Reclaiming our birthright

Nick | 03/03/2014 | 5

If you’ve been with us for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed we spend a lot of time on all four limbs at once.  Not only do we love to crawl, but we try to explore as many different ways to do it as possible.  The “functionality” of this might seem confusing at first, so I’m going to do my best (in 500 words or less) to impart to you my feelings on this most basic of movements.

Crawling (or Quadrupedal Movements) are, for most of us, the first way we started moving ourselves through space.  When we were infants we learned so much about balance, motor control and how every part of our body is somehow connected to every other part of our body.  Reengaging these movements can help re-teach us a lot of this as adults (as I mention a lot, since we started school most of us have spent an unnatural amount of time in unnatural positions).  So not only are we re-learning how to control our bodies, we’re also working on building functional mobility (who remembers how crunchy their first bear crawl with us felt?) and challenging our agility, unilateral loading, spacial awareness and balance. Oh, and who wants to train their core?  You can’t avoid it with QM.

Hey, barbells are great for so many reasons, but they are somewhat artificially easy to manipulate. Ever try to pick up a rock that’s even half your 1rm deadlift?  The results are usually surprising.  So from time to time (more often then not) we find it useful to go back to our roots and reengage some of our first movements as humans on this earth.  It’s my hope too that it helps inspire you to find new ways to move and maybe even (gasp!) have fun with movement.  If done enough, this kind of thing literally just turns into playtime.

If that’s not enough, here are a couple of other perspectives on it.  One is certainly an advertisement for a product (I don’t any about what they are selling) but makes really good points on why QM is useful.  The second comes from a parkour perspective.

Buildingmuscle.com

Parkour

STR:

Overhead Squat

5-5-3-3-1-1-1

WOD:

AMRAP 8 (for distance)

Reverse Bear Crawl Sandbag Drag