‘Crawling is the new plank’
Most adults don’t remember learning how to crawl. But Alexandra Greeves, 31, will never forget.
“I had to concentrate on it,” recalls the Bethesda, Md., resident, who struggled with keeping her head lifted and gaze high. She had to fight the urge to move too quickly, and constantly remind herself to drag the opposite leg forward after placing a palm on the ground. Her best teacher? A playmate who could propel himself across the floor no problem — her six-month-old son.
That’s because it was just a year and a half ago when Greeves had her first appointment with chiropractor Justin Klein, who declares that “crawling is the new plank.”
He prescribes it to practically all of his patients, including Greeves, who hadn’t worked out since giving birth and didn’t know how to deal with her pain.
“I’m looking at a 60-year-old woman who was in a car accident crawling right now,” Klein says while chatting on the phone from his facility, Got Your Back Total Health.
Klein’s unconventional approach to treating pain comes from his belief in Original Strength, a fitness system that encourages people to practise the movement patterns found in young children. In Original Strength parlance, crawling is a “reset.” And by “pressing reset” on your body — the way you would on your phone — you can bring back the strength and mobility you’ve lost over the years, he explains.
Original Strength co-founder Tim Anderson, who wrote about the benefits of crawling in his 2011 book, Becoming Bulletproof: An Uncommon Approach to Building a Resilient Body (Xulon Press), says there’s a reason kids learn to crawl before they take their first steps. It helps them develop a healthy gait pattern.
“It should take four limbs to walk,” he says.
His message is that too many adults have forgotten this, and are in pain as a result.
The ideas in the book formed the basis for what would become Original Strength and the Original Strength Institute in North Carolina. Original Strength-certified coaches are now in fitness settings around the world, and professional athletic teams are starting to embrace the teachings. (Anderson recently trained the coaching staff of the Cleveland Cavaliers.) Company vice-president of business development Dani Almeyda is looking forward to expanding into the medical realm.
The exercise is accessible to all ages and body types. As Almeyda says, “The cool thing is pretty much everyone has crawled before.”
Some may want to start with the standing version, called a cross-crawl — you walk in place while touching opposite elbow to knee. There’s obviously the baby-style crawl, and that lends itself to trickier variations where you’re on just your hands and toes. And to make it really tough, you can crawl for time or distance, or drag a heavy chain or sled.
So when are you going to see crawling at your gym? Chances are, you already have, says Cassia Denton, director of personal training and group exercise at Balance Gym Foggy Bottom in Washington. Maybe you just didn’t realize it because it wasn’t called “crawling.” It was “bird-dog,” a core strengthener in which you get on all fours and then extend an opposite arm and leg.
Any “contralateral” exercise like this derives from crawling, Denton says, and they all test two important skills: balance and ability to sense where you are in space.
As the fitness industry has been thinking smarter about how to improve people’s movement, there’s been more focus on this type of move, adds Denton, who notes that there’s more crawling than ever at her gym.
“What’s funny is when people encounter it, they’re really bad at it,” she says. At least, at first. After some practice, the co-ordination comes back, and that’s when Denton sees overall improvements in how people perform at the gym — particularly among those hitting road blocks because of injury or age. “Your movement in space just becomes better,” she says.