Book Review: Habitual Strength by Tim Anderson

What is Habitual Strength?

Habitual strength is the new book from Tim Anderson. I’ve been a quiet fan of his for a while, since I purchased his Original Strength DVD.  Now that I’ve read Habitual Strength, I’m thinking it might be time for a road trip to attend a Tim Anderson workshop or at least learn from someone certified in Original Strength. I love anything that makes mobility and movement more accessible!

Original What?

In case you’re not familiar with Original Strength, it’s a program by Tim Anderson that encourages you to use 5 RESETs based upon how we learned to move as babies and then toddlers. The premise is that we first learned how to move using these instinctive RESETs but years of sitting and cellphone use have robbed us of our original, God-given strength.

Confession Time

I watched the DVD, read the articles, subscribed to the Original Strength YouTube channel and then forgot to actually implement what I’d learned.  Sound familiar? How many of us attend some life changing seminar and drive home fired up and ready to change lives, then slip back into our old ways as soon as we’re making coffee the next morning? Oh, it’s just me? Whatever, I don’t believe you.

Habitual Strength Removes Excuses

Within the pages of Habitual Strength Anderson explains the relationship between habit and our current bodies, how negative thinking leads to poor posture and ill health and how adopting the right habits will slowly override years of neural programming to extend our lives, improve our energy levels and give us youthful, walking around strength!

Sound like a pipe dream? Maybe. But he makes a convincing argument with citations at the end of each chapter to back up his claims.

What I like most

Anderson explains his Five Resets again then lays out a week long program. Most days require zero equipment and sessions last about fifteen minutes or less. It’s not yoga but it is movement of a sort that most meatheads like me never do!

The sessions are designed to be done twice a day. One ten to fifteen minute session during waking hours and a second shorter, session in the evening.  The RESETs would probably work well as a warmup for your normal training but I’d advise against doing it that way. The idea is to use movement to correct the long hours of sitting we do, so I think doing them at a separate time from your normal workout would go a long way to adding some much needed NEPA into each day.

When to Do It?

If you’re a home gym athlete who trains in the morning: I’d recommend doing the daytime habits at lunch and the night time habits after dinner. If you train in the evening, I’d launch my day with the daytime habits session, do the normal evening workout and use the evening habits as a cooldown.  Either way, you get three movement hits a day.

Check out Habitual Strength, try the program for thirty days and see what you think.  You can learn more about Tim Anderson’s work and find an Original Strength workshop near you by going here.