my story – dance & sport
Why am I even writing all of this?
First and foremost, by way of introduction, I don’t like talking about myself… and this is one of the reasons why I’ve prepared this website: so you don’t buy a pig in a poke and can actually get to know me before you come meet me at a training.
Usually when I’m browsing someone’s website, the first thing I want to know first is who the person I’ll be learning from really is.
The beginning of my story was rather perverse. When I was six years old, my parents took me to a dance class. Five minutes in, I fled bawling…
Practically throughout my whole primary and high school, I was trying out various sports and the PE classes were always my favourite.
Table tennis, badminton, volleyball, football, track and field, choy lee fut – all of these gave me the dynamics and coordination needed to be good at dancing. It needs to be said, though, that until the beginning of my higher education my first love in terms of sports was skiing, which led to obtaining the title of a ski instructor’s assistant. This is also when I had my first teaching experience – instructing my ski camps colleagues.
Meanwhile I’d been dancing a bit from time to time, but those were insignificant dancing lessons to which I was reluctantly forced by my persisting parents.
I started my dance career in earnest towards the beginning of my studies, and the next eight years I was totally absorbed by training and ballroom dancing competitions.
I instantly knew I wanted to teach in the future, so every dancing class I attended, apart from learning how to dance, for me was an opportunity to observe my instructors’ work. At the time, however, there weren’t yet many who would pay attention to regeneration and health in training, and only now, from the perspective of many years, I can see how many things could have been done better.
After I finished my ballroom dancing career, I immediately started teaching ballroom dance couples, first children, and then adults, and that’s how the next thirteen years passed. In the meantime my wife and I got interested in West Coast Swing and… got totally hooked. WCS gave us joy, but also made us aware how much there’s still to learn about body movement, and how limited we actually were in our ballroom dance bubble.
Since 2014, we’ve been teaching West Coast Swing and learning ourselves from the best instructors. What is more, we saw more and more how little focus there is on health and biomechanics in the dancing world. With time, we’ve also started to notice that due to the modern sedentary lifestyle and spending long hours in front of a screen, our students have more and more problems performing a given exercise correctly.
At the same time, I’d been making a lot of training errors myself or I was neglecting my own training altogether. One’s body is an important tool of transferring knowledge for a dance instructor, and I’ve allowed my tool to go into disrepair completely. Knees, hip, groin, lumbar spine, shoulder girdle, wrists (I’m still fighting this one…) – I’ve had quite a lot of injuries.
Some I sustained when working with personal trainers, and this is how I understood that even under supervision, we still need to FEEL our body ourselves and understand our limits.
Similarly to the story described in Stuart McGill’s book Gift of Injury, my injuries jump-started my desire to get back in shape, or even before that, get well first. Thanks to the fact that I made it to the physiotherapist Marek Purczyński, my return to wellbeing meant my own, conscious work on my body, and acquiring more and more knowledge – and it all started on Mark’s courses. As I went on absorbing more and more information, I’ve started to find answers not only to my own problems, but also my students’. The more I knew, the more I started to realise how much I still don’t know… Although I was already suggested to teach the courses I listed on this page in 2018, I started teaching this topic four years later. When teaching, I need to know that what I’m teaching has a solid foundation. So I needed the time to finish a considerable number of courses and “conquer” a sizable list of publications/academic books on sport, biomechanics or neurology and then test the knowledge I acquired.
I’d like to share that knowledge with you. And since being active has a lot to do with staying healthy and how we function in our day-to-day life, I want to approach this topic holistically, using all of my experience and combining practical information with academic knowledge – from the perspective of an overall well-being, as well as biomechanics and neurology.
PS I have a tongue-in-cheek anecdote about figuring out sport moves.
When I was more or less eleven years old, being on holidays with my parents, I had a chance to play table tennis for the first time (a momentous event for a kid whose closest experience to ping-pong was hitting a ball against a wall). On the first day I lost all my games (and there were fifteen of us, all boys ten to sixteen years old), but towards the end of the holiday, after a couple of days observing my better opponents, I was winning every time… It looks like sports movement analysis was always a part of me.
