Evolve Move Play Podcast

The coronavirus is spreading across the globe and those of us in the movement community are going to play a vital role in the health and safety of our communities. Here's what you should know and do to help get through this epidemic!

The way you train directly affects the way you perform and the way you live. Are you stuck training dead patterns and irrelevant drills? Let's take a look at how you can breathe some life into your practice!

Are you a movement coach looking to revolutionize the way you train your students? Using a constraint lead approach is a surefire way to improve skill acquisition and overall engagement in your program. Check it out!

Think parkour is all about big jumps and flashy tricks? What if we told you it could lead to a deeper understanding of yourself, your community, and the way you approach hurdles in your life?

In our last three podcast episodes, we’ve gone a long way towards explaining why it’s important for humans to approach motor learning and skill acquisition from a standpoint of ecological dynamics. The human organism is an incredibly complex system of systems and for millions of years we’ve learned skills primarily by means of environmental necessity. If a problem or an opportunity arises, our survival could hinge on our ability to adapt and overcome the situation. This adaptability is one of our greatest powers and it exists in us to this day. Compared to this, the advent of instructors, coaches and learning facilities is relatively new to us. While coaching and instruction are invaluable at certain times and certain places, it is a major mistake when we abandon task constrained learning and unstructured play. Unfortunately this isn’t how the vast majority of our modern physical education programs approach movement and motor learning. The emphasis on competitive team sports and reductionist fitness trai

SHOW NOTES 00:00 - Intro 03:44 - Shawn’s Background 08:05 - Teaching Without Teaching 11:26 - What is Ecological Dynamics? 17:38 - Scaling Complexity, Manipulating Constraints 30:54 - The Zone of Optimal Challenge 35:24 - The Performance is the Screen 39:34 - Aliveness 46:57 - Task Constrained Learning 50:16 - Zooming In and Zooming Out 54:48 - Attention, Intention and Calibration 1:15:01 - Balancing Extrinsic and Intrinsic Attention 1:25:23 - Becoming Movement Problem Solvers How do humans learn to move? Be it in sports, fitness, trade skills, performance arts or just everyday life, the process of acquiring skill in movement is something that we all must go through. For decades now it seems like the most widely adopted method of motor learning has been to apply a reductionist mindset to skill acquisition.  The idea is to improve our movement by practicing isolated component skills with the hopes of perfecting patterns that can then be integrated back into the bigger picture task. For instance, if you w

We believe that the practice of movement is more than learning neat tricks and improving our physical aesthetics. While those things are great, what we are aimed at is a practice that goes beyond just the physical and improves as many aspects of our lives as possible. Movement is essentially an expression of the self— the body-mind organism that we are. It is how we interact with and experience literally everything going on within and around us. Our connections to the environment, to others, and to ourselves immediately affect the quality of our lives. If you are constantly unhappy with your own actions, scared of the world around you, and being alienated by your peers, cultivating a sense of purpose can be incredibly difficult to do. Building an ecology of practices that strengthen these relations gives us a better chance to create the life we want for ourselves. We can find affordances in our environment that nurture us and give us opportunities for learning and growth. We learn how to communi

It might seem obvious, but it’s incredibly important to understand that humans are complex. Not only are we physically complex, but we’re cognitively, emotionally, and socially complex as well. This is in big part because we must survive in a world that is just as mind numbingly complex as we are and, often times, directly hostile towards us. Existing amidst this complexity has required that we become a versatile and adaptive system of systems that is properly equipped to recognize, understand, and solve an incalculable number of emergent problems or tasks. Our capacity for self organization and skill acquisition is staggering, but as our technological strength grows our world becomes more reliant on computers and machines. As a result, we have made the mistake of adopting patterns of teaching and learning that, while they might make sense from an engineers standpoint, are actually at odds with how humans most effectively learn. I would wager that most of you reading this have experienced a time w

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a story is worth countless lessons. Each person who listens to a tale can see it freshly from the frame of their own life experiences and glean from it a level of wisdom that may have never been otherwise captured. More so, because we continually grow and gain new insights throughout the course of our lives, as we return to these stories time and again we find that they offer us new wisdom that we hadn’t been ready to receive before. John Vervaeke speaks of this as being a kind of sacredness; a relationship between person and narrative that affords an inexhaustible fount of insight and discovery. Throughout history and across cultures, the most prevalent theme humans have been sharing with one another is the epic struggle between order and chaos. It is a universal truth that life begets conflict and that the most admirable trait a person can aspire to is the ability to face the challenges of their life head on. To us, movement practice is a path towards tha

