“The Future Belongs to the Impure.” - Salman Rushdie
On our last night in Singapore we had a Q and A with Ido. I posed the following question to him: “What will the movers of the future look like?” I posed this question as a way to think about what “true” GPP versus specialization would look like starting from a very young age. GPP stands for General Physical Preparedness. I qualify it here with the word “true” because what most people think of as GPP still revolves around very specific, mainly very linear, movement patterns. Yes, the spine is meant to stabilize, but it is also meant to rotate! The knee likewise, is not just for hinging, it too was meant to rotate. (Boxers, MMA, dancers, capoeiristas, all rotate the knee).
“You are as old as your spine.” It was Ido who first introduced us to this sagely piece of wisdom from the Chinese. Anyone who comes to our gym and practices bridge drills, after years of sedentary life knows all too intimately how true this is. The same problems with the spine and shoulders emerge with the knees, ankle and hips. I watch as athletic folks at our gym are left exposed by the demands of the step behind to shenobi. Seemingly youthful movers, when asked to perform these locomotion patterns crumble under its demands. I have witnessed students with huge clean and jerks and squats look awkward and clumsy as they try to perform a simple low gate movement. Likewise, I have witnessed dancers and yoga practitioners with absolutely no hip drive and strength to actively flow from one low gate transition to another, look up at me with exasperation. The culprit in all of these examples? Too much specialization.
But a generation of kids are growing up at our gym who move from simple bridges and bridge rotations to olympic lifts to ring routines, to handbalancing to brachiation to acrobatics, to complex low gate positions to floreio and capoeira movements. Where will they be 10 years from now! When that foundation is built the possibilities are endless. A movement that takes me months to acquire will feel natural to these kids. They will have had years of practice to identify movement patterns and as such, they will pick up on movements with ease. They will adapt to newness and to difference in a way that is radically different from adults. And this adaptation to the new, I truly believe, to have an ethical dimension to it as well.
These Flux kids will not be masters in any given field or discipline. But they will be able to flow seamlessly between the disciplines. What will make them truly inter disciplinary rather than multi-disciplinary will be there openness to letting the borders between disciplines bleed into and influence each other.
Darci
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