From the Root to the Fruit

Four True Things About Balance, Bone, Tendon and Perception

 

A Beautiful Thing That Was Not True

A clip arrived in my feed the way these things always arrive: unbidden, confident, and forwarded by someone who meant well. A man was explaining trees. A tree, he said, grows in two directions at once. Down into the dark, and up into the light. The root system, he said, is a mirror of the fruit system. Below ground there is resistance, and the tree must push through it. Above ground, once it breaks the surface, there is no more resistance at all. And so:“do your hard work in the dark, and the world will see you in the light….”

It is a lovely thing to hear. I felt the motivational pull of it myself. And it sounds also well-thought and very intelligent, for about 20 seconds. I have stood under enough trees, in enough parks in Rotterdam and The Hague, to want it to be true.

It is not. A tree's roots are not a mirror of its canopy — they are a wide shallow plate, most of their mass sitting in the top forty-five centimetres of soil and spreading outward two or three times the width of the crown. Soil resistance does not build roots; it suppresses them, shortening them, thickening them, deflecting them, until the root does what roots actually do, which is find the path of least resistance and take it. And the notion that there is no resistance above ground is the exact inverse of the truth. Above ground is where the wind lives. Above ground is where load is.

A metaphor that is merely beautiful will hold your attention. A metaphor that is true will hold your weight.

I have spent  three decades at this point teaching people to move on wheels, and more than four decades on them myself, and I have learned to be suspicious of anything that arrives already polished. In this trade we are drowning in polished things. The borrowed cue. The recycled drill. The inspirational post that sounds like intelligent wisdom and is, underneath, a guess or a myth wearing a suit.

So I thought about metaphors that could take the weight. Not stories that merely sound like the truth about training, but findings that are the truth about training — and that happen, by good fortune, to also be beautiful. For now, I will share and tie together four. Here they are, and here is what they ask of us.

I. The Bicycle That Should Have Fallen

When it comes to explaining balance, I have used the bicycle as an analogy for years in training sessions and conversations. Since childhood, I have always been an avid bicyclist.

Everyone knows why a bicycle stays upright. The wheels spin, the gyroscopic effect resists tipping, and the machine holds itself up. It is one of those facts that has been repeated so many times it has stopped needing evidence.

In 2011, a team working between Delft and Cornell decided to test it. They built a bicycle designed to fail. They added counter-rotating wheels that cancelled the spin angular momentum entirely, removing the gyroscopic effect. They then set the front wheel's ground contact ahead of the steering axis, giving the machine negative trail and removing the castering effect as well. Both of the supposed causes of bicycle stability were now surgically absent.

They pushed it, and knocked it sideways. It recovered. It rolled away upright, correcting itself, balancing on nothing that anyone had said it needed.

What the researchers found instead was that stability emerged from a set of design variables — the location of the front mass, the tilt of the steer axis, and others — contributing in complex, interacting ways. There was no single mechanism. There was a system, and the system was the mechanism.

ON ROLLER SKATES

I think of this every time a roller skater asks me for the cue. The one thing. "Where do I put my weight?" "Is it the ankles?" "Is it my core?" There is a whole industry built on selling people the one thing, because the one thing is easy to package and easier to sell. That one intervention, that one training method, that one specific therapeutic modality that will change your life; that one supplement that will change your health, that one thing undiscovered by the masses that has the potential to change humanity….

But balance in rhythm roller skating is not a mechanism, it is a settlement — an agreement negotiated continuously between ankle, knee, hip, spine, gaze, breath and the eight-count you are riding. Watch a roller skater hold a groove through a long shuffle sequence. Nothing is still. The stillness you think you see is a thousand small corrections arriving fast enough to look like calm. Take away any single contributor and the others reorganize around the loss — which is precisely why a roller skater can look stable and still be one bad surface away from the floor.

What looks like balance is not a position being held. It is a correction being made, continuously, faster than the eye can resolve.

