The primal movement fitness trend—crawling, lunging, and pushing—will take off in 2023

December 26, 2022

When was the last time you crawled across your living room? Or, better yet, stood up from your desk to stretch and twist your body? If it’s been a minute, it might feel good to add more primal movements into your routine so you can bend and move in all the ways in which humans were meant to, reports Bustle.

That’s the idea behind primal fitness, a workout modality that’s poised to be a major trend this year, according to the Pinterest Predicts 2023 report (and the over 1.5 billion views it already has racked up on TikTok). It involves engaging in all the natural movement patterns that have been a part of human mobility and motion for hundreds of thousands of years, says Dorian Cervantes, an instructor with Brooklyn-based obé Fitness. Think squatting, lifting, pushing, running, and carrying.

Primal movement patterns are divided into seven categories: push, pull, squat, hinge, lunge, rotation, and locomotion (aka gait), explains Cervantes. Basically, if the movement gets you out of a modern-day sitting position, it likely counts as primal. The goal is to avoid a sedentary life and get back to the basics when it comes to moving around—all so that you can feel your best.

While it sounds simple, Cervantes notes that the primal movement trend is taking off for a reason. “We as a generation are more health conscious, and we have a better understanding of the importance and benefits of movement and exercise, especially post-lockdown,” she says. “I think we genuinely just want to feel better, and finally people are starting to catch on that you can feel great by moving your body.” And that doesn’t necessarily require you to go all-out with high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workouts every single day. Indeed, primal fitness prioritizes healthy mobility over anything else.

Take a look at the primal movement trend and you’ll notice that it involves a lot of bending, stooping, lunging, and squatting. Advocates say that when you do these movements on a regular basis, you start to feel better from the top of your head to the tips of your toes.

Here’s why: “Primal movements can help with posture, balance, and stability because they intentionally move your body in a way that engages more musculature and it moves the body as a whole, rather than through isolated joint movements,” says ACE-certified personal trainer TJ Mentus. It’s why these kinds of exercises are the perfect antidote to tech-neck and other musculature aches and issues that happen when you hold the same position all day.

Moving in a primal way is also good for your joints, Mentus tells Bustle, because it improves blood flow throughout the body and trains all your muscles to become more balanced. The end result? Supposedly, everything runs more smoothly. According to Mentus, it can even expand the types of activities you’re able to do as your mobility improves, and you start to feel stronger and more stable.

Beyond the physical benefits, primal movements are also great for your mind/body connection, says Cervantes, since they engage multiple muscle groups at once. She points out that it feels good to get up, stretch, and get “unstuck” by moving your whole self the way your ancestors did.

Research contact: @bustle

March 24, 2023

The world’s top alien hunter is about to embark on his most ambitious—and potentially, historical—mission yet, reports The Daily Beast.

Harvard physicist Avi Loeb is organizing a $1.5-million expedition to Papua New Guinea to search for fragments of a very strange meteorite that impacted just off the coast of the Pacific nation in 2014.

There is compelling evidence that the half-meter-wide meteorite, called CNEOS1 2014-01-08, traveled from outside our solar system. And that it’s made of extremely hard rock or metal—a material that’s hard and tough enough to prove the meteorite isn’t a meteorite at all. Maybe it’s an alien probe.

It’s a long-shot effort. After years of work, Loeb and his team have, with a big assist from the U.S. military, narrowed down CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s likely impact zone to a square kilometer of the ocean floor, nearly two kilometers underwater. But the fragments themselves are probably just a few millimeters in size. It’s worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. Loeb is basically preparing to look for big sand in a square-kilometer patch of small sand.

It’s worth the risk, Loeb told The Daily Beast. Any fragments the team recovers could turn out to be “technological”—that is, clearly manufactured and thus strong evidence of the existence of aliens. Or maybe they’re not artificial, but are made of some super-strong material that we’ve never observed until now. A rare metal forged in the hearts of neutron stars, for example.

In any event, “we will learn something new,” Loeb said.

