This post is a bit late in coming. I meant to write it earlier but when the virus crisis hit all things went by the wayside.
Last year I had signed up for an Animal Flow Level 1 workshop. I ended up postponing it but then finally decided to take it this year in February when they came back to Northern California.
I became interested in Animal Flow many years ago although I never really studied it further than watching some of the videos. After becoming an Original Strength coach, I became interested in all manner of ground and quadruped based training, as both ways of rehab and for conditioning and performance. Animal Flow was one of the ones I looked into, along with MovNat, Ground Force, and Animal Moves.
A big factor in all of these was simply. locale; in order to go to any trainings, I was less inclined to travel to a workshop given time and expenses needed. Thus, when Animal Flow started holding workshops here in Northern California, I could now at least look into one of those systems.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I got to the workshop. However it turned out to be a lot more than I thought it was.
All the movements were named after animals or animal equivalents. We learned all the applications of the Level 1 set of movements and how to coach them. After learning the individual movements, we practiced piecing them together into flows, so that you weren’t just practicing them alone. Of course you can do that, but stringing together sets of movements makes for more interesting workouts as well as challenging the body to adapt to many different movement patterns. Here is a flow my little group and I designed as part of the class:
It was awesome! I loved the flowing nature of the movements – watching others, you can see there is element of grace and dance in there, and all the while challenging your body to deal with multiple angles and weight shifts.
Our instructor, Freddy Satizabal, was out of Miami, FL. He was very knowledgeable and ran the whole workshop efficiently:
To fully certify as a Level 1 Instructor, I had to generate a bunch of videos showing my competency with the movements, and also design a flow which I had to teach someone for 90 seconds. But then, the virus crisis hit.
What a pain. The opportunity to solicit a client to help me with the certification kind of went out the window. So I sat around, worrying about other things besides certification, but also wondering when I could get around to certifying. Thankfully, Animal Flow offered the opportunity to test-out via Zoom video!
Yesterday, I woke up early and attended a 3 hour online test-out and passed!
If there is one benefit to this virus crisis, it is that formerly non-online things have all moved online. That goes not only for an opportunity to complete a certification here, but also for gaining learnings in all sorts of systems, where before you were forced to travel and attend in person. Experientially, I still prefer traveling and like the focus attending a workshop provides. But still it is hard to resist the temptation of taking more classes online. Animal Flow is now offering Level 2 online – woot! This is one that I may succumb to temptation and sign up for it.
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