I’d like to paint a scene for you. Please follow along. You’re walking through an enchanted glade with furry little woodland creatures, the smell of cedar and life spurring from every piece of flora and fauna, and the sun warming your heels as you merrily skip along.

Suddenly, you spy an odd looking creature off in the distance. It looks both majestic and fragile. Like a porcelain doll version of a mighty Canadian beaver. You walk closer, charily at first, then somewhat full of wonderment as the stark reality set in. The magnificent animal in front of you, in the middle of this enchanted glade of excellence, was in fact a unicorn.

 Now being as it’s an enchanted glade and the evil web of Steve Jobs is not able to affect it, you can’t take a picture of said unicorn with your iPhone because it’s currently nothing more than a brick. A shiny, sexy brick made of the finest products China has to offer.

As a result, when you leave this magical glade, you’ll be forced to describe to your kit and kin what exactly it was that you saw, to which you will most likely respond;

“Well, uh, it was like a horse, but with a horn coming out of its head, and it was magical.”

At this point your friends will start checking your pockets for remnants of the magic mushrooms they no doubt think you ingested.

The magic is what’s lost in translation. We’ve all had experiences that we felt intrinsically but had no ability to significantly explain to others. Such is life, and such is the pursuit of experiential living. While your friends may not doubt that you did in fact see a horse with a horn growing out of its head, they may be skeptical about the magic and simply assume the horse is living near a nuclear power plant a la Blinky, the 3-eyed fish from the Simpsons.

But if they were to see and feel that magic themselves, they would get it instantly and would agree, “Yep, it was magical.” Watching that fabulous beast prance around the forrest would probably bring a tear to their eye, not much different than watching this fabulous beast prance through the forrest during what appears to be the beginnings of a hurricane.

Somewhere out there is a camel looking at its foot and wondering why it’s getting a strange sense of deja vu after watching that video.

I’m sure you’re probably asking yourself “What the hell does any of this have to do with fitness, and why can’t I get the image of that old lady doing that terrible terrible thing out of my head???” Well, I’ll tell you what it has to do with fitness.

We’re all experiential learners. We prefer to do versus to listen to or read instructions, and we get a better understanding when someone shows us the right way to do something versus the wrong way to do something. This is the whole point of coaching, to help people feel the magic.

Let’s take a basic movement like a hip hinge. Some people get it right away, and some people may never understand what is being asked of them. I’ve had some clients where I show them once and they never forget it, and others where each rep of each set involves me adjusting what they’re doing in some way or another to help them figure out where to be, and then we do it all again once they move somewhere. This has gone on in some clients for a couple of years. YEARS!!! They’re just not getting the magic, and I can’t show it to them in a way that they can understand.

To them, a unicorn will never be more than a horse with a horn on it’s head.

Now consider someone like myself. Well, not someone like me I guess, but rather, me. The actual me. I recently had a chance to attend a really great certification in Salt Lake City where I swung kettlebells at altitude in a wore out my hands in short order. The SFG Certification for Kettlebell Instructors was a great experience, not just because I got to tower over Pavel and give Dan John fodder for jokes about Canadians, but because I picked up a few tips on how to make my own hip hinges more efficient and powerful.

Take for example a video of me doing a relatively piss poor kettlebell swing a few months ago, before instruction.

My knees and hips aren’t getting to full extension, the snap isn’t there, and I’m breathing like Fredo after the Kiss of Death.

Now compare that one to one more recent:

That’s your unicorn.

To most people, they would have seen the first video and thought “Hey, that’s pretty cool. What does that work, your delts or something?’ To which you would scissor kick them in the throat. People who had seen the magic would only see a horse with the cardboard innard from a paper towel roll duct taped to its forehead. The second one would simultaneously make those who have seen a good one before smile, and impregnate anything with ovaries within a 3 mile radius.

This was not something that was easy for me to figure out, as my instructor could attest. The entire first day was me trying not to fall over or launch the bell into the back of Pavel’s oddly shaped cranium, while simultaneously trying to break out of a lot of the old habits from olympic weight lifting and competitive sports that talked about soft knees and athletic ready positions at all times.

Then something magical happened. That first night after the course, after I was done weeping uncontrollably in the shower from the hamstring convulsions, it clicked in my mind. The next morning, the first set was phenomenal, so much so that my instructor Andrea stopped what she was doing, almost spilled her omnipresent cup of coffee, and had to bones it out with me in congratulations.

That picture is pretty much to scale, actually. It’s kinda creepy, in an animated reality sort of way.

Now the funny thing is I’ve done hip hinge movements for years. I’ve done hip thrusts, deadlifts, squat thrusts, squat lifts, hip squats, dead thrusts, and the ever popular press thrust, and sometimes I also work out. The point of this is I was thinking I could get hip hinge-y all night long, but all I was doing was staring at a horse with a horn growing out of its forehead. I had to travel to Salt Lake City and cry in my hotel room bathtub by myself to realize what a magical mythical beast that hip hinge really was. Then when I saw it again the next morning……

MAGIC

The point of this is that you don’t have to endure your own journey into the desert to find your unicorn, re-kindling the spirit of Hunter S Thomsons’ character Raoul Duke from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in order to find your own magical hip hinge. Sometimes you just need to have someone tell you you’re an idiot and you need to do it differently for you to find the magic. I would encourage everyone out there to find someone to tell you that you’re doing it wrong in order to become better. You’ll struggle, you’ll fail, you’ll probably hate a little bit of yourself along the way. But maybe, just maybe, you just might catch a glimpse of your own shining, shimmering, achingly beautiful unicorn.

Accordingly, you should probably make your own version of a trip to the desert by coming to Boston this July to hang out with Tony Gentilcore and myself at Cressey Performance to talk about all things deadlift, unicorns, and the magic of the indescribable details of training that can’t be conveyed through the written word. The early bird rate is still on until the end of June, and space is filling up quickly, so get on it while you can.

===>Click Here to Come to Boston, You Magical Unicorn, You <====