Basics Aren’t Sexy – Here’s How to Learn to Love Them

I used to run a Brazilian jiu-jitsu study group with a few friends.

No instructor, no mat fees, we just got together and drill. Most sessions we’d pick one basic movement and work it for a couple of hours. The same leg drag. The same knee-to-belly, over and over.

Sounds boring. It isn’t, and here’s why.

When we roll with other people later, that movement is just there. We don’t think about it, we don’t hope it shows up. It works, because we put in the reps when nothing was on the line.

That’s what the basics are for. They’re the thing you keep coming back to so you can count on your body when it actually matters.

Curry isn’t inventing a fancier three. He’s drilling certainty.

Same shot, ten thousand times, until it’s automatic when the game is on the line. Watch any pro, any dancer, any martial artist who’s been at it for decades, and it’s the same story.

They never stop running the basic steps. They get so good at them that everything else becomes possible.

You never graduate from the basics.

I’m 53 and I still do bear, monkey, and frogger, the most basic movements we teach. Before we go any further, though, we need to nail down what “the basics” even are, because most people get this wrong.

What People Get Wrong About “the Basics”

Most people hear “basics” and picture beginner exercises. The kiddie pool. Stuff you do until somebody lets you into the deep end.

That’s not it.

When we say basics, we mean the foundation, the base that everything else gets built on.

And underneath every skill or movement you’ll ever work on, there are three of them:

• Strength, which includes force and endurance
• Flexibility, which includes mobility and range
• Control, which includes skill and coordination

Every skill breaks down into these three.

Doesn’t matter how advanced. The more complex the movement, the more pieces it breaks into.

Take the bear. Looks simple. There’s a lot going on under the hood.

• Shoulder control
• Cross-body coordination
• Hip mobility
• Spinal extension
• Hamstring and calf flexibility
• Wrist strength

When you see a movement as a stack of smaller pieces instead of one big thing, you can find the piece that’s actually giving you trouble and put your time there. That’s how the advanced people you admire train. They take a skill apart, drill the weak pieces, and let them come back together.

We’ve written previously about how complex movement builds up from simple parts.

Everyone, forever, needs strength, flexibility, and control. Which ones you need, and how much, is the part that belongs to you.

You Can’t Build on a Base You Don’t Own

This is the part people gloss over, and it’s the one that matters most.

In every seminar I teach, the folks who struggle the most are the experienced movers. I taught a group in Australia once with some genuinely good athletes in the room. I started them on basic patterns, and within a few minutes half of them went, “Huh, I’m not as strong as I thought. I’m not as flexible as I thought.” These were skilled people. The base just wasn’t there underneath the skills.

Here’s why that happens. Most of us define our goals as somewhere other than where we are right now. We fixate on the place we want to get to, and we never really master the body we’ve already got. Then we stack more strength, more endurance, more load on top of a base we never owned.

It’s like handing a brand-new driver the keys to a 600-horsepower Ferrari. More power doesn’t help. It just gives you more ways to wreck. You end up working harder and harder and somehow staying in the same place.

Our clients put this better than I can, and a lot of them tell beginners the exact same thing: slow down and own the base first. You can read what they say in their advice to new folks. And if you want to see how the complex stuff gets built on top of owned basics, we walk through that over here.

Owning where you are is the only ground the next step can stand on. It can feel like going backward. It isn’t.

Find Your Weak Link

So you’ve got three attributes and a skill that breaks into pieces. Where do you actually start?

You start with the piece that’s holding you back. You’ve got limited time and limited attention, so you don’t spread it evenly across everything. You find the weak link and you pour your time there. Fix the thing that’s actually stopping you, and the whole movement moves.

Once you know which piece to build, good form is how you build it, one rep at a time. We get into that in detail in our article on good form. Picking the right thing to work on, then doing each rep well, that’s most of the game right there. Figuring out where your real limit is beats grinding harder at the stuff you’re already good at.

