Down the Rabbit Hole
Things outside of the conventional strength & conditioning stuff.
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Down the Rabbit Hole
Natural Movement, Play, and Evolutionary Wisdom with Rafe Kelley
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What if our modern discomfort, anxiety, and health challenges stem from lack of connection and forgetting what it means to move like a human? In this fascinating conversation, movement pioneer Rafe Kelly reveals how our disconnection from natural movement has profound consequences on our development.
Rafe explains how our brains evolved primarily to control movement, not just abstract thought. Drawing from evolutionary biology, anthropology, philosophy, and neuroscience, he presents a compelling case for why movement isn't just exercise—it's a fundamental nutrient our bodies and minds require. Even our metaphorical language reveals this connection: we speak of being "grounded" in reality or "in touch" with our emotions, unconsciously acknowledging our sensory-motor roots.
The discussion explores fascinating topics like the difference between Type 1 athleticism (speed, power, jumping) versus Type 2 athleticism (coordination, precision, skill), explaining why some physically unimpressive athletes dominate their sports. Rafe shares eye-opening research on rough-and-tumble play, revealing how wrestling and physical play activate unique brain pathways that develop empathy, boundary-setting, and social regulation. Parents will appreciate his practical insights on how proper physical play helps children calibrate their emotional responses to conflict.
As technology eliminates discomfort from our lives, Rafe argues we're inadvertently removing the very challenges that help develop resilience and embodied wisdom. His vision for movement education prioritizes activities with high "donor potential"—parkour, gymnastics, dance, team sports, and martial arts—that transfer effectively to other movement domains.
Whether you're a coach, parent, or someone seeking deeper physical literacy, this conversation will transform how you understand human movement and its role in our development. Discover why reconnecting with our evolutionary heritage might be exactly what we need to thrive in the modern world.
Introduction to Rafe Kelly
Speaker 1Hey , jeff , here at DC Sports turning back with another episode of Down the Rabbit Hole . In today's episode we have Rafe Kelly . Rafe is a huge influence on me personally and has a huge influence on what I do at DC Sports Training , and he has really changed how I view human movement . Rafe is a movement coach and the founder and owner of All Move Play , which is a company dedicated towards natural movement , and he has pioneered . He's one of the pioneers that's really brought about this whole movement of natural movement and community and he really does a great job of kind of blending an ecology of practices , as he would say , of parkour , contact , improv , martial arts , gymnastics , evolutionary biology , anthropology . He has such a unique way of viewing the world and viewing movement , uh , that I I I'm truly honored to have gotten him on this podcast . He's a man that travels the world doing amazing things climbing trees , going down waterfalls , cliff diving all types of awesome stuff and , um , yeah , I'm so excited to have had him on this podcast . We really get into some of his work . I mean this could have been a easily a three hour podcast if , if , uh , time allowed it to get into just a fraction of what rave covers . But we really get into evolutionary uh movements in in the the development of how humans move , the need for play and the science behind play , the need and the science behind rough and tumble , play and what it does for humans and interactions , and the importance of challenging people and stepping outside their comfort zones . And yeah , this is just a great podcast . Truly honored to have had him on .
Speaker 1Hopefully you like it as much as I do . Please give it a share , a like . Please tell your friends you know , enjoy this podcast . Thanks , rafe , it is a true honor to have you on . Sir , as we were just saying off air man , I am very influenced by your work from afar . Unfortunately I have not been able to make any of your seminars , but I know people who have a mutual friend . Joel Smith is always spoke highly uh to me about , about going out there and how awesome of an experience that was . And I've listened to ton of your podcasts , especially the ones with Joel . Uh , all over the place , man , but uh , you know , thank you so much for taking the time to jump on this call .
Speaker 2Yeah , I appreciate it . It's great to get a chance to chat about these things .
Speaker 1Yeah , man , listen , what I tend to gravitate towards from a personal standpoint is people that are just people that are generalists , and I don't mean that in the sense , like you just know a little bit , like you know a lot about a lot and you're very well versed in so many different areas and fields and you have such a unique way of , I think , putting it together and seeing the connections between things that maybe other people don't . And I just love that about listening to your podcast and reading your , your , your stuff on Substack and everything throughout the years you've put out In one of your more recent podcasts . You kind of put out , um , in one of your more recent podcasts you kind of I think it was more your recent
Being More Human in a Modern World
Speaker 1podcast you kind of , uh , you're singing a song by justin timberlake , uh , and you're talking about bringing humans back . Man , you know I kind of want to want to start there .
Speaker 1What does being more human mean to you ?
Speaker 2I don't remember that that's uh , that's pretty funny . Um , I'm not a very good singer , so yeah , I cringe in memory um what is bringing more human back yeah , you were talking about in the context of uh yeah , a fundamental belief that humans were , were meant to be , in nature .
Speaker 1And , uh , you know how important it is to reinvestigate , re reintegrate the wisdom of our past and in nature . And so I'm just curious , you know your thoughts on that man it's interesting .
Speaker 2Um , I think I was reading cs lewis recently . Uh , in his book the abolition of man , he's talking about this idea that throughout almost all of history , the goal of philosophy was to bring man into proper alignment with nature with what is right .
Speaker 2And then at some point we took on this sort of technological worldview , where the idea was that we could perfect the world through the power of technology and then perfect human beings , and we can go back to like John Locke and the idea of the human being as tabula rasa , like we are a blank slate upon which society writes and we're a blank slate upon which society writes . There's nothing in the slate that we have to respect . So really , all of my thinking in some sense , across many different fields , is somehow united , united by this idea of like , well , what if humans actually have a nature and if that nature is uh , intractable in some way , and then we have to learn to respect it ? So that is uh , you know , on one level . That's like the ancestral health idea .
Speaker 2It's like , okay , um , what if some foods are bad for us just because we didn't evolve to eat them ? Right , we didn't evolve in an environment of hyper-palatable , ultra-processed foods , say . Or you know , if you have a different theory of the cause , you could say we didn't evolve in an environment of like super high polyunsaturated oils , say , we didn't involve in an environment of like super high polyunsaturated oils . You know , we don't know exactly what the mechanisms of these things are . But we can see that people are suffering because the food that we're eating somehow doesn't drive health , and what drove the kind of initial development of my ideas within involvement play was that , just like you need food that is appropriate for a human being , you also need movement .
Speaker 2that's appropriate for a human being . You need a lifestyle that's appropriate for a human being . You need exposure to sunlight and green growing things and blue sky . That's appropriate for a human being . And so much of the idea is just trying to remember the significance of all of these things that we used to take for granted when we worked as farmers . Nobody had to think about getting the right wavelength of light first thing in the morning . It just happens , it just did . Yeah , it's incidental . It's incidental to every human lifestyle until like 50 years ago , 75 years ago .
Speaker 2But now , all of a sudden , it turns out that if you don't get the right kinds of light at the right time of day , that you have sleep disruption . We see that , uh , people have really low sleep quality across our culture . It turns out , oh , that's actually like one major potential mechanism driving the obesity crisis , because without proper rhythm of the cortisol cycle , uh , that stuff gets deranged and we know that people will over consume calories when they're sleep deprived and almost everyone's sleep deprived and even if you're sleeping , your quality of sleep may be substantially lower because of these environmental factors that we're not very aware of . So that's kind of the broad perspective that I come from , and then what I've been particularly passionate about is the role of movement and of kind of time in nature as expressions of that .
