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 92 - 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 - which can be health (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 needed to navigate and manipulate our environment. We develop our body awareness – with peripheral and central nervous system kinesthetic feedback – 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, we don’t think about how we walk, stand or move. 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 the new and complex movement pattern. 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 that require complex motor control. In this training process, it’s important to practice with proper technique, as poor habits of movement can cause dysfunction, 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, 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, nutrition which is necessary for us to move well. 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. Each person should have an understanding of the arthrokinematics and inter-related movement patterns that allow for pain-free movement. For humans, this requires good 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 or neck. Unfortunately, many people in our society are placing undo stress and strain on their joints 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 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 a natural pattern – part of the developmental sequence as an infant and child– and it can be re-learned/ re-trained at any age.
Darcy's Move for Health Physcial Therapy approach utilizes a "5-point checklist" that provides you with a framework to integrate the body awareness required to achieve healthy 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. With this approach you will be improving your core stability, strength and balance with every activity that you do - every day.
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. This stimulation must be repeated over time. Just as we can develop strength and endurance with 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 can diminish over time in correlation with our activity level.
It’s Never Too Late
More good news – with due diligence, practice and proper training, your body will respond. At any age and any activity level. It’s never too late to start to make improvements in your posture, movement, balance and wellness.
There’s Always Something You Can Do
Start where you are. Make strategic and meaningful intervention – with intention for change and improvement. You may need guidance from a Doctor of Physical Therapy to identify the areas of your body that are not moving well. I always recommend that you get a whole body movement assessment in order to determine the root cause of your movement dysfunction or pain. To optimize your recovery of function, you should also 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 goals.
Please reach out with any questions or if you'd like to talk,
Dr. Darcy
