Mike Fitch, Founder and Creator of Animal Flow, joins Cheddar Innovates to discuss how this workout builds mobility, strength, and endurance.

Cheddar Innovates

See How the 'Animal Flow' Workout is Shaking Up the Fitness Industry

Welcome back to cheddar innovates brought to you by curiosity stream. Sometimes we find ourselves in a workout rut and so it may be time to shake up your fitness routine. Our next guest is creating an all new fitness movement for a fun, challenging and effective, Most importantly, workout. Think of it as a combination of gymnastics meets breakdancing, joining us now is Mike Fitch, founder and creator of Animal Flow Mike, let's just start off with you telling us a little bit about, you know, this workout, How does it work? Yeah, so animal flow is a ground based movement program that's designed to connect our bodies to ourselves, our minds to our bodies through the floor. And one of the ways that we found that's really beneficial in doing that is by placing hands and feet in contact with the ground and moving around. There's this great misconception of course, because of the name that it's all about acting like animals, but it's really about improving the connection, communication and function of the human animals. So it's how we inhabit our vessels and move them through space. So I'm curious how did your fitness journey kind of sparked the idea for this type of exercise? Well, what you're seeing there on that video, that's actually actually a piece from a mini documentary we put out called, We invite you to move that the call to action is just try anything. And that was really my story is I had been working as a personal trainer for a decade and I just thought, you know, it's time for something new. So I started exploring different body weight based movement practices. So I started with gymnastics which led to parkour which led to breaking or breakdancing. I really started getting into hand balancing and I just thought wow there's so much here that my clients could benefit from, but they would probably never go and join an adult gymnastics class or go to a parkour gym. So could I create a system that anyone could enter into at any level and feel successful at right away? And that was really the catalyst for creating animal flow. It certainly does have a feeling of being less intimidating than some more aggressive kind of workouts, but still to your point being pretty effective in terms of being effective, What are the benefits this type of workout from a physical and even, you know, a mental perspective. Yeah, so one of the things that we really enjoy with animal flow and the animal flow practices, that you can see it as a fully integrated approach to fitness or movement or you can look at each movement as an individual tool that you can use to elicit a very specific response. So if I look at the entire animal flow system, I could use it strategically to improve strength, power, speed, endurance, coordination, mobility, stability, flexibility. So I could take my athlete, maybe my body builder and make him more bendable and pliable, I could take my yogi and make them more explosive and powerful. So it really depends on how I want to use it. But then also you did mention The brain part and there was a study done in 2016 where they looked at using animal flow and its effects on cognition. And they found that there were a noticeable increases in markers of cognition. Just in four weeks of novel quadruple movement training. Yeah, It certainly seems very interesting. You know, we've learned a lot kind of hearing you talk about animal flow but I'm wondering if you can show us a little bit how it's actually done. Sure, I'm gonna show you just two quick flows. The first flow would be more of a beginner flow. This is going to be more of a mobility focused flow. Mhm. And then if I'd like to up the game a little bit and get a little bit more dynamic. Mm hmm, mm hmm. I mean it doesn't look intimidating, looks like something new to your, what you're doing right there can do in the middle of your living room floor. So, you know, not being intimidating and being pretty accessible to everyone. Interesting that you've come up with this. I think this is going to be a bit of a game changer in the fitness space. Really appreciate your time. Your insight. Congratulations on the work that you're doing, mike, Fitch, founder and creator of animal flow