Developing confidence in our movement abilities
NOTE - This post was originally written for our 'weekly warble' segment in a few Facebook groups for the community local to our gym.
Welcome to the weekly warble here at Ideanthro Movement!
This week I'm going to warble on about "confidence" as it applies to our fitness and movement capabilities.
The reason that the topic of "confidence" is on my mind is that yesterday I had the opportunity to do a PT session with a 10 year old girl. This girl normally participates in our outdoors Youth Program group sessions but with the wet weather yesterday we had to rearrange our schedule and she came for a PT session inside the gym instead. Because one of our other coaches, Adrian, leads the Youth Program I hadn't seen this girl for about two months and I was blown away by how much her confidence in her fitness and movement abilities had increased since I last saw her. While previously she'd been willing to give things a go, but was clearly very nervous doing so, yesterday the nerves were gone and she was enthusiastically giving everything a go. Her strength and movement skills still have a long way to go, but with this newfound confidence she's absolutely on the right track.
With that all said, let's get to the warble proper (as if I wasn't already warbling with that exciting but long introduction!).
One of the things I love about owning a gym where we deliver fitness through a natural movement based approach is the way that natural movement helps us to develop confidence in our own physical abilities. However at the same time I'm also aware that sometimes people see pictures of our approach to fitness and think "that's awesome, but I could never do that". And that's totally understandable.
The great thing about natural movement is that even the most fancy and complicated movements can be broken down into really simple progressions that allow everyone to start improving, no matter their current abilities. It may take time to build up, and that's totally ok, but there's a path for everyone to get going. Once we start, we see the progression in our abilities and our confidence in those abilities grows with it.
I'll give you an example. There's a lady in her 70's who joins in our group sessions two mornings each week. She's had a hip replacement and her knees aren't as spritely as they once were. At least once per week we practice 'vaulting' which, for a young thing might mean leaping over our biggest vault box, but for this lady, at the moment, it means learning different techniques to step over our small and medium sized vault boxes. Just the week before last she successfully stepped over our vault box leading with not only her preferred leg, but also her non-preferred leg. If you know anything about hip replacements you'll know that's a pretty big deal. That newfound ability is reflected in greater confidence and safety in her daily life doing things like getting up and down stairs and getting out of the train when there's a big drop down to the platform.
Anyhow, all of this was a warbly way of saying that while natural movement can sometimes look fancy and difficult (as well as a heap of fun), there are ways that everyone can get started and begin to progress; and with that progress comes not only increased physical abilities but increased confidence in those abilities as well.
Thanks for reading!
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