Core Coiling and the Weck Method

This week I knew what I wanted to write about, but because my brain was so scrambled from the 3 days I spent down in San Diego last weekend taking the Weck Method Qualification Course and learning all about Core Coiling, Limit Force Elastic and Bosu ball compression techniques, it’s taken me a minute to figure how exactly to explain myself.

It all started about a month ago when I came across a concept known as the coiling core and the exercises that tap you into it, which caused me to spiral into an obsession about the circular nature of our universe and into the arms of a teacher who eccentricities are currently polarizing the fitness industry.

There’s a good chance I’ll lose a few readers by opening this email with a story about my first time doing an exercise but if you’ve read on this far, cheers and now bear with me for a minute.

After my first experience tapping into the coil something about me felt fundamentally different. I can only compare it to my first time trying psychedelics, where before I took it I didn’t know and after I took it, I knew. It was as if I had downloaded some kind of information which shifted the way I knew and experienced myself.

The coil is not an invention. In fact many of the world’s top performers are able to access the coil without knowing that they are coiling at all. But the coil is at the root of human efficiency, in that it allows the body to spiral around it’s center of mass causing you to move faster, with more balance and with less energy. But these are the things I learnt going in depth for 3 days with the Weck MethodCreator, David Weck and head trainer Chris Chamberlin. What attracted me to this method in the first place was still the feeling of that first exposure I had a month ago.

When I walked out of my first coil, it was as if my torso had springs in it and my mind became flushed with creativity. I didn’t even walk out of it actually, I sprang out of it and bounded across the living room setting my downstairs neighbors off on another one of their regular freakouts. I couldn’t quite believe the physical sensations it caused me to have and in my mind I began to obsess over spirals. I saw them everywhere. I thought about spirals in tree trunks and how we are standing on a massive spherical collection of matter spiraling our way through the universe. I thought about how our DNA is made up of spirals, how our heart is a spiral and how our muscles are just spiraling out all throughout our bodies. But what really got me good, was how vivid my dreams became. And then how vivid my friends and clients dreams became. Some people told me that they never dreamt but remembered having vivid ones the night after coiling. Some had nightmares and others had wild sex dreams! Nothing I have ever taught or experienced has effected people’s dream state and so this is totally new to me.

I thought about it a lot and came up with a theory. The standard coil setup employs a whole body contraction but you are positioned in a way that your body is spiraling upwards from the ground like a barber pole. When you contract any muscle, it requires an electrical impulse delivered by your nervous system. When you spiral anything it seems to travel faster. So I recon that when you coil, this entire body contraction produces a spiral of energy from the ground up which gathers speed, shooting up and out through your head, potentially causing some kind of psychological shift. I chatted about this with David a little bit and we likened it to the waking of the Kundalini spirit, the serpent that lies within us.

The coiling core isometrics are just the start, this concept can be applied to all the different ways that we move and I’m excited to be at the forefront of experimentation. We were only the 6th group to go through the course and there have been many great trainers with a ton more experience than I have who are applying this concept to their athletes already. If you are a baseball fan or an NFL fan, you are going to see a shift in the way these athletes move as the Weck Method catches on. To be honest, I felt a little out of my league that weekend in the Weck Method Lab. I’m not well versed in American sports, but I do know surfing and all I see are coils when I’m watching the best and now I have a slow mo app to show you what I mean. Stay tuned to my Instagram for more of that and until next time, don’t forget your ABC’s (Always be coiling).