Have you ever sat down by a campfire and listened with rapt attention to a well-told tale? Before we had books, video games and movies this was our most important form of entertainment. Stories are more than just a means of entertainment though, they are an ancient and integral part of the human experience. 44,000 years ago, early humans were etching figures of heroic hunters and mighty beasts onto cave walls in Indonesia. In 1800 BC the epic of Gilgamesh was being scribed onto clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia. More recently the Harry Potter series has sold over 500 million copies worldwide and last year total box office revenue in North America amounted to $11.89 billion. It’s not hard to understand why the power of storytelling is held so close to our hearts. Stories make sense of the world. They allow us to see life through the eyes of another. They guide us to insight, deepen our understanding, and increase our chances of survival in a dangerous and hostile universe. Of all the tales told around

What does movement mean to you? Is it just a fun pastime? Maybe you use it as a tool to reach certain health markers or become more attractive? Is it a grueling obligation or some form of punishment you put yourself through to make up for unhealthy life choices? Whatever it may be, chances are you’ve been conditioned to view movement in some light that doesn’t capture the ways it can truly serve you, your community and your environment as a whole. At Evolve Move Play we’ve taken on the sizeable task of reawakening people to the power and purpose of a dedicated human movement practice. We’ve found that movement is not only a source of physical nourishment, but mental, social, and emotional nourishment as well. Through trial and error, extensive studies, experimenting and testing our theories, we’ve been able to build a sound framework around what we practice, how we practice, and most importantly, WHY we practice. In this piece, and the accompanying video, we’re going to give you a look at those three elem

Greetings everybody and welcome back to the Evolve Move Play Podcast! We’ve taken a bit of time off to focus on running retreats and releasing our Natural Parkour Online Course. It will be a few weeks before we are ready to get the podcast running again full steam but we decided to offer this special episode the celebrate the release of our friend Mark Walsh's book Embodiment. Find that book here https://www.amazon.com/Embodiment-Moving-mindfulness-Mark-Walsh/dp/1916249221 For our 31st episode we have the one and only Mark Walsh of Embodied Yoga Principles joining us to talk about his new book “Embodiment: Moving Beyond Mindfulness”. This is his third time visiting us on the podcast, and if you didn’t catch his last two appearances, I highly recommend that you go listen to those first to get a real solid idea of just what embodiment is and why it is so important for those of us working towards our most heroic selves. This episode we will talk at length about how to conceptualize our practices and how to l

We recently held our 2019 Return to the Source seminar and by all accounts it was the best event we’ve put on to date. What started years ago as a three day parkour seminar in nature has blossomed and evolved into an event that time and time again brings people together and reconnects them to core components that make life feel more meaningful. This year we were joined by Aaron Cantor, an incredible coach and friend who’s been on the podcast before. He was both a participant and a facilitator at Return to the Source, and it was an absolute joy to have him present to share his stories, movement, humor and support. Not to mention also leading the group in a wonderful dance party on the final night. After the event we sat down to film an interview for the podcast, but decided to make this one a little special and let Aaron ask all the questions. Where did Evolve Move Play start, how did it get to where it is now, and where do we intend to go? What’s the aim of EMP and how do we go about achieving it? How

RETURN TO THE SOURCE AUTUMN RETREAT! Oct 3-6th https://www.evolvemoveplay.com/ev_event/autumn-retreat-2019/ TODAY'S EPISODE Motivation seems to be a big problem. The cost of being a member at your average gym is about $60 a month yet every year about 5.1 million Americans end up wasting a total of around $1.8 billion in unused gym memberships.  It’s a strange statistic if you think about it. We all know that movement is vital in maintaining a healthy body and brain. We know that positive lifestyle improvements are good for mitigating stress and anxiety, increasing brain function, reducing the risk of diseases, and can make us less susceptible to injuries.  Meanwhile, we are bombarded by marketing that idolizes those who are fit and healthy. Our movies, our television shows, the people we follow on social media... all make it clear that having a strong, fit-looking body brings great social reward and probably loads of self respect and confidence. To add to it, we even have state of the art facilities

