Carl Paoli - Free+Style: Maximize Sport and Life Performance with Four Basic Movements

First Published in 2014 by Victory Belt Publishing Inc.
Copyright 2014 Carl Paoli and Anthony Sherbondy

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 13: 978-1628600209 (hardcover)
978-1-628600-56-8 (ebook)

This book is for educational purposes. The publisher and authors of this instructional book are not responsible in any manner whatsoever for any adverse effects arising directly or indirectly as a result of the information provided in this book. If not practiced safely and with caution, working out can be dangerous to you and to others. It is important to consult with a professional fitness instructor before beginning training. It is also very important to consult with a physician prior to training due to the intense and strenuous nature of the techniques in this book.

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foreword

Let me get this out of the way first: I am an unabashed Carl Paoli fan. No other coach or athlete has had a bigger impact on the way I have come to understand how humans move and should move.

But first things first.

Its one thing to talk of bulls, and another thing entirely to be in the bullring. The first time I met Carl it was as an athlete. Hed heard about what we were doing and, like any great athlete searching for a better way, decided to see for himself. One skill set ubiquitous to nearly every working coach is the ability to spot talent. It took me all of about two minutes of watching Carl move to know that something was different about him. If youve seen Carl Parkour, Olympic lift, on the rings, or on a trampoline, you know exactly what Im talking about.

Its big of me, right? Spot the freak show of an athlete among a group of mere mortals? But heres the rub: Carl was performing movements hed never seen or attempted before. I was watching him pick up new skills on the fly. And he was doing it well.

Im very lucky in my career. I get to go behind the scenes and exchange notes with the best coaches on the planet in nearly every pro/college/Olympic/national-level sport you can think of. This means that Im exposed to the very best athletes in the world. Im used to seeing mutant athletic prowess. Heck, even my children are used to hanging out with some of the greatest athletes of my generation. What Im saying is, Im a bit immune to witnessing the outliers of human function in their fields. Its not that being around a bunch of superwomen ever gets boring (it never does!); its just that you start asking a different set of questions after a while. And this brings me back to Carl.

Watching Carl move, it was clear to me that hed had formal movement coaching and training. Like the great coach Dan John says, No one just walks in off the street and overhead squats their body weight fifteen times. No one. But what is never taught, and what is so amazing about Carl, is that he has the ability to translate his historical skill set into the successful completion of novel tasks on the spot. And here we are at the really interesting questions. What skills are transferable? How and why? Is there a root or fundamental movement language that sets up a lifetime of continued skill development? What does that program look like? What are its core elements and values? Does it explain complex phenomena outside its domain? Does it scale up and down based on ability? Is it observable, measurable, and repeatable? Can it be taught to children? In short, how do you create a human operating system that remains flexible and infinitely utilitariana model that prioritizes skill acquisition over raw work but allows for greater power, force, and complex task completion over the long haul without the dead-ends of injury, low skill, poor motor problem-solving, or failure to reach peak individual function?

I work with plenty of athletes who are very successful in spite of having nearly zero meta-awareness of their skill sets. They are the best in the world, and they have no idea why what they do works or how they came to understand their abilities (besides generally freakish dedication and hard work). They have even less of an idea how to transfer that information to another athlete verbally, much less communicate the many thousands of mini-steps required to build skills. And this is precisely why getting to hang out with Carl over many years at the Lab/gym is so profound. He knows how he got from A to B, and more important, he knows how to teach you to get from A to B.

Thanks to the Internet, we are living in an age when the training methods of the best athletes and coaches on the planet are at our fingertips. And while its nearly miraculous that you can log on and find a 5k training program used by Kenyan runners or some secret Russian squat program to follow, it is akin to reading about how to race a Formula One car without really knowing how to negotiate the first turn at 200 kph. You can do it, but chances are you are going to end up in the weeds or worse. And this is precisely what we are witnessing in the greater athletic/competitive world. We take many millions of eggs and toss them into the first turn at 200 kph, and the ones that dont break go on to the next turn. I witness these gaping holes in the fundamental understanding of how we should and should not move on a daily basis. Ask my wife, Juliet, about the onslaught of e-mails we receive from the worlds best soldiers and athletes asking us for help. The scale of the problem is far worse than you can imagine. For example, we havent even moved the needle on womens ACL injury rates. How is it that young girls are able to get all the way to college and pro-level sports without knowing how to jump and land? Its not an issue of strength or will, I assure you. Its an operating system error. The egg finally breaks in one of the turns. The season before womens slope-style skiing debuted at the 2014 Olympics, 75 percent of the sports top ten women sustained knee injuries. Would you let your daughter play if the odds were three out of four that shed win an ACL surgery?

So where do we begin? Physical education in schools is practically absent. Go be a volunteer at any elementary schools field day games and be prepared to be horrified at the profound lack of movement skill. I mean basic life skills, like hopping or performing a forward roll. Ive done it. I witnessed fifth graders who could not extend their hips with enough ability to hop 10 meters in a sack race. True fact. This isnt news by any stretch. Nearly every master coach I know advocates for some kind of formal movement training for developing children. Remember that kid in your class who took gymnastics/karate/dance as a child? Remember how he or she was able to backflip into the pool on the first try, or was the best athlete on the team in high school? Of course you do. And so do the master coaches. You see, after about a billion hours of clinical hands-on coaching experience, all these master coaches and movement educators noticed that these kids are very teachable.

This is all well and good, but it still doesnt get us any closer to the reality of endowing athletes of any ilk with a formal, systematized, progressive, and immediately transferable set of skills. You mean kids who climb trees a lot as children can usually perform pull-ups and are more stable, effective, and injury-proof swimmers and throwers? Sign me up! By the way, how much tree climbing? How often? How high? What if Im not strong enough to climb a tree yet? What if I dont have a tree? How do I get a classroom of kids to climb at the same time? How do I progress tree-climbing skills? How do I not kill any kids in trees? Right?