Explore, Evolve, Express

A few years ago we brought in the concept of a levels-based system at the gym.

Here’s why.

Everyone is unique: strength, learning style, experience, mobility, anatomy—all different. But the main difference is training age and skill acquisition. Having someone who has never worked out before jump into their first class and do a kettlebell swing with no instruction isn’t just bad practice; it’s dangerous. On the flip side of that, spending 30 minutes breaking down a move isn’t fair for someone who has been in class for a long time. This is why we have our foundations program. However, a lifelong journey of movement, training, and exercise isn’t just a few weeks of intro and then boom, you're there. It is, as the name suggests, lifelong. This is why we brought in the idea of more levels: Explore, Evolve, and Express/Expand (more on that later).

The levels worked for a while, but then I noticed something that I didn’t account for : fear and the ego.

While each level was a continuation of the journey, essentially the Explore and Evolve was an extension of the Foundations program. The Expand class was not an endpoint; it really was just a place of autonomy, a mindset that training and movement are part of your life forever. That one understood the ebbs and flows of training, how to push themselves or how to pull back, how to modify, how to adjust. Instead, what we saw was that people saw the next class as a destination. There was a lot of anxiousness just to get to that level rather than take the time to feel your way along the process. Alternatively, we saw people being content where they were. People would be content where they were never pushing themselves that little bit harder to get to the next level and loosing the idea of progressive overload.

This flew in the face of the whole concept, which was modeled on Benjamin Bloom’s Mastery Learning. Instead of really learning the concepts, there would be a rush to the next thing. The final problem with this: good old logistics. We all have busy lives, and flexibility is really, really important to staying consistent when starting out with a new routine.

So how did we adjust?

The names of the classes are gone, and the distinction after Foundations is gone, but everything else is the same. Especially Bloom’s Mastery Model. The Foundations classes are a way of getting yourself accustomed to the gym, a way of feeling into the movements and culture of the gym. We will break the movement patterns down. We will have lots of time for questions. We will really learn that training is about meeting myself where I am not and nothing to do with the person beside me.

The Advanced Kettlebell Skills and Conditioning class formerly Explore is focused on more variety.

Learning more advanced skills will improve coordination. The lighter weights but more rest will increase endurance as well. In this class, everyone’s exposure to the skills will be different. That is great, different folks will be working on different things. Different intentions. Maybe you want to work on conditioning and really push it. Great, you will find the variation of the skill that you can express the most amount of intensity with. Maybe you want to focus on the skill. Great, work with more focus on the complexity to evolve the movement. Maybe you want to see how heavy you can go on a move you have been developing, great, explore it!

The Strength and mobility class is all about strength and mobility.

This class is more structured, less variety. The program will follow a similar structure forever with movement, intention, and intensity changing every 4 to 6 weeks. This class is really where you will see the mastery model come into play. Everyone will be working on their variation of a pattern. The variation that will work best for them. For example, let’s say the movement pattern is an upper body push. Within the same class, you may have someone working on doing push-ups with 50lbs attached to them. The person beside them may be working on an inline push-up. The next person a plank. Within the same class, everyone is working on the “level” of movement that will suit them the most for the intention they have. Every session that we do will have some element of Exploration, Evolution, and Expression. That will be different for everyone else.

When we Explore we become curious about direction and goals. When we develop, we Evolve towards that. When we Express we see what has changed or how close we are.

We want to see what we are capable of. Maybe this is the exploration of the movement, seeing what is available to you. Maybe this is exploring how heavy you can go or trying to figure out a new skill. We are just having fun and seeing what’s there. We Evolve when we take the information we find from Exploration and develop a program to develop the areas that limited us. That might be focused mobility work. It could be breaking skills down into more manageable and achievable movements or maybe it is finding weights that we train progressively to get overall stronger. Then we have Expression. This is where we have fun. We test how strong we are, we play with new tricks or link movements together for a flow. We play with new skills. We go for a really hard run or hike a mountain. We take our newfound bodily awareness to try a dance class or play a new sport. Expression is fun; it is what it is all about. None of these are mutually exclusive. The same exercises can have different intentions. Within the same class what is one person's Exploration may be another’s expression. A dancer will express freedom of movement in a warm-up flow while someone new to fluid movement will use it as Exploration. A super mobile person will use the mobility section as Expression while the tighter person will use the same section to develop and evolve mobility. During the strength section, the former will use it as development, while the latter may use it to explore what new weights they can lift.

The key is that we are not lost, constantly stuck in the same intention.

That we play off each element of movement to keep enhancing the capacity as a whole. If we only ever Explore, we will most likely never really develop anything. If we only stay developing, we will eventually get to a comfort zone never really knowing what we are capable of and never really looking for weaknesses to actually develop. If we are stuck expressing all the time, we will only be able to express what we already have and eventually get frustrated with a lack of progress. The idea is to be excited and intentional about movement. Every time I find a weakness, I have a road map to train. Every time I am focused on developing something, I am excited to express all the hard work.