Heal Yourself and Move

Heal Yourself and Move Heal Yourself and Move shows you how to transform your body and training effortlessly, powerfully a

Issue 6 of the Substack is live.Somatic Fitness Has Arrived in Melbourne. Here's What's Underneath It.A studio has opene...
02/06/2026

Issue 6 of the Substack is live.

Somatic Fitness Has Arrived in Melbourne. Here's What's Underneath It.
A studio has opened in Melbourne. The word somatic is suddenly in circulation. People are saying it without flinching.

I've been waiting for this moment for two decades.

For most of that time, I couldn't use the word in a room without losing the room. The blank look, the polite redirection — they came in fast. So I built a whole vocabulary of workaround language. Relaxation, connection, deep muscles, release. Because the actual word was a category killer.

Now it's a category opener. And the essay is about what's actually underneath the word — the lineages it comes from, the teachers I trained with who passed it down, and the three reframes it brings to cardio, strength, and flexibility when it's done accurately rather than bolted to a conventional fitness frame.

If you've trained for years and sensed there was something more to it that you couldn't quite name — this is what you were sensing.

Free to read. Link in comments.

Issue 6 of the Substack drops tomorrow.Somatic Fitness Has Arrived in Melbourne. Here's What's Underneath It.A studio ha...
02/06/2026

Issue 6 of the Substack drops tomorrow.

Somatic Fitness Has Arrived in Melbourne. Here's What's Underneath It.
A studio has opened. The word is in circulation. People are saying somatic without flinching.

I've been waiting for this moment for two decades.

For most of that time, I couldn't use the word in a room without losing the room. Now it's a category opener. The doorway is real, and there's something genuinely transformative on the other side of it — when it's done accurately.

Tomorrow morning, an essay about what's actually underneath the word. What it asks of you. And what it can do when it's done properly.

7am Melbourne. Link in bio.

Issue 5 of the Substack is live.The Linearity Distortion.There's a sentence I find myself saying to almost everyone I wo...
26/05/2026

Issue 5 of the Substack is live.

The Linearity Distortion.

There's a sentence I find myself saying to almost everyone I work with: you're trying to force a straight line through a body that's built from spirals.
Think about how most of us were taught to move. Lift the weight straight up. Press straight out. Same rep, again and again, identically. Clean, repeatable, straight.
But your body isn't built from straight lines. Every joint rotates. The connective tissue runs in spirals. Even a movement that looks perfectly straight is a sequence of spirals underneath. So when you train the straight line, the body produces it by overriding its own spiral nature — and the gap between the two has to go somewhere. That gap is the tension, the plateau, the injury that arrives doing something ordinary.

It explains something a lot of people feel and can't name: getting fitter or stronger, and somehow feeling worse in the body the longer it goes on. And the moment, somewhere after forty, when it feels like an off-switch flipped.

The good news in the piece: that's not decline. It's a strategy running out, not a body. Change the strategy and the body answers — I've watched people in their seventies do exactly that.

Free to read. Link in comments.

Issue 5 of the Substack drops tomorrow.The Linearity Distortion.Your body is built from spirals. Almost everything most ...
26/05/2026

Issue 5 of the Substack drops tomorrow.

The Linearity Distortion.

Your body is built from spirals. Almost everything most of us were taught about movement asks it to travel in straight lines — lift straight up, press straight out, same rep again and again.

The body can produce the straight line. But it does it by overriding the spiral nature underneath. And the gap between the line you're imposing and the body you're imposing it on has to go somewhere.

That gap is your tension. Your plateau. Your injury waiting to happen.
Tomorrow morning — what's actually going on underneath, why most people change immediately in a place they didn't expect, and what shifts when you stop overriding the one thing your body already knows how to do.

7am Melbourne. Link in bio.

22/05/2026

Two years of pain in one foot.
He’d been told: lose some weight, your foot will feel better.
I asked one question. Is the other foot a problem?
No. Same weight on both feet. Same body. Same shoes, same floors, same hours standing. One foot wrecked. One foot completely fine.
If the weight were the cause, both feet would be in trouble. They weren’t. So the weight wasn’t the driver. It might have been a passenger. It was not the cause.
Three weeks later — no weight lost — he can take the pain to zero on demand. On a long day on his feet it never gets past a four. Most of the time it sits at zero. In his words, he can’t even notice it.
Pain gets blamed on the obvious villain — the weight, the age, the wear and tear. And the obvious villain is so easy to accept that nobody checks whether it actually fits.
One question often does the checking. If this were the cause, what else would have to be true?
His foot was never about his weight. It was about whether anyone had shown him how to carry it.

