If you type “playing”, “playtime” or “play” into a google images search you will see children and animals playing around in many different ways and some interesting art/photography.
You see very few adults or even teenagers for that matter.
If you go for a walk down a main street in any town, what do you typically see people doing?
For the most part we see people in a rush walking to work, people sitting in chairs in cafe’s, standing at lights not talking to anyone, window shopping and keeping to themselves and other regular boring stuff.
Now imagine this:
You walk down the same street and you see a guy piggy backing his girlfriend on their way out for lunch, you see a group of friends out the front of a cafe’ drinking their coffees sitting in a comfortable squat rather than in chairs, people having lunch on bean bags, a guy in a suit on his way to work skipping down the street, a group of kids doing cartwheels as they walked to school, people playing hopscotch on the footpath and a couple of elderly people playing with hoolahoops.
Imagine if your next job interview was in a park, or even better, imagine if it was in a tree ???
What a tremendous world that would be 🙂
Naturally this seems like a fairytale to most people because we consider it to be “unrealistic” and i guess too good to be true.
So, let’s have a look at some of the physical and psychological benefits that we would be rewarded with if we lived in this kind of world:
1. Playing regularly rather than just in set, pre-determined sequences and time frames would dramatically increase the average persons day to day energy output, therefore reducing risk of becoming overweight or obese.
2. Chronic pains that are associated with living a sedentary lifestyle would be dramatically reduced, due to daily growth and development which have been proven to increase with more frequent complex movements. This is because your muscles, bones, tendons, ligaments and other tissues would be in regular use, therefore would not become dormant (a common cause for chronic back pain is dormant or under-utilised muscles in the hips).
3. The risk of heart disease would be dramatically decreased due to healthier blood flow, better regulation of hormones and more neuromuscular stimulation. heart disease is one of the biggest killers of human beings today and has been proven to be directly linked to inactivity in a lot of cases).
4. Nothing lights up the brain like play. Three-dimensional play fires up the cerebellum, puts a lot of impulses into the frontal lobe, helps contextual memory be developed and a lot more that is still being researched and studied by the NIFP (National Institute for PLAY).
This is why I PLAY.
Because I am sick and tired of living in a society that fights laziness with more laziness. I am sick of hearing discussions and reading articles about teenage suicide which could have been avoided if we didn’t live in such an egotistic world, I am sick of seeing human beings thinking they are not capable of doing amazing things only because they are physically incapable of performing them which has stemmed from lack of movement and play.
This is the beginning of a massive change. A change in the way we think, a change in the way we move, a change in the way we play.
Apparently, “responsible” adults don’t climb trees in good clothes, don’t roll around on the ground and don’t jump in puddles. Apparently, “responsible” adults don’t do anything.
I believe in the power of change, I believe that when you stop playing you stop growing and i believe that if you stop growing you start dying.
I also believe that in order to change the world, we need people to see the benefits, so i’m asking everyone that reads this to PLAY in a way that a “responsible” adult shouldn’t or wouldn’t.
Move like you did when you were a kid and enjoy it 🙂
This blog is now a forum for people to discuss the philosophy of PLAYtime, to implement in to their lives but most importantly to learn how their bodies work, discover their own limitations and become better people and better players .
#PLAYtime
A UFT PLAYground is a place that people of all shapes, sizes and ages learn to develop their movement abilities through an infinite learning and development program. UFT PLAYgrounds have been created to re-inspire our natural ability to move, create, adapt, re-act, connect, have fun and of course PLAY.
PLAYgrounds have been developed to allow people to feel and explore their own abilities by utilising a multidimensional, infinite, creative and PLAYful approach to training.
We live in a world full of specialists and obsessions. At an ever increasing rate, people are specialising more and more, in their jobs, in their businesses, in their sport and in their training. The result, is a backward step in human evolution. By specialising, we limit ourselves to thinking that 1 particular way of doing things is the right way, or the only way.
We promote creativity, not only in movement and training methodologies but in thinking in general.
A UFT PLAYground is created to provide the general public with an opportunity to PLAY across multiple styles of training and moving, to be able to progress in the training methods that they become passionate about or that excites them and to be a part of a community that promotes more than just fitness.
The “fitness” industry above all others has brought about a need to specialise in order to achieve anything, and majority of what we do for “fitness” is for an aesthetically pleasing reason. We understand that aesthetics are nice and we too love to look and feel good. However a UFT PLAYground is developed to allow people to move better than ever before across a broad range of training methodologies and ideas. Aesthetics, therefore are a result not a goal of that system. We know that “If you train to look good, you will not always enjoy what you do, but if you PLAY a lot, and do the things that you love, you will ending up looking good”. Aesthetics should be a result not a goal.
For years now, we have recognised that the best movers on the planet are children. They are flexible, mobile & fit, they have better relative strength than a typical adult (and even most adolescents), they are the best creators and innovators, they learn faster, the adapt better, they interact better with other people, they are more connected to nature and most importantly, they PLAY more than anyone else.
As adults, we tend to believe that because we are taller and more experienced in “life”, we are better, and then we get to an age that says we are “too old to PLAY”. As we grow taller (and in a lot of cases rounder), we experience things that inhibit our ability to move, think and not think. We allow our experiences to limit our abilities as humans, whether it be a physical injury, a story that we heard or a youtube video that we watched. We also allow our emotions to control our behaviour because of our past experiences. Maybe it was the feeling of humiliation when we tried something new, regret when we failed or heart break when it was taken away from us. Because of this, we allow our experiences to control our future instead of learning from them and creating our own
.
This is what UFT PLAYground’s are built on. The understanding that we as humans need to go back to the way things were before our negative experiences took over our subconscious mind and body.
A UFT PLAYground gives people the ability to re-learn what they have lost, as well as develop new sets of skills that will allow them to follow any particular passion that they uncover in PLAYtime. When we PLAY, we are simply, exploring. Through exploring we become curious and through curiosity we become obsessed or passionate about a particular thing. This is why in a PLAYground we allow people to PLAY across a broad range of training systems (minimum of 3), Through this system they are able to identify 1, their current limitations and be educated on how to overcome them, and 2, identify their passions and learn to develop, grow and excel in them.
UFT PLAYgrounds are also a development centre for up and coming entrepreneurs in the fitness industry.
Each PLAYground founder will have been trained and will be continuously trained in UFT’s Trainer Success System.
This system allows personal trainers, coaches, teachers, instructors, etc. to continue to develop in their fields of specialty (as they play they will find it) and in the philosophy of PLAYtime. They will also be trained in the business systems of UFT in order to have their own successful and profitable business.
See UFT Trainer Success System for more details.
I like it, everything is so very true haha