According to biology, movement is a basic characteristic of life. Everything that lives, moves. So why don’t we put more emphasis into how we do it?

It seems to be something that can be taken for granted until it’s taken away. It’s not uncommon for a person to be unaware or unattentive of an underlying problem until they are suffering enough to catalyse them into action. Usually this tipping point or trigger is a catastrophe of enough magnitude that the outcome restricts or prevents the person from doing something of importance or convenience. 

One example could be having a small back ache from a sedentary lifestyle and unvaried movement. This ache may not be noticeable enough or “enough of a problem” for the person to do anything about it until years later when it becomes a more limiting injury, reducing their quality of life enough to catalyse them into action.

Different people may have different thresholds or tipping points that inspire them into action so it is important to remind ourselves as coaches that not everyone is at the same stage in life and certainly not on the same exact journey. 

Learning to meet your client where they are at is vital, which is why we will be looking more into coaching methods and different categories of intervention, different types of personality traits, and different strategies to communicate later on in this resource. For now though, movement. 

What is movement? 

In physics, motion is the phenomenon in which an object changes its position over time. For human bodies, it’s what brings us closer to a particular goal. For example you must move your body to seek out water and food. You also have a facial display of expression which involves smaller movements on your face to convey how you feel. This allows you to interact with others more effectively. It's this goal directed purpose that gives our movement ‘function’. 

We first learn the foundations of these movements or motor skills during our development as children.

Movement in childhood development

Coordination of whole body movements (gross motor skills) are usually acquired during childhood as you learn to move and interact with your environment in order to fulfil a basic need or goal. This has been observed by development theorists such as Piaget in his theory of cognitive development and Erickson’s psychosocial stages. According to Piaget, newborns interact with their environment entirely through reflexive behaviours. They do not think about what they’re going to do, but rather follow their instincts and involuntary reactions to get what they need: food, air, attention, and curiosity.

As you move through your stages of infancy, you learn to intentionally repeat actions that bring you pleasure or desired outcomes (early stages of habit building). In other words, you move your body on purpose because it feels good or it gives you what you want. This starts to happen from months 1 to 4.

As your goals (and you can have many goals at the same time) start to involve you moving across distances in order to seek out those basic needs (or to engage with exploration and curiosity), you see the neuromuscular system develop further with even more connections forming between nerve cells (both inside the brain and between brain and body). 

This is when you start to see more familiar words from a physical training perspective. For example, as you lift your head (while laying on your back) to look around and to roll onto your stomach, you are developing the fundamentals of core stability and movement. Then with the incorporation of your arms and legs you can begin to crawl distances, getting higher and higher until you can lift a knee into a half kneeling or lunging position. You then move into a deep squat and eventually stand, walk and then run. These movements have been observed widely as a child’s physical developmental milestones.

All of these movement behaviours serve to enable you to interact with increasingly complex environments and greater demand as you seek to fulfil your goals of basic human needs (like food, warmth, and attention) and exploration/curiosity. 

Further development and missing opportunities in sedentary life

Children normally learn basic gross motor skills by the time they are 2 years old and then develop them further as their environment becomes increasingly more complex with added elements of play, rules, and social interactions layered on top of the basic needs.

Fine motor skills normally come later as they require more dexterity and the coordination of smaller muscle groups for smaller and more precise movements. Both gross and fine motor skills improve through repetition and adapting to greater challenge and demand. If you only practise a skill at one level, you only get good at that one level. You have to challenge the boundaries of what you can do in order to improve.

Unfortunately, many children are missing out on these opportunities to challenge and develop their motor skills as kindergartens can be forced to spend more time on academic instruction, meaning more seated work, less movement, and less active free play time. Physical education classes and recesses are also usually the first things cut when more academic time is required for remediation in reading and math skills.

A child entering the modern school system becomes integrated into a sedentary lifestyle from a very young age. Research indicates that this sedentary lifestyle has a negative effect on cognitive development as well as chronic pain.

In order to help today’s typical client (and even athletes) with muscle imbalances from a sedentary lifestyle, health and fitness professionals must take special consideration when designing programs and plans. An integrated approach combining mobility techniques, corrective exercise, and strength training should be used to improve the functional capacity for each individual person. This approach should include appropriate forms of flexibility, mobility, and strength and neuromuscular control training, as well as different types of environments and different planes of motion.

These are the basis for the use of the ONI Movement Development Model. All of the phases included in the model have been specifically designed to follow biomechanical, physiologic, and functional principles of the human movement system. They should provide a step by step systematic process that will help improve muscle imbalances, minimise injury, and maximise results.