Ido Portal: Israeli movement teacher widely regarded as a leading authority on movement practice, drawing from capoeira, dance, gymnastics and martial arts. He has trained elite athletes including UFC champion Conor McGregor.
What this episode covers
Andrew Huberman hosts movement expert Ido Portal for a wide-ranging conversation on what movement really is and how to practice it. Portal argues movement is not just physical translation through space but the entity tying together action, emotion, and thought, and resists tight definitions in favor of open, playful exploration. They connect his practical ideas (squatting, spinal waves, walking, the small frame, eye and head use, touch and proximity) to neuroscience of motor neurons, neuroplasticity, vision, and evolution. The discussion repeatedly returns to themes of failure as the gate to learning, variability and mutation as the engine of growth, and the limits of language and 'hacks.'
Recommended on this episode
Yoga Body
Mark Singleton
“For example, yoga, there is a good book called the "Yoga Body", which will destroy a lot of people's yoga practice.”— guest
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
E.T.
Steven Spielberg
“That comes from seeing the movie "E.T." when I was a kid and puffing out my stomach and then realizing that I could wave it”— Andrew Huberman
The Spinal Engine
Serge Gracovetsky
“Like the work of Gracovetsky on the spine, "The Spinal Engine", and to see how these old ways of moving”— guest
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
Edward O. Wilson
“had this beautiful word and indeed named a book. Actually, the word was better than the book... This word is consilience”— Andrew Huberman
Big reveals from this episode
- Portal flips Huberman's framing: we are not a brain with a body but a body with a brain, with movement as the entity tying everything together.
- Portal explains his squat challenge: accumulate 30 minutes a day resting in an unloaded squat to restore a fundamental, eliminated human position.
- He claims he has injured many of his students and that a totally safe teaching system has practically nothing to offer.
- Spinal waves can trigger emotional releases, and 'first you fuck him up' before an athlete's growth and freshness arrive.
- Huberman cites neuroscientist Erich Jarvis that song and dance may have preceded and driven the evolution of speech and language.
- Portal claims people go to BJJ classes mainly to be touched, not to learn BJJ, framing touch deprivation as an underdiscussed adult problem.
- Huberman states visualization helps mainly people already skilled at it; nothing replaces real physical practice for improving movement.
- Portal says the modern yoga most people practice is heavily Western-influenced and very linear, unlike rounded traditional dances and martial arts.
Worth remembering
- Nobel laureate Sherrington called movement 'the final common path,' reflecting how much of the nervous system is devoted to it.
- Chameleons stick to walls via van der Waals forces, exchanging molecules with the surface, not by suction or stickiness.
- A decerebrate cat with its neocortex removed can still walk on a treadmill ('fictive motion'), showing patterns are downloaded into the spine.
- Motor neurons controlling undulation in fish are molecularly identical to those controlling spinal undulation in humans.
- In experts like Federer the racket trajectory is highly stereotyped, while novices' movements look like a tangle of rubber bands.
- Soviet researcher Bernstein found a sledgehammer strike became more accurate even as the variance in individual body points increased.
- Panoramic, soft-gaze vision uses the fast magnocellular pathway, giving reaction times up to four times faster than narrow focus.
- Myopia can develop because too much close-up focus lengthens the eyeball; lack of panoramic vision drives the change.
- Noam Sobel's lab found people who shake hands wipe the other person's chemicals onto their own face over 85% of the time.
- A pre-motor system constantly hums in anticipation; movement occurs when these gates are released, smoothly or ballistically.