Articles

Change Your Age Teacher Training Curriculum

  • Print

Completing the Change Your Age Teacher Training would allow you to become a certified teacher of the Change Your Age Program.

THE PROGRAM:
The Change Your Age Program is about people learning to move more youthfully.

OBJECTIVES:
To identify strategies and apply movement lessons that can help to change the age a person’s movements by improving their functional capacities, their agility, their dexterity, and their coordination.

The program will require the student to sharpen their attention, expand their body awareness and deepen the sensory and motor control of their body.

The Change Your Age Program will show you how to look, feel, and move younger, offering invaluable tools such as:

  • The Change Your Age Mobility Survey, helping you evaluate:
    • Do you move old for your age?
    • How young do you feel?
    • How young do you want to feel?
  • How to assess if your current fitness program is hurting instead of helping
  • How to recognize and change physically damaging habits to avoid injury and pain
  • 30 core lessons that help you discover more youthful movement
  • Tips to improve flexibility, posture, and the coordination of your mind and body
  • Tips on customizing the program to suit your own needs and lifestyle

REQUIREMENTS:

  1. Certified as a Feldenkrais practitioner and have permission to take the course from the Educational Director, Frank Wildman, GCFT, PhD.
  2. Completion of a 2-day workshop in Change Your Age is also a requirement for the 4-day teacher training, unless other arrangements are made with the Educational Director.
  3. Read the Change Your Age book and follow the instructions before attending the course.

TRAINING FORMAT:

  • The full Change Your Age teacher training consists of six days and 30 hours of instruction.
  • The first part entails the full 2-day Change Your Age workshop.
  • The second part is the 4-day teacher training.
  • You are not required to take the workshop and the teacher training at the same time.

CURRICULUM AND LEARNING STRATEGIES:

2-day Change Your Age Workshop
You will be doing Change Your Age lessons.  The structure will follow the Change Your Age Program as defined by the Change Your Age book.

4-days Change Your Age Teacher Training
People will be trained to both observe the aging process and its reversal.

Students will be expected to see the major signs of aging in their clients and students, and recognize which of those signs of aging can be reversed and which cannot.

Besides learning all of the lessons in the Change Your Age Program as defined by the lessons in the Change Your Age book, students will have access to more lessons for a more expanded program and alternative lessons to be used for specialized situations, i.e. particular injuries or neurological difficulties.

Change Your Age teachers will learn how to design the Change Your Age Program in any time format required, meaning if it’s an hour class per week, 90-minute class per week, 2 classes a week, a day-long workshop, a half-day mini-workshop, or a full weekend workshop, the Change Your Age teachers will be taught how to use various optimal formats to teach within different time constraints.

People will be taught how to utilize the various routines (combinations of lessons) that are outlined in Chapter 4 of the Change Your Age book:

  • Morning Routine
  • Energizing Routine
  • Mid-day Routine
  • Fitness Boost
  • Nighttime Routines
  • Sleep Enhancement tips
  • Lessons to Develop a More Expressive Face and Reduce Tension in the Jaw.

People will be taught how to develop programs with particular foci and orientation, as described in the Change Your Age Mobility Index.  Special attention will be paid to the following categories of habits.

  • Posture
  • Timing
  • Movement
  • Balance

Change Your Age training will include a mini-course on gerontology, a field I began studying and working in 40 years ago.

Health Issues related to movement for people in different age groups — 20-80 — will be discussed, including the most important features that must be retained as we age to maintain our fullest functional capacities.

The goal of the Change Your Age Program is to help people to fulfill their full human potential regardless of what age they are starting this exploration.

The Feldenkrais Method will be the basis for the Change Your Age lessons, however there are significant differences.  For example, a 45-minute to 1 hour-long Awareness Through Movement lesson might be taught in 10-15 minutes.  Some lessons will be only several minutes long.  The objectives of the lessons will be clearly stated and information about motor learning, body awareness, and principles of movement will be taught.

How to use hands-on to facilitate the students’ learning while the lesson is on-going will be for many Feldenkrais practitioners a new skill.  So the Change Your Age training will require new ways of approaching, apprehending and guiding a student through a Change Your Age lesson while they may be making major changes of weight bearing or position or major center of mass shifts.

Topics of discussion and study will include the following.  All of these will be approached from the point of view of an aging body and a body that improves with age.

  • Orientation and scanning
  • The dangers of exercise: over-stressing
  • The limits of learning by imitation
  • Competing with yourself
  • Work vs. effort
  • Exploratory movement
  • Non-linear movement and learning
  • Reversibility

Students will have an opportunity to learn the following aspects of Change Your Age:

1.  To understand these elements of the Change Your Age theoretical framework:

  • Movement as biological phenomenon. Time and space as measured by movement. Related notions of rhythm, rate and speed of movement.
  • Learning as a biological phenomenon - the evolution of the learning process: reflex, automatic and intentional movements.
  • Functional anatomy. The accordance of structure to function in human functioning.
  • Evolution in the field of gravity.
  • Levels of function in the central nervous system.
  • Regression as general biological phenomenon.
  • Latent capabilities and probable growth of the central nervous system.
  • Movement and its organization in the nervous system.
  • Movement as a means of extending awareness.

2. To present a Change Your Age lesson appropriate to individuals in a group, specifically, to:

  • Know a large number of basic Change Your Age lessons;
  • Understand developmental movement;
  • Understand the internal organization of Change Your Age lessons;
  • Learn by experiencing the lessons oneself, exploring oneself in movement to better perceive motion in others;
  • Perceive the change of muscular tone after many repetitions of barely perceptible movements and after the use of auxiliary movements to help differentiation;
  • Understand differentiation of movement as distinct from range, as well as the role of smoothness, reversibility and delay in initiating movement;
  • Diagnose visual and tactile movement habits and peculiarities of structure and learned responses;
  • Appreciate the importance of subtle movements and mental image as means of removing muscular limitations;
  • Learn handling techniques and principles of instructive touch applied to all joints and muscle groups of the body; and
  • Understand the primary importance in neurological reorganization of feelings and sensations, such as lightness, ease, and length.

3.  To understand:

  • How to enhance one's own sensory appreciation and muscular efficiency and how they affect the individual's response;
  • How to verbalize minimal conceptual understanding of the Change Your Age Program;
  • How to be aware of the intention behind one's actions;
  • The limitations of the Change Your Age Program; and
  • How to differentiate between a medical, diagnostic approach and Change Your Age as a system of learning.
     

STUDENT EVALUATION AND GRADUATION

Student evaluation will be performed by the instructor. Graduation will be determined by successful completion of the course after demonstrating the ability to teach and help teach others the Change Your Age Program.
 
TEACHING FACULTY

Frank Wildman, PhD, GCFT

 TUITION, FEES, HOUSING AND ENROLLMENT

  • Tuition - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for current fees
  • Housing is the responsibility of the trainee.
  • Enrollment agreement - sent via e-mail to interested parties - must be signed and returned to us prior to confirmation of your enrollment.

POST GRADUATE TRAINING

Post Graduate Training will happen through the Change Your Age Network.
 
 
(Revision: 24 November 2010)