This is also the honest answer to why the Soulful Fitness Roller Skate Compendium cannot be edited. People generally assume the fundamentals are protected out of tradition, or ego, or brand. Yes, that happens in certain areas, situations and communities. In this case, they are mostly protected because their characteristics interact. Alter the ankle position of a fundamental and you have not altered one thing; you have altered the settlement, and the settlement is what was keeping the skater upright.

 

II. The Arm That Remembered

Take a tennis player who has swung a racquet on one side of their body for twenty years, and scan both arms. What you find is not subtle. In national-level players, the playing arm's humeral shaft carries roughly a quarter more bone mineral density than the arm that merely came along for the ride — around twenty-five percent, against a side-to-side difference of about three percent in matched non-players.

Two refinements make this finding far more interesting than the headline.

The first is the mechanism. When researchers looked closely at how that extra strength was built, they found it was not a matter of the bone becoming denser. The bone had become larger. Wider cortex, greater cross-section, more material further from the centre — which is exactly how an engineer would strengthen a column. Loading did not improve the quality of the structure. It rebuilt the structure.

The second is what happened when the players stopped. Four years after retiring from top-level competition, having cut their training from roughly seven and a half hours a week to three, the players were scanned again. The gain had not gone anywhere. The humeral shaft difference measured twenty-five percent before, and twenty-six percent after.

The body does not rent what it has built under load. It owns it.

ON ROLLER SKATES

Here is the part I want every roller skater over forty to know, and every roller skater under thirty to believe in advance.

Rhythm roller skating is a decades-long bilateral and rotational loading pattern applied to a human skeleton. The footwork, the weight transfers, the repeated eccentric absorption on the same leading side, the rotational carriage of the upper body against the lower — all of it is signal. Bone reads it. Bone answers it in the only language it has, which is architecture.

And that architecture persists. This matters enormously, because the culture of roller skating tends to treat everything as perishable. Miss two months, lose it all. That is true of some things — cardiovascular fitness is genuinely fickle, and so is neuromuscular sharpness. It is much less true of the deep structural adaptations. The roller skater who spent fifteen years on wheels and then took a decade away does not return to zero. They return to a skeleton that still remembers what it was asked to do. I have seen it happen many times. People re-entering after years of absence.

Rollgevity is not a promise that you will never step off. It is the observation that what you build correctly, you tend to keep.

 

III. The Slow Tissue

Muscle is an eager student. Present it with a demand and it responds within weeks — visibly, measurably, gratifyingly. Tendon is not eager. Tendon is a slow, sceptical, conservative tissue, poorly vascularized, low in cellularity, with a collagen turnover measured in seasons rather than sessions.

This is not a small technical footnote. It is a structural asymmetry with consequences. Muscle and tendon adapt on different timelines and respond to different stimuli. Plyometric work and moderate-load resistance training will raise a muscle's force output substantially while producing a comparatively small response in the tendon that has to transmit that force. The strength arrives first. The tolerance arrives later.

Which means that in the gap between them, an athlete is quietly assembling the conditions for their own injury. They feel stronger, because they are. They feel ready, because the tissue giving them that feeling is the fast one. The slow one has not finished reading the memo.

The clearest natural experiment came from American football. In 2011 a labour dispute shut the sport down for one hundred and thirty-six days and gutted the preseason. When the players came back — strong, motivated, and structurally unprepared — Achilles ruptures spiked.

Progress you can feel is the fast tissue talking. The slow tissue does not announce itself until it fails.

ON ROLLER SKATES

Now hold that finding against the culture of our sport.

Rhythm rollerskating rewards visible progress. The new footwork pattern, the cleaner transition, the sequence that finally locks to the count — these are legible, shareable, and deeply satisfying. Nothing about a tendon is legible or shareable. Nobody has ever posted a reel of their collagen cross-linking.

So the incentives point one way and the biology points the other, and the roller skater in the middle accelerates toward the exact gap the researchers described. This is why the roller skater who returns after a layoff and immediately trains at the level they remember is in more danger than the beginner. The beginner's demand and tolerance are both low, and therefore matched. The returner has memory of capacity, muscle that recovers it in weeks, and tendon that will need at least a few months.

