Rediscovering Movement: The Benefits of Infant Development Exercises for Adults
What is meant by Infant Development Exercises for Adults?
The fitness concept of "infant development exercises" centers around the idea that adults can benefit from engaging in movements and patterns that are typical of early human development, from infancy through the first year of life.
Used in fitness and physical rehabilitation settings, these exercises fall into the realm of stability training, which includes core strength, mobility, flexibility, and proper neurological function. Some of you may have observed the phenomena of placing a very young infant in one location – an infant who has no control over his/her arms and legs – only to return a few minutes later and see that he or she has moved several feet from their original location.
How does an infant with no limb control end up moving?
The answer is core strength, and it’s how every single human being develops their musculature – or are supposed to.
Aside from scooting along the floor using just spinal head-to-pelvis inchworm-like movements, other patterns like rolling, putting feet toward the mouth, pushing up from the floor, and crawling are what form the core foundation for walking, running, and jumping.
Like the caterpillar who must overcome the challenge of squeezing out of its cocoon in order to force fluids into its wings and be able to fly away as a butterfly, nature designed us to go through the rigors of spinal serpentine movements in order to properly set the basis for which every one of our subsequent muscular movements would be accomplished thereafter.
Photo by Filip Mroz on Unsplash
No Arms, No Legs, No Worries
Let’s pause here for just a sec, because there is at least one human being on the planet that is regularly wowing people with limbless core control. You may have heard of him. His name is Nick Vujicic, and he was born without any arms or legs. This link is a 13:51 video on 60 Minutes Australia's Youtube channel. It’s worth watching the whole segment, but for an absolutely unbelievable lesson on core function, watch the minute from 0:42 to 1:37.
Spoiler alert: Watch the video now, because I’m about to tell you what happens, and I’d rather you see it for yourself!
In that minute, you will see the potential of solid core function like most of us have never comprehended. Nick – without arms or legs – will jump off a diving board, swim in the pool, pull himself out of the pool unassisted, and “walk” along the pavement. Other videos have variously shown him doing other seemingly unbelievable things, from playing soccer to driving a boat.
Ok, so now that you’ve seen a truly awe-inspiring individual – who happens to be demonstrating what must be the best core function of anyone on the planet – let’s get back to discussing how we normal folk might try to claim for ourselves some of that great core function…
What are the benefits of Infant Development Exercises for Adults?
Just as core exercises have emerged over the last few decades to be identified as the central starting ground for fitness routines, infant development exercises can be thought of as the central starting ground for core exercises.
As such, they are “the core of your core.”
Physically, identifying one’s imbalances in these movements – especially when it comes to spinal mobility – allows that person to work toward re-integration. Spinal segments that are restricted can be unlocked, while spinal segments that are hyper-mobile can be stabilized in blending with the true deepest core muscles: diaphragm, pelvic floor, transverse abdominis and multifidus (collectively known as the inner unit).
Physically, it’s not really a complete core function to put our clients into a plank and expect that it will optimally activate the four inner unit muscles. These muscles need to be taught how to activate, but then also need to be actually manipulated into function. Yes, we can (and should) tell our clients to breathe diaphragmatically in the midst of a plank, but how will the multifidi learn their precise role in stabilizing each spinal segment, for example?
(We will show you how in this article.)
But then it gets a bit more fancy. See, these movements are so intricately tied to our primal emotional development that they are discussed within developmental psychology practices, and practitioners have been using these infant development principles specifically for healing trauma.
What is the Historical Use of Prescribing Infant Development Exercises in Children and Adults?
This section will explain infant development patterns for adults in more detail, by exploring various practitioners and historical fields of use.
Klapp’s Kriechmethode (Crawling Method)
At the beginning of the 20th century, an German orthopedist named Bernhard Klapp was treating scoliosis patients when he noticed that crawling on all fours gave the spine a mobilizing, exercising and corrective influence. Klapp established a program for treating children with scoliosis as well as poor posture, calling his method Kriechmethode, the “crawling method.”