Speaker 2It's like , you know , the whole idea of Evolve Move Play was we evolved to move right , we didn't evolve to be sedentary animals , and then we evolved to actually be motivated to move and to learn and acquire movement , primarily through play . All mammals play , but the more social , the more intelligent and the more flexible an animal's behavior , the more that it relies on play developmentally and the less on sort of hardwiring of of survival skills . Human beings have the longest , most extended childhoods of any animal by a long shot . We we really leverage the sort of inherent educational drive to attune the individual to the ability to be really adaptive to very different environments , and that's what made humans being so , so , uniquely powerful . And yet we've completely forgot that this , this drive , is actually what motivates the cultivation and exploration of skill in , uh , you know , most people throughout history and so , uh , so it's , you know , trying to remind people of that .
Speaker 1That was the original goal of Evolve Move Play um , yeah , I love that and you kind of touched upon it with with the quotes of what CS Lewis and that you're talking about . Um , and I've heard you talk about this before and I love . I was a social studies teacher so I love history lessons , I love anthropology , I love all that stuff and I love when you talk about the role that cognition is rooted in motor skills , uh , and motor development and and I wasn't aware of the history of plato and things , would you mind kind of to the , to the listeners talking a little bit about that and how they're connected I ?
Speaker 2I maybe misquoting , but I believe there's a guy named Daniel Wolpert who did research on sea squirts .
Speaker 2Yep , so sea squirts are like the sort of like predominant example of like how deeply the sort of upper cognitive capacities are dependent on movement , because sea squirts are an animal that lives as a free moving animal in the ocean for a period of its life and they have a nervous system at that period of their life and then they attach themselves to something like a barnacle and during the sessile portion of their life they uh digest their brain .
Speaker 2So we can look at the evolution of the central nervous system and we can see that it is really originally a tool for controlling the apparatus of the body . As the body gets more complicated and it does more complicated things and has more complicated sensory capacities , the brain has to grow . So you may have read Nikolai Bernstein's work and looked at his layers of motor learning and it's like , okay , so we're starting to operate in increasingly more complex relationship to the environment . So a sponge maybe has the level of tone that can kind of adjust its body to be better able to sift things from the environment , and then you know , a relatively primitive animal can use muscular power to explode and get away from something or get towards something , but it's not very directed .
Speaker 2And then we have directed things and then we have this capacity for complex behavior and all of that sort of like layers up into the brain . So the brain , the part of the brain that we use to think it is evolved out of that capacity for higher level motor expressions . And when we look , and this is uh , uh , it's not . It's not my friend Johnakey's research , I don't think I can't remember who he , he , he gets it from , but uh , he looked a lot into the um , the role of metaphor , and what he found is that you can't get below it , that all of human cognition is in some sense rooted in sensory motor language . That grounds us and we don't even realize how much we're saying it . Like I just said , it grounds us . That's a sensory motor thing , like being connected to the ground . Sense like senses . We sense the world . We have to interact with the world through senses and sensing is not just passive , right ? People think about sensory as passive , but it's not . You actively are moving your eyes all the time to pick up the relevant information from the environment . So that perspective it sort of gets broken . In some sense our connection to the world gets broken because of descartes and car was a brilliant philosopher , many , many important things right , like cartesian graphing has is an incredible technology .
Speaker 2But in his project of trying to doubt everything , the only thing that he was able to so solidly stand on was his sense that he had a self right , that he could , that he experienced himself .
Speaker 2So , so therefore , I think , therefore I am Kogito ergo sum . And then he , you know , this is at the time when our sort
Mind-Body Connection & Philosophy
Speaker 2of mechanical model of the universe is developing . We've had Copernicus , we've had Galileo , and we see the world in a very different way than we saw it before , and so he's trying to separate out the the , the sensing , willing soul , and its connection to God from the mechanistic world outside of it . And so then we ended up with this mind body dualism , where the body is a machine and the mind is a soul originally , and now we've collapsed that to a kind of computer . So we're a computer running around in a machine , um , and it's , it's it . And then , you know , I find this really interesting , like you know a lot of people in our sphere , in the kind of motor world we're , we're grappling with the idea of direct versus indirect perception , and you know , we kind of , like I was talking , to .
Speaker 2Brent Vizzierlu . You may know him , but we were talking about that and he was saying , oh , schema theory only develops , like in the 1960s , or something . It's like what was the ecological approach to visual perception ? What was that in response to ? But actually the idea of indirect perception goes all the way back to Kant . Right , it's Kant who says that our model of the world is inherently broken and we can never perceive the thing as it is in itself . Right , the thing in itself is something that is not available to our senses . So so that's , uh , what 17th century ? Uh , and so we've been living in that kind of worldview of , of of our separation from the world for a long time . So I've gotten a little bit lost in all these philosophical details . Can you remind me what the question was ?
Speaker 1Yeah , yeah , no , just again . You've talked about before in the past how cognition is rooted in motor skills .
Speaker 1Yes , okay , talk about the metaphor with John Brevicki , and I think that is so fascinating because you're absolutely correct with that in using words like grounded or you know , I'm in touch with and things like that or I'm in touch with and things like that . Well , again , these are all sensory motor acts and I think that is very fascinating that not a lot of people have made those connections , and you were one of the first I've ever heard talk about it . And then you were also talking about how philosophy is also tied a lot with motor development , excuse me and Play-Doh , and how Play-Doh was a wrestler and Plato and how Plato was a wrestler .
Speaker 2Yeah , plato was a wrestler , so philosophy means the love of wisdom . So the core question was how do we develop wisdom ? And Socrates , the Socratic project , is interesting in a sense because he contrasted himself with two different schools that preceded him . One school was the Sophists , and his critique of the Sophists was that they understood the power of words and so they could teach people rhetoric and so they could make things significant , right and salient , but they didn't really have a theory of how to come to truth underneath it , really have a theory of how to come to truth underneath it , whereas the natural philosophers were now very interested in trying to sort of like empirically break up the world into its constituent parts and understand them .
Speaker 2But they didn't have a theory of what made all those relationships work , what made them significant right , so you had one thing which could give you truth without significance and another thing which could give you Significance without truth .
Speaker 2And philosophy was an attempt to try to find the Socratic , platonic philosophy was a time attempt to try to find that the sort of integration point between those and Socrates was soldier and a stonemason . So you know , our idea of a of a philosopher tends to be a kind of egghead sitting in a in a Oxford Don's office . Um , but now imagine this you know , heavy set , thick , muscled , scarred old man right who sits around with uh , with a bunch of uh of young men who he's probably just got out of the gym , they've just finished wrestling and carrying things and throwing things , and they chat and that's kind of like how he midwives wisdom is by challenging them on their ideas . And that was Plato's inspiration . Plato was a champion wrestler , I believe , at , I think , the Isthmian Games , or maybe he competed at the Isthmian Games . So not the Olympics but similar games . And Plato , his name , is not his given name . Aristocles , I believe , was his given name . Plato is a nickname , it means broad , so you can imagine the broad shoulders of a high-level wrestler .
