When I started out in health, wellness and fitness in 1996, I never knew that a humble whiteboard pen might spark a realisation about the way I approached education. After all it’s just a pen, right? But as they say, ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ and we intend to wield it to change the world of learning.
The birth of The BodyMapper
This is the story of how I distilled 24 year’s educational experience into a five-step learning system to disrupt the way we engage with information and develop new skills. And then hooked up with two fantastic guys who shared the vision and knew we could make it into something tangible and exciting.
It’s March 2020 and I’m on the phone to a former colleague, Dave Christophi as I drive from London to Petersfield. The country is about to go into lockdown, and everything is going to grind to a holt. Except there is an exciting conversation underway and we are not in the mood to let it go. It surrounds an idea I had been shaping for two years and we think we might be able to run with – us and a third, highly respected industry colleague, Paul Dorkings. And so, the BodyMapper crystals began to form.
What is The BodyMapper
The BodyMapper is a trademarked, unique and practical learning system designed to inspire everyone to understand and invest in their body. The idea came from my teaching thousands of students over the years and identifying what best helped them grasp concepts and convert them into confidently delivered skills.
Addressing learning challenges
I also wanted to help those students who didn’t find the learning process so straight forward. I knew that some struggled reading long passages of text, others couldn’t remember complicated words for musculoskeletal structures, or found it hard to visualise the complex concepts being taught.
The volume of information would on occasion leave students drowning in an overwhelming sea of words, making them despondent, self-critical and disheartened. Others couldn’t concentrate or sit still for more than five minutes, because the mechanisms of learning did not speak to their heart and soul. They really couldn’t care less about range statements, learning outcomes or standardisation. They wanted to be excited.
And if they didn’t practice using their new skills, they also found their capabilities fading quickly. And I felt it wasn’t their fault – it was mine for not exploring better ways of connecting with them and showing them a way to tap into their unique skillset.
See, Feel, Map, Move, Memorise
So, I set about characterising a five-step learning system which celebrated the diversity of student’s capabilities, senses and thinking – knowing that no single approach would work for everyone. ‘With five, we might have a chance’, I mused to myself. And the likelihood is that we will progress to add more to the BodyMapper sequence as we gain feedback from our students on how we can improve the experience.
The five steps were nurtured in my favourite learning space – my face to face workshops. The steps gained the titles, ‘See’, ‘Feel’, ‘Map’, ‘Move’ and ‘Memorise’ to reflect the key skill steps needed to help students transition from new concept to confident reproduction of skills.
The system recognises that when we learn, humans often first see something and derive a level of understanding. We might then touch it to feel its form (babies add to this by attempting to taste an object, with sometimes hilarious consequences) – gaining a different type of information, processed by the brain in a different way. We then teach our students how to map the terrain, in our case with those whiteboard pens, drawing muscles and joints on a person, because it stimulates another perspective. Penultimately, we get our students to move the mapped structures, because with motion comes a learning layer that cannot be derived from static viewpoints. And finally, we ask our students to memorise by practising and repeating all the steps in the process, because nothing can replicate this multi-layer ‘learning by doing’ – again, again and again.
We also add the element of gamification, making some of these tasks against the clock because we believe that when you become comfortable with repetition, regularly getting things ‘wrong’, you learn quicker and quickly improve performance. Yes, that is right – we believe the secret lies in our students to get things wrong.
Disrupting accepted norms of learning
I wanted to avoid gimmickry, fad or passing trend – it had to be creative, effective and stir the curiosity of its viewers. Too much education today is dry, indigestible and fundamentally fails to acknowledge pillars of human behaviour, learning and skills acquisition.
Much education is also inclined to set itself up to be self-congratulatory with testing and high grades proving the quality of a course. ‘Just read the league tables and look how successful we are’, say the schools, colleges and universities. I don’t buy it – teaching students to achieve a number in a test is a flawed way to identify what they are capable of and lacks ambition and perspicacity.
I have proved this academic paradigm to be indulgent and misinformed in my own life experience, by ‘playing’ the system at A-level and Degree level where I achieved nearly top grades in both. Does this make me clever? No. Does this make the school and university I attended, particularly inspiring? No. It simply means that I worked out a way to spend three quarters of my time at school and university ‘messing around’ and playing sport, then cram information into my head in the last couple of months to pass the exams. The point? I am not special because I got a good degree. I just found a way short circuit the strictures of UK education by jamming short term information into my brain and regurgitating it in exams. These results prove little. And I found achieving those grades to be a short-lived, hollow victory. How many other young people end up feeling that way?
Inspiring figures in education
It wasn’t until I began to watch certain people present their ideas on education and the fundamental cornerstones of learning, that I began to understand much more about how we humans behave in the right learning environment.
One such person was Sir Ken Robinson, who in February 2006 presented the most viewed TED talk of all time, ‘Do schools kill creativity?’ (Currently running at 65.7m views). When I heard him talk and subsequently read his books, I felt like I was meeting the one person in the world who truly understood what learning is about. His inspiration and his influence around creativity are there in the BodyMapper. And for that inspiration, I am grateful.