Wilhelm Reich’s Orgastic Reflex & Kundalini
Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian doctor, psychoanalyst and deputy director of Sigmund Freud’s outpatient clinic. He became known for his radical ideas in the realm of psychotherapy, human sexuality, and bioenergetics. In the 1930’s and 1940’s, Reich's work extended into areas that many considered controversial, including a biological or cosmic omnipresent energy that he called “orgone energy.” (Similar to the concept of Chi/Qi in Chinese Medicine.)
Despite controversies, Reich's ideas influenced later developments in body psychotherapy and somatic psychology, where the notion of healing through the body and the movement of energy continues to be a significant focus.
Even recent research studies have aimed to explore connections between Kundalini practices and the concepts proposed by Wilhelm Reich. Kundalini describes the activation of an energy thought to be dormant at the base of the spine; one that can coil up the spine in a serpentine-like manner. Reich’s “orgastic reflex” is described as waves of energy from head to pelvic floor and back (connected to breathing).
Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s Body-Mind Centering (BMC)
Occupational therapist, movement therapist, neurodevelopmental therapist, Laban Movement Analysis, and Kestenberg Movement Profiling specialist, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen founded Body-Mind Centering (BMC) in 1973. Similar to how Reich bridges western psychology with eastern yogic kundalini, Bainbridge Cohen describes herself as a pioneering movement educator that draws from both Western and Eastern scientific knowledge.
BMC’s work has been utilized extensively in the realm of dance. A 2011 study in the Journal of Dance Education compares somatic education (a learning process that uses sensory-motor techniques to help people gain more control over their physiological processes) with dance education, recommending, “Dance educators can strengthen their organization of dance classes using the neuro-developmental foundations of Body-Mind Centering.”
BMC is also associated with emotional expression, and describes physical body systems in relation to mental-emotional components. For example, the mind is thought to become structurally organized by embodying the skeletal system, which provides supporting ground for our thoughts, while the muscular system is how “we embody vitality, express our power, and engage in the dialogue of resistance and resolution.”
Concepts within BMC include:
Bainbridge Cohen discusses how our physical senses gain information for our internal environment as well as externally, from others in the world. For example, choosing to absorb information is similar to bonding with something in our environment, while blocking out information is akin to defending against something/someone. And this is the interplay, the connected psychological and physical dance, of how we interact with the world around us.
Any imbalance or incomplete stage of infant development can lead to muscle imbalances, as well as mental problems.
Movement development not being linear, but rather in overlapping stages dependent upon the stages prior.
Primitive reflexes like righting reactions and equilibrium responses are automatic responses, but that underlie our intentional execution of an action. They are the foundational elements of our movement, and therefore need to be addressed.
Exercises include:
Cellular Breathing - Imagine breathing in & out from every cell of the body.
Navel Radiation - Involves a wide variety of touch therapy and movements that are focused around the umbilical (belly button) region.
Spinal Movement - Head to tail movement, like a fish or as in rolling.
Homologous Movement - Simultaneous movement of upper limbs or lower limbs, as in push-ups or jumping with both feet. This helps us differentiate between the upper and lower parts of our body.
Homolateral Movement - When limbs on the same side move simultaneously, like a lizard crawling. Also accessed by hopping on one leg.
Contralateral Movement - The cross-body pattern of opposite arm and leg moving simultaneously, as in mammalian crawling or human gait.
Psychological Applications for Infant Movement Patterns
The field of psychology is not shy with theories about infant movement patterns. These theories are intuitive as well. For example, what posture comes to mind when you think of, ‘a shy person’? Can you see how you intuitively imagine a posture that is very different from, for example, that of 'an arrogant person'?
In other words, one’s mind creates one’s body postures and functions. This can be seen in the differences between how a person with a ‘type A’ personality lifts weights when strength training, or walks down the street, compared to a person with a ‘type B’ personality. Even deeper, and more complex, is how one’s mind can create unique tightness or weaknesses that are completely independent from other physical influences. Dramatic examples include overly tight pelvic floor muscles as a holding pattern stemming from sexual abuse, or gastro-intestinal anxiety (with subsequent irritable bowel symptoms) arising after a stressful life event, even though one’s food habits haven’t changed.
