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Krister

Much better connection with the instructor. It’s a completely different experience. You get help, you get support. Now I start to learn things. Before I didn’t—it was more like pushing into the different positions. Now it’s like, “Okay, you’re good here. Okay, good. Then I’ll go further.”

I didn’t know about—maybe you don’t know your limits. You try to push your limits, but here you can also get guidance that “here is your limit, you should stop here.” Sometimes you also need to push yourself a little bit and go a little bit beyond your capability. Then when you go back to the basics, you can look at that from a completely different perspective. You will learn much more, actually.

I was also a PC student in a mathematics course—there are different levels. I try to compare with what I did in mathematics in the past, and I can see it makes a lot of sense, of course. For me personally, to look at the Strategic level of classes, there are a lot of things that you learn about yourself, of course.

If you want to develop your golf skills, I think both mentally and also physically, this is very helpful. It’s a lot about understanding the forces underneath your feet, and it’s about upper and lower, about the separation that we’re working a lot with here. If you understand those concepts from here, then you can start to experiment with that in the golf swing as well.

In golf, there are a lot of movements that you need to control. Now I can see that I can actually take the things I learn here to golf, and also in golf take back to here.

It feels very proper. There’s a sense of doing it right—alignment, let’s do it correctly. That’s very well transmitted. The teachers are trying to get you to think and then do. Every teacher really tries to convey that, which is something I don’t see much elsewhere. It’s one of the good things about this place.

At first, I did Foundation, then when I got better I did Elements, and gradually Elements started to feel easier, so I went to Strategy. Strategy was fun, so I only did that for a while. That was how I approached it initially.

But at a certain point, when I understood what it was about, it became part of my life. For example, I don’t really want to do Strategy in the morning, but I do want to move my body before starting the day. So in the morning, I do Foundation and Elements. If I only do that, my body complains—my joints want to go further. Then I think, “Let me do Strategy,” and I come to Strategy. So it’s become part of my life cycle now. It’s not about levels anymore—it’s about matching the class to what I need.

There are definitely benefits to doing Strategy and then going back to Foundation. Even though I don’t consciously plan it that way, I think it works. The classes are designed very precisely. For example, if pose A exists, in Foundation it goes to here, in Strategy it goes to there, and Elements bridges between them. Understanding this makes your practice more three-dimensional. What you’re doing with your body and what you’re thinking about can be different, but being conscious of both leads your body movements in the right direction. If you don’t understand that, you can’t achieve the proper pose. That was a beneficial side effect I discovered.

The approach to strength training and how the hip mobility improved when I run—that changed a lot. My running form changed.

One good thing about Baseworks is that it balances moving the body with calming the mind really well. In Baseworks, there are so many checkpoints, so you can calm your mind pretty methodically by following the method. I think if you just follow the method, you can achieve that state without thinking too much. Just do it.