Interviews Worth Studying
Over the last year, Ido has done a handful of long-form interviews. Here are some of the clearest windows into how he actually thinks about movement, practice, and development.
Mark Bell Podcast
Because the hosts are serious athletes, the discussion gets much more concrete and sophisticated than most.
→ Key idea: People tend to develop either their optimal OR compensatory movement capacity (For example, Feldenkrais vs strength trainers). But general movement development requires both.
Antifragil
More focused on psychology, identity, and the relationship between practice and self-development.
→ Key idea: “Use the doing to find a place from which you can choose”.
Robert Love / Brainfit
A more accessible conversation around longevity, cognitive health, joint health, exercise vs movement, and movement complexity.
→ Key idea: Ido describes constantly changing grips, paddles, & other constraints while playing ping-pong. Not to maximize performance, but to pursue the most development. “When I do this, you’re not going to be impressed… I’m looking to develop myself”
Roundtable With Students
A conversation between Ido and several long-time students about practice and growth.
→ Key idea: We now have access to endless information, yet we feel something is missing. What's missing is practice.
Bonus: Session With Mark Bell & Nsima
A practical example of Ido leading a session
A Suggestion: Don’t binge these. One conversation digested and assimilated is worth more than five that never left a trace.
Information Toxicity
We have too much information and not enough knowledge. I’ve been reflecting very much on this lately, in my life and practice.
As Ido describes it: all the information has become available, and yet - we have nothing. All the tutorials exist for everything online, yet we keep looking for more protocols, more “actionable bits”, to layer into our lives.
The missing enzyme
The way I’ve come to look at this: there is a process that converts information into knowledge. But in our modern era, the mechanism is broken: There is an enzyme missing, between information and knowledge.
That enzyme is action, practice.
Sensing the depletion of knowledge, we follow the instinctual drive: we consume more information, not realizing what is missing. We don’t need more information - we need the enzyme that converts information into knowledge.
We don’t need more information
I don’t need another cue or insight about an exercise. I need more reps. I don’t need to find a better exercise - I can bring better efforts to the current one.
Often in class, people want to move to the next variation of an exercise, because they can perform the easier variation. But this is very misguided - we need time to wrestle with the work, before it results in an actual transformation.
Another tendency I see in class, is that students, before doing some exercise, ask why we are doing it, what does it work on. This isn’t a bad question - it’s the timing that is bad.
“We shall do, then we shall understand”.
Let yourself embody the thing first, let the concepts come later.
But to do this requires a certain patience, “living inside the question”. To sit and digest information requires developing tolerance for the ambiguity that comes from not knowing.
But what’s the harm?
What’s the problem with so many “actionable bits”? What can possibly be bad about having more information, especially the finely curated, expertly produced youtube videos and podcasts of the modern era?
The same thing that is bad about too much water, a most essential resource for our existence - we drown.
If I’m listening to a podcast to get an idea - I need to do something with those ideas. Another podcast means I don’t do anything with the previous idea, and it sits there, undigested.
So what is the recommendation?
If you want to apply this… for one week, no new inputs - no new podcasts, no tutorials, no scrolling for tips. Take one idea you already have, and work on it each day.
Malke’s Latkes
In the town of Chelm, there is a woman named Malke, famous for her latkes (potato pancakes).
Everybody knows about Malke’s latkes - crispy on the outside, soft as clouds on the inside.
Malke’s neighbor Mendel wants to taste these latkes. He decides he will steal the recipe.
He stands outside her window, writing down every detail while she cooks.
Back home, he follows the step:
First instruction:
“Use extra virgin olive oil.”
“Olive oil?” he says, “Everyone uses vegetable oil. That must be a mistake.
He uses vegetable oil instead.
Second instruction:
“Grate the onions to a fine powder.”
“A fine powder?” he says, “Everyone dices onions. Must be a mistake.”
He dices instead.
He continues this way, making substitutions.
Finally, his latkes are ready, he sits to eat…
“What’s so special about Malke’s latkes? They taste like everybody else’s latkes.
What does this have to do with movement practice?
