Podcaster. Writer. 👋 Hello, I want us to go from simply having conversations, to actively creating better conversations — https://craigconstantine.com/ has more about me, and my ongoing projects.
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Care made physical
Movement culture frames pain as enemy, teacher, or adversary—something happening to you. Sarah Mohr names a fourth frame. A body producing pain is a body still tracking the injury. A body that has stopped reporting—through override training, dissociation, nerve damage—has lost a channel of contact with itself. The absence of pain about something that should…
From the archives: Galo Alfredo Naranjo
Galo Alfredo Naranjo poses a quiet challenge to the way most people relate to coaches: “How do we mitigate injuries? How do you get in tune with your body? Versus just like, Hey, Coach, what am I doing today?” The point isn’t to fire your coach. It’s to notice when you’ve outsourced the questions you…
The wrong way around
Adults try to figure out their bodies and outsource their feelings. Phil Lombardo names the inversion: a biomechanical assessment requires technical expertise you don’t have. Your emotional state requires expertise no one else has. The therapist who tries to name your feelings is overreaching. The friend who tries to assess your gait is amateur. The…
From the archives: Christian Anderson
Christian Anderson’s practice spans parkour, weapons, music, drawing, and blade-smithing — but the through-line is what he sees in children. “You don’t have to tell a kid to play, to jump, to climb. There’s a lot of innate understanding of movement that I think children have.” His coaching is built around remembering that — and…
Different blocks
Adult movement practice has a vocabulary that insists on a difference from what children do on a Saturday afternoon. Training, discipline, mastery. Nick Anastasia doesn’t reach for it. He calls parkour a more complicated way of hanging out with friends and playing with blocks. He isn’t making an analogy. The activity didn’t get replaced. It…
From the archives: Andrew Suseno
Rasa is Indonesian for “taste” — and also for the heart’s discernment of feeling. Andrew Suseno’s Moving Rasa initiative takes that double meaning seriously: just as you have a sense of what something tastes like, you have a felt sense of your relationship to a picture, a book, a friend, a value. Movement becomes the…
The useful distance
We tend to think of practice in binary terms: inside or outside. Andy Day names a third position—still in the rooms, no longer doing daily reps. The useful distance isn’t a compromise. The full insider can’t see the shape of what they’re moving through. The full outsider has no body memory of what the inside…
From the archives: Michael ‘Frosti Fresh’ Zernow
Most parkour conversations treat competition as either the goal or the corruption. Michael “Frosti Fresh” Zernow holds a different view: competition is a doorway. It’s how the outside world finds an understandable way into a community most people don’t know exists. The trick isn’t to refuse it. It’s to be involved in it on terms…
Sufficient for
Fifteen years into parkour, Minh Vu Ngok stopped strength training. Not from injury or crisis—he’d simply reached the point where his strength was sufficient for what he wanted to do. The always-improving narrative reads any such exit as quitting. The harder skill it trains out of practitioners isn’t the ability to keep going. It’s the…
From the archives: Bryan Riggins
Most movement narratives about fear treat it as something to overcome. Bryan Riggins doesn’t. “Fear has a place always,” he says. “If people think that it doesn’t exist or that they don’t have it, they’re lying to themselves.” His parkour practice — particularly his work on descents — is built around being honest about what’s…
Ask the face
We use the smile in one direction: something feels right, the face confirms. Sam Govindin uses it the other way. Before a difficult jump, he attempts a smile on purpose and reads what comes back. The standard procedure for checking whether you’re ready is to ask yourself—but the inner narrator is also the party most…
From the archives: Andy Fisher
At eleven, last in the morning run and arriving to find the breakfast gone, Andy Fisher made a decision: “I wasn’t going to be defined by my condition, and I could grow.” Decades later, that refusal threads through his teaching, his passion projects, his ongoing work on efficacy. The connection between his unconventional pursuits and…