This is a foundational level, 4-week Strength and Flexibility course, led by Aaron Martin. Sessions will run on Saturdays, Nov 13, 20, 27, and Dec 4, for 4 consecutive weeks from 10am-12pm.

If you are interested in enrolling in this course at a later date, we will run this course again in February 2022. We encourage you to get in touch with us via IG DM (@aaronmartintin) or WhatsApp (+85266873701) to get on our waitlist as our courses do fill well ahead of time.

Foundation in Strength and Flexibility Course

This course is for people who want to clean up their foundational level of strength and flexibility - whether it’s the first time you are seriously trying to improve your strength or flexibility, or if you have already been active but you are looking for advice and guidance in how to continue to become stronger and mobile.

We cover strength basics like how to get your first clean push-ups and pull-ups, how to strengthen knees and hips, how to reliably

touch the floor in a standing forward fold and even how to work towards a front split.

If you have seriously asked yourself these questions before and you would like to know the answers, then we have designed this course for you:

How often do I have to practice to get results?

How intense do the exercises have to be?

Can I make progress with training only once or twice a week?

What are a few good exercises I can start with?

How many sets and repetitions do I need to do per session?

What do I do if I have made some progress in strength/flexibility but I got stuck at a plateau after a few weeks?

If we get stuck or fail to make progress, whether it is yoga, weight lifting, trying to do handstand or cartwheels, or just trying to get comfortable in a deep squat or forward fold, it is often useful to start at the beginning and look at the most foundational level of our abilities.


Can we bend well in the knees, hips, and ankles?


Can we reach overhead without effort or tightness?

Can we flex and extend our spine with relative ease?

Can we stabilise our weight over one foot or if our knees travel over our toes?

Can we catch ourselves on our hands in case of a fall?

And if the answer is “no”, what do we do next?

There are no secret, hidden techniques to being well prepared in our bodies (as far as we know) - it simply takes knowing a few basic principles, a solid plan and a strategy to handle difficulties when they come up in practice.

That’s what we have created this 4 week, 8 hour course for. (Even though you might be practicing a bit more than that, if you are keen to do the homework exercises. ;))

The Course Content:

10 movements - 4 pillars - a sustainable plan

We practice 10 well balanced movements that cover the most important ranges for our day-to-day life, that prepare you well for most sports and athletic activities. If you were to reach the end stage of each movement, you might just be in the top few percent of the population in physical preparedness and ready to take on just about any new hobby. Or how many people do you know who can do active front splits, full bodyweight pull-ups and single leg squats on end?

We keep it to 10 movements for simplicity and adherence. Getting too fancy too quickly can make training feel overwhelming. We cover progressions from super easy to very hard and lock in your current status in each session. That way you know exactly where you are at and what your next goal is.

This list is not complete and won’t be perfect for every sport and every person - but if you are working towards a specific skill, like a climbing move, a yoga pose, a martial arts kick or an acrobatics skill, you can still use the principles to design your training program and ask us for more specific advice during the course.

Our 4 pillars are

• FORM : the exact execution, body position, muscle

activation and intention we use during the exercise as it relates to our goal. Is the foot turned out or turned in? Is

the hip facing forwards or open? Do we round the back or keep it straight? Knowing our goal for each movement will give us clear form guidelines

• INTENSITY : in order to progress, we need to go past a threshold stimulus for a minimum time period each practice session. Going too far past the threshold will affect our recovery time, which affects our training frequency. Knowing how to work at the right intensity is key for consistent progress. That’s why we work with an intensity scale during each exercise - over time you will get a good feeling for what a solid workout intensity is for you in your current session.

• VOLUME : In the beginning progress can happen with sporadic, intense efforts - a hard workout every now and then might be good enough. But as our body adjusts, the same lax approach won’t get us the same results. Instead we will set a baseline for how often, how intensely and for how long we practice each session. As we monitor progress we will adjust our volume either up or down - regulating volume is an important piece that will help us to make consistent progress over months, instead of weeks.

• VARIETY : Knowing good form, the right intensity and how to adjust volume for our 10 strength and flexibility movements is more than enough to make noteworthy progress in most cases - but this course wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t cover how to change up the training stimulus to counter staleness. Changing how we position our body in relation to gravity or our hands or feet in relation to the load can significantly alter the mechanics of the exercise. If done strategically this can practically guarantee continuous growth for years.