A man came to me with two years of pain in one foot.He'd been told, more than once: lose some weight, and your foot will...
22/05/2026

A man came to me with two years of pain in one foot.
He'd been told, more than once: lose some weight, and your foot will feel better.
I asked him one question.
Is the other foot a problem?
No. Same weight on both feet. Same body. Same shoes, same floors, same hours standing. One foot wrecked. One foot completely fine.
If the weight were the cause, both feet would be in trouble. They weren't. So the weight wasn't the driver. It might have been a passenger. It was not the cause.
Three weeks of work later — no weight lost — he can take the pain to zero on demand, under full load, during ordinary daily activity. On a long day on his feet it never gets past a four. Most of the time it sits at zero. In his words: he can't even notice it.
This is the thing I keep running into. Pain gets blamed on the obvious villain — the weight, the age, the wear and tear — and the obvious villain is so easy to accept that nobody checks whether it actually fits the evidence.
One question often does. If this were the cause, what else would have to be true? And then you look, and the story falls apart, and the real thing underneath it becomes findable.
His foot was never really about his weight. It was about whether anyone had shown him how to carry it.

What You're Actually Lifting — Issue 4 of the Substack is live.Lindy is in the studio with a four-pound dumbbell. I'm th...
19/05/2026

What You're Actually Lifting — Issue 4 of the Substack is live.

Lindy is in the studio with a four-pound dumbbell. I'm three feet away from her with a sixteen-kilo kettlebell. We are doing exactly the same thing.

Same protocol. Same internal discipline. Same diagnostic question being asked of the body, at every rep, at every angle.

Am I lifting the weight, or am I lifting the weight plus the bit of me that locks into tension?

If you can answer that question honestly, and you're willing to let the answer change what you do next, then everything in this essay follows.

For anyone who's training and not getting the transfer into ordinary life. For anyone in their fifties, sixties, seventies who's been told their body is just declining. For anyone who's been hurt by their own gym session and wondered what they were doing wrong.

Link in bio. Free.

Issue 4 of the Substack drops tomorrow.What You're Actually Lifting.When you pick up a weight you're lifting two things....
19/05/2026

Issue 4 of the Substack drops tomorrow.

What You're Actually Lifting.

When you pick up a weight you're lifting two things. The weight, and the bit of you that locks into tension in order to lift it. Most of strength training is the second thing — getting stronger and getting strain at the same time.

The strain doesn't go away when you finish the workout. It waits, in your pec or your trap or your lower back, until you reach for something light and ordinary and it tears something that wasn't ready.

Tomorrow morning — what to do instead. Plus the number you should be able to lift in each arm. And why the body's age-based decline is mostly something else dressed up.

7am Melbourne. Link in bio.

The Fork That Tore Your Back — Issue 3 of the Substack is live.I want to tell you why the fork tore your back.Not litera...
14/05/2026

The Fork That Tore Your Back — Issue 3 of the Substack is live.

I want to tell you why the fork tore your back.

Not literally a fork, though sometimes literally a fork. A box of nappies. A toddler in the doorway. A grocery bag in one hand and a car key in the other. The small, ordinary action that suddenly stops being small.

The official story is bad luck. The real story is that the fork was the last action in a chain that started two hours earlier on a gym floor.

The piece is for anyone who has ever torn something doing something small. For anyone who's started to think their body is just getting older. For anyone in the gym who's wondered why the strength they're building isn't actually making the rest of their life easier.

Link in bio. Free.

Issue 3 of the Substack drops tomorrow.The Fork That Tore Your Back.For anyone who's ever bent down to pick something sm...
14/05/2026

Issue 3 of the Substack drops tomorrow.
The Fork That Tore Your Back.

For anyone who's ever bent down to pick something small and ordinary off the floor — a fork, a sock, a toddler's shoe — and felt something deep in their back, hip or shoulder go.

The official story is bad luck. The real story is that the small action was the last move in a chain that started two hours earlier in the gym.

Most strength training quietly removes the one thing your body actually needs. The argument tomorrow morning.

7am Melbourne. Link in bio for the Substack.

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https://attractwell.com/ZacJones/page/mi-lab-pain-to-performance-start-for-1, https:

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