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”
“I think that rugby and football are under-rated as self-defense arts”
“For kids, having a free flow based sport as their base is really important, and it’s difficult (for them) to deal with all the stoppage in play (in more structured sports)”
“Making everybody miss (tackling you) seems like such an extraordinary expression of athleticism”
“The fundamental things we think you should be able to do are: martial arts, parkour, some sort of team sport element, and be able to manipulate objects… sticks, balls, ropes… and you shouldn’t just be competent in each of those areas, you should be able to blend them”
“If you think about the goals of (your sport) you can try to abstract a game from those goals rather than just trying to warm up through lighter technical variations of the same technique you are going to be covering anyway, it becomes less redundant and a lot more fun”
“You gotta warm up the brain and the emotions. You are going to have a better lift if you have a game and are laughing, before you get to the lift”
“When I was training in nature, because that was where I was training, what I found is that a lot of the movements that I had expected to have to decompose for people and give them a lot of cues to get them through, they automatically self-organized”
“A lot of times we think they need technical fixes, and it is a physical problem, or is it just like an awareness issue? When its’ awareness, athletes are thinking of the skills as independent expressions, rather than having expression towards something. So what I like to do is teach principles, before techniques.”
“Instead of saying, here’s why you should step your leg fully to the ground, I introduce the idea of having full control of the rhythm of your movement”
“I can tell you what you did, or what you should do, but that doesn’t mean that on the next repetition you’ll be able to do it. There is a little more problem solving that goes into that, so how can we set up a constraint for you that can allow you to start expressing the behaviour that you are trying for”
“Sometimes it is a mechanical problem; you need to get the mechanic to fix the thing. So as coaches, we need to think in these levels of systems. Is it because the glute can’t fire well, or the tibia can’t glide at all? Or is it because it’s a habitual pattern the athlete has and there is no physiological limitation, we just need to do differential learning or feed the error so they can start doing some kinestheic mapping to control the position”
“Pick the highest progression of the skill that can be failed safely”
“That really does matter to people, your ability to empathize with their journey”
“Something as high order as actually doing martial arts skills, can give you mobility. But you can spend years trying to perfect your mobility and have no physical skills to show for it”
“I try to avoid giving a cue until I see someone do something at least 3 times”
“Check your cues with your athletes. Just like they need feedback in your movement, you need feedback on your coaching”
“If you work with high school and college athletes who are part of a team of coaches who are probably variable in terms of competency. So if you can install in students, respectfully a way to know what works for them, to be able to say, thanks but no thanks, to that cue, it’s going to help a lot in athletes being able to sustain themselves in that maelstrom that getting input from 6 different coaches can be”
“That’s the problem I think we have with that type of (hyper-analytical) personality; how can we get them to be more focused on the perceptual information in the environment, and getting an autonomous relationship to it in the expression of their sport”
“A huge issue with those absolute maximal jumps is that they are very easy to break athletes with”
Show Notes
Bill Boomer Water Flow Exercise
Mountain Goats Climbing a Near Vertical Face
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.
About Charles St. John
Charles describes himself somewhat paradoxically as a fitness industry professional and an athletic amateur, in the literal sense of the word. He dabbles in a variety of disciplines for the love of movement, but takes a very academic and business-oriented approach to both his digital marketing for fitness businesses and his coaching and personal training.
Most relevant to our conversation today, he 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 as well. He currently coaches at the APEX Denver Parkour (Apexdenver.com) and Circus facility in Colorado.
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