- View the 'Do schools kill creativity?' video here
And perhaps the most uplifting people on my journey? My students. I feel profoundly lucky to have had the opportunity to ‘play around’ with the constructs of learning over the years. Experimenting with different approaches in the classroom and at presentations has revealed so much – not about the grades my students could achieve, but about the limitless scope of their trust, self-belief and creativity if I engendered the right environment for them.
My kind and supportive students have chipped away and moulded the experience like sculptors with an intriguing statue, congratulating me when an idea worked and telling me in no uncertain terms when it did not, and I quote (student’s name withheld!), ‘Pete, I don’t know about anyone else here, but I find this a complete waste of time…’. Blunt. And oh, so helpful. They say it is when we get things ‘wrong’ that we learn most. And didn’t I know it!
Why BodyMapping?
So, The BodyMapper team set off on a mission – to improve standards and the understanding of how the human body works. We wanted students to be able to more effectively support, train and care for the human body. And to do that, they needed to understand it better first.
We wanted people to engage with complex information in a practical, user friendly way. That meant reinforcing and contextualising student’s existing knowledge. Bringing previous learning from lectures and books to life. We looked to provide an alternative demonstration of understanding – to ‘learn differently’. Our students would, we hoped, develop their ability to articulate complex topics. And, importantly, we wanted to help people convert theoretical knowledge into commercial skills.
Who is BodyMapping for?
We set out to bring The BodyMapper to undergraduates and qualified professionals in the healthcare, wellness and fitness industries. That means physiotherapists, medics, chiropractors, massage therapists, rehabilitation specialists, fitness professionals, osteopaths, strength and conditioning coaches to name a few. The truth is we are learning a lot about who our audiences are, and our minds are opening up to new possibilities – the latest revelation being that artists are increasingly interested in learning how to draw musculoskeletal structures. Where it might go next, we don’t know. No doubt people from around the globe will share their stories with us as they arise.
Who ends up benefitting from it?
Evidently, it is intended to benefit those who study The BodyMapper courses as mentioned earlier. But it is so much more than that, because as you look down the line of people this will impact, you realise that it is the person to whom a student and then practitioner articulates this different way of thinking who will be changed forever. It sounds grandiose, but I have witnessed at first hand the breakthroughs when, in the first instance, a student understands, then can later ‘paint a picture’ for the client, who listens and absorbs with interest. Ultimately, we truly believe that everyone can benefit from learning about their body and investing in it. This is the heady space from which our just cause derives.
The Art in BodyMapping
It sets us apart that we encourage our students to draw the structures they learn onto a human body. Looking at pretty pictures in a book or on a screen is not enough. And I won’t settle for that. I want our students to learn by doing. Drawing these pieces of art creates something magical.
I find that when people travel this creative path, they experience something unexpected that unfolds beneath their eyes, something which is uniquely theirs. Their thinking, imagination, and creativity. When you create a safe, nurturing learning environment in this way, students come out with ideas and perspectives which you could not possibly have imagined.
In short, I want to spend my time working with students who end up proving to themselves how creative and skilled they are – not how capable they are at reproducing a generic syllabus. The learning of the future is individualised, personalised and celebrates ‘diversity and not conformity’ as Sir Ken Robinson points out.
And after all, the human body is a matter of such exquisite beauty, both in form and function. We are all blessed to own one of the most sophisticated ‘machines’ on the planet – one that soaks up the millions of stimuli in our world, every second, analyses them and then responds with lightning precision, without even a flicker of conscious thought in many cases. This body we own, brings us all our experiences of life – people, places, memories, love, loss and hope – and so to learn more about it and how to look after it are noble causes indeed.
Feedback so far
In any journey, creating a new company and new services, you wait with bated breath to find out whether your world view, resonates with your customer – whether it changes the way they think and inspires them to greater things. And I am delighted to say that for the BodyMapper, that the early signs are heartening. Not only are we receiving feedback of a kind that we hoped for around the boardroom table, we are also being told about applications which we had never imagined. We are being forced to adapt assumptions and to remould our view of the future – in a way which makes the nerves tingle and the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.
I am not particularly enamoured by the indulgence of playing back our positive reviews, but what I am excited by is the diversity of thought emanating from the first BodyMapper students, so I will be selective in my choices. Here are a few:
Like I say, it doesn’t pay to get carried away – what it does do though is galvanise us to do better. There is so much more we can do.
Evolution of the BodyMapper and future plans
As we progress from this initial bundle of courses, entitled, ‘Bone and Joint Mapping’, we intend to progress into areas of greater complexity including MyofasciaMapping, MovementMapping, InjuryMapping and SportMapping – all designed to progress the skills of our customers and pique the imagination for future developments. After all, BodyMapping could be applied to almost anything – opening up potential opportunities in nutrition and related areas.
And if it works in the healthcare, wellness and fitness industries, what other industries might it transform?
We want this system to become a global way of thinking. I would say ‘standard’ but that gives the impression that we would want to limit people’s growth to an expected or desired norm.
No. We’d far rather be blown away by the new and innovative thinking of the next generation. After all, who are we to say what is possible?
I don’t think we can possibly dream up what is coming down the line – the global impact of coronavirus has proven that.
That is unless we ask our students to do just that. Dream up new answers to the new questions we haven’t yet asked ourselves. See, feel, map, move, memorise. What next?
