Moving Well - What Does That Mean
Human movement is a marvel. As a Doctor of Physical Therapy my career focus has been helping patients recover from injury, surgery and illness in order to achieve their goals for life activities. Each person is unique - with movement patterns and postures that reflect our strength, mobility, stability and balance. As infants and toddlers we naturally develop and integrate unconscious reflexes and movement patterns that allow us to get out of a bed or chair, on/off the floor, up/down stairs, walk, reach, lift, carry, hold, push, pull and run - as well as to perform a variety of tasks and activities. We have a large amount of our brain dedicated to our hands and our feet and this has served us well to manipulate and navigate our environment.
With an active lifestyle, children continue to improve strength, mobility, stability and balance as motor, sensory and neuro-muscular body and brain development occurs. Unfortunately, in the United States our peak in physical activity level occurs at age 6. This is primarily due to prolonged sitting in classrooms, with our transportation and with our jobs that are sedentary. Our sedentary lifestyle often results in compensations that decrease the quality of our human movement - including a loss of strength, mobility, stability and balance - use it or you lose it. We can develop dysfunctional movement patterns that place undue stress and strain on our body with resulting pain and disability.
A sedentary lifestyle is a major contributing factor to human movement dysfunction. The good news is that it's never too late to make a change. Our body and our brain, including our muscles, bones, nerves, cardiovascular and pulmonary systems will respond to the appropriate physical demands placed on them. That's true at age 2 as well as at age 102 - and every age in between.
A Vision for Movement
Active movement starts with a mental thought – a vision for intention that requires us to use our body and it’s component parts. To move your body with a task or particular goal in mind. Our motor cortex sends signals via our central nervous system and spinal cord to our peripheral nerves, which activate muscular responses and initiate movement patterns. We can also move sub-consciously and reflexively – without active intention – as many of our movements are controlled by reflexive patterns. Therefore, we don’t think about every movement we make. However, we do develop habit patterns for human movement in our daily lives - and these movement patterns can be healthy (or not!).
Starting to Move
We develop the ability to move with practice. From infancy throughout childhood, adolescence and adulthood, we practice patterns of movement – with intention and with reflexive control – to develop the strength, balance and motor control we need to navigate and manipulate our environment. We develop our body awareness – with kinesthetic feedback from our peripheral and central nervous systems – which allows us to understand the position of our body in space and how to move it.
Auto-pilot Patterns
From infancy, our human developmental sequence – including eye and head control, rolling, crawling and walking – our patterns of movement - are practiced and integrated. We use our motor and sensory cortex, central and peripheral nervous systems and our reflexes to allow many of our movements to occur without active cognitive thought. For many of our movements, such as walking, standing or performing tasks and activities, we don’t think about how we are doing them, we just do it!
Task-Oriented patterns
When we are learning a new task or pattern of movement, we must provide cognitive oversight. We slow down – and really think about what we are doing and how we are doing it – until we begin to integrate new and more complex movement patterns. Once patterns of movement are learned, we can then increase the speed of movement with much less cognitive oversight required. Many of you may relate to this process when practicing music, sports or hobbies or learning a task or activity that is new. which requires more complex motor control. In this training process, it’s important to practice with proper technique, as poor habits of movement can cause dysfunction (moving your body and joints in unhealthy or compensated ways) that result in pain and injury.
Postures
Postures can be sustained and/or repeated. We develop postural habit patterns, often without thought about how we are maintaining them. In our society, with a pre-disposition for forward-oriented and sustained tasks and activities, this often leads to forward head and shoulder postures, neck and back strain and with ischemic, tight and sore musculature (often including the hips and mid-back/ shoulder areas).
Muscles as Shock Absorbers
Muscular control of human movement patterns is key, as the muscles act as shock absorbers around your joints. With good muscular control - including proximal/ core and distal/ extremities, all of your joints should have very little stress on them. The good news is that we can develop optimal habits for movement, including the body/kinesthetic awareness and neuro-muscular recruitment patterns required. And we can re-train bad habits and learn to move efficiently and well. An old dog can learn new tricks.