The expedition is almost ready to depart for Papua New Guinea. “We have a boat,” Loeb wrote in on a post on Medium on January 27. “We have a dream team, including some of the most experienced and qualified professionals in ocean expeditions. We have complete design and manufacturing plans for the required sled, magnets, collection nets and mass spectrometer.

“And most importantly,” he wrote, “today we received the green light to go ahead,” referring to the approval of Papua New Guinea’s for the mission.

The plan, Loeb said, is to deploy a variety of custom sand-sifters—some with magnets, others like huge sieves—and methodically search the seafloor for two weeks. The main reason it’s taken eight years to organize the mission is that, first, Loeb and his team had to figure out where the meteorite’s fragments came down to Earth.

It was easier said than done, since no single instrument precisely captured CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s journey to the seafloor. But if anyone was motivated to try, it was Loeb. While these days more and more scientists are coming around to the idea that we’re probably not alone in the universe, Loeb was banging that drum even when it was unpopular.

When a very odd, shiny, football-field-size object streaked across then out of the solar system in 2017, Loeb was among the first scientists to say out loud what others may only have been thinking: This object, which scientists later named ’Oumuamua ( Hawaiian for “scout”), might be an alien probe.

And Loeb isn’t afraid to put his money—well, his donors’ money—where his mouth is. In addition to studying strange interstellar objects such as ’Oumuamua, Loeb through his Galileo Project is painstakingly building humanity’s first global network of small telescopes , which will scan the sky for alien craft, or at least the remains of alien craft.

To narrow down CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s impact zone, Loeb needed data from two sets of instruments. The first set was from U.S. military missile-warning satellites that, thanks to their sensitive infrared sensors, tend to also detect meteorites while scanning for missile-launches.

These satellites can not only provide at least a vague indication of where a meteorite is heading; they also capture images of the fireball that results from a meteorite’s fast, hot trip through Earth’s atmosphere. The timing and intensity of a fireball can tell us a lot about a meteorite’s composition. Basically, the longer it takes for the atmosphere to ignite a meteor, the tougher the meteor is.

After much wheedling, Loeb convinced the Pentagon to release the full fireball data for CNEOS1 2014-01-08. They indicated the 2014 meteorite might be the hardest meteorite on record.

The second set of data Loeb needed was much more precise telemetry for the meteorite’s path than the military could provide. So, he checked on nearby earthquake sensors. “We found that the blast wave from the meteor explosion generated a high-quality signal in a seismometer located at Manus Island,” which is part of Papua New Guinea, Loeb wrote at Medium.

Armed with the two data sets, Loeb and his team were able to narrow the likely impact zone from 100 square kilometers to just one square kilometer. “This reduction in the geographic uncertainty of the … fireball improves the search efficiency in the forthcoming ocean expedition to recover its fragments,” Loeb and company wrote in a study, not yet peer-reviewed, that appeared online on March 13.

After having arranged funding and manpower, narrowing the search zone, and getting the Papua New Guinean government’s approval, Loeb and his team are now putting the finishing touches on their special sand-sifting equipment for recovering magnetic meteoritic debris from the seafloor.

Once it’s all ready, hopefully this summer, Loeb and his team will set sail.

Expectations are running high. But Loeb said he’s bracing for disappointment. “There is a chance it will fail,” he said of his expedition. Even success could be something of a letdown, if the team recovers fragments, but those fragments turn out to be natural in origin rather than artificial.

It’s important to frame even that secondary discovery as a major advancement, Ravi Kopparapu, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told The Daily Beast. “This could give us more confidence on the nature of the interstellar meteor—and could point to whether this meteor is unique or a new class of meteorites.”

Maybe Loeb and his team will go to all that trouble to find the remains of CNEOS1 2014-01-08, only to confirm it isn’t an alien probe. But don’t expect a setback like that to cause Loeb to give up his search for evidence of extraterrestrials. He said he understands how convincing the proof needs to be, and how hard it might be to find it. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he said.

Research contact: @thedailybeast