Take one skill you’ve been stuck on and be honest about which of the three is the holdup. Usually you already know. You’ve just been avoiding it because it’s the boring one.

Strength, Flexibility, Control, and How to Spot Your Weak Link

Strength

The basic components of strength include power and endurance.

Strength is more than what you can lift. It’s power, which is how fast you can use it, and endurance, which is how long you can use it.

How to tell if it’s your weak link: you can get into a position but you can’t hold it, or you fade after a few good reps and the rest get sloppy.

Where to build it: for power, work jumps. Our jump tutorial has progressions for every level. For endurance, locomotion is hard to beat, and it’s a lot more interesting than another set of timed holds.

Flexibility

Mobility and joint health are necessary parts of flexibility.

Flexibility is just being able to get into the positions you need. It’s mobility, which is that range applied in motion, plus healthy joints that move well without pain.

How to tell if it’s your weak link: you physically can’t reach the position. Your heels won’t drop, your shoulders won’t open, your hips won’t let you sit into it.

Where to build it: put your squat into motion instead of treating it like a static stretch, and use targeted joint work like we show in our Body Maintenance Guide.

Control

Balance and coordination are the basics of body control.

Control is what lets you apply your strength and flexibility smoothly and on purpose. It’s balance and coordination.

How to tell if it’s your weak link: you’ve got the strength and the range, but the movement is shaky. You can’t pause partway through, and you wobble when you slow it down.

Where to build it: work your balance with something like front scales or standing on one leg with your eyes closed, and train coordination directly, since your nervous system builds those pathways through repetition.

Three attributes. Find the one that’s yours, and aim your time at it.

Why a Number Is Never a Basic

A lot of groups will tell you a one or two minute handstand hold is a basic requirement before you’re allowed to do anything else. That number is made up.

A handstand hold can’t be a basic, because the handstand itself is built on other things. Wrist strength, open shoulders, a strong core and hips. Those are the basics. The hold time is just a number somebody picked.

Here’s an even clearer one. People ask me about the planche all the time. Everyone talks about straight-arm strength, and sure, that matters. But the real basic of the planche is wrist and finger strength. I’ve watched plenty of strong people who have all the muscle to hold it, but their wrists aren’t ready, so they’re stuck. They skipped the boring piece to chase the shiny skill, and the boring piece is the exact thing holding them back.

Same logic with push-ups. The point of a push-up isn’t to do more push-ups. It’s to build the strength for the things you actually want to do out in your life. Chase a rep count and you miss the whole point.

A number feels good. You tick the box and you move on. But owning your wrists for the planche isn’t a box you tick. It’s a thing you keep building, year after year.

The real basics of any skill are the pieces it’s made of. Not the skill itself, and not a number somebody pulled out of the air.

Practice YOUR Basics

It would be easy for us to hand you a list. Ten exercises, this many reps, hold for this long, call it the GMB Fundamentals and slap a checkmark next to each one. A checklist is comforting.

That’s not what we’re after. We’re after physical autonomy, which means understanding what your body needs for the goals you actually have. When you know what your basics are, for your body and your goals, you can work on them head-on.

And coming back to the basics is never dropping down a level. Every time you return to them, you bring everything you’ve picked up since. More strength, more awareness, more control. You’re looking at the same movement from higher up. It’s a spiral, and each time around you’re standing higher than before.

I still do bear, monkey, and frogger. I’m not doing them because I never moved on. I’m doing them because they’re where everything else comes from, and every single time I come back, I pull a little more out of them.

That’s what mastering the basics really means. Not finishing them. Owning them, and letting them carry you forward.

That kind of work, figuring out what your basics actually are, is exactly what our curriculum is built to do, and Elements is where it starts.

Elements is the first phase. We assess where you really are, then give you the strength, flexibility, and control work that fits your body and your goals. It’s how you find your own base and build something solid on top of it.