Speaker 2And this is the foundation of the Western philosophical tradition and a big part of the philosophical tradition that comes after it . The Cynics and the Stoics and Epicureans and all of these people have this idea of internalizing the sage . They wanted to internalize the unique virtues of Socrates or Plato , and it was very much understood by many of these schools that part of that was to actually grapple the philosophy , was a kind of grappling with life , and that the best education for that grappling was in wrestling . I believe that both Epictetus and Seneca , who are early , really important Stoic figures , stoic philosophical figures mentioned this in passing , and then , if you read the Platonic Dialogues I'm reading the Republic right now you know , Plato in his visioning of the perfect philosopher kings , the foundation of their education is in gymnastics .
Speaker 2And when they say gymnastics they don't mean modern artistic gymnastics , they mean the entire practice of physical culture , which for them was wrestling , running , jumping , throwing , throwing things , bearing arms . Um , if you were , if you were a spartan , it meant like running through the woods and jumping over things and crawling through ditches and doing all the kind of stuff that I like to do , not so much in athens , but uh , related traditions , and that again became lost over time , I think in part actually due to , maybe , a Christian emphasis on spirit as separate from body , and then especially through the enlightenment and the idea of mind-body dualism right . Once you get mind-body dualism , the body is is especially really insignificant and unimportant , and so the education of the mind is is what we need to devote our time to , and the education of the body is sort of , like you know , important only in so much as we consider it necessary for the health of the system to sustain the mind's education , and that's very much not what it was like in the origins of Western philosophy and indeed in a lot of the .
Speaker 2Eastern philosophical traditions where we see something like Taoism is deeply interconnected with internal martial arts like Bagua , xingyi and Tai .
Speaker 1Chi .
Speaker 2Of course , yoga is a really important aspect of the philosophical tradition of .
Speaker 1India .
Speaker 2And that includes the asana as well as the meditative practices . So we can see this connection across many different cultures .
Speaker 1Yeah , I've heard you discuss in another interview kind of the connection there with modern jujitsu and modern MMA and people taking that up now because of the popularization of UFC and stuff . But they've lost the uh , the , the wisdom aspect to that . I would love for you to kind of touch upon that because I think that's very fascinating .
Speaker 2It's the reciprocal right , which is when we , when we don't respect the interconnection between the body and the mind , one one direction is to sort of like glorify the mind and neglect the body , and the other is to sort of like to dive into the body , to become of the body , but then to not ask the question like what are we developing in a broader way through this ? Traditional martial arts like aikido , you know even judo um taji bagua , all these things , they , they have a a philosophical core to them .
Speaker 2You know the , the budo code , or bushido code , in uh in japan um , various traditions , uh , daoism in in china , uh , the chivalric code in relationship to european martial arts prior to the modern period all these things are are connected , but if we look at modern mma , um , there is often like a rejection , in some sense , that we should treat sport as being about character and life in any way . John Donaher , who's widely considered the greatest technical BJJ coach in the world right now , has said very specifically that he's completely uninterested in character . Right , that that's not his job . His job is to teach people and what we traditionally had , this ideal of the warrior sage , that somebody who became extremely competent in the application of violence should also become somebody who had wisdom to do it or even the capacity to heal people . Right , if you understand how to break the body , maybe you understand how to put the body back together , and we don't see that , right ? Um , john jones is the greatest mma fighter of all time . Uh , he seems like a rotten human being . Conor mcgregor is the most famous , uh , yeah , uh , mma fighter of all time . You know , he appears to be a co-cad , like he beats up old men in bars and , uh , you know , it's a serially predatory relationship towards women , as far as we can tell from the public um , so , so we don't , we don't , um , we're not doing the work to connect the idea that we're trying to use these things as a way to scale up human virtue in a broader way .
Speaker 2I believe that they have that capacity , but I think that we have to approach them very differently . And John Vervaeke , my mentor I mentioned before , he's a martial artist . He studies Tai Chi , but he said if martial arts are not a wisdom practice , then they're irresponsible to teach . Right , it's sort of like , um , if , if I was , if I'm an mma coach and I've taught you to be able to , you know , kill with your bare hands like 99.99 of the human population , um , and I've taught you nothing about virtue . It's the same as if I taught you how to fire a gun and taught you nothing about gun safety . Yeah , um , but we , but as a industry , because of the sportification , the way that we separate
Type 1 vs Type 2 Athletes
Speaker 2sport from life , uh , we just haven't wanted to , we haven't grappled with that and uh , it's probably time that we really need to .
Speaker 1I agree . Um , yeah , no , I uh , yeah , no . I completely agree with you . And do you work ? Have you ever worked with like team sports ? Any team sport athletes ? No .
Speaker 2Um , not directly in the sense of like . I haven't been invited to work with a team Um , but I have had athletes who are former team sport athletes or current teams for athletes who come and work with me one-on-one or that .
Speaker 1I teach , no , and and to your point of understanding , kind of the the wise , with , with , with what they're doing and things like that . I think that is one of the one big missing piece in team sport , athlete training Uh , that's predominantly who I work with . Uh and uh , you know they again , they separate the mind from the body , uh , to your point , and they just focus on the body , but not not .
Speaker 1You know , the analogy I give is they work on the car , not to make it a mechanical thing , and they forget about the driver you know , and it's , it's the skilled driver that you got to have , and I know that kind of ties in with another point that you've talked about with type one verse , type two athletes you're talking about with joel , you know I thought that was . I've never heard it . I mean , I knew exactly what you're talking about . I've never heard it kind of uh classified that way .
Speaker 2You might kind of talk about that , because I think that is such a great point uh for team coach yeah this is not like a particular area of research for me , it's just an idea that I've come across . I think I came across this idea specifically through my friend Todd Hargrove , who does bettermovementorg Really brilliant kind of thinker in the movement world . He got it from somewhere else , I'm not sure where . But the basic observation is that there is a set of physical qualities that we kind of think of as like classic athleticism that tend to correlate . So if we see an athlete who runs really fast , we can predict that they probably jump pretty high and will probably be right , right . We can predict that , you know , for their body weight they can probably lift a relatively large amount of weight , you know you know , supposing their levers aren't really ridiculous or something like that .
Speaker 2Right , like , sometimes you see the guys who are like 6'1 and 140 pounds and they don't lift a very heavy barbell weight , but no , yeah , but the the more normally proportioned ones who are naturally fast and and and jump high , they lift heavy too . Um , so , uh , those things tend to correlate and we can talk about those . I think is a type one athleticism is the the term that we used . So , uh , you know , track and field athletes tend to be like really high in type one athleticism . So type two athleticism would then be more like the ability to attain like super fine motor skills . So how fast you run doesn't really correlate with how good you are at darts or pool or you know , shuffleboard .
Speaker 2But it turns out that maybe there's a little bit of correlation between those things . So somebody who , like shoots free throws really well might paint the corners really well in playing baseball . So that's what would be called , uh , type two athleticism . So when I think about this , I think about ? Uh , I'm trying to think of a good example right now from the nba .
Speaker 2I go back in the day to my you know when I was a child and I was playing , I watched the nba , but like there was this guy , desmond mason , remember desmond mason yeah , okay , desmond mason like was basically michael jordan when it came to jumping and running , but he was a scrub , right , yeah , like he was .
Speaker 2He was a he . You know , no offense to him , he would kill all of us in a basketball game , but at an NBA level . He didn't have high-level ball skills , he didn't have high-level shooting skills , he didn't have high-level perceptual awareness . So Michael Jordan was really interesting because he was like elite of elite on both of these areas . And then you look at a player like , uh , like nikoli yokich today . And what's really interesting to me about nikoli yokich is he may be like the best type 2 athlete we've ever seen yeah , right , and he's good enough type one but he's definitely not anywhere near exceptional in that area . But he's managing to develop , to dominate a league which probably has arguably the best type one athletes in any sport in the world , purely through type two athleticism , and I just find that fascinating . So I love to watch nicole yokich yeah , no , he's , uh , he's very skilled .
