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Length: ~2hrs, 17 lessons
My rating: ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5)
My one-liner takeaway: Doing something exceptionally well doesn’t necessarily mean you can teach it well.
Despite the title, I assumed this’d be a course from Simone Biles explaining how to be a high-performing gymnast. After all, why else pay $90 to sit with a master of the craft when you can learn the basics for free on YouTube? This course is a prime example of a Masterclass whose premium is grounded in a celebrity voicing over commodity content. I found it fairly boring and regretted my personal challenge of watching all of them, but soldiered on in order to give a fair read on the lessons. I was really hoping for more of the soft skills (discipline, managing failure, etc.) essential in becoming an extraordinary athlete, and there was none of that. I would’ve gladly watched an hour more if that’s what was included.
I did earn a greater appreciation for the nuances of complex movements in Olympic gymnastics by watching the progressions of smaller exercises building up to them. To the uninitiated, it all is a blur of athleticism, without any eye for catching the subtleties in body posture. Overall, anyone watching this course would likely have (and need) access to a facility and a coach already. Save your money. A better Masterclass idea may have been learning the fundamentals from her coaches.
If you’d like to hear it directly from Simone, check out her course here. As of now there are over 100 instructors to learn from, with more being added every week!
This review is part of a larger series, where I try learning from every single course within the catalog. Find my full list here.