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Crawling For Fitness… What’s Up With That?

 

Guests visiting our studio are often surprised to see that we crawl around on our large turf area.  We also do rolling and other “odd” movement patterns, which we’ll cover in later blog posts.

Crawling for fitness… so, what’s up with that?

Good question!

No, it’s not because our workouts are so brutal that they can’t walk and are about to throw up.

Silly Rabbit, puking is for the flu… and frat parties, I suppose.

In general, the cross/crawl pattern helps in balancing the right and left hemispheres of the brain.  If you would like to learn more about simple exercises balancing the brain, check out: Brain Gym <— Click Here

It’s a pattern that is usually ingrained as infants when we learn to crawl.  However, for those of you that were “early walkers”, you might have skipped this learning phase.  And if you did skip it, you likely have a tough time skipping.

Note: Many experts in child development are encouraging parents to discourage early walking by infants.  Really, crawling does an infant good, so keep pushing those toddlers down (figuratively speaking, of course) 😉

Literally, we see it all the time, juniors and adults who skip incorrectly; meaning that as their right knee moves upward, so does their right arm.  Proper skipping would have your left arm move forward at the same time that you right knee moves upward.  This isn’t hard to fix, but can make for some good fun and laughing at yourself 🙂

Here are a few specific reasons that crawling kicks butt:

1) Activates and integrates different parts of your brain
2) Improves hand/eye coordination
3) Restores the nervous system
4) Teaches shoulder and hip coordination
5) Improves Balance and Agility
6) Restores Posture
7) It can be TOUGH!  There are several different levels of crawling, and everyone is surprised at how taxing it can be.

Crawling

Note:  The version shown above is  quite ADVANCED.  Please don’t let it dissuade you from coming in and trying crawling for fitness!  You’ll be glad you did.

Website/Book Recommendation:  What to learn all the nitty-gritty about crawling and more?  Check out Original Strength <—-Click Here