One 1989 book called Perspectives in Developmental Psychology, explores the theory of infant development, how our physical movements are associated with our mental processes. Authors describe the exercises of infant development as “a movement-based, ‘bottom-up’ account of behavior in the sensorimotor period.” The sensorimotor period is widely accepted to be the first stage of a child’s life (from birth to about age two) when your little one explores the world through sensory interactions with their environment. It is the first of the four stages of Piaget's theory of cognitive development.
Perspectives in Developmental Psychology confirms that our physical movement is related to our mental-emotional development, saying, “At this stage of the life cycle, then, the link between the developing mind and the developing limbs may be especially direct.”
The 2018 Cambridge Handbook of Sociocultural Psychology, 2nd Edition, doubles down on the strong causal relationships between movement and psychology. When a baby is in utero, their head and tailbone have the opportunity of being in contact with the uterine wall. The fetus develops proprioceptive awareness by yielding to and pushing against the uterine wall, which sends signals along the spinal cord from the head to the tailbone and back.
And here are the psychology implications, where physical postures amount to mental-emotional states:
“Yielding provides a supporting bond, before pushing for separation.”
“When resting on our belly and actively yielding the body weight on the ground, passing the weight through the forearms, we feel an immediate confirmation of our embodied existence.”
“Pushing also empowers getting away, separating the self from the ground or a supporting other; establishing one's own [personal space], becoming an individual.”
“Reaching is not a natural solution to obtain a distal object and bring it to the mouth… Reaching is a manifestation of the baby's vitality and complex history of blending with the ground and the world.”
Otherwise, the Cambridge Handbook does also discuss how infant motor development patterns are critical for physical development as well, outside the womb:
Both yielding and pushing are needed to mold proper spinal curves.
In the first months of life, newborns' robust kicking and crying help develop the muscles required to form and support the lumbar curve. This curve then allows the infant to start raising its head, and develop secondary curves.
Ultimately, students are left with the profound awareness that there are not only certain required sequences needed for proper physical development, but that these physical sequences are absolutely critical for mental-emotional development too.
Water-Based Methods for Healing Prenatal & Birth Trauma
In a 1999 paper, David Sawyer, M.A. Buddhist Psychology, Integrative Body Psychotherapist, and licensed professional counselor, draws from Reich, Bainbridge-Cohen, and others to expand infant development patterns into water therapy. In the paper, titled, “Birthing the Self: Water-Based Methods for Healing Prenatal & Birth Trauma,” Sawyer discusses the importance of the serpentine/inchworm motions, as well as concepts like hyperextension in posture being potentially caused by intense rage/anger, and how implantation of the fertilized egg into the mother’s uterine wall can provide both vital nourishment as well as unwelcome energies of being wanted (too much) or not wanted. Considering the fact that only one sperm will win a race against several hundred million other sperm, Sawyer says, “Emotional issues tied to this period of development often involve life and death.”
Healthy movement is described as being like:
“Seaweed undulating in the waves,” anchored firmly to a rock from its base.
Serpentine body movements synchronized with the flow of craniosacral fluid.
Craniosacral fluid, or cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), is a clear, colorless body fluid found within the brain and spinal cord. The fluid acts to provide cushion to these neurological organs, as well as nourishment & clearing waste (similar to how blood flow functions in the rest of the body).
The paper also discusses how the exercise of crawling can aid in coordinating the left and right sides of the body as well as the left and right hemispheres of the brain. This paper, too, asserts that each movement pattern is built on the ones before.
Ultimately, Sawyer is putting forth that important foundational movements can be even more therapeutic when combined with immersion in water. Babies in utero live in water, where the primitive brain is dominant. Then, a child’s initial months outside of the mother’s tummy continue to be rooted in the primitive brain. This crucial developmental phase is also when many lifelong psychological patterns begin to take shape (the first two years’ sensorimotor phase).
