Evolve Move Play Podcast

Humans are complex and so is the world through which we navigate. Often times the things we don't pay attention to have an astounding influence on our ability to accomplish our goals and grow as individuals. Subtleties in how we breathe, how we stand, how we move, how we think, how we perceive ourselves, others, or our environment, all coalesce to either help or hinder our efforts in sport and in life. Today we are beginning a conversation with Simon Thakur about how we can change the way we practice the powerful subtleties of our selves so that we can more effectively become the people we want to be. We will be talking about the ecology of practice ranging from meditation and contemplation to specific physical disciplines and how to determine the scope of value that they can offer to us on our personal journeys. We also touch on why the game of Capoeira inherently creates students that learn skills faster and why divorcing the movements from the game tends to negate those results. This is a brief episo

What makes a practice sustainable? What is it that enables someone to devote years of effort and intention to a study? What keeps the fires of motivation stoked and fueled throughout the trials and tribulations of our lives? Finding the answers to those questions is an important and very personal process that can only be walked by the individual who searches; however there is something to be said about the capacity for evolution that is held within the practice itself and the person who studies it. Humans are wildly curious, adaptable, and innovative with a boundless capacity for growth. When we can get past our fixations on comfort, aesthetics, or competitive superiority we can set our aim towards a process of continual learning. We abandon many of the fears associated with failure and begin to seek the limits of our capabilities so that we may expand them. This state of being requires a practice that reflects our own complexities and layers of potential depth; one that will grow with us and offer new a

This week on the Evolve Move Play Podcast we are very excited to have Caitlin Pontrella with us to discuss the importance of play in facilitating learning, developing physical, social & emotional capabilities, and building strong, inclusive communities. We feel this is a topic of paramount importance; as our society moves forward into an age of higher productivity and relationships become more and more built upon a platform of technology, we are gradually seeing the practice of creative, unstructured free play being left by the wayside as rates for anxiety and depression continue to rise. Play is not only where we naturally develop physical capacities like strength, stability, speed, coordination, etc... it's also where we develop our ability to solve problems, communicate with peers, negotiate, and learn empathy. Losing something so incredibly important to us is a real problem which is why it's great to have Caitlin on to talk about her extensive experience on the subject and to discuss what we can do t

Parkour is a sport that, in many ways, is still in it's infancy. The practice only began gaining traction in the late 90's & early 00's yet, in the short time since, we have seen an incredible surge of young athletes performing feats that previously had only been seen in elite gymnastics competitions. Many of these athletes have gleaned their knowledge and skills only by watching internet videos and devoting their free time to practicing with friends at their local spots. The internet has played a surprisingly powerful role in this sudden spike of popularity and skill. YouTube and Instagram feed fuel to the fire of parkour practitioners around the world and of all the pages that are devoted to the practice, Storror has risen above all the rest. Even if you don't know who Callum Powell and the rest of the Storror team are, chances are you would recognize some of their films which highlight their amazing technical abilities and penchant for jumping rooftop gaps hundreds of feet in the air. We are really ex

For most people, the prospect of failure is highly intimidating. It's uncomfortable and usually comes with some sort of consequence that can drastically alter our lives or the way we view ourselves. Commonly the approach is to try and avoid failure altogether and stick to things that are comfortable and as non-threatening as possible. The problem with this ends up being that life is uncontrollable, and so long as we are people who are striving for things, the chance of failure is always looming. What if we looked at this problem differently though? What if instead of avoiding failure, we faced it? What if we practiced falling down, getting rejected, coming up short just enough to learn how to do it gracefully and without catastrophe? What if we removed our fear of failure and replaced it with understanding and confidence instead? It's interesting to think of how far we might go towards achieving the things we set out to do. On this week's episode of The Evolve Move Play Podcast, we talk with Amos Rendao.

