What Is Evolved Coaching? A Different Way to Look at Movement

What Is Evolved Coaching?

Two people can perform the same movement and get there in completely different ways.

Both can squat.

Both can reach overhead.

Both can rotate.

Both can run.

The movement may look successful from the outside, but the body does not always create that movement in the way we expect.

One joint may contribute less while another contributes more. A person may have enough total motion but create it through a substitution. An athlete may move well initially, then lose that strategy when speed, load, or fatigue increases.

Evolved Coaching is a framework for figuring out how the body is solving those movement problems.

The course organizes that process around concepts including programming, degeneracy, tensegrity, movement patterns, evolutionary transitions, breathing, evaluation, and problem-solving.

But the bigger idea tying those concepts together is relatively simple:

Don't just ask whether someone can perform a movement. Ask how they are performing it.

Movement isn't just about range of motion

When an athlete struggles with a movement, it is easy to assume they simply need more mobility.

Sometimes they do.

But Evolved Coaching encourages us to separate movement quantity from movement quality.

A person may genuinely lack ankle dorsiflexion, hip rotation, or shoulder flexion.

That is a quantity problem.

Another person may technically have enough motion, but create it by moving excessively somewhere else.

That is a different problem.

The treatment or training strategy should probably be different too.

The body is very good at finding another way

One of the major concepts in the framework is degeneracy.

The guide describes degeneracy as the ability of structurally different elements to produce the same function or output. In movement, this means the body can often substitute one strategy for another when a movement option becomes unavailable.

For example, the framework discusses situations where:

• scapular motion substitutes for shoulder motion

• scapular retraction substitutes for thoracic rotation

• finger extension substitutes for wrist extension

• spinal movement substitutes for bending through the extremities

The task still gets accomplished.

But the strategy changed.

That doesn't automatically make the compensation bad. Adaptability is useful.

The question is whether the athlete has multiple useful options or has become dependent on one strategy because another option is missing.

The body works as a connected system

Evolved Coaching also looks closely at how movement at one joint relates to movement elsewhere.

Its tensegrity model describes coordinated and often opposing rotations between body segments during closed-chain movement. The lower-extremity examples in the guide connect motion at the hip, femur, tibia, ankle, foot, and toes rather than treating each joint as an isolated hinge.

That changes the assessment.

Instead of asking only:

Does this ankle dorsiflex?

we can also ask:

What are the tibia, foot, knee, and hip doing while the athlete dorsiflexes?

That gives us more information about how the entire movement is being organized.

Finding the movement is only step one

Another important part of the framework is that simply creating a better movement isn't enough.

The general programming progression moves through:

Awareness → Endurance → Strength → Power/Speed

First, the athlete has to experience and recognize the movement.

Then they have to maintain it.

Then they need to produce force through it.

Eventually, the movement has to survive speed.

That last step is especially important in sport.

A movement that only exists during a slow corrective exercise isn't very useful if it disappears as soon as the athlete runs, throws, jumps, cuts, or swings.

Assessment becomes problem-solving

This may be the most useful part of Evolved Coaching.

The goal isn't to run everyone through the same screen and prescribe the same corrective exercise.

Instead, the assessment becomes a series of experiments.

Change the position.

Change the load.

Change the speed.

Look at the whole movement.

Then zoom in on one joint.

Ask what changed and what didn't.

If changing the ankle immediately changes the squat, that tells us something.

If it doesn't, keep looking.

The framework is less about proving your first theory correct and more about finding the variable that actually matters.

Better movement means more options

Ultimately, I don't think the goal of Evolved Coaching is to create one perfect way to move.

It is to give the athlete more movement options.

Enough mobility to access useful positions.

Enough control to organize them.

Enough capacity to tolerate them.

And enough adaptability to use them when sport becomes fast, heavy, chaotic, or unpredictable.

That is the idea I plan to explore throughout this series.

Next, we'll look more closely at one of the framework's most interesting concepts:

Degeneracy. Why the body substitutes movement, and why the place that looks wrong may not be the place where the problem started.