Speaker 1Uh , yeah , you look at him . He doesn't look like the the type that you'd think would dominate , but he is incredibly skilled . Um , and yeah , and that's always . I'm sorry , what's up ?
Speaker 2Well , what I find interesting is that people think that the jumping high is just natural and the like ball skills thing is somehow just purely skill . But like Nikola Jokic says , he was always like that , like from the time he was a little kid . He could just throw things and catch things and put them exactly where he wanted them to go . And obviously , like they're both amenable to training , like we can take an athlete and make them a much better type 1 athlete and a much better type 2 athlete .
Speaker 2But some athletes just come in with both a higher floor and a higher ceiling , with both a higher floor and a higher ceiling . And that's a whole other thing , which is we don't realize the difference between an athlete's sort of athletic floor and their athletic ceiling and that they're not that correlated . So an athlete walks into the gym and you think , oh , they're super talented because their floor is high , but it doesn't necessarily mean that their ceiling's high . Another athlete may come in and be relatively unimpressive with their floor athletically , and then it turns out when you start training them , they just respond like mad . And the response to the training between the two athletes , it it's just , it's like this intrinsic quality that the athlete has that you don't know until you start working with them yeah , no , I agree .
Speaker 1Um , yeah , it just makes me think of my uh you're talking about the type two particularly my best friend in college . We played football together and he was an offensive lineman , 6'6" , 6'1" , 3' At the college he's 3.05 . Now he's a little bit heavier , doesn't run , doesn't jump , anything like that , but I mean he can shoot darts , he can shoot a basketball . He was the guy that just sat in the corner that would piss you off hitting the threes in the corner . He wouldn't fucking move . Yeah , play defense wouldn't do anything . He just sat in that corner and he could nail him .
Speaker 1Uh , you know , in his his eye , hand coordination , his ball skill , everything like that was fantastic . But yeah , he wasn't gifted with with the gift of uh speed or jumping . But uh , um , no , I love that uh analogy because again , in with the population , that that that I particularly work with and with a lot of high school football here in western pa , it's just they want type one , type one , type one , and and you know they , they , they forget that , amen , you know you got to be skillful in this stuff and and they just keep beating their head through that . Um , and so I love , I love that now you've talked about , uh with joel , how you think basketball is more of a dance . It will stay to basketball . Since we're talking about the guy you mentioned , he played for the Supersonics , correct ? Yeah , yeah , okay , cool yeah .
Speaker 1Make sure , yeah , I got , I got . I got NBA jam right behind me here in the gym . So I think he's a playable , playable character . But you know he talked about how basketball to dance and how you you know you like contact improv and dance and things with reactive . I mean , are you doing , have you ever done contact improv ? Is that something ?
Speaker 2Yeah , yeah , yeah . So I mean I basically , when I first started conceiving of Evolvement , of Play , one of my inspirations was Georges Hebert's méthode naturelle , and so he basically looked at the survival skills . Is method natural ? And so he , he basically looked at the survival skills . He noticed that , uh , like , actually french farmers , but also tribal people that he had traveled and seen , had like magnificent physiques without any formal gymnastics training , yeah . And so it's like , oh well , like you can just become a great athlete through a lifestyle . So what are the elements of that lifestyle ? And that's the fundamentals of physical education . And so he broke it down to walk , run , jump , climb , move on all fours , balance , swim , lift , throw and self-defense 10 qualities . So I basically was like , well , if we take the first seven of those , those all involve just moving the body through space , so we call those locomotion and we take , you know , lift and throw , and you could add carry and catch , you know juggle , et cetera . Those are manipulativeulative skills , and then self-defense is combative . But then there's like , well , every culture dances . Where does that fit in this picture ?
Speaker 2So , coming into kind of like really trying to understand a generalized perspective on movement , I had done martial arts since I was six years old . I'd been doing parkour at that point for like
The Importance of Dance and Movement
Speaker 2five years and I had lifted weights , I'd done CrossFit . You know I could deadlift 400 pounds . I was , you know , I was a good athlete . I played basketball not at any level , I was just a pickup basketball player , but I played a lot of basketball and so I kind of knew a lot of things , things , but I didn't know anything about dance really . So I worked with a couple , a few different people in the movement community , people who are specifically movers . You know , they were not , they were selling their skills to the movement community , but they had backgrounds in professional contemporary dance and all of them had worked contact improv . So Tom Wexler , shira Yaziv and Nuria Boart those were kind of some of my early influences in this area , and then the work of Josef Frusik and Linda Capitano as well . And then I went and did bits and bobs of uh of like axis syllabus and various other sort of contact improv , uh dance traditions that come together , um , and so that became like a touchstone of my work . I spent uh , I think I spent six months studying contemporary dance with like a fairly high level group of people , and then I did a year of Capoeira as well . So those became things that I kind of integrated into my model of movement . So , yeah , I'm a I'm a huge believer in the value of that .
Speaker 2One of my favorite stories about the power of dance is Israel Adesanya . Israel Adesanya is one of the greatest kickboxers and MMA fighters of all time . As far as I know , he didn't do any other sports in youth other than dance , but he's a really , really , really serious dancer . And then at 18 , I think , he decided he wanted to fight , went into an MMA gym and fought a month later . I think Wow , but he was able to take all of that body intelligence that he had from dance and right away , like , solve problems in the combative space fairly well .
Speaker 2Um , so I I found you know that remarkable and obviously you know some athletes are just incredibly gifted and we you again we don't know exactly why some athletes come in with a floor that's where it is when they show up . But there's something very intriguing about the role of dance to me in the overall cultivation of the ability to feel the body , to attune , to recognize rhythm , to express , to have an extremely wide range of motor potentials opened up and the intrinsic motivational drive that comes out through dance , where people dance for hours and hours and hours . All of that , I think , is really interesting from a sort of general athletic preparation .
Speaker 1No , that's awesome . It reminds me of a study I saw with older populations elderly trying to work on cognition and memory and they took a group that just kind of did your standard cognitive tasks playing Uno or playing cards and things like that and then they had a group did synchronized swimming and the group that did the synchronized swimming obviously showed after I think it was a month or two months like way better cognitive development and memory and things like that . So dance and water , which is gotta be tough , so no , that's a . That's what made me think of that . Now , if you were to a question for if you were going to work , if someone asked , you said hey , ray , if you were , can you work with our football team team ? Would you put dance in their off-season training ? Would you put forms of that in there at all ?
Speaker 2quite potentially . Yeah , um , you know , if I was working with an aunt , if I was working with an off-season like football program , you know the the first thing for me would be , like , who are these guys ? What do they need ? Where do they come from ? Right , like , if it's like a uh , maybe more of an urban african-american crowd that like comes from a culture that , like already has a high respect for dance and they're all like jamming and like showing movement in the in the weight room , like you and you're like , okay , let's just like , like , let's you know , who do they admire ? Who can I bring in ? And like , just let them do that .
