The major difference between the movements in this grown-up playground and the kind that happen at a conventional gym is the neurological elements of fitness: coordination, accuracy, agility, and balance. These capabilities require a knitting together of nerves and muscles and adaptations in the brain. They can only be acquired through practice, and are accelerated by coaching. They are entirely absent from the kinds of workouts that people do at gyms. The modern gym has been deliberately designed to not require any coordination, accuracy, agility, or balance. The attributes of fitness that bind the body and brain together have become the exclusive province of athletes, dancers, and the few lucky children who still climb trees, pop bicycle wheelies, and hang upside down from monkey bars. The stripping-away of coordination, accuracy agility and balance from physical culture – from our modern notion of fitness – has made us weaker, because power, the ability to apply maximum force, requires neural circuitry that’s impossible to develop on a pulley cable.
Posted on: Mon, 14 Jul 2014 02:39:42 +0000