There's a circus in town!

Jon:
Wednesday means class at Playa Barceloneta. After an astonishing autumn Barcelona showed herself from her more cranky side. Chilly and with rain in the air the boardwalk was calmer than usual and we both suspected that we would have to do a session for ourselves. But no. Instead we are blessed by the northern Gods with Oscar and Sofia. Oscar is a circus performer and Sofia a dancer and well.....what can you say? It's honestly not much of a challenge to teach people like that. They are motivated, knows what the hip is and what it means to have a straight back.
The more I teach the more I think that perhaps the most important thing that you can teach people is not how to do a swing, a squat, or a handstand. These skills are just tools for making other people as well as yourself learn about their/your own body. Teaching kettlebells we try to give people the tools to know and take care of their own house so to speak. Or as Kelly Starrett puts it "Every human being should be able to perform basic maintenance on themselves."
Training should be a bit like learning a new language: you can learn a few phrases here and there but to master it you have to know the basics. The more you learn however, the easier it gets.
Both Oscar and Sofia however are obviously multi lingual. After spending half an hour or so on the swing making it look nice and tidy we went on to the goblet squat, games standard push-ups, one arm and H2H swings and touched on the press. Very rapid progress indeed! Everything was finished off with a short workout and all of a sudden we had a couple of new friends in Barcelona. Hopefully in the future Oscar can teach us some handstand skills. Sort of loosing faith on that one lately. He obviously knows what he's doing though.