Speaker 2Right , and you know , if it's more like square corn Fred , midwest kids who , uh , who are a little anxious about dance , I mean , who knows , maybe I could convince them with some squared or something , but but you have to like , you know , know , like , when I think about working with team sport athletes , the question is always like , what are they already getting from their sport ? How do I achieve the goal while staying as close to their sport as possible ? Um , and how do I make sure that I'm not like adding unnecessary risk to the equation , right ? Those are kind of questions that I would . I would be asking but uh , but yeah , I think you know there there's definitely lots of stories about uh , about , you know , nfl athletes who like go and practice ballet , um lynn swan being one of the most famous .
Speaker 2Yeah , yeah , but I mean that is that right now I'm thinking about . Like , like football is choreography . Yes , sir , right , yeah , it's not all of it , it is part of its choreography . So I'm just imagining a bunch of , like a lineman doing some hip hop choreography getting down in the trenches .
Speaker 1Well , I think , yeah , well , no , I think the idea again of dance , because actually , to be honest with you , I studied modern dance in college for a brief while . And so the idea of coordination well , if you're doing coordinated dance versus just kind of improv , coordinating movements to rhythm which has its time and place , so similar to what you're talking about with football , but with team sport , athletes and team sports , as you know , especially football , you have the ideal of what you're trying to achieve , but then there's the chaos of having to go against 11 other ugly guys . And you know , with dance and I loved what you were trying to get to with that , with talking about basketball it's , you know , especially with improv dances you got to be able to react accordingly without thinking kind of taking that out and being more of a type two and just reactive and go with the flow , type of thing . So I I liked that a lot as well and , uh , it kind of ties in that . That ties in a couple questions and things . I want to directions I want to go . One was I love , um , your courses and I love your talks , uh , and I could listen to you all day about rough and tumble play and the history of it and things , and I think I was one of the first to buy your course when you , as soon as you came out with it . I've been implementing it with team sports and I've implemented it here in my my private facility .
Speaker 1One I mean I got a lot of questions to go here . One , but to the listeners would you mind discussing why rough and tumble play is so important from a developmental standpoint ? Because it's I never knew . It was something I always did with my father , my brother , but I never knew there was a science behind it . So I started listening to you and then I started looking into all the books that you talk about and you know Free to Learn , and all the work that you talk about and you know free to learn , and all the the work
Rough and Tumble Play Science
Speaker 1by Peter Gray and all that stuff . I'm fascinated with it . So one would you mind discussing that ?
Speaker 1And then two , just from a practical standpoint , I'm curious on your thoughts . So again , let's just go to a football just because it's that's what we're talking about . Kids that maybe have not rough and tumble played before or didn't do enough of it as children . I think I can spot it pretty easily working with kids , because they're the kids that just take everything too serious . They're the ones that go from zero to 60 and there's , you know , there's just everything's competitive and everything like they can't just be playful . I'm just curious One , is that something you've noticed ? And two , you know , how do you kind of scale , or you know things from a practical standpoint ?
Speaker 2Oh yeah , I mean , I think , I think it's like we see it across our entire culture , right , like I think that this , this inability to like , deal with shades of gray , this , this ramping of emotion , this feeling like everything , like just triggers you to the the end and everybody's like ready for war the moment anything happens . Right , I think that's actually like fundamentally because we've developmentally messed up kids by denying them a fundamental nutrient that teaches them to calibrate the experience of conflict . Please go .
Speaker 1Please go . I love that . Yes , sir , no , please go , I love that so essentially play researchers .
Speaker 2You know you just watch animals play , watch children play and you notice that there's patterns , right ? So play researchers . You know various play researchers have come up with this essential kind of breakdown of play into three primary categories . As far as motor play , there's also narrative play and all sorts of other aspects of play , but the three primary motor modes of play are locomotive play , so you take a kid to a playground and they just start climbing things and swinging on things and sliding down a slope , something like that . That's locomotor play .
Speaker 2Second would be object-oriented play Kid messing with a fidget spinner , playing with a yo-yo , juggling , swinging a stick around object-oriented play . And the last one is rough and tumble play , which is dyadic or group , so you do it with somebody else , and it usually involves elements of mock combat play , fighting , often connected to chasing and things like that . So , like a classic example probably everybody has seen is like dogs , right , you get two dogs together , one of the dog bows . They start like slinging their teeth around each other's faces , running and chasing each other , tackling each other , falling down . And the same thing happens with kids . So , especially like high energy little boys , you get them together and like they can't keep their hands off each other . They're pushing each other , they're giggling , they're laughing , they're knocking each other down , they're climbing on top of each other . You know they're pretending to fight .
Speaker 2That's rough and tumble play and as it turns out , it's extremely universal among at least mammals , and maybe even beyond that . And Jak Pengsep did research that showed at least rough and tumble play is associated with a specific reward pathway in the brain . The neurology associated with the reward for rough and double play is not the same as social dominance , it's not the same as as sexual thrill , it's not the same as as exploratory play or exploratory movement . So all these things are rewarding , but this is very rewarding . And also he showed that animals are highly , highly motivated to do it . So if you , you know , if a , if a little rat sees another rat it can play with and it knows that there's a chance to play , it'll work really hard to solve a problem , to get into that arena to play . And then I think there's research in macaques that shows that rough and tumble play will be engaged in even when it comes at a cost to their developmental trajectory , for how fast latane adult size . So if they're in a calorie deficit and they not so much that they're fully starving , but they're . They're like calorie stressed , they'll still play . And so that's like what is going on with this and this kind of play . It makes you physically tired , it's loud , it's noisy , it attracts predators potentially like uh , there's a lot of costs to this kind of place .
Speaker 2So it's a little bit of an evolutionary mystery why it would exist , and so researchers have put a lot of time into understanding it , and it has a number of roles . The first hypothesis would just be that it is a way of rehearsing specific skills . So how successful are you going to be at fighting ? So how successful are you going to be at fighting ? How successful are you going to be at hunting ? The research is kind of equivocal on that .
Speaker 2There's some animals that don't seem to really need rough and tumble play at all in order to hunt . Well , like cats don't seem to . There doesn't seem to be a strong correlation in cats between their hunting skills . The hunting skills seem to be really hardwired in cats , but what it turns out is that a cat that isn't allowed to engage in rough and double play is far more socially reactive . It has a harder time tolerating other strange cats and new situations . It's much more fearful of new situations in general With humans and monkeys and things like that . Rough and double play seems to be more associated of new situations in general With humans and monkeys and things like that . Rough and double play seems to be more associated with actually having skills that allow you to fight effectively . But it also plays this really important role in developing social connection so kids that roughhouse together become better friends . They grow up and have stronger connection . It develops intimacy .
Speaker 2Jordan Peterson wrote a paper called Play and the Regulation of Aggression where he hypothesized that the rough and tumble play effectively teaches empathy because it's highly motivating to do and it flirts with pain .
Speaker 2It's highly motivating to do and it flirts with pain , so if you overdo it then people will stop wanting to play with you , which forces you to pay attention to and be aware of somebody else's experience and therefore developing empathy .
Speaker 2He's pointed to some research and I haven't been able to track this down or haven't tried it on recently which showed that in boys who are really aggressive , the most effective thing you can do is give them lots of access to rough and double play and that's what helps them regulate and learn to overcome their aggression . In young boys . There's some other research which has come out which is a little bit more equivocal around this and it finds that a father-son rough and double play can actually be associated with negative behavior , with higher levels of peer aggression . But when the father is highly disciplined in the way that he plays with the child , where he enforces boundaries , then you see the opposite reaction . So if there's a lot of aggressive play between children and adults and children , it can just be a symptom of a lot of aggression in the , in the the family system or the individuals . But when that play is well bound greed , then we see that it has a really positive impact on that child's sort of pro-social behavior .
