Working in the Real World

Life is not gentle. It asks us to lift, exert, recover, and respond under imperfect conditions. Our clients want to age with their strength intact and in hand: to lift luggage, pick up grandchildren, climb stairs, recover from falls, return to dancing, hiking, and working. They like progress they can feel and coordination they can trust.

This retreat is about shaping our work to meet the real world. It is for the practitioner who wants to mature their understanding of effort from a liability into an asset. We’ll work with muscularity, constraint, leverage and load as conditions that make learning visible and achievement measurable. We’ll examine and celebrate how leverage dignifies effort and restores agency and confidence for you and your clients. Effort Made Good is designed to help practitioners build a professional relationship to the physics of sensible and sustainable coordination.

The Retreat Mission

Our field prioritizes sensing and feeling, and often diverts our attention away from effort, measurement, and clear outcomes. The implication is that awareness and effort are opposites that can never support one another. Yet how do we demonstrate improvement, guide resilience, and compete in a world where coordination, strength, and vitality are openly discussed, demonstrated and celebrated everywhere else?

Here, we are going to break the rules that nobody made in the first place: that effort is suspect, that metrics objectify people, or that understanding anatomy is a reductionistic dead-end. We’ll replace those rules with functional leverage, testable learning, and problem-solving you can stand behind.

Our Work Together

For the Juniors

If you’re early in your practice, this retreat is not about proving what you already know. It’s about building a fuller foundation for your work. You’ll learn how to recognize when effort is useful versus wasteful, how leverage changes the distribution of power and dexterity, and how to use resistance without fear—your own or your client’s. You’ll leave Effort Made Good with clearer eyes, better questions, and practical ways to design your sessions that prepare people for the real physical challenges of their lives.

For the Seniors

If you’ve been practicing for years, you may have started to feel the functional inadequacy of smoothness without strength, of reducing effort without gaining capacity, of insight without consequence. Effort Made Good is an opportunity to sharpen your work and deepen its impact. We’ll interrogate the habits of thinking and acting that no longer serve, refine how you evaluate improvement, and expand what you’re willing to ask of yourself and your clients. The goal isn’t to make the work harder—it’s to make it hold up under life’s demands.