white belt wrote: ↑Sun Nov 07, 2021 11:01 am
Edit: I guess another thing I’m getting at is that it may be more useful to just play a sport or take a dance/exercise class than to read a bunch of books about the benefits of movement.
Agreed. Don’t read books about the benefits of movement, find a good theory of movement / athletic development and spend time practicing. Side note: most modern hip hop / dance classes for adults are generally geared at people with the ability to understand / be able to replicate advanced dynamic movements at the drop of a hat. Spend time asking around with facilitators for specialty into classes if you want more of an intro.
If RoamingFrancis is trying to become a personal trainer, he doesn’t need to just become a good mover / athlete though, he needs to have a mental model of how to bring others there.
There is great disagreement whether many sports / etc actually develop many of those capacities in some sort of systemic and meaningful ways, but even when it comes to hard core martial arts / dance / etc, we see a lot more of “bucketing” good movers and bad movers based on performance filters and those who have the ability to continue over time (I.e. self selected due to lack of injuries, seeing continuous progressions, etc). Those who got filtered out or filtered down to lower teams are generally the ones who are not fit, prone to injury due to bad movement, etc.
So (in my opinion) the job of a good personal trainer would then be to generally understand how to evaluate and treat the physical shortcomings of this lower tier of “less athletic” or “worse mover” class, and give them a systemic treatment based on the above evaluation to work through fixing their athletic shortcomings and once those are worked through allow them to start having the “training velocity / momentum ” (ability to train skills) of the higher tiers of athletes above through increased athleticism / whatever you want to call the large grouping of physical movement skills.
In my long and thorough experience with many people along the ladder in a place which valued the above (and teaching people to be teachers most of all), it becomes pretty clear that “being athletic” and “being able to train others effectively” are two very different skills, but in order to be a good trainer and lead from the front, you need both. And a big piece of that “being able to train others effectively” skill is understanding a systemic way to train others to be athletic, which may be something a naturally athletic person never had to go through at all(!). Consider it a depth increase holon (Ken Wilber, theory of everything) which needs both to progress. I consider it a highly artisanal skill that is very hard to develop.
Basic intro stuff I recommend studying the programming / exercises recommended from Ben Patrick for bringing people up to a much higher athletic ability / being able To rehab tons of injuries and imbalances. This is very basic (but highly important) development stuff though, equivalent to learning to eat veggies. It is building the machine correctly, but not really using the machine that it has built, you need to add that on top.
Once you’ve built something akin to hitting most of those goals / alongside after you are progressing (obviously I have some criticisms of his teachings and methods, but the results produced are incredible and speak for themselves), you can move into the fun / complex / juicy stuff. All martial arts sit here, so does dance, and high tier gymnastics / the other sports which involve complex object and body manipulation. Choose your own adventure to the things that interest and drive you. This is beyond the personal trainer tier. I studied a lot under the methods of Ido portal / movement culture, but anything with a high drive towards complexity should be continuing to build new athletic skills, then eventually integrate them together, and then this can eventually allow for you to (wittingly and unwittingly) integrate the skills together to make new creative work / patterns (see Jacob’s Stoa ERE talks for more on this).
(Post script; I am not an athletic / movement trainer myself. I have spent thousands of hours training next to them and hanging out with those being trained for such, so these are just my mental observations of the processes being played out next to me.)