Notes on Coaching Movement, Part 1

Compare the movement of humans crossing a busy intersection with that of a herd of antelope crossing a savannah. In one scene you sense synchrony; in the other, cacophony.  We humans are both blessed and cursed with individuality. We are crooked, elegant, awkward, expansive, hunched, rigid, powerful. The diversity of our attitudes keeps politicians up at night.  And offers the student of the human body a lifetime’s worth of challenge and learning.

Is it possible to help a twisted body move with grace and efficiency?

Yes, but it takes understanding, empathy, rapport, creativity and technique. In this post I’ll write about the first four.

Understanding the continuum of clients’ availability and awareness

We can help a person improve movement at various levels. Superficially, we can invite them to strengthen weak muscles and to release areas that are overly tense. The clients’ improvement comes from what we teach them. This may or may not be sustainable depending on clients’ motivation to continue doing the exercises.

A deeper level of somatic education can lead to lasting change in the way someone inhabits their body. This approach invites the client to become aware of their habitual movements and to explore sensations that stimulate new movement behaviors.

Both approaches can be appropriate depending on a client’s goals and circumstances. Effective coaching at either level—or anywhere in between —depends on a coach’s ability to identify both what a client is doing with her body and what she is perceiving.

But how can you know what another person is sensing in her body?

Motor empathy

Our brains’ mirror neurons tell us what someone else is sensing. In a famous experiment, instruments wired to a lab monkey’s brain lit up during lunch hour when the experimenter was eating a banana. Like the monkey’s, our neuromuscular systems respond to the actions of other people. This accounts for the pleasure we feel when watching a ballet or a soccer match.  And the degree of pleasure we derive increases if we ourselves have also danced or played football. For coaching movement, this means that experiencing a variety of physical experiences contributes to one’s ability to identify movement patterns in other people. 

So part of your preparation to coach movement is to move your own body in ways that are not usual for you.  If you’re an athlete, learn to tap dance; if you’re a dancer, learn to box.  This not only helps you see patterns in others, it also expands your sensorimotor repertoire, giving you more tools for creating therapeutic coaching techniques.

Body/mind connection

Along with biomechanics and coordination there are non-physical factors involved with how people move.  A person’s history affects the way they express themselves physically. To be a good movement coach you don’t necessarily require training in psychology or social science, but you do need to know within your own being that body, mind and spirit are of one essence. Your personal experience of and conviction about the body/mind connection creates a relational space in which your clients feel seen as a whole, whether or not they have yet come to that conviction themselves.

Rapport

Affinity between client and coach is a determining factor in the success of a learning experience. But let’s also consider the teacher’s affinity with him/herself.  What interests us—therapists/teachers—on a particular day, our moods, our outlooks: these are screens through which we meet our clients. We need to recognize that we are not perfectly consistent in what we have to offer.  And that’s okay.  Our ability to accept and trust ourselves and our dedication to our work will be received by the client through their mirror neurons.   

Creativity

There are times when you simply don’t know what to suggest.  A client’s movement patterns may be mystifying, confusing, troubling.  Nothing in your training has prepared you for this client.

But something can occur to you.  Literally, occur—happen.

Something occurs when you let go of your hope of being able to help (or succeed).  In this precious moment, innovation—something you’ve never seen or done before‑‑emerges from a place within you that’s deeper than your intellect, experience and education. There’s a glimmer of an idea.  You say to the client, “let’s try this.”  And you go ahead, even though you’re standing at the edge of a cliff. It can be scary. But it’s a place where there is a wide, wide perspective. Where both you and your client and the challenges you both face are miniscule. 

To move through such a moment, it helps to have prepared yourself with some type of meditative practice.  Something which induces in you a state of absence, a state in which your agenda, your hopes and needs are put aside. Entering such a state, over and over, prepares you to meet that client, the one who in that moment becomes your teacher.

© 2022 Mary Bond