Speaker 1Now is there any research that you've seen that also talks about cause I I ? I looked into some of the research and I see it does talk a lot about the father , but I haven't seen anything talking about the mother . Is there anything ? About the mother's relationship with rough and tumble playing their children .
Speaker 2Yeah , I mean the research tends to focus on fathers . They find that , inherently , fathers just do this a lot more than mothers . And I noticed this in my own family , right Like I have . I have three children and and my wife my wife does rough house with our kids sometimes and my kids will rough house with her , especially if I'm not around . But by and large , if they're in the mood to rough house and I'm available , they will choose me , uh , they will initiate , they will ask for it in relationship to me . Um , I sort of find it more rewarding than she does .
Speaker 2I can't remember the researcher who's looked into this , but there is a researcher who has done some research that shows that bonding hormones like oxytocin are maximized between father-child dyads in a physical play and maximized in mother-child dyads in like cuddling . Yeah , makes sense , and you see this in the way that kids behave . Kids will will push their father away to get to their mother when they need comfort , yeah , yeah . And they will run to their father when they want to play , yeah , and so this is . It's not that fathers can't be comforting . My kids come to me all the time for a hug and everything , but if they're really upset and their mother's available . They're going to bias towards her , yeah , and in the same way she rough houses with them , but that's more ends up being my responsibility , and I haven't . I haven't seen a lot of research that specifically looked at the role of of rough and template play in mothers , other than to notice that it is substantially something that the fathers do .
Speaker 1Okay , anything . Have you seen anything in the research talking about , like the importance of female development and and and young girls , uh , anything like that , or is it all just kind of focused on on boys ? Yeah ?
Speaker 2Yeah , so there's um , there's research on mink , which is really interesting . Research that shows that what they call sexual competence in mink , in both males and females , is uh is associated with experiences of rough and tumble play . So if you deny rough and tumble play to mink , you'll see that males will have a much lower rate of initiation of sexual encounters and an inability to actually make the sexual encounter happen or they don't understand how to make the mechanics work . But in females it's the opposite . Females that are not roughhoused with basically don't refuse sexual encounters , Whereas females who have been roughhoused are much more able to sort of turn away suitors that they don't want . Interesting .
Speaker 1Gotcha .
Speaker 2So I think that's pretty interesting in our culture today too , because we see that the young men I think I saw a statistic recently , gotcha something like 30 to 40 percent of young men have never , or like men on like 18 to 29 , have never asked a girl out , like never approached , yeah , um , or maybe it's never approached in person , something like that , uh , but that's uh , you know , that's like pretty profound like that . So many people don't understand that , like the basic function of courtship that that's breaking down in our society and if we're denying people the kinds of play that teach them the physical confidence and attunement and ability to read and work with another person's bodily responses , it makes sense that , like when courtship and sexuality comes into play , like people are really confused and don't know what to do yeah , no , no , it makes sense .
Speaker 1Um , yeah , they're the , uh , they're the awkward guys at the bar just off in the corner , man , um , but uh , no , I don't . I've noticed implementing , you know , your , your rough and tumble games and some others that I've picked up . Uh one , the kids that struggle and maybe have not done it as much . And then also , when I've tried to do it with females , if I get a couple of teammates going against each other , it's just they don't know how to necessarily do it and it's just they don't . You know , it's more uh , kind of slap boxing verse , like they're trying to actually do stuff . Um , I was just curious , you know , with the research , with that , because I think it is important , because you know I'll get a sport like soccer . I get a lot of female soccer athletes and the parents or the coaches will come to say , well , I want you to get the girls stronger , when usually what they mean is stronger on the ball , right , not to get knocked off the ball and all right . So that's where I think rough and tumble play come in and to an extensive being able to be physical and be able to use their bodies and things like that . And that's where it's like the girls that are very good at that , I've noticed are the girls that are far more physical when they do those type of games . But I think it's hugely missed and hugely important in development .
Speaker 1I also have three children and they will rough and tumble with me all the time . My boys are getting to the point where they try to hurt me , where they like to really beat up on dad . But you know we love your games , like your drunk uncle game is a very fun one . That's a fun game . Now , how do you tie back if you have an athlete or if you have a person or if you have someone in a group that struggles with keeping it playful and they are just they're the ones that are trying to win at all costs and just can't turn it down . Like , how do you scale those things ? Are there things you say or you do ? Or maybe you just don't do those games or activities with them ? Like what , what's kind of ?
Speaker 1because I definitely noticed that with with some with they just can't . They can't be playful .
Speaker 2It's got to be 100 all the time yeah , I want to go back for a second , if you don't mind , and just talk about working with women and men , because I think that's a really interesting thing and uh , and then that , that , that that piece about like girls who are strong on the ball in soccer or basketball or whatever it is right , and how much of that is like are you physically strong enough versus how much of that is like do you feel comfortable with the contact ?
Speaker 2yes yes , and do you do you have like a lot of social innovation about , like , the potential to hurt the other girl and things like that ? So , just broadly like , I work in a very specific kind of context right , like I put my work out on social media and it attracts people and attracts kind of early adopter , pioneer type people , but 50% of the people I work with are coaches themselves , and they pay a lot of money to come work with me and like for a week in person , and so I think it's a really unique like kind of little world that I inhabit . That's not necessarily always like the kinds of experiences I don't necessarily get to work with or have some of the same challenges that coaches who work in a facility have . Yes , what I have noticed , though , is that a lot of the especially early on , when I started doing the rough and tumble play , I would get a lot of female students who would come in , who would be very hesitant to do it , but I have been very successful in sort of like introducing it in such a way that it becomes really attractive , and , essentially , everybody's always done it yeah , in the end , even though people say , oh , I don't think I'm going to participate and they usually have an amazing time and often it's the women who say they had the most profound experience . We do get women who are more hesitant , who find some of the games too intense , who need to step out for a while . So it's not like it always works that way and it's definitely more often female students who will be like this is too physically intense . I'm just not having fun right now . I need to do a different variation of it . But we have had really good success with that and we've seen like so many women find it really healing to engage in that kind of intense physical play .
Speaker 2Um , now to the second thing about , uh , like being , you know , like , like , willing to take contact , willing to give contact , find female students in general are , you know , just not all of them . Some of them , like there's so many women who come to work with me who feel so set free by , like working with a big , strong man who they can just go as hard as they possibly can against and who they trust to be safe with them , like that's like the best experience with them . But especially when women work with women , you'll see them be really hesitant about contact and really like you know , oh , I'm sorry , oh , I didn't mean to like , are you okay ? Like ? There's a lot of sort of like social grooming that's happening in those experiences and I wonder how much of that is like socialized versus how much of that is actually just men and women have different personalities and natures .
Speaker 2Because , like I , look at my oldest daughter , who's 13 now , she roughhoused with me intensely , like throughout her young childhood . She was always like , had the freedom to roughhouse with her little brother , who's only two years younger than her , so they were like at it a lot . Um , as she hit puberty , like she just completely flipped the script on her willingness to engage in context .