Your Heart & Lungs
Most people don’t think about their heart and lungs as key elements required for human movement. But they are the engines of our body, providing energy via circulation, oxygenation and nutrition which is necessary for us to not only move well but to recover and be metabolically healthy. To ensure optimal movement and function over your lifespan, you should spend as much time with focus on strengthening and conditioning your cardio-vascular system as you do on your musculo-skeletal system.
Joint Mobility
As a Doctor of Physical Therapy, I believe it’s important for each person to understand their body, how each joint moves and functions, as well as how your body moves as a whole. You have body parts, but your body moves as a whole and all of our body parts have a role in healthy human movement. You should have a good understanding of how your joints, muscles and nervous system work together (the arthrokinematics) and the movement patterns you should have to allow for pain-free movement and function. For humans, this requires sufficient movement of the hips, knees, ankles and shoulder girdle areas. In combination with core stability (see prior blog - "Core Stability - What is It and How Do I Get It") in order to move and function without strain on the back and neck. Unfortunately, many people in our society are placing undo stress and strain on their joints and spine secondary to not moving well.
Body Awareness
The good news is that everyone can improve their body awareness. Including where and how you are moving. You can improve your core stability and your balance to reduce your risk for falls. You can improve hip, knee and ankle motion, as well as your postural alignment and shoulder girdle mobility. Improving your movement patterns in these areas will take strain off your back and your neck. Core stability is natural – it's part of the developmental sequence as an infant and a child– and you can re-learn/ re-train at any age! It's never too late, and there's always something we can do to improve your healthy human movement.
Darcy's Move for Health Physcial Therapy approach utilizes a "5-point checklist" that provides you with a framework to integrate your body awareness that is necessary to achieve healthy human movement patterns. This 5-point checklist provides you with a quick reminder to integrate core stability with balance that you can apply to all of your daily activities. By implementing this body awareness you will improve your core stability, strength and balance with every activity that you do - every day. With practice and time you will develop new habit patterns to move and function in a healthy way.
Use It or You Lose It
Our bodies and our brain are amazing. Blood supply , nutrition, nervous system stimulation and cellular metabolism will be delivered to the body areas that require it - as a result of the use of our muscles, joints, connective tissues and our cardio-vascular and respiratory systems. To build strength and endurance, this stimulation must be frequently repeated over time. Just as we can develop strength and endurance with repeated movement and function, we can also lose this capacity with disuse. The functional capacity of our heart, lungs, circulation, balance responses, strength and our postures will either increase (or decrease) over time in correlation with our activity level.
It’s Never Too Late
More good news – with due diligence, practice and training and incorporating optimal breathing, mobility and strength/endurance for healthy movement patterns - your body will respond. It’s never too late to make improvements in your posture, movement, balance and wellness - any age and any activity level. There’s always something we can do to help you achieve your goals to move and function better.
Start where you are. The key is to identify your unhealthy movement patterns and to address the root cause of your movement dysfunction and compensations. A whole body movement analysis will reveal specific areas of your body where you may have strength, mobility and/or balance deficits. Strength, mobility and/or balance issues in one or more areas of your body often result in undue strain on other joints or muscular areas of your body - both near and far from your area(s) of deficit. By analyzing how you are moving holistically, this provides a road map for strategic intervention – with specific areas to address for change and improvement. This will allow you to achieve your best strength, mobility and balance for your body as a whole. I always recommend that you get a whole body movement assessment from a Doctor of Physical Therapy in order to determine the root cause of your movement dysfunction or pain. To optimize your recovery of function, you should must understand how and where to move your body well, have a comprehensive home exercise program and be sure that you are re-training to move optimally.
I'm here to help you to achieve your best healthspan and to help you achieve your human movement and functional goals. Please reach out with any questions or if you'd like to talk,
Dr. Darcy
