Meet Kaylee Cahoon

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kaylee Cahoon a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Kaylee, thank you so much for joining us. You are such a positive person and it’s something we really admire and so we wanted to start by asking you where you think your optimism comes from?

My life’s work is really a metaphor for how all things work in life. Physical Movement is a pattern or sequence, influenced by your architecture, your movement development from birth, your beliefs, influences of past experiences both positive and negative, your relationship with gravity, and your self image. How a person organizes a movement is how their brain interprets what options are available, and which one would be best for that moment. Often in movement dysfunction, the brain has decided that there is only one choice, and it may even be a painful one. My work is to explore all of the possibilities in order to give a person as many options as possible. An example of this would be when a person feels restriction in turning their head, I might ask them to think about turning the back of their head instead of their face. This shift in ‘how’ the rotation occurs puts another possibility in their toolbox. The awareness of the head having both a front and back, allows the head to turn a little differently sequence wise.

The more possibilities, the more hope, the more resilience for dealing with adversity.

The body is amazing in how it can accomplish a single movement in a million different ways, this is often demonstrated in how we develop compensatory patterns after healing from an injury or surgery. Seeing my clients find hope that things are in fact changeable, and therefore improvable, is a giant dose of optimism for me. The irony is that the one thing you can not change is that things are always going to change! Developing the ability to fully explore options in order to be the director of the change is incredibly empowering.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

Kaylee Cahoon is widely known as a distinguished Movement Educator, Structural Integration Practitioner, and professional athlete body coach. She developed the SMARTCore Movement Method®, a unique approach to improving movement patterns by focusing on the nervous system’s organization of movement rather than just the muscles. This approach, developed over 30 years, utilizes manual therapy and movement re-education to optimize movement efficiency and expand movement potential.

Kaylee’s work is particularly recognized for the following aspects:

* Professional Athlete Body Coaching: She is known for helping elite athletes improve performance, prevent injuries, and extend their careers.
* Structural Integration and Bodywork Expertise: Kaylee is certified in Structural Integration, a bodywork method focusing on fascia. She also created her own manual modality called Structural Functional Bodywork™.
* Teaching and Mentoring: She teaches her own courses, such as Movement Specificity™ and Structural Functional Bodywork™, and mentors other practitioners.
* Diverse Clientele: Her work extends beyond athletes to include dancers, entertainers, and individuals with various conditions like MS, traumatic brain injury, and chronic pain, with many medical professionals referring patients to her.
* Background: Kaylee has a background as an internationally touring professional modern dancer and choreographer for television and theater.

Kaylee Cahoon’s approach to movement education and bodywork is built upon a foundation of extensive training and exposure to a variety of somatic movement approaches over 40 years. These include:
The Pilates Method
Moshe Feldenkrais
Ideokinesis
Bartenieff Fundamentals
Laban Movement
Alexander Technique
These diverse influences, combined with her understanding of anatomy, physics, and neuroscience, have shaped her unique perspective on movement and the nervous system’s role in it. She is motivated by the endless possibilities of the human experience.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

1. Focus: Whatever your interest is, hone it, sculpt it, shake it up, look at it upside down and backwards, rethink it, but never lose focus on it.
2. Problem Solving: Identify the problem and find a way to improve the outcome.
3. Creativity: The answer might not lie in your existing knowledge. It’s actually more fun when it doesn’t!

Who is your ideal client or what sort of characteristics would make someone an ideal client for you?

People come to me to get ‘fixed.’ My work has the capacity to take someone’s pain away, often in one session. If I wanted to develop a dependency model business, I would simply fix my clients all day, knowing they will be back regularly to be fixed again. There are many successful businesses even in healthcare that operate this way. I am sure my clients would be very happy to see me every week without having to take much accountability for themselves and one could even say “She has a thriving business, with all repeat customers”
However, my business is guided by my personal ethics. I am interested in teaching my clients the skills to fix themselves. Self sufficiency is my goal for them. This allows me to see thousands of different people and spread the word, instead of the same 30 people. My approach allows me to leave the world better than when I arrived, in the best way I can contribute, which makes me feel happy and fulfilled, along with my client.
My ideal client wants to look at themselves, develop awareness to the many habits and shapes their body takes on throughout the day, change the way they sit, stand, walk, drive, put their socks on, use their phones, computers, etc. My client wants a recipe for what to do when they ‘step in it,’ so to speak, to keep chronic issues from coming back or turning into a surgery event. My client wants to live a very long time in a well functioning body and is excited to develop a lifestyle that would support that goal. Because my client wants to live a purposeful and capable life, I lead by example.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.smartcoremethod.com
• Instagram: @smartcoremethod

Image Credits

Stephanie Waddey