The development of athleticism entails mastering proper techniques for agility, coordination, flexibility, power, reaction time, speed, strength, balance and endurance. An athlete’s training approach should directly lead to improvement in the quality of the various connective tissue and neural structures required to execute the sub-categories of athleticism as well as the biomechanics and sport-specific skills optimally and safely.
Conventional resistance training systems (weightlifting) do not address ALL of the aforementioned athletic sub-categories. Consider for instance a squat, clean or deadlift. While these methods might lead to improvement of max strength in the specific exercise, this approach equates to minimal (at best) transfer to the track, court, ring or field, as these movements do not stimulate functional movement patterns and do not address agility, or reactive ability. Other forms of training must then be added to the conditioning program to address the remaining athletic components. This ultimately leads to a training system that consists of many separate components that do not complement each other or the sport-specific needs of the athlete.
The Flow Kinetix approach to the development and training of human performance movement is administered through a Systems-Thinking approach, which is a set of practices based upon the perspective that the component parts of a system are best understood in the context of their relationships with each other and with other systems – rather than in isolation. The Systems-Thinking approach focuses on cyclical rather than linear cause and effect relationships. In this vein, Systems-Thinking can serve as a diagnostic tool that will allow us to propose better questions to big challenges. It moves us away from the linear ideology of traditional analyses, and instead attempts to uncover how movement patterns and over time and in response to and within context and circumstance.
Systems-Thinking moves the training approach away from a reductionist attempt to isolate single structures that may correlate with particular movement results, and instead towards an understanding that the processes that are at work when the particular movement result is present. With a Systems-Thinking approach to training human performance movement, it is necessary that the individual elements within the system are acknowledged, analyzed and understood, but also – and more importantly – the interactions of these elements, and the whole systems within which they exist.
