from understanding to practice

6.1. From Understanding to Practice — Transcript (English)

Summary:

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Transcript

Hi, congratulations on making it this far.

We are halfway through the course.

And in the previous segments, we’ve covered most of the foundational concepts and movement patterns that you need to be aware of to understand basic movement instructions.

So for example, if I were to say that in this short excerpt of a form transition, we need to create Distributed Activation by pulling the legs in, watch the grid lines and symmetry by ensuring that the front knee is above the heel, adhere to the midline, keeping the rectangle of shoulders and the pelvis in order to establish Fixing-Separating-Isolating, while not forgetting to draw the shoulders down and perform the micro movements of the ribcage and performing Intensity Modification for safety by stopping before the sensation of compression in the lower back, and performing Intensity Modification for effort by coming out of the form if the front thigh burns, and performing Intensity Modification for form by only bending the front knee to the point where we can keep the foundation intact, while maintaining natural breathing, and you need to do all this simultaneously.

So just to list what we need to be aware of while performing a movement that lasts like three seconds, I had to speak for 40 seconds at least at fast pace, and out of approximately 70 non-function words that I said over 40, more than half, were terminology that either is unique to Baseworks or is used in a significantly different way compared to common use, which means that it requires prior learning to understand.

Remember we started this introductory Primer course by saying that Baseworks is not about what you’re doing, but about how you’re doing.

The movements we do are relatively simple, but we are performing them while engaging muscles, attention and intention in a very specific way.

So in the segments up until now, we weren’t really practicing Baseworks.

Instead, if we were just learning to understand what we’re supposed to do when we hear specific cues.

Also, it’s important to understand that instruction is a form of communication, and while we can show a certain movement and we can verbally describe it, things like attention, intention or muscle coactivation in the absence of visible movements are invisible.

So in Baseworks we rely on verbal instructions a lot to explain these invisible and very important things, and therefore our instructions are heavily codified to remind you precisely what you need to do.

However, as I just demonstrated earlier with this three second movement example, I needed at least 40 seconds, if not a minute, to mention all the details using 15 unique terms.

And just from this example, it’s obvious that we cannot possibly mention all the necessary instructions all the time.

However, Baseworks has a very tangible logic.

And after some experience in Baseworks, and even maybe now already, I’m sure that you are able to anticipate the instructions, the cues, and infer what needs to be done, even if it’s not mentioned.

So even when we don’t say “draw the shoulders down,” you should be drawing the shoulders down.

Even when we don’t say “spread the fingers,” you should be spreading the fingers.

Of course, it takes some time to develop fluency in this ability to apply all the Baseworks movement patterns simultaneously all the time, but we have reached an important milestone because we have covered the core concepts and core movement patterns.

And it’s finally time to practice Baseworks.

Because if we want to achieve noticeable results and perceptual shifts, what we need to do is not just learn about the method, but actually put it into practice.

So for the rest of this course, we begin to shift from the cognitive understanding of the task to practice.

It’s like the difference between knowing the grammatical rules of a language in an abstract form and being able to use them in natural speech.

So from now on, we will be spending less time on theory and key points and more time doing the practice, continuing to apply everything that we learned so far.

We will still introduce a few important concepts, But these concepts will be at a different time scale, not something that applies to a particular movement, but rather to an entire practice session or its part or as a part of approach to practice.

And our first concept to cover is the Baseworks Ignition.

And we will be talking about it in the next lesson.