Today’s episode features Rafe Kelley, owner of Evolve, Move, Play, a business designed to use movement practice to develop more resilient and embodied humans.  Rafe was a basketball player and gymnast (and gymnastics coach) in his teens, and started in the martial arts at 6 years old, studying Tang Soo Do, Aikido, Kung Fu, Kick Boxing, BJJ and Muay Thai.  He has experience in modern training disciplines such as sprinting, gymnastics, crossfit, FRC, modern dance and many others.

His primary specialization is in parkour, where Rafe co-founded Parkour visions at age 23, and eventually left to form Evolve, Move, Play.  Rafe’s passion to is help people build the physical practice that will help make them the strongest, most adaptable and resilient version of themselves in movement and in life.

When we think of training, we think of lifting weights, growing muscles and quantified training programs.  At the end of the day, this concept of “training” is really a smaller part of the entire paradigm of human movement.  Sports performance coaches tend to think of “movement” as not really being “training”, but when we see things such as the strength to bodyweight ratios of gymnastics, the jumping abilities of basketball/volleyball players, or the dynamic power (and also jumping ability) of a parkour athlete, we realize that play and flowing movement has a critical role in maximizing one’s total development (and do so in a more embodied way).

In this crucial episode, Rafe goes in depth on structured vs. unstructured training ratios, warmup concepts, variability, athleticism and lessons gained from parkour, ideas on complex vs. simple training means and much more.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.





Key Points

Rafe’s background in athletics and what led him to the movement practice of parkour
Generalist vs. Specialist considerations in training
Ratios of structured to unstructured training for better athlete engagement and success
Impact of a play-based warmup on subsequent training in a session
Lessons from parkour based training, and it’s impact on more traditional training for outcomes such as vertical jump training
The impact of more complex training means on more simple physical qualities
Rafe’s vision for the future of movement and fitness in our culture




“I think the biggest problem we face in our industry is the problem of motivation”

“We’ve got a 30 billion dollar fitness industry, and we have the most unhealthy population in the world”

“What everybody needs to engage in a physical practice is they need some combination of feeling safe enough, feeling like they are supported properly (having social support and not feeling disapproval) and they need a balance between structure and novelty”

“If you have that 80/20 rule (80% of the results with first 20% of the effort), you want to as a generalist, be in the 20% of all these different practices, but you always need room for play”

“Within my own practice and working with people, I find that I weave back and forth between more structure and less structure….In life we’re always dealing with this balance between order and chaos”

“The tao is the point between perfect order and chaos… the way”

“(Regarding the warmup) We always work on flow, we always work on some games where we are chasing each other, and we work on some games where we are sparring, some body to body stuff”

“I don’t like to start with really structured, rote stuff in the beginning because it bores me.  I like to get emotionally warmed up for a session first, and then I do the hard work”

“We don’t think enough about how much the emotional and cognitive impact of training impacts the training effect”

“We don’t think enough about how much the emotional and cognitive aspect of training impacts the training effect….