When asked the final question—three words to describe his practice—John Baker offers: playful, softness, and collaborative. He pauses on the second word to explain:

“I guess it comes out of being injured in the past—but trying to be softer with movements and softer, gets more gentle in general.”

That brief explanation deserves its own space, because “becoming softer from injury” points toward something that’s easy to miss about what happens after bodies break down and rebuild.

Notice what Baker doesn’t say. He doesn’t say injury made him more careful, more cautious, more protective. Those would be the expected responses—injury as teacher of fear, injury as enforcer of limits. And maybe those are part of it. But “softness” is a different word entirely, suggesting a different kind of learning.

Being careful means you’re still approaching movement the same way, just with more attention to risk. Being cautious means you’re holding back, restricting yourself. Being protective means you’re guarding against threat. These are all external adjustments—changing what you do or how much you do it, but not fundamentally changing your relationship to force itself.

Softness is internal. It’s not about doing less or avoiding more. It’s about a different quality of engagement—less gripping, less forcing, less tension held unnecessarily. You can be soft and still fully committed to a movement. You can be soft and still train intensely. Softness isn’t weakness or timidity. It’s the opposite of hardness, of rigidity, of meeting the world with unnecessary force.

Consider what might need to happen for injury to teach this. The injury itself is usually the result of hardness in some form—pushing too hard, gripping too tight, refusing to yield when you should, forcing something that wasn’t ready. The body breaks when it can’t absorb or dissipate force. Recovery teaches you what it feels like to move without that hardness, often because you temporarily can’t generate much force anyway. You’re moving from necessity with whatever you have available, which means learning to work with softness rather than overriding it.

But here’s what’s interesting about Baker’s description: he says trying to be softer “gets more gentle in general.” Not just in movement, but in general. This suggests softness isn’t just a physical technique you apply to parkour or training. It becomes a way of approaching everything—a default orientation rather than a specific strategy.

This makes sense if you think about what softness actually requires. To move softly, you have to feel more. You can’t force your way through if you’re being soft, which means you need much better awareness of what’s actually happening. Where’s the tension? Where’s the resistance? What’s the minimum force necessary? Hardness lets you override these signals. Softness requires you to listen to them.

Once you develop that sensitivity in movement, it’s hard to turn it off elsewhere. You start noticing when you’re gripping the steering wheel too hard, holding your jaw tight during conversations, approaching tasks with unnecessary intensity. The gentleness that started as a physical adjustment to injury becomes a broader way of being.

This reveals something important about what injury can teach beyond the obvious lessons of “know your limits” and “warm up properly.” Injury can teach you the difference between intensity and tension, between commitment and forcing, between strength and hardness. It can teach you that you’ve been using way more effort than necessary for most things, that softness isn’t the opposite of power but often the source of it.

It can also teach you that protection doesn’t have to mean rigidity. Many people respond to injury by becoming harder—more controlled, more tense, more defended. They’re trying to protect themselves by adding armor. But softness protects differently. It absorbs rather than resists. It yields rather than blocks. It finds a way through rather than powering over.

The question this raises: can you learn softness without injury teaching it? Or does something about the experience of breaking and rebuilding create access to this quality that’s difficult to find otherwise? Maybe injury strips away the option of hardness temporarily, giving you no choice but to discover what softness offers. And once you’ve felt that difference, you can’t quite go back to forcing things the same way.

Baker’s brief mention suggests injury taught him something valuable—not just what to avoid, but how to move, and ultimately how to be. Not more carefully, but more softly. Not with less, but with less excess. That’s a different kind of learning than we usually associate with getting hurt.

This field note references the Movers Mindset podcast episode “Collaboration with John Baker,” published January 26, 2024.