Using infant patterns in aquatic therapy, one can potentially better tap into the primitive brain, releasing unhelpful patterns and unlocking the profound potential of both mind and body.
Fitness Applications for Infant Movement Patterns
In the last few decades, the fitness & corrective exercise / rehabilitation world has also begun to apply infant development movements to exercise programming. My first introduction to it was from the CHEK Institute in the mid-2000’s. Here are some recent uses of infant development exercises in fitness.
Original Strength
Tim Anderson is a personal trainer and co-creator of the Original Strength System. In his book, Original Strength Performance: The Next Level, co-authored by NFL strength & conditioning coach, Chip Morton, and athletic trainer, Mark Shropshire, authors lay out their simplified system of performance, based upon three pillars.
Pillar #1 is to breathe using the diaphragm, and through the nose (rather than mouth).
Pillar #2 is to activate the vestibular system appropriately, which is essentially by ensuring that the athlete’s tongue is on the roof of the mouth.
Pillar #3 is to purposefully engage the natural contra-lateral X patterning of the human muscular system. (ie. Crawling)
Although proper breathing is typically the starting point for infant development, these authors’ usage of infant development is primarily through their use of contra-lateral patterns like crawling, which they say “lends itself well to strengthening the diaphragm.” Their fitness programming recommends plenty of crawling in various ways, followed by exercises including: rucksacks, weight vests, loading the limbs with weighted clubs to enhance arm swing, pushing/pulling sleds, posterior chain single leg deadlifts, anterior chain turkish get-ups, holding awkward loads (loads that are uneven in each hand), and heavy carries (in all sorts of ways).
Their 5-step basic plan of progression is similar to many corrective exercise-based performance programs:
Start with corrective exercise (stability/mobility, the three pillars)
Add low loads to reinforce correct patterns
Contra-Lateral movements
Strength training (adding heavier loads)
Speed & Power training
Photo by GMB Fitness on Unsplash
ACE Fitness
It was fun to find a 2018 article at ACE Fitness, titled, “Why Crawling Fixes Everything,” which means that even some mainstream fitness is aware of the importance of these exercises. Calling “infant movement patterns” a potential “cure-all” for clients, the author discusses exercises involving rolling, rocking, squatting and crawling used to get people out of pain.
The article reminds us of some of what other infant development pioneers have been telling us along the way; that three things are important:
synchronous contra-lateral movement patterns
dramatic shifts from our normally chronic sedentary lifestyle
core stability
CHEK Institute
Under the dynamic leadership of fitness educator Paul Chek, the CHEK Institute offers a course for fitness professionals called, “The Science and Application of Infant Development for Adults: How to Overcome the Missing Links to Motor Development.”
In a 2020 Paul Chek YouTube, An Introduction to Infant Development Exercises, Chek calls infant development an “Integration of psyche and body together” and the “foundation of human movement.”
Physically, serpentine movements are critically important because of how they pump fluids through the spinal discs, which do not have their own blood supply. This means that these kinds of “pressure fluctuations drive osmosis and diffusion, which brings nutrition and fluids in, and waste out.” Not having optimal serpentine movement in our spine would therefore lead to locked joints, desiccated discs, and cartilage degeneration in the spine and periphery joints. Ultimately, locking or lack of rotation anywhere in the spine can cause periphery joint injury, most commonly in the knee and shoulder.
Mental-emotionally, Chek says, “There is an intimate relationship between thoughts, feelings, and the body…If you have blockage in your body, it can disrupt the flow of life force, energy or qi, or consciousness even, through that part of your body…If you have too much laxity in a segment, it tends to be an indication of too much excitation or movement through that area.”
