Today’s episode features Rafe Kelley, owner of Evolve, Move, Play, a business designed to use movement practice to develop more resilient and embodied humans. Rafe was a basketball player and gymnast (and gymnastics coach) in his teens, and started in the martial arts at 6 years old, studying Tang Soo Do, Aikido, Kung Fu, Kick Boxing, BJJ and Muay Thai. He has experience in modern training disciplines such as sprinting, gymnastics, crossfit, FRC, modern dance and many others.
His primary specialization is in parkour, where Rafe co-founded Parkour visions at age 23, and eventually left to form Evolve, Move, Play. Rafe’s 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.
When we think of training, we think of lifting weights, growing muscles and quantified training programs. At the end of the day, this concept of “training” is really a smaller part of the entire paradigm of human movement. Sports performance coaches tend to think of “movement” as not really being “training”, but when we see things such as the strength to bodyweight ratios of gymnastics, the jumping abilities of basketball/volleyball players, or the dynamic power (and also jumping ability) of a parkour athlete, we realize that play and flowing movement has a critical role in maximizing one’s total development (and do so in a more embodied way).
In this crucial episode, Rafe goes in depth on structured vs. unstructured training ratios, warmup concepts, variability, athleticism and lessons gained from parkour, ideas on complex vs. simple training means and much more.
Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.
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View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.Key Points
- Rafe’s background in athletics and what led him to the movement practice of parkour
- Generalist vs. Specialist considerations in training
- Ratios of structured to unstructured training for better athlete engagement and success
- Impact of a play-based warmup on subsequent training in a session
- Lessons from parkour based training, and it’s impact on more traditional training for outcomes such as vertical jump training
- The impact of more complex training means on more simple physical qualities
- Rafe’s vision for the future of movement and fitness in our culture
“I think the biggest problem we face in our industry is the problem of motivation”
“We’ve got a 30 billion dollar fitness industry, and we have the most unhealthy population in the world”
“What everybody needs to engage in a physical practice is they need some combination of feeling safe enough, feeling like they are supported properly (having social support and not feeling disapproval) and they need a balance between structure and novelty”
“If you have that 80/20 rule (80% of the results with first 20% of the effort), you want to as a generalist, be in the 20% of all these different practices, but you always need room for play”
“Within my own practice and working with people, I find that I weave back and forth between more structure and less structure….In life we’re always dealing with this balance between order and chaos”
“The tao is the point between perfect order and chaos… the way”
“(Regarding the warmup) We always work on flow, we always work on some games where we are chasing each other, and we work on some games where we are sparring, some body to body stuff”
“I don’t like to start with really structured, rote stuff in the beginning because it bores me. I like to get emotionally warmed up for a session first, and then I do the hard work”
“We don’t think enough about how much the emotional and cognitive impact of training impacts the training effect”
“We don’t think enough about how much the emotional and cognitive aspect of training impacts the training effect…. I think a lot of variation in how athletes adapt is how much they enjoy and are intrigued by the process and how deeply it taps them into flow state”
“That would be my guideline, are my students having fun and making progress. If they are have fun and not making progress then you probably need more structure. If they are making progress but they are not enjoying the process at all any more then you are probably going to run into a problem down the line unless you address that”
“In parkour, use time instead of sets and reps”
“I think parkour is incredibly powerful in developing elastic qualities of the athlete”
“Parkour athletes are now flipping and twisting a similar amount to Olympic gymnasts, but they are doing it on inconsistent, variable terrain over hard surfaces… and they have achieved this despite the fact that they don’t have coaching staffs supporting them, they don’t have the same amount of hours, and they didn’t start when they were 4 years old”
“The self organization potential power of athletes, and the power of play is vastly more than we realized, and a lot of our traditional methodologies is probably actually getting in the way of optimal development of athletes”
“If you were able to pull parkour athletes out to other sports, the elastic abilities that they have would be incredibly valuable to any other athlete”
“I jump higher now (age 37 doing parkour) then when I was 21 training specifically to dunk”
“Your whole body (down to the cellular level and the cytoplasm) is responding to whatever type of stimulus that you’re giving it”
“When we engage in a natural movement practice, we are exposing all of our tissues to a much broader set of vectors of force, which is essentially nourishment for the cells to become strong”
“The more complex your training is, the more pathways you are creating adaption on (e.g. why maximal sprinting rises so many other qualities)”
“Variability is really valuable in training because it helps the nervous system identify control factors across multiple iterations”
“One of the triggers to FLOW state is a rich environment and high consequences”
“I think of exercise as supplements, and movement as the whole food”
“Group flow states are super critical to high level group performance”
“If you look at kids when they are playing, they spend a lot of time negotiating the rules (so everyone feels like they have a chance of success and they are safe)”
Show Notes
Sugar Ray/Maradona/Rickson Video
Pedro Salgado Explosive Jumps
Variable Bounding
About Rafe Kelley
Rafe Kelley is the owner of Evolve, Move, Play, a business designed to use movement practice to develop more resilient and embodied humans. Raised by two yoga instructors, he was a basketball player and gymnast (and gymnastics coach) in his teens. Rafe started in the martial arts at 6 years old, studying Tang Soo Do, Aikido, Kung Fu, Kick Boxing, Brazilian Ju Jitsu and Muay Thai.
Rafe also has experience in modern training disciplines such as sprinting, gymnastics, crossfit, FRC, modern dance and many others. His primary specialization is in parkour, the practice of navigating obstacles by jumping, running, flipping or swinging over them, a skill set he primarily taught himself by watching videos and training deep in the woods.
Rafe co-founded Parkour visions at age 23, and eventually left to form Evolve, Move, Play. His students have included world-class parkour athletes and MMA fighters, as well as untrained grandmothers. 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.
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