself. Carl is not going to teach you the specifics of a movement or sport; instead, he gives you a template that you can use to develop any specific movement. For example, instead of teaching you how to throw a baseball, this book teaches you a universal foundation that will help you further develop your pitching skills. Human movement is intuitive, but not always perfect. This book shows you how to: * Turn on and trust your intuition about movement * Use tools that help optimize imperfect movement * Tap into the universal movement patterns and progressions underlying all disciplines * Use Carl Paoli's movement framework to create roadmaps for your physical success * Learn what being strong really means Freestyle is a practical manual to develop human movement regardless of your discipline. It is equally applicable to veteran athletes, weekend warriors, fitness enthusiasts, people trying to pick up a new sport, and people who are simply curious about improving their health. By developing your awareness and learning to see across other disciplines, you can tailor any training regimen to meet your unique goals. Carl Paoli was born in the U.S., but grew up in Spain, where he became an elite gymnast who trained and competed on the national circuit for more than fifteen years. He received numerous gymnastics accolades, including a National Gold Medal for Vault. Carl also studied environmental science at Universidad Miguel Hernandez and specialized in genetic engineering and coral reef ecology. After university, Carl returned to the U.S. to pursue a career in marine biology. Even though Carl found work that related to his studies, his mind never strayed far from his love of sport and fitness. He reentered the world of gymnastics in 2004 in San Francisco, where he lives and works as a strength and conditioning coach for his own practice in collaboration with San Francisco CrossFit and AcroSports. In 2010, Carl launched GymnasticsWOD.com, currently the largest online resource for gymnastics-movement training and conditioning for CrossFit coaches and athletes. He has coached thousands of athletes around the world through the GymnasticsWOD website and by way of his Freestyle Connection seminars. In 2011, Carl was part of the coaching team for Annie Thorisdottir, who went on to become the first two-time winner of the CrossFit Games in 2011 and 2012.
Anthony Sherbondy holds a PhD from Stanford University where he studied Engineering and Neuroscience. His research focused on finding new methods for measuring and visualizing the "wiring diagram" of the human brain, which he has published in several articles and given numerous talks on around the world.