Speaker 2So she was like 10 years old the first time we went out for soccer and she was so hesitant to get near another girl and like bump into him , and she's just like that , you know . Whereas my , my youngest daughter , who's seven , she wrestles , uh , and she's just like you know , every time there's a group of kids wrestling she's the first there . She's kicking the boy's butts , she loves doing it and and it's like how much of that is just the personality of the kid and , uh , and you're gonna , you know , if the kid wants to excel in soccer , then you're gonna have to support them and these games can , can certainly help , um , but like , in understanding where it comes from . You know , there's a a certain amount of it that just like maybe is , is intrinsic and you have to to work with that . So that's kind of my of my thoughts on on the , on the , that , that dynamic .
Speaker 2I think it's a really interesting dynamic . I think it's incredibly important . I think rough and tumble play between men and women is really healing , and accepting that men and women are different is also really valuable and healing . And we have to accept difference while also trying to open the options and the freedom for people as much as possible and to show them how beneficial these things can be . That's kind of my perspective on those things .
The Value of Positive Struggle
Speaker 1I love it . Yeah , it made me think about another interview I heard you talk about , with the need for humans to have positive struggle , and you gave a specific story of I think you were cliff diving or base diving or cave dive some crazy stuff you do and some . There was a woman there that like just she was so fearful and kept falling . She was in tears and then wrote some glowing review . We might kind of talking about the need for humans for positive struggle , cause I like , I really liked that and that that I feel like this day and age , with how you've talked about it before , how our technology and everything's trying to make things more comfortable and no-transcript , if you want to go to the age with your children or anything like that , because I love that , because that is something I try to do with my children is I want them to be as motor competent in as many different scenarios as possible . Whether they decide to play team sports or not , I don't care , but I want them to know how to to move .
Speaker 1You know the joke we have , especially during covid we'd said is you know , when the zombie apocalypse hits , we got to be able to defend ourselves , we got to be able to climb and swim and throw and hunt and do all these things . So that's . We always talk about the zombie apocalypse because my kids like those kinds of books and stuff . But yeah , if , if Rafe Kelly was in charge of designing a you know , a school curriculum , I would love .
Speaker 2I would love to do that actually I'm so I'm homeschooling my kids . I just started homeschooling them . My wife started last April , but now I'm homeschooling my kids last april , but now I'm just going to get it . So I'm really working hard on the academic side of this as well and the connection between them . But one of the the core ideas behind my model of the generalist mover is this idea of um kind of a hierarchy , of a hierarchical network of activities , or or or education . And how do we recognize that ?
Speaker 2So you , know I was inspired by the early days of CrossFit and this idea of the infinite hopper of physical tasks .
Speaker 2The fittest person is the person who does best across , and it's like well , not all tasks are equally relevant though . So how do I do best at the tasks that matter the most , and then you can't actually train everything . So how do I do best at the tasks that matter the most , and then you can't actually train everything , so you have to look to train the things that have some sort of advantage over other things , right ? So if you treat every physical task as sort of equal validity , then you have no starting point . Uh , as sort of of equal validity , then you have no starting point . So the analogy I like to give is in gymnastics . You have six events . For the men , you have the floor , the vault , the high bar , the parallel bars , the rings and the pommel horse . So in theory , you might think , okay , six events , you train each event equally , that's going to create the best athlete , but what you find is that every good coach trains the floor exercise
Building a Complete Movement Education
Speaker 2much more than everything else , sometimes like 50% of the time when they're preparing in the younger generation .
Speaker 2Why is that ?
Speaker 2Well , I think the floor exercise has an asymmetrical set of donor skills to the other exercises that the others don't . It , biomechanically and structurally allows ways of approaching skills that are relevant across everything else . So if you want to be able to do a giant on a high bar , you have to be able to do a handstand . You have to be comfortable in a handstand . Is it easier to learn a handstand on the high bar or on the floor ? It's on the floor , right . You actually have to be able to do like a back extension roll type movement . You learn that on the floor first before you learn on the high bar . And if you look at elite , if you look at all around gymnastics champions , elite , if you look at all around gymnastics champions , you could ask what is the event they're most likely to get another medal in ? And you find it's the floor . So when you want to be a generalist , you're like , okay , well , I need to prioritize the floor . And then on the flip side , the pommel horse is the least biomechanically similar to every other event . It's the most specialized . So if you're going to cut one thing out of your training and you're training as a gymnast you always cut the pommel horse . So then you apply that sort of across the entire realm of physical culture . What are the things that are going to give me the most benefit across everything else ? What are the things that are going to give me the most benefit across everything else ?
Speaker 2Let's look at team sports . You'll find most people in both the NFL and the NBA believe that there are more NBA players who could play in the NFL than vice versa . Yeah , right , yeah . Why is that ? Well , partially , it's well , nba players make more money , it's safer to play in the NFL , you get a longer career . But when I look at the games , what I see is that every player especially in the way that the NBA is played now on an NBA court , handles the ball , throws the ball , catches the ball , sets up picks , runs around picks , moves across the floor , does off-ball movement . It's like , oh so every player is essentially playing quarterback , running back and lineman Right . So if you , if you're trying to navigate around a pick and roll to get to the ball handler , that's fundamentally skills that have donor potential for somebody who's trying to get to a quarterback in the NFL . But because the NFL or in American football , because American football is more specialized across those things . It's actually harder for those skills to transfer and it's like a small-sided game too , because you have five on five the opportunity per unit time to develop high-level ball skills and movement .
Speaker 2Without the ball skills and movement around other ball skills and movement around other people's body skills , they're all really high in basketball . Now basketball has a really big problem , which is that it's not scaled well to children . So the way that you play basketball with a huge ball and a huge hoop when you're eight years old is very mechanically unrelated to how you play basketball when you're an adult . So I don't think it's a great sport as a foundation for an eight year old . I prefer rugby to like develop all the moving around skills and the and the handling the ball skills , and then when 12 , 13 , either five , two , five , three , five , four . Now we can move them into basketball and have them play basketball .
Speaker 2So , um , this is just how I'm generally thinking about this problem so now the same problem with like what do I want my kids to read ? What do I want them like to watch ? What do I want them to like what ? Like you know what math teaches you other math versus what math is highly specialized . This is how we create generally educated people that then it can be something . So , for instance , like you have to wait till someone's or you have to like introduce it to them in a scaled way . But as like to understand all of western literature , you have to understand the bible . Yes , so whether you're a christian or not a christian , it's like you don't understand jk rowling or jr tolkien or dostoevsky or any of this stuff if you haven't read the bible , because all of it is in reference to the Bible .
Speaker 2Okay , so that's what I'm trying to construct is like that map of what are the highest threshold nodes . So then you have the nodes that have the most asymmetrical donor potential , and then you have these nodes that are like portals into a whole new network . Right , and that's where swimming is different . Right , swimming doesn't make you better at anything that's not related to swimming . Swimming , yeah , right , if you swim a lot , you will get zero transfer to basketball and sprinting and all of these things . But if you can swim , you can canyoneer , you can surf , you can sail , you can go underwater cave exploring , you can surf , you can sail , you can , you know , you can go underwater cave exploring , like , like , there's so much of the world that's available to you .
