Do You Know How to Read?

by Andrew Gorecki, DPT

We believe that better movement is the answer to changing our world whether your talking about obesity as an epidemic, health care costs, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, etc. We also believe that if you want better movement you must learn how to move.  For some reason we separate movement or exercise from other learned skills. Let me give you an example.  Lets take the skill of reading. We would all agree that nobody is born with the ability to read. Now we do know that language is something we learn naturally by observing our environment but there is a logical progression to that.  The analogy to movement is that yes we do learn to sit, crawl, stand, and walk without somebody teaching us, just like language and also in a logical progression.  But in order to learn other movement skills we must be taught them just like reading is a language skill.  So lets get back to learning to read.   We start as young children with Phonemic Awareness (means that children become aware that speech is made up of individual sounds), then we progress to Alphabetic Awareness, Sounds to Word Awareness  which gives us the learned skill of language.  We then learn to read with stages being taught that include Pre-alphabetic phase, Partial alphabetic phase, Full alphabetic phase, Consolidated alphabetic phase which then gives us the ability to read.44

My point here is that reading is a learned skill that must be taught.  Movement has stages and a logical progression that also must be taught.  This includes principles of movement such as our body moves in three planes (sagittal, frontal, transverse), foundational movements such as jumping, hopping, lunging, pushing, pulling, reaching, squatting, walking, running, lifting, stepping, etc.  Most of us were never taught how to move our bodies. Yes we had gym class and maybe we played sports but we never were taught how to move our hips, thoracic spine, feet, abdominals, etc in three planes of motion that build a health degree of mobility and stability.

This Blog is created to share movement literacy.  We truly believe that if you learn better movement it will transform your life.  Stick with us while we share with you how to move better.  It will truly be transformational.

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