Gray Cook at Google

I had an opportunity to do a talk at Google recently, and I’d like to invite you to take a look at it. They have a thing called Talks at Google where they invite people to talk about innovation or changes in their profession and some of the things they are seeing or doing to try to promote change. I tried to tell the FMS story as it sits in 2016.

It was one of the hardest talks I’ve ever done because I was speaking directly to the consumer, and directly to whoever is watching the video later. I didn’t have the convenience of leaning on medical or fitness or anatomical terms. I tried to keep it pretty clean, without using slang from our field.

When I articulate what we’re doing at Functional Movement Systems to a professional, it’s completely different than when I talk to a consumer or somebody who may not have the movement background of the people doing movement screens and functional exercise.

I didn’t realize this, but over the last 10 years we’ve amassed quite a few recordings that have been turned into a transcript and are also pretty clean audio. My publisher, OTP, has collected those into an audio book. We put those in sort of a scaled order from a simple approach to movement to the evolution we’ve arrived at today.

In the audio book, you’re going to hear me use some of the same phrases and analogies a few times. That’s because sometimes I can’t think of a better way to say things. But also because these stories create the impact on the audience I’m speaking to at the time.

One of my audiences was a World Summit on movement. One of my audiences was a group of physical therapy students at Duke University. Sometimes I’m just lecturing on a podcast, but each of these talks builds upon the others to help us understand the fitness and the functional and even the clinical concept of how we’ve arrived at our study of movement.

The main theme is that we look at patterns more than parts and let the patterns guide us to review the parts that may be the weakest link.

Here’s the Talk at Google, available as a video, audio and transcript.

If you want to go deeper, the lecture set is called the Gray Cook Lecture Compendium and is available in both audio book and ebook formats. Go for the audio book if you’re like me—I’m an auditory learner; I’d rather take a walk and listen to something than have to give up movement to read something. If you listen to these lectures, I do apologize if you notice some redundancy, but if you hear me using a particular term or phrase or analogy multiple times, it’s because I can’t think of a better one. Maybe you can—but if you can’t, you’re welcome to use mine.

I hope you enjoy.