Ido Portal Teaches Dr. Andrew Huberman the Fundamentals of Movement | Huberman Lab Clips
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00:00:04.100 | Recently, I had the pleasure of hosting the one and only Ido Portal on the Huberman Lab podcast.
00:00:09.300 | I know many people are familiar with Ido and his work, but for those of you that might not be,
00:00:14.100 | Ido Portal is credited with being the world expert in all things movement and the person
00:00:19.860 | who coined the term "movement culture," which is the gathering in and around movement practices
00:00:24.820 | that span from sport to martial arts to dance, gymnastics. Ido and his colleagues have essentially
00:00:30.820 | combined all the different forms of movement that exist out there and expanded upon them to create
00:00:37.220 | patterns of movement that utilize all aspects of the nervous system and that can be incorporated
00:00:42.740 | not just into sport and dance, etc., but also into daily life. Having Ido on the podcast offered the
00:00:48.420 | unique opportunity to learn directly from him, and so rather than just sit in front of a couple
00:00:53.220 | of microphones, which we did, we also spent many hours doing movement practices, the first of which
00:00:58.660 | actually involved no movement. It began by lying on the floor, and Ido gave me and Odelia, one of
00:01:05.460 | his colleagues, instruction as to how to move out of a motionless state in very deliberate ways,
00:01:12.980 | as well as incorporating things like facial and eye movements, which felt very unusual, I confess,
00:01:18.100 | but quickly led to an expansion into other forms of movement that were dynamic and involved
00:01:24.180 | multiple people. You could call this dance or you could call this sport, but really what it
00:01:28.580 | involved is setting a small number of ground rules or constraints as to how one could or could not
00:01:34.900 | move, dictated to me by Ido, and that forced me to move in very specific ways that sometimes were
00:01:41.940 | very uncomfortable to me, not painful, but uncomfortable, meaning that they didn't necessarily
00:01:47.940 | bring me to a place of reflexive action. I had to think very hard, but very soon I noticed
00:01:52.820 | I was able to carry out the movements constrained by those rules in a reflexive way, which was very
00:02:00.420 | surprising and told me that the neural circuits for those particular movements had to have existed
00:02:05.220 | before that training with Ido because there's simply no way they could have wired up very
00:02:10.900 | quickly in the moment. So essentially what Ido was doing was revealing to me or allowing me to reveal
00:02:15.700 | to myself the different patterns of movement that are contained in the language of my nervous system,
00:02:21.220 | but that I was unaware of prior to the work with him. Then we moved on to some other sorts of
00:02:26.340 | dynamic movements involving high-level coordination of using feet and hands to stomp on tennis balls,
00:02:33.300 | bounce them up, grab them with the hand that was dictated in the moment by Ido. That was challenging
00:02:39.940 | at times, to say the least. Other patterns of movement involved an extreme amount of balance,
00:02:45.220 | again, my balance not being terrible, but certainly not being at a high-level skill
00:02:50.180 | and certainly not having done these sorts of moving practices before. I struggled quite a lot,
00:02:54.180 | but found that within each movement practice at the point of struggle, there was often a breakthrough
00:03:00.260 | into getting it or suddenly feeling as if my body could perform the movements, whereas a few moments
00:03:05.780 | before I couldn't. One of the more challenging drills, I guess you would call it, or practices
00:03:12.020 | that Ido put me through was one in which he would change the rules within the moments of movement
00:03:21.220 | so that one had to both be paying careful attention to the instruction and to the movement
00:03:26.340 | mid-movement and change those movements, which as a neuroscientist, I can tell you, has to involve
00:03:32.740 | a lot of what we call top-down control, that is engagement of the four brain circuits for
00:03:37.140 | anticipation and learning and rule acquisition, and to combine those with reflexive action and
00:03:43.780 | deliberate action. And what I discovered was that there were two things that really helped with
00:03:48.340 | that. One was to so-called clear the mind, but of course nobody knows what clearing the mind is nor
00:03:53.940 | how to do it. What this involved for me was making sure that I did not generate any movements until
00:04:00.740 | the command was delivered and then taking a pause before generating the movement that I was instructed
00:04:07.380 | to do, which at first felt slow and clunky, but clearly led to faster, more accurate execution of
00:04:13.460 | the instructed movement. And the second one was to try and forget the rule as soon as I learned it,
00:04:20.580 | because indeed the rules were changing very quickly. There were many other teachings and
00:04:24.580 | learnings throughout the day, that is Ido teaching and me attempting to learn, and by the end of the
00:04:30.420 | day, I confess I felt quite differently in my body. What do I mean by that? I became not hyper-conscious
00:04:37.380 | of every movement, but certainly far more aware of my posture and the various movements that I make,
00:04:42.580 | and I have to say that has continued not just for several days or weeks, but for several months
00:04:47.700 | after that single day of movement practice with Ido, which I find remarkable and encouraging and
00:04:55.620 | has led me to start to incorporate some of those same movement practices into my daily routine.
00:05:00.660 | Needless to say, it was a very special experience for me to get direct movement instruction
00:05:05.540 | from the luminary of movement, Ido Pertal, and I also couldn't help myself but to ask Ido to
00:05:13.540 | perform some movement practices for us because he is so unbelievably skilled, and he most graciously did.
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