Cristina Latici is a movement coach and former dancer with decades of training. She coaches parkour in New York City, drawing on years of collaborative work with choreographers where she developed movement pieces through responsive improvisation. When she talks about coaching, she emphasizes reading students, understanding their backgrounds, and knowing when to offer guidance versus when to step back and let them explore.

So when she describes being dragged by a dog toward a lamppost and her body automatically solving the problem, it’s not a story about beginner’s luck. It’s a story about what happens when training operates faster than conscious thought.

The setup: she was dog-sitting a huge, difficult dog. The instructions were to tie the leash around her waist so she could brace if the dog pulled. She’s walking, holding coffee, eating. The dog spots another dog and bolts. Everything goes flying. She’s running, being dragged, thinking “this is not gonna end well.”

What happens next: she throws her arms around the lamppost and spins around it, using the circular motion to dissipate the force. She falls, but she’s okay. People lean out windows asking if she’s alright. Her first thought: “oh my God, like that’s because I’m a dancer.”

She’s describing something she calls “touch”—not the physical sensation of contact, but what she terms “this intuitive touch sense that develops in our bodies over time from having engaged with a physical discipline.” In that split second before impact, her training provided an option that wasn’t consciously planned. The lamppost became a tool rather than an obstacle because her body recognized a solution before her conscious mind could process the problem.

This is a process that happens unconsciously, I think to a certain degree.

The question is: what actually is this?

Cristina distinguishes it from the literal meaning of touch—physical contact with another person or object. Instead, she’s describing something closer to proprioceptive intuition, a developed capacity to sense and respond to spatial and kinetic information without deliberate thought. But that definition, while accurate, doesn’t capture the phenomenon. The lamppost example isn’t just about sensing where your body is in space. It’s about having a library of movement solutions available for recall under conditions where conscious decision-making is too slow.

Consider what didn’t happen: Cristina didn’t freeze. She didn’t brace and get yanked into the post. She didn’t try to stop the dog with pure strength. Her body accessed a movement pattern—spinning around a vertical axis while managing momentum—that had no direct relationship to dog-walking but perfect applicability to the situation. The transfer happened automatically.

This suggests touch isn’t one thing but a cluster of related capacities. First, pattern recognition that operates faster than conscious thought. Second, a sufficiently diverse movement vocabulary that unexpected situations map onto existing solutions. Third, the ability to execute movements under duress without planning them. And fourth—perhaps most importantly—the trust to let the body respond without conscious override.

That last element matters because touch can’t develop if you’re constantly stopping yourself to think. Cristina describes this process as largely unconscious, which means it requires surrendering some degree of conscious control during practice. You have to move enough, in enough varied contexts, that your nervous system builds associations your conscious mind never explicitly creates.

The question of how touch develops leads to an uncomfortable answer: you can’t directly train it. Cristina acknowledges this tension: “i think that’s something you can talk about with people, but I’m not sure you could necessarily extrapolate that concept and teach it directly.” You can’t drill “intuitive lamppost spinning” any more than you can drill “appropriate response to unknown future emergency.” Touch emerges as a byproduct of sustained, varied movement practice. It’s what accumulates when you spend years moving.

This creates a pedagogical problem. How do you help students develop something you can’t teach? Cristina’s answer, implicit in her coaching approach, seems to be: create conditions where touch can develop, then get out of the way. This means providing enough structure that students build skill, but enough freedom that they encounter situations requiring spontaneous adaptation. It means resisting the urge to immediately correct every movement, allowing students to solve problems through exploration rather than prescription.

The dance background matters here because dance training—particularly the kind Cristina describes, where she developed work collaboratively with choreographers—requires constant responsive adaptation. You’re working with partners, with music, with spatial constraints, all while maintaining aesthetic quality. The training builds exactly the kind of unconscious responsiveness that later manifests as touch. When the dog dragged her toward the lamppost, her body had a decade-plus library of “how to move around vertical obstacles while managing momentum” to draw from.

But here’s what’s missing from most discussions of touch: the role of failure. The lamppost story has a happy ending, but touch also develops from all the times the adaptation didn’t work. From falls that hurt. From movements that failed. From situations where your intuition suggested something that turned out to be wrong. Touch isn’t just a collection of successful patterns—it’s a refined sense of which patterns to attempt and which to avoid, calibrated through experience.

Cristina mentions limits: “obviously there’s accidents that happen where you could potentially get… yeah, there’s limits.” Touch helps you navigate unexpected situations, but it doesn’t make you invincible. This acknowledgment is crucial because it prevents touch from becoming mystical. You’re not developing supernatural awareness. You’re building a more sophisticated internal model of how your body interacts with the world, one that updates faster and operates with less conscious overhead than untrained movement.

Why does this matter for anyone thinking about their own movement practice? Because touch reveals something about what movement training actually does. We tend to think of movement practice as building specific capacities: get stronger, more flexible, better at particular movements. All true. But touch points to a different kind of development—the creation of an intuitive movement intelligence that transcends any specific skill.

This intelligence manifests in mundane ways more often than dramatic lamppost spins. It’s the reason experienced movers catch themselves when they trip in ways that look effortless. It’s why they can navigate crowded spaces without conscious path-planning. It’s the accumulated residue of thousands of hours spent moving, crystallized into responses too fast for thought.

The frustrating part: you can’t shortcut this development. There’s no “touch in six weeks” program. Cristina explicitly says you can’t teach it directly, which means the only path is the slow accumulation of varied movement experience. This runs counter to contemporary training culture, which emphasizes efficiency, specificity, and measurable progress toward defined goals. Touch develops in the gaps between those goals, in the unstructured exploration, in the moments of spontaneous adaptation.

Perhaps the most important thing Cristina reveals about touch: it’s not about moving perfectly. The lamppost story ends with her falling. She’s okay, but she still falls. Touch isn’t about executing flawless technique under pressure—it’s about having enough movement options available that you can find something workable even when the situation is novel and chaotic. It’s a fundamentally improvisational capacity, which means it requires comfort with imperfection.

For practitioners, this suggests a question: does your training create conditions where touch can develop? Or does it optimize for other qualities—strength, skill acquisition, measurable progress—at the expense of the kind of varied, spontaneous, slightly chaotic movement that builds intuitive response? Both approaches have value. But if you want to develop the capacity Cristina describes, the capacity that turns lampposts into solutions rather than obstacles, you need to spend time in situations where you can’t plan the response. Where the body has to figure it out in real time.

Touch is the sense you can’t teach. But you can create the conditions where it teaches itself.

This field note references the Movers Mindset podcast episode “Insight with Cristina Latici,” published February 27, 2025.