The society we live in today is the safest and most prosperous society that has ever existed on the planet. The likelihood of dying due to illness, murder, or starvation have dramatically plummeted in the last 100 years. More people are being lifted out of abject poverty now than ever before, while the everyday technologies we hold in our hands grant us the full extent of human knowledge and entertainment with just the tap of a finger. Yet, there’s a problem. Anxiety, depression, PTSD, adolescent suicide, and many other mental health ailments have skyrocketed in the last decade. In this age of prosperity, humans are feeling more disconnected from themselves and their communities, more detached from the natural world, and are having incredible difficulty finding a sense of meaning in their lives. This week on the Evolve Move Play Podcast we are very excited to have with us John Vervaeke, a cognitive psychologist/scientist at the University of Toronto who has made it his mission to understand and remedy t

"The tao that can be told is not the eternal tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the mother of all things. The named gives rise to the 10,000 things." -Tao Te Ching In today's episode of the Evolve Move Play Podcast we speak with Marcello Palozzo, a parkour athlete and movement coach who has been dedicated to the process of self mastery and exploration for over a decade. The core of Marcello's practice does well to embody the opening verse of the Tao Te Ching. Movement is a vast and complex entity that offers endless opportunities for insight, improvement, and self development to those who possess the humility, curiosity, and dedication to the lifelong journey. With our highly rational minds and our tendencies towards reductionist ideals, it can be easy to fall into the trap of specialization and to become highly invested in practices that are inherently limited in their scope of potential value. Marcello has avoided this pitfall and developed a practice that consta

On this week's episode of the Evolve Move Play podcast we talk with Aaron Cantor, an embodiment and movement teacher who has spent the last 15 years creating and sharing his Primal Practice. Over the course of an hour and a half we speak at length about using the incredible power of story telling to enrich our abilities to teach, learn, and live.  The art of telling stories is ancient. The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest recorded piece of literature, dating back to 2700 BC, and in it are common archetypes that have been found in myth and legends all over the world, which suggests that variants on The Heroes Journey predate writing by thousands of years. The fact that humans are deeply connected to and dependent on stories is further exemplified by the costs of the average feature film budget. Most films run between $70 and $90 million, but the blockbusters can soar into the hundreds of millions, hitting as high as $425 million in the case of James Cameron's Avatar.   As instructors, one of the best ways we

One of the most common questions I get from people who are interested in taking on the practice of parkour is “Am I too old for this?” Always the answer is no. Parkour is for everyone. It’s the practice of moving our bodies more gracefully and efficiently through complex environments, which is exactly what our bodies are evolved to do. I understand that it can be easy to watch parkour videos on YouTube of young athletes jumping between skyscrapers, or performing olympic-level acrobatics over concrete, and come away feeling like it’s a dangerous fringe sport reserved for adrenaline junkies. The fact is that this extreme element of parkour is but one branch of a much larger tree, and to denounce the practice in its entirety based on that branch would be similar to refusing to drive your own car because you saw a dangerous looking NASCAR race. This is one reason why we are excited to release our fourteenth episode of the Evolve Move Play Podcast featuring our good friend Julie Angel. If you don’t know Juli

In this episode of the Evolve Move Play Podcast, well known genetics, evolution and history blogger Razib Khan is my guest, I have been following Razib's work since 2005 and he has been a major influence in understanding Evolution and Genetics in depth. In this interview I specifically wanted to review the ideas around how evolution can produce broken solutions, or break useful adaptions when selective pressures are high. This is topic of huge relevance in our current world of exponential technology change I think you guys will get a lot out of it. If you want to suppor these podcasts, please support us on patreon. https://www.patreon.com/rafekelley

This week my guest is Mark Walsh teacher of the Embodied yoga principles and embodied facilitator course. We dive deep into the intersection between, somatics, movement based therapy, yoga and martial arts and what embodiment training is all about.

Check out all our podcasts at www.evolvemoveplay.com/evolve-move-play-podcast Jozef Frucek is of the most inspirational movement teachers I have encountered and Fighting Monkey is an incredible practice. He was on fire in this interview. We were all over the place with too many ideas thrown out to track completely. Fighting Monkey and Evolve Move Play are very similar conceptually and contain many similar elements, with the differences arising partially from our different movement backgrounds, as well as our personalities and philosophies. One of the key ideas in movement practice and indeed in life is the balance between form and formlessness. When we create order and structure we give ourselves a scaffolding to work from and a goal to work towards but we constrain our options, constrain what we can perceive, how we can act. Conversely, with formlessness the potential is limitless but direction is difficult. The biggest difference between FM and EMP seems to be in the balance found here. The Fighting Monk

