Speaking in 2019, Andy Pearson describes a measure for a coach, and by it he asks himself whether he is failing. It is not the number of students, or the money. It is “how many people have you coached that have ultimately on an overall scale become better than you?” He means “an overall practitioner who has come into your class and then gone on to be better than you are,” not the newcomer who is taller and has “a bigger jump.”

The show’s introduction says he has “coached many people all around the world to not do what he did.” He has begun to wonder whether that is the trouble.

If his students become coaches “and they do the same thing to their students,” he asks, “are we going to be gradually losing what it means, what parkour is about?” He thinks it has happened once already. Between the teachers he learned from and himself, “there was already stuff lost. That’s one generation away.”

What made him, he thinks, is the part of his training he now keeps from his students. “There’s a lot of stuff that was just really, really stupid stuff,” he says, “and therefore, I don’t give that to my students.” Warm-ups, when he was learning, were a thousand squats, or “you could bust out 500 pistols,” one-legged squats by the hundred. “I wouldn’t get my students to do that.” But he asks:

“However, by not giving it to my students because it’s stupid stuff, does that mean they are now losing what made me?”

Giving it to them has a price he knows from his own body. By his own count he is “pretty messed up”: torn pectoral muscles, a separated shoulder, a fractured rib cage, two fused vertebrae, and herniated discs. He wishes he had gone to the hospital for the injuries he trained through. So the question cuts both ways: “How do I now do my classes and not hurt my students?” He calls it “a tough question,” and he has no answer to it.

He does have a suspicion. When he learned, “it was like, whack, here is the line, it’s way beyond what you think it is, and you either try and get there or you don’t.” With his own students he is “gently bringing them upwards.” He thinks the line set beyond them may be part of what his coaching is missing.

A thousand squats before training is a load. The line is an expectation, set far beyond what the student thinks they can do. He has watched, on Instagram, a coach whose students do amazing things at twelve or thirteen, and he wonders whether it is the coach’s own level: “his bar is higher than mine and therefore what he expects his students to do is higher.” And he has noticed small groups who “haven’t got coaches” at all and seem to him “way, way better” than students who learn in classes. “Are these kids doing things that we’re missing in classes? I don’t know.”

A coach can raise the bar. What a coach cannot easily do is stop being responsible for the people under it, and the groups he describes had no one in that role. If part of what made him was that nobody was protecting him, a class may not be able to give it back, however high the line.

If you coach, the question is yours too. Of the hard things that made you, which are you keeping from the people you teach, and which could you hand over without the harm? And if you learned with no one watching over you, can you tell, looking back, which parts were the stupid stuff and which were the line?

This field note references the Movers Mindset episode “Andy Pearson: Failure, inspiration, and injuries,” published August 14, 2019.

This work was produced using AI language models directed through an editorial system designed by Craig Constantine. The author selected all source material, designed the creative framework, directed the editorial process, and made all acceptance and revision decisions. The prose was generated by AI under sustained human editorial direction.