The plan

While we can likely make noticeable progress in just 4 weeks of training, to substantially improve our strength and flexibility takes time and consistency. You will leave each session with homework for the week. As you get more familiar we will gradually introduce

new movements to your homework, until you know all 10 movements from up close.

At that point you will know when, how often and how intensely to practice. And when you have achieved your milestone goal, like a forward fold that you are happy with or clean deficit bodyweight pushups, you will know how to progress your exercises and adjust your training volume to continue to improve for the coming months.

You will leave this course with:

• 4 flexibility exercise + 6 strengthening exercises that require the least amount of equipment and are practical to do on holiday, in quarantine, at home or at any gym

• An actual training plan that fits your current level of strength and

flexibility

• 4 principles to that help you adjust your training plan for weeks

and months to come

• the knowledge for how to show up in any gym, yoga studio or

fitness class to make consistent progress

Why do we practice Strength and Flexibility in one course?

It is easy to think of ‘strength training’ and ‘stretching’ as two separate kinds of practice - maybe in the form of heavy weight training versus going to yoga classes to do passive stretches. One has to do with creating a lot force and the other one with relaxing - they are practically two opposed kinds of training, right? As the research becomes clearer, we are finding out that the two qualities are much more closely related than we have thought before.

We need strength in a stretch to actively contract muscles in the shortening side of a joint - which in turn helps the lengthening side to relax further through a mechanism called ‘reciprocal inhibition’.

And vice versa, in weight training we want to go through the largest range of motion we can handle and stretch our muscle fibres, to increase the tension stimulus that will result in improved muscle growth.

Today most professional athletes use full range of motion strength training to improve functional flexibility and support injury prevention - and most flexibility training includes loaded stretching which is a form of strengthening muscles to support deeper stretch positions.

And lastly and perhaps most importantly, our goal is to be physically well prepared for any situation life throws at us. If we are super strong, but can barely touch our toes, or if we are very flexible but feel unstable or unsafe, then we don’t have the freedom we are looking to develop.

This course is intended to be the basic crash-course for developing strength and flexibility that many us wish would have been mandatory in school - not because it would have been fun, but because it is so useful to know to stay healthy and fit.

Why a 4- week course > a class??

- STRUCTURE: Cultivating a structured, as opposed to random, learning culture.

- GROUP GROWTH: Learning with a dedicated group supports us in learning and growing.

- DEDICATION: Blocking out a specific day and time on a weekly basis, is a signal to the brain that we are here to learn and achieve. - HOMEWORK: The space between sessions is not random, but potential for personal practice and development.

About Aaron Martin

Aaron is a Hong Kong-based movement teacher and performer. He is a self-taught parkour athlete and acrobat with an interest in teaching quality movement patterns to people of all walks of life. Through his focus on teaching pedagogy and movement learning he draws from a multitude of disciplines and experiences to help his students find balance between strength, flexibility and coordination.

About SharedSpace Movement

Questions? WhatsApp 66873701!


About Aaron Martin

Aaron is a Hong Kong-based movement teacher and performer. He is a self-taught parkour athlete and acrobat with an interest in teaching quality movement patterns to people of all walks of life.

Through his focus on teaching pedagogy and movement learning he draws from a multitude of disciplines and experiences to help his students find balance between strength, flexibility and coordination.

A call for collaboration

We have run various iterations of this course over the past 3 years in Hong Kong, and our teaching and organization is constantly improving. At this point, we are working on building a digital version of this course, to make it accessible to practitioners globally. If you’re in Hong Kong and interested in enrolling in this course, we call for your collaboration by:

- FEEDBACK | Before and after the course, through your preferred format (call, email, short in-person meeting)

- ACTIVE PARTICIPATION | In a group WhatsApp chat, we encourage participants to share their training progress through video format

- PERMISSION TO DOCUMENT | We’d love to be able to document everyone’s learning progress in class in photo and video form.

- TESTIMONIAL (Optional) | For those who are happy to, we’d love your help in filming a short video testimonial, so we find the others, and continue to teach wonderful students like yourself.

Talk to us directly if you are interested to help and you could get access to the beta version of the online course in early 2022.

Other offerings:

Aside from this Strength and Flexibility short course, we also offer courses to explore Handstands, and Soft Acrobatics. If you might be interested in exploring those courses first, OR concurrently with the Strength+Flexibility course, we encourage you to get in touch with us with all your questions. We will get you sorted :)

Questions? WhatsApp 66873701!