A Case for Movement (And Why You Need More!)
TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read)
Human are designed from birth for movement.
A lack of movement as we age is partly responsible for many avoidable diseases of aging.
Basic human movement and the ability to move all joints through a pain-free and unrestricted range of motion is the fundamental prerequisite for all sport-specific skills.
We can hear you arguing already…”I exercise for an hour every day! I’m good!”
Have a peek at the title again - it doesn’t say exercise, it says MOVEMENT. And while, related, the two are very different. Today we explore why movement is such a critical part of human life, and how the mastery of it is a necessary prerequisite for elite athletic performance.
In the Beginning…
Visualize a newborn held in a doctor’s hands, a picture of frenetic motion: squirming, stretching, crying and shrieking. We expect arrival into the world to be accompanied by a frenzied flurry of action.
Birth is a violent, chaotic and explosive event that is a microcosm of life; a desire for movement.
Hard wired right into an infant is the suckling reflex, designed to aid in breast feeding. This simple, primordial movement, ingrained in our DNA, helps form the bones of the jaw and face, critical processes that can affect breathing, swallowing and the eruption of teeth. From birth, movement is a gift helping us grow and navigate our world. From birth, we are designed to move.
As the infant grows and develops, movement and body language become the primary method of communication, filled with reaching, stretching, swiping and cooing motions. The caregiver slowly begins to understand what different movements mean: hunger or satiety, anxiety or discomfort and much more.
As infant turns to toddler, it becomes challenging to keep up. Rolling morphs to crawling, standing, walking and running. No instruction or assembly is required. As a species, we are creatures of movement from birth, and medical doctors use these movements as markers of health and development.
And in the End…
The building blocks of movement come pre-bundled with the gift of life, and we are rich with it in our early years. Then, starting around the late teenage years, a gradual movement decay begins that quickly cascades into a steep decline. By age 30, most of life is spent in a malnourished state of movement, and we all eventually pay the price for this state.
The average day: Wake up, wash up and sit for breakfast. Grab a seat on some form of transit until arriving at the destination. Most occupations now involve piloting a computer; we have become desk jockeys. Return home at the end of the day via seated transportation and relax from a stressful day of sitting in front of a computer by…sitting in front of a television. If lucky, maybe there was an hour in the gym, which means maybe 20-minutes of actually lifting heavy things against gravity…unless of course you are a cardio bunny!
Do we honestly believe this is enough? The human body craves motion. As it slowly declines over a lifespan, we concurrently begin to weaken and fade. Think of the squirming spasticity of a newborn infant contrasted with the slow cessation of movement in the frail and elderly.
Like air, water and food, movement is not optional. Every gesture, big or small, load’s the body’s tissues at the cellular level. This is a massively important concept to understand, as movement can literally help prevent and slow down diseases of aging like muscle wasting, osteoarthritis and osteoporosis.
Movement is not just critical for life. Movement is life.
Movement Lays the Foundation for Athleticism
Elite athletes: Break of dawn sweat-inducing squat sessions, meticulously controlled diets, and a team of specialists hired to maintain the body in optimal condition. And yet, we are talking about the body in terms of something so simple and boring as basic human movement. Why?
The Iceberg Illusion of Success
As described, human movement is an essential component of life, but for elite athletes, it is so much more. For the best athletes, there is a commonality of movement capabilities that we too often forget amidst the glory of sports highlights. Many of the best athletes in the world can cross over and play multiple sports at a high level because of their fundamental understanding of movement. We wrote more about the importance of that here.
Think of an iceberg: At the surface of the water level and what you see with the naked eye are the glorious highlights. But what lies beneath the surface - basic, fundamental human movement is the massive floe of ice that anchors everything above.
When we see an iceberg, we are wowed by it, but it is important to understand more about what is going on beneath the surface. The same principles apply to world-class performance.
Applying the iceberg illusion to human movement, we see that the base of success underneath the surface is rudimentary human movement; freely moving our hardware (joints) through their full range of motion without pain or restriction. This paves the way for athletic movements: pushing, pulling, hinging and squatting at high velocity and with tremendous acceleration. The cherry on top, the tip of the iceberg, are the sport-specific movements and skills that are so amazing to watch, and so inherently unnatural; training a shoulder to throw a ball at high speeds, using our hips to glide on ice and the powerful rotational movements needed for shooting and striking.
Human First. Athlete Second. Sport Third.
When we watch the highlights, we are seeing the tip of the iceberg. The massive amount of time dedicated to basic movement is what anchors everything above it.
Training human movement is not ‘sport-specific’ and does not yield obvious, immediate and measurable results. This makes them justifiably unappealing to the majority of parents enrolling their kids in programs! We are naturally attracted to those who push sport-specific training, as it intuitively makes sense to train the skills and movements we see the professionals performing.
As a result, the hierarchy of needs when building athletic bodies has become inverted: Parents now seek sport-specific skill training for their pre-pubescent children despite a declining culture of movement that has rendered our young athletes incapable of something so simple as full range of motion squat.
Trying to layer sport-specific training or athleticism on a base of faulty movement is a recipe for disaster. Without fluid hips and spinal mobility, you cannot expect to sprint 100-m with any degree of success. Devoid of human movement prerequisites, athletic and sport-specific movements will eventually crumble, leading to injury and breakdown. It is part of the reason behind the mounting pile of youth sports injuries.
Humans evolved for movement. It is a precious gift we squander too often, and it is vital that we remember to train the basics of human movement before getting caught up in sport-specific training. Learn how to squat, hinge, push, pull your own body weight through full range of motion first. Then start layering up.
Don’t get caught up staring at the tip of the iceberg. There’s more than what we see on the surface.