Beyond Exercise: The Art of Sincere Play

By Misha Lantsov · Movement teacher and bodyworker in Colorado

The limitation of single solutions

No one movement practice holds all the answers to vitality. Every discipline—martial arts, strength training, yoga, climbing, dance, running—offers something valuable. What interests me most are the practitioners who study the layer underneath a single sport or method and ask what transfers across them.

That is where movement becomes more than exercise. It becomes a way of studying strength, coordination, attention, adaptability, learning, and our relationship to challenge.

The practice beneath the practice

A broad movement practice can develop mobility, strength, coordination, endurance, and focus at the same time. But underneath the exercises and physical games is another possibility: using practice to learn how you respond to complexity.

How do you deal with something unfamiliar? How quickly do you become rigid when a task gets difficult? Can you cooperate, improvise, fail, adjust, and try again? Physical practice gives those questions a concrete place to live.

Sincere play

Children often play with remarkable seriousness. They invent rules, inhabit roles, test limits, wrestle, run, negotiate, imitate, and solve problems together. The play is enjoyable, but it is not meaningless.

I am interested in that same quality in adult practice: not forced silliness, but sincere play—focused engagement with a problem whose outcome matters enough to draw you in, while remaining open enough to experiment.

The expanding field of possibility

Yes, a movement practice can help you learn skills, get stronger, become more mobile, and build physical confidence. Those are worthwhile outcomes. But I am more interested in what those capacities make possible.

A body with more options can participate in more of life: climbing with friends, carrying a child, learning a dance, sprinting, getting on the floor and back up, trying a new sport, or simply meeting an unfamiliar physical problem without immediately deciding it is not for you.

A practice of learning

My own studies include Marcello Palozzo’s five-year Human Movement Studies program, where I am currently a fourth-year student, alongside continued practice in acrobatics, strength, athletics, fighting, dance, breath, teaching, and other forms of physical study.

Denver Movement School is one place I try to make this kind of ongoing adult learning available: movement as the vehicle, but capability, curiosity, and practice as the larger project.

References

• Elfering, A., Grebner, S., & Semmer, N. K. (2024). Mindful movement reduces negative affect and increases vitality: A randomized controlled trial in a field setting. Work, 76(4), 1157–1165.
• Brown, S. L., & Vaughan, C. (2009). Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. Avery.
• Waitzkin, J. (2007). The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance. Free Press.