Today’s episode features Rafe Kelly and Charles St. John.  Rafe is the owner of Evolve Move Play, and has studied and taught a multitude of movement practices spanning gymnastics, parkour, martial arts, weightlifting, Cross-fit and more for decades.  His passion to is help people build the physical practice that will help make them the strongest, most adaptable and resilient version of themselves in movement and in life.  Charles has been training parkour since 2009, and coaching it since 2012. He carries multiple parkour coaching certifications and is a certified personal trainer for general fitness, while he currently coaches at the APEX Denver Parkour (Apexdenver.com) and Circus facility in Colorado.

Motor learning is the worldview by which you keep yourself from over-compartmentalizing elements of a total training program.  It’s how you discover the window, or lens by which an athlete acquires mastery in their sport, and also determines how you go about constructing a training session with the “whole” in mind.  It allows one to see the forest from the trees in the process of athletic mastery.  If we only listen to “speed”, “output” and “drill” oriented material, and leave out the actual over-arching process of motor learning in any sort of athletic performance discussion, we end up with a more over-compartmentalized, less sustainable, less effective, and less enjoyable model of training

On the podcast today, Rafe and Charles speak in the first half, on games they particularly enjoy from a true “generalist” point of view; games that encapsulate the most essential elements of “human-ness” in movement.  These game principles can be plugged into either general (for the sake of better outputs for the subsequent training session), or specific warmups (for the sake of “donor” learning to the main session).  In the second half, we get into a detailed discussion on dynamic points of learning and coaching, speaking on points of drill vs. holistic approach to skills, frequency of feedback (and types of feedback), working with highly analytical athletes, checking the effectiveness of one’s cues, and much more.

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Timestamps and Main Points:

4:41 – Why Rafe and Charles love rugby as a multi-dimensional game that encapsulates a lot of human qualities and opportunities

14:12 – “Hybrid” games that coaches like to play as a generalist warmup to a strength training session, and the emergence of “king of the course”

23:21 – How to craft a “donor” activity to prepare for your primary training activity

32:49 – What the balance is, in parkour, on teaching actual technique, vs. decisions

52:08 – How to properly tell stories and frame skills to an athlete, without letting words get in the way

1:02:11 – How many efforts to let an athlete perform, before coaches should seek to intervene in the form of a cue or instruction, and how to help athletes be better self-learners

1:14:34 – Cueing and instructing athletes who may desire more structure than others

1:22:37 – Thoughts on velocity of a movement, and the transferability of drills, or slower versions of skills, versus fast movements

1:27:02 – “Feeding the Error” and principles of variable learning that can assist in skill development

1:32:38 – How to improve learning by reducing potential “fear” constraints in sports with a potential risk element



“I would contest that (rugby) is the best designed ball sport… it’s the only sport I played that allowed for a range of body types”

“Team sports have all of (generalist fitness) demands in them… and you have to do it in a team manner, you have to cooperate with other people”