As someone who considers themselves relatively fit and strong, animal-style exercise is shockingly and humiliatingly hard.
Jake Dearden, a trainer, influencer and fitness racer is taking me through some floor moves and instantly I’m reduced to a puce-faced beginner. In my head, I’m aiming for the fluid motion of a cat or the contained power of a primate but instead, I’m a retiree who’s lost their reading glasses under the sofa.
‘Animal’ or ‘primal’ movement is having a moment. Chris Hemsworth has been seen making his way across the floor on his hands and feet. Conor McGregor, an MMA fighter, trained in this way many years ago and now social media is abuzz (440,000 Instagram posts on the animal flow hashtag).
Dearden is a keen advocate: “You don’t need any kind of weights, you can do the moves anywhere, they are full body and they require mobility. If you do conventional resistance machine workouts, you’re not engaging the core, you’re not having to think about the movement.”