I often think of learning movement skills like learning a new language. there’s many components and moves that are like the alphabet and vocabulary. Eventually you learn to string them together in a coherent or effective structure. This is often called fluency or, in movement terms, flow. 

When you learn to speak as an infant, you go to school and they teach you about letters, then words, then sentence structure, then grammar, then proper technique for forming a sound argument. 

No. Of course not. 

You learn by mirroring, and doing. Copying and experimenting. Receiving feedback and reinforcement for the sounds you make. 

Movement is the same. your instincts guide you and you learn through copying and experimentation until certain movements achieve your desires. 

So should we learn to move through structured schooling or should we learn through “just doing”- copying, experimenting and being in motion? 

The catch as I see it is we are not coming to “movement school” from an infant's stage. 

We already know a language that we’ve been using our whole lives. So simply immersing ourselve in a movement lifestyle can be useful, but we may be coming in with already ingrained patterns of movement that are inefficient and body adaptations that are unstable for the movements that we are trying to emmulate. It’s like watching an olympic gymnast do back flips and not seeing the 10,000 hours of practice that led her there, and trying to copy her by throwing yourself in the air… it’s likely you’ll get hurt. Or you may see those feats of skill and they’re so incomprehensible that you never even try. whereas if you learned step by step, you’d start to gain a clearer understnading and even enthusiasm for progressing towards those skills. 

It’s also like just throwing yourself into a country that speaks an entirely different language. You’ll surely learn that way, but you will have an infants understanding of the language. You may also come in with preconceived notions from your native tongue of how sentences and sounds are made and you may continue for years to speak poorly unless you get some help and schooling. And what if where you happened to land speaks with such a distinct dialect that no one outside of that region can understand you? You’d have put in all that time immersing yourself in a language that has no application anywhere else (which is totally fine if that is where you want to live - just not if you wish to be understood when you travel) 

We are constantly mirroring others - even unconsciously - and we are being influenced consistently by a sedentary culture with poor motor skills and habits. Our native tongue for our bodies has become “sedentarism”. We approach movement with bodies that have adapted for not-moving, and we think about movement from the perspective of a foreigner observing a new language - we see movement from the perspective as being in contrast to sedentarism. Often, when we watch people move: it’s like listening to a specific dialect. The movements are effective for where and what that person is doing: biking, gymnastics, football, hockey - but the skills are specialized and super specific to that one activity, and not very applicable anywhere else. What’s harder to see in ourselves is where we’ve developed poor motor skills for the daily motions like walking that can lead to the aches and pains that we assume are the products of aging. We assume that’s just the way it is - kind of like not being able to hear that you have an accent in your language because everyone around you talks the same way.

So what’s the solution? 

I propose we do both. We immerse. And we go to school. We play, copy, experiment and we learn the skills of generalized movement. If we want to learn a specific movement language, we’ll understand it much better if we also know the mother tongue.