Stephane Vigroux can speak to this personally, in 2001 right before parkour exploded into mainstream consciousness Stephane tore his knee during a shoot for Nike. This was one of the earliest commerical shoots for parkour and at that time Stephane was one of the top athletes on the orginal Traceurs team. The Traceurs were the team David Belle had founded after leaving the Yamakasi. Stephane had been training day and night with David for years attaining an incredible level, but on that day he did not listen to his body telling him it was done he took a jump he knew he should not and tore his ACL, the surgery was badly done and had to be redone. He was unable to train and largely abandoned by his friends in the traceurs. It took years for Stephane to fully recover but he did! He regained his level began training with Williams Belle and the Yamakasi and then co-founded Parkour Generations the first group to popularize parkour coaching on a global scale and who reintroduced the Yamakasi to the global community.

"There is no better way to keep good people weak, then to tell them they will magically become bad people if become powerful."" This weeks podcast features a second sit down with celebrated self defense author Rory Miller. In this episode we dig deep into. 1. The problem of orienting effectively as finite creature in an infinite world. 2. How we evolved to be powerful 3. Why our education systems are set up to prevent us from becoming strong 4. Why we need to become powerful to be virtuous 5. Principles based training 6. Social scripts why we need them how the limit us and how to step out of them to achieve your goals 7. And the balance between the lizard, monkey and human brain and whether reasons or emotion and intuition are our greatest guides.

Last week we introduced our new podcast season with discussion of nutrition from a brain based perspective focused on food but looking at how products in general hijack our reward centers. This week we are looking at nutrition and the problems of the modern world from the perspective of movement, bio-mechanics and movement ecology with Katy Bowman! Katy Bowman has been a huge influence on my thinking about natural movement, so it was pleasure to get a chance for a quick discussion during the Ancestral Health Symposium this year. Enjoy the interview and please share your thoughts and questions below.

Why do we get fat? Why do we overeat? Many people think it’s because of too many carbs, others claim it’s due to much fat. The answer is more complicated and it has implications that stretch far beyond diet. We get fat in large part because modern industrialized foods are designed to hijack our reward systems and create addictive responses. So says our first podcast guest of the new EMP podcast season Dr. Stephan Guyenet. Dr. Guyenet is the author of The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts that Make Us Overeat, and is in my opinion the foremost public expert on the neuroscience of overeating. The food reward hypothesis that Stephan and I discuss in this episode has implications far beyond what to eat and how to manage your weight. It also helps us understand some of the main mechanisms behind the mismatch between our modern lives and our evolved nature. If you understand how the food industry has hijacked our reward system for profit, you can begin to see how this basic principles applies to many aspe

Simon Thakur is one of my absolute favorite thinkers in natural movement. It was an honor and pleasure to recently get the chance to teach with and learn from him we sat down and recorded a few days after a camp he runs that I guest coached at. Topic covered include The importance of the deep time evolutionary perspective on human movement What neurobiology tells us about how the brain adapts to movement and meditation The importance of story telling and myth to physical practice. The Worm, Fish, and Lizard layers to human movement.

Enjoy this great conversation with amazing mover and movement thinker Tom Weksler. One of my favorite interviews so far. Lots to think about in the art of coaching and self cultivation that was brought up here. Concepts covered include Minimalism in teaching The Wabi Sabi Concept The consilience of modern scientific approaches to training with Zen and Taosist concepts The roll of dance in movement culture

This one is going to be controversial. Like it or not violence was major feature of human evolution, to understand ourselves and the movement capacities we have its a vital thing to study and few people have seen as deeply into that world as Rory Miller. He has been huge influence on my understanding of violence human nature and movement for 10 years and it was an amazing pleasure to interview and train with him. Our apologies for the poor sound quality one of mic's wasn't work we thought the content was worth sharing anyways.

Frank Forencich of Exuberant Animal was one of the really early influential thinkers on applying the evolutionary paleo perspective to movement practice, one of the first great play advocates and great author.