Deload. Reload. Roll. The order is not stylistic and is not only for the mental part; it is for the body, the brain and the soul. It is the only sequence that lets the slow tissue catch up to the fast one before the fast one writes a cheque the slow one cannot cash.

This, more than anything else in the whole methodology, is what the Rollgevity tagline is about. Not about how good you roll. About how long you roll good.

 

IV. The Dancer Who Stopped Spinning

At Imperial College London, researchers put twenty-nine ballet dancers and twenty rowers — matched for age and fitness — into a chair in a dark room, and spun them. Afterwards, each was asked to turn a handle in time with the sensation of still spinning. Their eye reflexes were recorded. Then their brains were scanned.

The dancers' sensation of spinning faded faster than the rowers'. And the more years a dancer had trained, the greater the effect. It was not simply spotting; the design controlled for that.

The scans showed why. In the dancers, there was a selective reduction of grey matter in the vestibular cerebellum, and the extent of it tracked with years of ballet experience. Most striking of all: in the rowers, the sensation of spinning and the reflexive eye movement stayed coupled, as they do in most people. In the dancers, the two had come apart. The reflex still ran. The feeling had been gated.

Training did not give the dancers more machinery. It gave them the authority to ignore a signal.

ON ROLLER SKATES

Every rhythm roller skater has met the moment. You come out of a turn and the room keeps travelling. Your feet are correct and your inner ear is lying to you, insistently, and the lie is loud enough that you put a hand down.

What the Imperial study tells us is that the fix for this is not courage and it is not tolerance in the sense of gritting your teeth. It is an actual physiological renegotiation between what the vestibular system reports and what the brain elects to believe. It is built by deliberate, repeated, structured exposure — which is to say, by training, in the old-fashioned sense of the word.

This reframes what we are doing when we drill turns and spins slowly, on the count, with and sometimes without music, for weeks. We are not merely rehearsing a movement. We are conducting a long argument with the vestibular cerebellum, and the argument is winnable, and the winning is visible on a brain scan.

It also reframes fear. The nervous roller skater at the edge of the floor is not weak. They are experiencing an unedited signal. Give them the exposure and the signal gets edited. That is not a motivational slogan; it is grey matter.

What The Four Have In Common

Set them side by side and something emerges that none of them says alone.

The bicycle tells us that competence is systemic, not located — that there is no single cue, and anyone selling you one is selling you a simplification that will fail under load. The tennis player's arm tells us that load writes itself into architecture, and that architecture endures long after the training that built it has stopped. The tendon tells us that the body contains fast tissues and slow tissues, and that the fast ones will happily lead the slow ones off a cliff if nobody imposes patience. The dancer tells us that sustained practice does not only build capability — it edits perception itself, changing what the roller skater experiences, not merely what they can do.

Which is the whole quintessence of Rollgevity, arrived at from four directions by people who had never heard of it.

Roller skate for the structure, not the applause. The structure is the part that stays.

The man in the video was reaching for something real. He was reaching for the idea that the invisible work is the work that matters, and he is right about that — he simply borrowed a tree that could not carry the claim. The irony is that the true version is better than his. Strength is not built in secret and then merely displayed in public. It is built by load, in the open, under conditions that could genuinely put you on the floor. Roots seek the easiest path. The trunk earns its stiffness by being bent, repeatedly, and not breaking.

That is what we are doing out there. Not performing an outcome. Earning a structure.

 

AN INVITATION

If you have read this far, you are already the kind of roller skater the Soulful Fitness Roller Skate Training ® methodology was built for — one who wants to know why, and wants the why to be true.

Bring me the thing you have been told. The cue you inherited, the drill you copied, the wisdom that arrived already polished. We will put weight on it together and see whether it holds. That is what the Roller's Digest Series is for, and it is what every session under the Soulful Fitness banner is for. When you come to our training studio in The Netherlands and enter our domain in person, I will safely help you challenge your balance regardless of your skill level and experience. And then? Then, I make sure you will come out stronger on the other side.

That is not magic, that is doing the right work, in the right way at the right moment.

Brian B. Kanhai, Soulful Fitness Roller Skate Training® - August 2026.