This is a collection of ten things I found out about in the past week that felt relevant to my work.

They can be read as individual curios, or, as I understand them, as waymarkers towards a more interesting and inclusive culture of fitness.

The London Perambulator, a fascinating documentary about the suburban psychogeographical wanderings of “former arsonist” Nick Papadimitriou:

“Ludo-diversity” is a term coined in 2016 by the Belgian sports historian Roland Renson “to explain the mechanisms of extinction, survival and invention of movement cultures and to warn against a modern sport monoculture”.

The term movement culture is proposed here as a more universal concept than the term sport. Sport refers to a rather recent modern and typically Western cultural product, which has been exported and imported worldwide. Imposing this concept of sport on periods of the past or on other non-Western cultures can be seen as a form of anachronism on the one hand, and of cultural imperialism on the other.

Nowadays, “movement culture” is used most often by advocates of the pseudo-primitive exercise programmes sold for lots of money by MovNat, Ido Portal etc. It’s fun comparing that with this use of the term as a means of preserving vernacular forms of physical activity threatened by such programmes.

I am compiling a calendar of traditional sporting events in Britain. There is such richness but it’s so hard to find. I will try to have this calendar ready by next year.

Related to the first point above, I often think of this bit in Dorothy Parker’s ‘Men: A Hate Song’, first published in Vanity Fair in 1917:

There are the Cave Men,—
The Specimens of Red-Blooded Manhood.
They eat everything very rare,
They are scarcely ever out of their cold baths,
And they want everybody to feel their muscles.
They talk in loud voices,
Using short Anglo-Saxon words.
They go around raising windows,
And they slap people on the back,
And tell them what they need is exercise.
They are always just on the point of walking to San Francisco,
Or crossing the ocean in a sailboat,
Or going through Russia on a sled—
I wish to God they would!

Members of the Pinnacle Club, photographed in 1933.

‘Wrestlers’ by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. From the British Museum collection.

Building on last week’s Kurt Hahn stuff, this week the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award programme, which was inspired by Hahn, released a list of 25 “character hacks”:

Get work experience or a part-time job
Spend time getting to know an older person
Become a mentor to someone younger
Volunteer for a charity
Join a club for your hobby
Go to a music festival or a gig
Learn a foreign language
Set yourself a personal physical challenge
Learn first aid
Learn to manage your own money
Travel somewhere new
Experience a digital detox
Campaign for something you believe in
Learn to cook
Try vegetarianism or veganism
Spend time in nature
Carry out a random act of kindness
Learn about your history
Speak in public or in front of the school class
Create a piece of art or music
Go dancing
Dress for yourself, not others
Engage in politics
Learn about climate change
Have a conversation with someone you’ve never met

The use of “carry out” in point 17 is very funny. Also isn’t point 25 impossible? Shouldn’t it say “met before”?

This week I remembered Gregory Bauge’s outrageous save from the 2009 UCI World Sprint Championships:

I read two nice things about skill acquisition. Firstly, in Richard Sennett’s ‘The Craftsman’:

We should be suspicious of claims for innate, untrained talent. “I could write a good novel if only I had the time” or “if only I could pull myself together” is usually a narcissist’s fantasy. Going over an action again and again, by contrast, enables self-criticism. Modern education fears repetitive learning as mind-numbing. Afraid of boring children, avid to present ever-different stimulation, the enlightened teacher may avoid routine - but thus deprives children of the experience of studying their own ingrained practice and modulating from within.
Skill development depends on how repetition is organised. This is why in music, as in sports, the length of a practice session must be carefully judged: the number of times one repeats a piece can be no more than the individual’s attention span at a given stage. As skill expands, the capacity to sustain repetition increases. In music this is the so-called Isaac Stern rule, the great violinist declaring that the better your technique, the longer you can rehearse without becoming bored. There are “Eureka!” moments that turn the lock in a practice that has jammed, but they are embedded in routine.

Secondly, this memorable diagram in the educationist and mountaineer Robin Hodgkin’s essay ‘Skills and Safety’:

A skill is the ability to perform a difficult action correctly, not by virtue of consciously held precepts but by unconscious knowledge of innumerable earlier performances and attempts.
A skill can best be understood therefore as a focussed phenomenon - one act in the present deriving from innumerable past sources. This may be diagrammatically shown thus:

Final thing on the skill acquisition theme…

Skateboarding taught me how to fail and fail and fail (and then sometimes succeed). This edit of raw footage from Nora Vasconcellos’ recent part in the Welcome Skateboards video is inspiring:

Similarly, this blew my mind. Learning, yeah?!

New Fitness Culture Scrapbook #2