My background
I am a former British international gymnast and later qualified as a British Gymnastics Level 3 coach, British Wheel of Yoga teacher and Yoga Sports Science Gold coach. More than a decade teaching primary school gymnastics led me to develop YOGYM Education and ask how stillness, alignment and body awareness might support movement learning.
Research project
When I began teaching gymnastics in primary schools, I encountered a practical problem: how could I teach children to control movement when many could not yet organise their bodies in stillness? Some copied the general shape of a skill, but not the organisation that made it controlled. Physical literacy is commonly described through competence, confidence, motivation, knowledge and lifelong engagement, yet teaching often begins with visible actions such as running, jumping, throwing and balancing. Much less attention is given to the organised state from which purposeful movement begins.
Many primary teachers I worked with felt unsure about teaching gymnastics skills. Yet England’s PE curriculum asks pupils to develop balance, coordination, flexibility, strength, technique and control; gymnastics is an example rather than a required starting point (Department of Education, 2013). YOGYM offers a progression through stillness, body awareness and controlled movement before children tackle complex gymnastics skills. After I began teaching yoga in 2007, I introduced breathing, alignment and focused attention into school gymnastics. Every lesson began with a simple listening position: standing upright, feet together, body aligned and attention directed towards the instruction. I timed how quickly the whole class could achieve it, not simply to produce a faster response, but to help the children learn how to stop, organise themselves and become ready. They then learned simple, accurately aligned body shapes, which we used to create a structured warm-up before progressing to body-awareness work, carefully broken-down skills, ability groups, pair work and relaxation.
After several weeks, whole classes could become still and quiet for two minutes. I observed changes in listening, alignment, confidence and movement control. These observations were not from a controlled study, but their consistency across years compelled me to investigate what stillness might be doing.
Stillness is not inactivity. During quiet standing, the nervous system integrates visual, vestibular and proprioceptive information while producing continuous muscular corrections (Peterka, 2002). Movement also begins before it becomes visible: anticipatory postural adjustments help stabilise the body before a limb moves. A handstand does not begin when the hands touch the floor, nor a jump when the feet leave it. Each begins with attention, orientation, weight distribution and preparation. The stillness I am describing is therefore not passive, rigid or punitive, it is embodied readiness.
My archive includes lesson films, baseline photographs, stopwatch measures, lesson plans, teacher testimony, children’s drawings and examples of progression. At Saint John Fisher Primary School, the approach continued for twelve years. Other footage follows the same Upton School cohort from Year 2 into Year 3 and compares lessons 4 and 11 at Our Lady of the Rosary. In Reception, the focus was movement preparation and body awareness; formal gymnastics skills followed in the next term. This material cannot establish causation or prove that YOGYM is superior to another approach. It documents the origin of a researchable idea sustained in real schools.
The question is also relevant to talent recognition. Some children who initially appeared unremarkable changed considerably once foundational movement was deliberately taught. If selection relies mainly on visible performance, children who have had fewer opportunities to develop those foundations may be overlooked (Prieto-Ayuso et al., 2020).
Physical-literacy research recognises balance, coordination, confidence and movement competence (Longmuir et al., 2018). Deliberately taught stillness as an integrated capacity involving posture, sensory awareness, attention and readiness to move deserves closer investigation. Recent professional discussion has echoed this concern. Responding to the YOGYM idea, sports scientist Alfredo Silva described stillness as a possible blind spot in physical education and linked it with postural tone, proprioception and body-schema development. His response is professional commentary, not research evidence.
Pushkarenko and Durden-Myers’ (2026) new conceptual analysis links physical literacy and social-emotional learning through embodied movement. It raises a question from my practice: could stillness and bodily control help connect physical literacy with self-regulation?
Take-homes and applications
My central research question is: does explicitly teaching stillness, alignment, breathing and body awareness before formal movement skills improve children’s movement control, confidence and physical literacy? A prospective study could compare a YOGYM-informed programme with conventional physical education, using postural-control measures, skill assessments, observation and children’s own accounts.
Children need to move, explore and play. The proposal is that brief moments of organisation may help them move with greater awareness and control. Questions arising from practice compelled me towards research. My school evidence does not prove the proposition, but provides a basis for formal evaluation.
References
Department for Education. National curriculum in England: physical education programmes of study. 2013.
Longmuir PE et al. Canadian Assessment of Physical Literacy Second Edition. BMC Public Health. 2018. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-018-5902-y
Peterka RJ. Sensorimotor integration in human postural control. Journal of Neurophysiology. 2002;88:1097-1118. https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.2002.88.3.1097
Prieto-Ayuso A et al. Are Physical Education Lessons Suitable for Sport Talent Identification? IJERPH. 2020;17:1961. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17061961
Pushkarenko K, Durden-Myers L. More than movement: A conceptual exploration of the convergence of social-emotional learning and physical literacy. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living. 2026;8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2026.1927655
Author Bio
Lisa Jackman is a former British international gymnast, 1976 Junior World Champion on asymmetric bars and 1978 Commonwealth Games silver medallist. A British Gymnastics Level 3 coach, British Wheel of Yoga teacher and Yoga Sports Science Gold coach, she taught curriculum-time gymnastics in primary schools for more than a decade. She developed YOGYM Education to explore stillness, alignment and body awareness as foundations for movement learning and physical literacy.