This story comes to mind when somebody tries an exercise, but doesn’t experience certain benefits. You inquire further, and realize they changed some critical details.
Someone is told to count reps - they just stop when they feel like it instead.
Someone is told to focus on a certain detail - they ignore it because it seems unnecessary.
Someone is told to scale an exercise - they persist with what feels comfortable.
Then they report that the method “doesn’t work.”
This is rarely malicious. It’s usually automatic. We don’t know which variables are essential.
The more obvious lesson here is to do your best to learn what is presented in front of you, to drop your expectations and see clearly.
To learn something new, you must perceive what is in front of you - including what you don’t yet understand.
But perception is selective. We interpret new information through old frameworks. We see recipes in terms of recipes we already know.
We think we can be different from Mendel, who changes the recipe as he implements it.
But we are all Mendel.
Perception requires filtering - how else do you avoid writing down irrelevant details: that Malke wears a green dress while making the latkes, for example?
The problem is not making the mistakes of Mendel - the problem is of thinking we can do anything besides what Mendel does.
The practical solution is simple: Try your best to follow the recipe, but be suspicious of yourself, especially when things seem familiar or unimportant.
Over time, a certain wisdom is acquired - a refinement of the filter so that it can become more intuitive, more sensitive when asking “what is important here?”
Authenticity and Movement
The Problem of Copy–Paste Movement
Lately we’ve been reflecting with our teacher, Ido Portal, on the problems of our movement culture - so much copying and pasting things from outside, not really letting them emerge from a development of ourselves.
There is a lack of authenticity in the movement presented. Movements are copied (from tutorials, etc), and pasted without the internal development that would make them truly one’s own.
And the finger points back at us: we’re all guilty of this.
Take a simple acrobatic movement like the macaco or a cartwheel. Countless tutorials of these exist.
But who was the first person to discover a macaco? That person discovered this movement INSIDE their body. They didn’t copy a video. They had a practice that created the conditions necessary for the movement to arise.
The movement was autochthonous to them.
The Autochthones
The ancient Greeks had the idea of “Autochthones”: beings that live where they come from. They arise from the land itself.
We use the word “indigenous” to refer to who is first to arrive to a place, but autochthones are something else: a downstream differentiation of that place itself, a manifestation of it, ARE it, in a way.
This is relevant to the question of authenticity in movement.
Create the Conditions
Instead of copying and pasting the macaco, we can invest ourselves in developing the conditions that give rise to it: familiarity in certain positions, mobility, elasticity, other inversions, connections through the arch of the body.
The result is something completely different.
You might not see a difference when viewing it “straight on” - but do the movement with a slight twist, and the deficits of the “copy-paste” method will be revealed.
That’s not to say tutorials are the problem. You can copy something, and use it as a scaffold for growing inside of it. That’s what we’re in the business of offering with teaching movement classes.
Nurture the seed
Imagine there is a seed inside you, some essence.
When you see something impressive outside of you, the temptation is to copy that thing - at the expense of the seed.
Because this seed inside of you is not capable of this impressive feat, you replace it with a copy of what you see from the outside. Now, you can “do that trick”, but it’s not connected to anything else inside of you.
Now, imagine instead of replacing that seed, you start to nurture it. You use what is outside to indicate possibilities, as a roadmap, but you don’t replace the essential quality. You nurture that seed until IT is ready to perform the trick.
That is the autochthonous movement, bringing OURSELVES to the practice.
Connect the Pieces
It’s easy to misunderstand what movement practice is about.
It’s not just about learning novel exercises or collecting more tricks — “new,” but still just more of the same.
What makes a movement practice different is how the pieces connect. Avoiding the common trap of randomly mish-mashing things hoping that they come together to make something meaningful.
One overlooked ingredient for finding meaningful connections in movement is in-depth discussion — not talking for talking’s sake, but clarifying the links between seemingly disparate domains of movement.
These discussions, tied directly to physical experience, broaden your map of the movement landscape.
This creates a symbiotic loop:
the physical work becomes more meaningful,
and the ideas become embodied and pragmatic.
Combining in-depth discussion with hard work is octane for development, yielding fresh insight and integration.