Speaker 2So another model that I've think about is , like education is like investing . Right , I want my kids to have a , like a really good portfolio . I want them to be movement millionaires , and what a millionaire means is that you can do the things that nobody else gets to do , right . So , like recently , I went , uh , on a canyoneering trip with three friends . So we we hiked in , we dropped into this canyon and we climbed down like 20 waterfalls , the most beautiful waterfalls that you barely see , right , nobody else there . Like you got to be confident , to like drop off the edge of a cliff on a rappel to go access this space , and having that physical capacity is the door that's open to you that's not open to somebody else . In the same way that you know , when you have a certain level of wealth and power , you get to walk into a room that somebody else doesn't get to walk into .
Speaker 2So I want my kids to have as many of those rooms open as possible . And I want everybody's kids to have as many of those rooms open as possible . And so what are the ? What are the ? What are the things that have that highest donation capacity of the most important notes on a physical education level Parkour , right , that on gymnastics that's the best expression of that locomotive capacity .
Speaker 2Some level of team sport , like the way that I would do team sport is , yeah , like probably rugby for kids , then basketball or I'd try to convince people to like , shrink the basketball down to an appropriate size and the hoop down to an appropriate size , and I think playing a variety of them is good , but like , that's like kind of where I , where I focus , um , some kind of dance , super valuable um , some kind of martial art , that's like .
Speaker 2that's the core four for me and then sprinting , weightlifting , jumping , those are like you know , you , we want to do those for preparation for all these athletes . Yes , sir , um , and I think that I should be . That's the gymnastics is the heart of every education . Uh , you know , margaretta striker is one of my biggest ones .
Speaker 2She said physical education is the foundation of all education . It's how we build up the capacity of the individual . Um plato in plato's republic is talking about the . The beginning of the character is in uh , gymnastics and music . How much we don't , we don't pay attention to either of those in our education now no , they're being cut out yeah , so I want , I want my kids to be able to sing .
Speaker 2I want my kids to be able to play an instrument . That's another , that's another whole world . I want them to be able to draw right , because if they can draw , they can think visually . Yeah , I want them to be able to write . So , every day , like my kids read and then they have to write about what they read , they have to tell me what they learned , so that they're actually doing it . And we're doing that by hand right now , because I think it's much more much more education .
Speaker 2Um , they gotta be able to do math . You know there's whole worlds that are open to you in math . Um , they have to be able to speak right rhetoric that's a huge thing in the past and they have to be able to read fiction and non-fiction right and understand literature , understand non-fiction and understand , like , the history of the western canon . And then , of course , there's a huge aspect of well scientific literacy and then the passions of the child and meeting the passions of the child .
Speaker 1So we're , we're not just like okay , learn music in general .
Speaker 2It's like , well , what is the music that that makes you want to learn music ? How do we find a pathway into understanding the classics that works for you , right ? So we don't just throw you know ? Uh , for , like , my son is super interested in military history , so it's like , okay , let's study the battle of thermopylae , that's how we're going to get into to greek history , right ? Um , you know if , if my daughter maybe is more imaginative and more mythological , it's like let's go to the metamorphoses of ovid , things like that .
Speaker 2So that's kind of how I think about education in a broader way . I don't know if that's a perfect answer to your question , but that's where I , I'm playing , no , it is .
Speaker 1No , I love that and that's you know . Kudos to you for homeschooling , sir , because , to be honest with you again , I went to school to be a social studies teacher and so I am discouraged with our education system and schools around here and if I could , I would homeschool my children as well . So , you know , kudos to you , sir , cause I , I , I think that's fantastic and I , you know , good good for your kids , I , we try to have them go to , you know , traditional schools , but then we try to do the homeschooling stuff ourselves and have them chase passions and things that you're , you're , you're alluding to . No , that's , that's awesome .
Speaker 2Thank you . Yeah , I think everyone has to recognize that the the the ultimate responsibility for the education of the child is always the parents , and we can't , we cannot just sort of like hand it over to the school systems and they don't educate the child and everything that you actually want the child to know . Yes , sir , so so you're homeschooling whether you're homeschooling .
Speaker 1Yeah , a hundred percent , 100 , um , yeah , and too many times I hear you know I work with a lot of adults as well and they just , they just blame the teachers and don't take ownership on on themselves , and it's disheartening . And then you know , we just had . You know , now that we're back in school here , you know summertime and kids don't do any kind of schooling during the summer . They take those months off and it's just like , asked them , do they like to read now ? Well , cause they associate reading with things in school Like , well , okay , what are the things you're passionate about ? What are the things you like ? You know I like this , I like that . Well , why don't you read about that ? Then you know , but no , rafe , I , I love it .
Speaker 1And thank you so much , sir , I don't want to take any more of your time . I know your dog's probably hopefully not beaten at the door and trying to eat your GoPro stuff , but no , sir , it was a true honor to to have you on . I've been listening to you for years and this is awesome , good to speak to you and thank you so much . You know , where can people , my listeners , learn more about you , about Rafe Kelly and Evolve , move Play and your work , sir .
Speaker 2Yeah , ev , more about you , about , uh , rave kelly and evolve move play and in your work , sir , yeah , evolve move playcom is the , the website . Uh , we're fairly active on instagram , um , a little bit on facebook , uh , and then I've been uh writing on my sub stack , both my personal sub stack , rave kelly , and my , uh , the evolving play sub stack . So we have a set of online courses which you mentioned . I believe you've taken on some of our online courses .
Speaker 2We have an online membership , so that's available through the website and if you have any issues or questions , you can hit up info at evolvemoveplaycom and we'll get back to you and do that , and I'm personally on sabbatical right now and focused on writing a book , so I won't be teaching any retreats or workshops in the next year .
Speaker 1I was going to
Closing Thoughts and Resources
Speaker 1ask you because with all of your anthropology and all your history and physiology , psychology , just everything like will you ever ? Will you ever do that ? No , that's awesome .
Speaker 2That's the goal . That's the goal . But I have students and teachers who worked with me for a long time . I did a cohort of eight apprentices last year who worked with me for a year , who are now out and certified coaches . So those guys are around . We'll get some more info up about them . But there will be Evolve Me to Play workshops happening in Europe and the United States through my students next year . So people can find all that info on the website as it comes out .
Speaker 1You mentioned Todd Hargrove and I actually messaged him not too long ago to see if I can get him on a podcast he said in a couple of weeks , in October , because he's putting out on his sub stack right Chapters to this new book he's writing and I love it because it takes , you know , neurology , it takes , uh , evolution and anthropology and he's kind of put it together and it just makes me also think of your work , like I think you two should , if you haven't already , I that would be awesome to to combine your guys info yeah , he's been on my podcast , I think twice , um , but I taught and todd todd's daughter came to the parkour gym that I owned in , but I was a co-founder of .
Speaker 2I was never an owner of , but I was a co-founder of in Seattle from 2009 to 2013 . So we met through that and then , from like 2014 to 2020 , when I moved out of Seattle , we would meet for drinks once a month and chat and stuff . So it was a really good time . Uh , miss that guy , but hi , todd , if you're seeing this , yeah , man , no , that would be cool .
Speaker 1Uh , I'm very excited for his book . I've been reading his chapters as you've been putting them out . Uh , that's awesome . They , you know . Is there a timeline on when your book ?
Speaker 2No , no , not at all . I'm literally just just beginning the process of exploring how I'm going to put that together .
Speaker 1It's just that's the intention is to put my energy towards that awesome , okay , well , hey , hopefully , uh , sooner rather than later , good luck with that process . Uh , rafe , thank you again for your time . Thank you , jeff , have a good .