January Finally Ends

Today, we are going to have one of those personal posts, possibly while I procrastinate on some university work. I’ve been talking a lot about stuff about philosophy and neurodiversity recently, sometimes academically and sometimes in a more poetical way that I like to think of as a homage to e.e. cummings. What I have realised is that I love doing that, but I also make some brainrot, so I’ve made a few that will appear on YouTube Shorts and TikTok.

I used to try to make content that straddled both, sat in a sort of mild-mannered middle ground; now I’m going to abandon the middle ground and just be me. I think this flies in the face of the idea of being a content creator (am I a content creator?) and sticking to your lane, but honestly, I don’t really make any of this for anyone except for myself. Sure, it is nice to get validation, but I feel I have grown beyond that.

Coaching life

I guess this isn’t exactly true, as my career is giving me a lot of validation right now. Which is a place many of us never get to, so I’m going to bask in that while I can.

I am about to embark on what can be the most disruptive part of my career. I believe we get cycle coaching wrong. As someone who teaches coaches and works for a national governing body, this is a big statement. I’ve been working towards this for years, but it was only the other day, while I was sitting in a meeting, that I realised how our language, our culture, our media, and the coaching tools have made cycling a truly gatekept culture.

The irony being I was in a meeting about inclusivity, but I don’t feel inclusivity is the answer. I have watched many other coaches’ versions of inclusivity, and I have spent so many nights lying awake reflecting on my own. I believe inclusivity at this point has amounted to little more than adjusting the doorframe to the cycling room, and it still relies heavily on participants making the effort to fit the room. We should align the room so that the effort is on the coach and the environment.

At work, I call this adaptive environments and using real space. Initially, these were neuordivergent projects, but I’ve seen in organisations’ reactions that these principles resonate with everyone.

I have mostly been testing these ideas in the velodrome, indoor skateparks and school playgrounds. I’ve been working with groups, schools, colleges, and universities. The change I have seen is staff from these organisations attending the neurodiverse sessions, then booking them for themselves and their colleagues. Not as much to learn, but as a way to bond and have fun. Some of these people have been involved in getting children to cycle for decades, but have never felt the urge to cycle until they experienced these sessions. Simply put, a person-centred approach to alignment will bring more people into cycling.

Inclusion is easy to say

All of this is not to boast or stroke my ego; it is to say there are other ways out there, and we need to embrace them if we want more people to cycle. My simple statement is:

Inclusion is not inclusion if the participant is doing most of the invisible labour.

I use a very person-centred approach and believe behaviour is first expressed through movement, watch people and you can see what they need. The problem is that many coaches say they watch, but really, they are thinking up their next big monologue to show their knowledge and power.

Coaching has generally brought the wrong people in, often people who are more attracted to the power, who will say the “right” things when questioned. The other coaches who come in are often too scared to deviate even slightly from the textbook. You can see these people as if their session plan isn’t working; they don’t know what to do.

On this front, I’ll use autism. I see cycling groups across Scotland being funded for autism sessions. What they do is offer a space to sit if you feel overwhelmed, and try to lower the volume. This is not inherently bad and is necessary.

It is, though, not as inclusive as you think. It is very much that you have altered the door frame, as the rest of the instructions are the same. Which still passes on the work to the participant. They are monitoring sensory load, translating instructions, suppressing stims, and managing social and cultural expectations. All of this is on the participant.

All we need to do is make three changes:

Sessions should be paced to attention cycles, not time.

Communication matches processing styles.

Success is defined more broadly than compliance or conformity.

For many people, this will be seen as “soft”; you won’t look as much like a coach or a teacher, really, what does that even look like? This is what we need to change: people learn more when they are in an environment free of cognitive load. What happens to your laptop when you stress its system and overload it?

Yes, I have answers, yes, I’ve been showing people them, feel free to send me questions, but I was aiming for a light-hearted look at life and as usual, I’ve gone off at a tangent. Hopefully, it gave you some food for thought.

More brainrot, BMX jibs.