Why Take RTS?

Image courtesy of salvationarmy.org

I was reading through online forums earlier this week and I came across one in which the author had heard of RTS and had looked at information online about the courses but wasn't able to understand what made this series of courses different than, say, the biomechanics course he took as an undergrad.  This seems to be a fairly common response when people have asked me what I am going to Oklahoma City for and I have given them an abbreviated answer.  When I saw this forum post I got excited because I once again had the opportunity to answer this question but I didn't have to answer on the spot and I could take a little time to explore why, to me, the RTS courses are different than any other of a similar nature.

What follows is how I responded in that moment.  I could certainly go back and edit some of the verbiage or add additional viewpoints or thoughts, but for the sake of preserving an uninterrupted stream of consciousness, I haven't altered what I initially wrote, although there are certainly MANY more points that could be made.

"Okay, so what makes RTS different than other courses? A great analogy that is used in class is that of soup. So let's say you want soup. You can go to the store and pick out a can from the selection and there, you have soup. Or maybe you have a friend who likes to make soup so they help you make some because you don't feel comfortable going off on your own and making it. Then let's say after a while you do like to go off on your own and follow recipes out of cookbooks, and from that maybe you start experimenting with your own combinations of ingredients, kind of tossing things in that seem like they may go together. A while longer of that and now you have created some soups that are your own and that are pretty tasty. Tasty to you, at least. But what if a friend is allergic to some of your ingredients so you cannot share your soup with them? Or what if your soup is only palatable to you and a few others? Your ability to alter your soup and create a dish that isn't threatening to your friend's health and tastes good to them is rather limited due to how you learned and understand soup.

Compare this to a master chef who understands the intricacies of all the possible ingredients and how they interact with one another and the flavors and textures and scents they produce when certain portions of each are mixed together. This knowledge base would allow you to create a different soup for every single person that is both extremely tasty to that person as well as meets their nutritional needs.

Substitute exercise for soup, and when you really start to grasp the principles that are presented and explored in depth in RTS, that's when you start to become a master chef. Because of these principles, you can take any person and, if you know their medical history, you can appropriately assess their abilities and apply force and progress them in a manner that doesn't cause pain or degradation of their structure and actually allows them to enjoy the experience and feel good while they are exercising.

Image courtesy of shape.com

Creating experiences is a huge part of RTS, as well. From how you construct a specific exercise for them to how you cue them throughout the exercise, you can take a leg extension machine and put three different people on it with three different knee conditions and make them each feel twenty different sensations and provide them with infinitely more experiences with this one piece of equipment performing this one motion than if they were to do it on their own or be instructed by somebody who didn't understand all of the variables that are at their disposal.

Additionally, you develop the ability to objectively evaluate equipment and exercises for what they really are and what they are actually doing to the body instead of getting caught up in the hype or magic that seems to predominate much of today's exercise world.

So that's just kind of the tip of the iceberg with RTS. A huge thing to point out is that while the physics, mechanics, and anatomy may not be any different than what you were presented with in school, the viewpoints, thought processes, discussion, and exploration of these topics are almost certainly going to be different. To illustrate why this is so hugely important, consider the following quote,

"Quantum physics shows us that when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." - Dr. Wayne Dyer

Relate this back to the soup example. When you were creating your own soup, you had the exact same access to ingredients and cooking utensils as the master chef, but the difference was, to that master chef, those ingredients and how to go about preparing them with the utensils carried a COMPLETELY different meaning than to the average soup maker. The master chef could see all of possibilities that were before her while the average soup maker could really only provide others with what they had already tasted and made and approved of themselves.

This is where probably one of the biggest components of RTS comes in, and that is the application of the knowledge covered in the classroom to actual exercise. I cannot speak to the ability of undergraduate courses to prepare students to effectively apply what they have learned to any situation they come in contact with, but I feel that is certainly a strong suit of the RTS courses.

If you have taken or are taking the RTS courses, what makes them different to you?  If you haven't, why not?
Your body.  Your training.

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