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If you’ve ever been told your squat is “wrong,” this conversation will change how you think about movement, pain, and coaching. We sit down with author and Feldenkrais practitioner Todd Hargrove to connect three big ideas: how humans evolved to move, how babies develop skill without coaching, and how pain reshapes the brain’s map of the body. The result is a refreshing framework for training that values awareness, variability, and play over rigid cues and one-size-fits-all fixes.

Todd breaks down Feldenkrais as “structured baby play”—slow, mindful lessons that compare different versions of the same movement so your nervous system can feel what works. We dig into why chronic pain often dulls proprioception, how left–right discrimination reveals smudged cortical maps, and how graded motor imagery and simple sensory drills can redraw those maps. Instead of chasing a single corrective, Todd shows how to create learning environments where solutions emerge from exploration, not command-and-control coaching.

We also zoom out to the evolutionary blueprint: millions of years of climbing shaped our shoulders, and every child’s instinct to crawl, hang, roll, and squat is nature’s curriculum. Todd explains transfer—why some fundamentals like squatting and hanging support many tasks, while hyper-specific drills don’t—and why playful, variable practice sticks better than repetitive “work.” Along the way, we compare top-down information-processing models with ecological dynamics, land on a practical middle ground, and draw a clear line between complicated problems you fix like a bike and complex ones you grow like a garden.

If you want to move with less pain and more skill, this is a roadmap: correct less, notice more, and make training feel like an adventure. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs a fresh take on pain and performance, and leave a review with one playful drill you’ll try this week.