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle asserts that we are always operating in a state of limited understanding. No matter how many variables we take into consideration, no matter how long we worry and fret, we can never have all the data since the amount of data in any given situation is infinite. At the same time, however, humans have minds that are incredibly good at finding patterns, understanding cause and effect, and creating storylines that lead to places of deeper understanding and profound meaning. We tend to love solving puzzles and tracing our fingers along the lines of maps. We thirst for knowledge and understanding and truth. Every human finds themselves in an ancient dance between order and chaos and while many of us may have natural inclinations towards one end or the other, there is an undeniable power in being able to harness the strengths of both. Can we establish enough order and discipline to prepare ourselves for the rigors of survival while never losing the sense of awe and mystery that

“To me, ultimately martial arts means honestly expressing yourself… Now it’s very difficult to do. It is easy for me to put on a show and be cocky... I can make all kinds of phony things and be blinded by it. Or I can show you some really fancy movement. But to express oneself honestly, not lying to oneself, and to express myself honestly, now that my friend is very hard to do. “ -Bruce Lee In this podcast we’ve talked a lot about the process of building an ecology of practices around becoming our most heroic selves. As I said in the last episode’s description: the things we choose to do require that we invest our time, money, and energy in order to absorb the lessons that are given. Often times the huge investment that we put into our practice of choice can bias us towards believing that there’s no need for other practices, that our one discipline has it all and is superior to all the rest. We can tie our egos into the practice to the point where we see ourselves as products of the school in which we trai

In this complex and chaotic world, there are an endless array of hobbies, past times, disciplines and studies that can be woven into the tapestry of our lives and choosing the ones that are capable of enriching our existence in the most broadly applicable ways can be an incredibly daunting task. The fact of the matter is that whatever we choose to do carries with it the weight of our time and commitment. Because we devote considerable portions of our lives to these practices it’s worth considering how they develop our character - which requires that we honestly consider how we want or need our character to be developed. Mark Walsh is an embodiment teacher who has made the structure of self transcendence a core focus of his work and he’s joining us today to provide some deep insight into how we can live more embodied lives and truly get the most out of the practices we pursue. In this episode we will detail the paths and pitfalls of both generalist and specialist training, how to determine the efficiency or r

***Listen to our first conversation with John Vervaeke https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/meaning-crisis-role-movement-practice-john-vervaeke/id1349557801?i=1000434529380 *** As living, thinking creatures, we are constantly faced with problems that must be solved in order to survive and thrive, but have you stopped to think about how do we do it? In the infinite set of variations on how we can act and interact with the world, how do we decode what information is relevant and zero in on actions that yield the results we desire? In our second episode with John Vervaeke we are going to spend a good amount of time unpacking the incredible intricacies of decision making and give you a basic framework for understanding how to differentiate between the types of problems you face and the strategies that will lead you towards effectively solving them. As we’ve covered in many of our podcasts, one of the core issues that we face in movement and in life is the ability to orient to chaos and act, then weigh the

One of the biggest difficulties in progressing as an athlete is deciding on how to structure a training program to best meet the goals that they have set out for themselves. It requires an honest assessment of many different factors such as physical, mental, and emotional capabilities and a firm understanding of how the body and mind work to enhance and sustain performance. Many athletes deal with a lot of frustration around hitting plateaus while many of them struggle to incorporate training routines that are often too complicated or poorly designed to offer any real benefit. Today we are stepping away from the philosophical content and diving into the nuts and bolts of technical development for parkour and movement practitioners. If you’re interested in learning how to take your skill, strength, speed, and subsequent training practices to the next level, our guest Ryan Ford is one of the foremost thinkers on the subject. In our conversation we’re going to talk about practices that beginners should orien

“...the sea's only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong. Now, I don't know much about the sea, but I do know that that's the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions, facing blind, deaf stone alone, with nothing to help you but your own hands and your own head...” -an excerpt from 'Bear Meat' by Primo Levi. The sport of parkour has spent the last decade spreading like wildfire across the globe. We see it in television, movies, and video games. Training facilities are cropping up in nearly every major city and parkour's top athletes and teams usually have tens of thousands (or up to millions) of followers and subscribers on social media. Like anything else that experiences an explosive rise in popularity and public access, parkour has gone through some drastic changes since the days of it's humble concept