Low maintenance - vs High maintenance
Once you start having at your disposal some movement vocabulary, you will notice that some movements are easy to remember, others... not so much.
Low-maintenance Movements
These are easy to digest movements, which are learnt quickly, and usually don't leave us easily. These are movements you learn once and will be able to recover fairly easily even if you don't practice them for a while.
One training session is enough to get the backbone of the movement (if explained/taught properly).
This is not to say we master them in one go, but rather that the demand they place on our body and brain is simple enough for us to get the essence of it rapidly (and, surely, keep refining it year after year).
On the other side of the spectrum, we have High Maintenance Movements.
I like to think of these as needy plants requiring daily watering.
A typical example would be a freestanding 10-sec handstand. If you stop practicing your handstand altogether for a few weeks, you will quickly loose your gains.
High-maintenance movements are complex, skill-based movements involving strength, coordination and sometimes difficult technique.
High-maintenance movements are usually of an acrobatic nature, but not exclusively.
Moreover, what constitutes a high-maintenance movement will be somehow subject to individual differences - there are strength or ability thresholds after which what a high-maintenance movement becomes a low maintenance Movement.
PROGRAMING
This distinction allows us to start thinking more mid and long term about our movement practice and how we want to orient it.
This is also the kind of thought-process we may want to engage in as teachers working with individuals for several months or years in a row.
When designing our training program, it is wise to:
pick the Low-Maintenance Movements that have the potential to yield a wealth of benefits - e.g. a simple shoulder roll and a C role are excellent teachers.
carefully reflect on which High-Maintenance movement we want (and why), for these will only blossom over months and will require a lot of maintenance to stay usable.