Sharing a Reply to Tracy Fober

One of the very best practitioners I have ever met. She was kind enough to make a comment about my last article and always keeps me grounded.

Tracy C. Fober PT, CSCS - https://www.ironmaven.net/, Instagram - @tracyfober, X - @ironmaven

Thank you for speaking the language of physical literacy. It reorients one's approach -- away from the clinical or sciencey, back to the human in relation to their body, gravity and the ground.

Hi Tracy,

Thanks for your words. It is always heartening to hear from you as you are one of the small group who keep me sane and give me hope that this battle can be won!

All the things that I write are not based on some crackpot ideology but from when an ‘inkling’, born of my teacher training, grew into a real source of solutions to the problems I was surrounded by. Thirty-five years ago, or thereabouts, the penny dropped as I navigated the plethora of physical and emotional limitations being expressed by the athletes I was working with at the high, higher, and highest echelons of sport.

I, along with thousands more, had capitulated to the wearisome phrase of, “This is Soccer (substitute every other sport in this phrase), we don’t do things that way.” The coaching fraternity had been informed in its coach education that the centre of the universe was the game/sport-specific actions and postures.? Fortunately, I had not been trained as a Games Master or a Pseudo Scientist but as a Physical Education teacher. In this training, I received a brief exposure to the puzzle-solving strategy of implicit learning and luckily, I remembered it daily in my PE teaching.

Games masters are mostly of the ideology and the employment necessity of ‘results, ranking and reward’ while the pseudo scientists are mainly of the ‘publish or perish’ ideology or have fallen foul of the ‘research grant’ greasy pole of the University environment.

‘Physical Literacy’ or ‘Movement Vocabulary’, or whatever is an appropriate descriptor, is simply a long-term exposure to the foundation movements of Squat, Lunge, Pull, Push, Brace, Rotate, Hinge and Landing (and all the adventures that each one goes on to create myriad hybrids). These long-term ‘adventures’ are the result of adapting to the changes that exposure to the “Direction, Amplitude, Speed, Complexity and Force” continuums bring to the journey (Adventure 1).

The journey can also include (for those involved in competitive activities) the application of all these adaptations into the competitive elements of the fundamental movements of Running, Jumping, Throwing, Kicking, Catching, Striking and Flotation (Adventure 2).

The campaign for the progression of the foundation movements sees the skill categories of Locomotion – Non-Locomotion – Manipulative being utilised to create different contexts for the journey.

This part of the toolbox acts as a seamless transition from the foundation movements to the fundamental movements for life and sport. In my experience, the greatest success in the development pathways occurs when there is an appropriate cyclic rotation between the foundation movements, the skill categories and the fundamental sports / life movements. See this as the structure of the ‘General’ phase of the General-Related-Specific structure of the journey. Each individual will require their own blueprint of this cyclic, non-linear prescription and progression.

The greatest lesson I have learned is that you do not need only competitive games to gain the enormous benefits in physical (mechanical and metabolic) and emotional well-being that the foundation movement adventure can bring. It does not take a genius to recognise that ‘Adventure 1’ should be a basic entitlement for everyone, no matter what your age. Unfortunately, there is no curriculum or practitioner development for this nor is there any desire in play by the current decision makers. Thank goodness I have a network of practitioners who keep the flag flying and keep me hopeful.