James Goodlatte’s Common Sequence of Infant Development Movements for Adults
What follows is a sequence of infant development movements that I have periodically drawn from, since about 2004 with my clients, often as their core warm-up for the session. It is important that the client feels these movements in the correct places, typically the core ‘abdominals’ and front of the neck primarily. Diaphragmatic breathing through the nose should always be coached, along with jaw shut and tongue on the roof of the mouth, not touching the teeth. The order is one I have used, but should be adjusted per client’s needs and abilities. It is not necessary to do all of them, nor to omit other exercises from this sequence.
1. Diaphragmatic Breathing - Before doing any infant development – and really any exercises – the client must be taught proper diaphragmatic breathing, inhaling to fill their ribs, lower back, and belly. Ideally, they should be able to do this in all positions (supine, prone, seated, standing, etc) before adding another pattern on top of it. This is the essence of infant development layering. Do this first, otherwise you are teaching the system to skip the critical underlying phase of development (like infants in jolly jumpers, see next section, below).
2. Quadruped Serpentine - An opportunity for the client to assess their ability to undulate their spine in a fluid graceful manner. It’s kind of like a cat-cow sequence, but with less range of motion, and intended to be a self-check into one’s ability to undulate their spine in a mild dance-like rhythm.
3. Starfish - A basic starter exercise that most can accomplish, feeling their abdominals work.
4. Supine Inchworm - A complex movement requiring the client to lift their spine, lifting only from the back of the head and rear pelvis. Once this can occur with abdominal and front neck activation, actually crawling up and down the mat is next.
5. Supine Rolling - A solid exercise that most can accomplish, with varying degrees of progression and regression.
6. Prone Inchworm - Even more difficult than the supine inchworm, this requires the client to lift their spine, lifting only from forehead and front of pelvis. Later stages would also crawl forward and backward.
7. Prone Rolling - Another usually-doable exercise for many clients; it’s important that they feel their abdominal muscles and also glutes, more than lower back and other areas.
8. Baby Crawling - An absolutely critical exercise for establishing synchronous movement between contra-lateral (opposite) arms & legs.
9. Bear Crawling - Once the baby crawl is synchronized, and rhythmic, lifting one’s knees barely from the floor is the next step. This exercise is also absolutely essential and extraordinarily useful in a fitness setting.
10. Bear-Crab Rollovers - Once the bear crawl is mastered, you can ask your client to control a contra-lateral bear rotating into a crab, and vice versa. They’ll rotate using their precision on just two opposite limbs. The key is slow and controlled perfect rollovers.
11. 1 Dumbbell (1DB) 1 Leg Deadlift/Squat (holding weight in opposite hand) - An exercise that many trainers are already using with their clients, it is an important part of the infant development sequencing.
12. Contralateral Gait Exercises - these could include a variety of exercises that reinforce proper standing contra-lateral mechanics of the human body.
Standing Arm Pumps - Practicing the swing phase of running, but with legs still.
Run in Place - Just like most of us have done before, arms and legs are asked to emphasize their coordinated contralateral synchronized movements.
Dynamic Skipping - A further step in force-generation, dynamic skipping requires a tremendous contralateral arm swing coupled with a powerful knee/leg thrust.
Can Parents Do Anything to Encourage Proper Infant Development in their Children?
Definitely yes! The main answer is to give your child plenty of places and time to simply be on the floor, and do not hurry their development to be faster than it is.
First, placing your infant on the floor simply gives them time to figure out how to activate their deep spinal inchworm muscles, rolling, and more. That’s Mother Nature’s design.
Some things to consider are that some floors are too hard, and might, for example, not feel soft enough for the child to ‘baby crawl’ with their knees on the floor. If so, this would count as “skipping” a stage of development, and will lead to imbalances from never having established this important phase. It’s probably wise to have a mix of flooring available for your child to crawl.
Second, do not hurry your child through these stages. Unfortunately, many of us do this without realizing it:
Baby Exercisers, like Jolly Jumpers - If your child cannot already jump on their own, putting them into a harness like this teaches them to “jump before they walk.” Your child should be given the chance to develop their own postural & stabilizer muscles necessary, before ever considering using a device like this.
Baby Floor Seats & Sit Ups, like Bumbo - If your child cannot sit up already on his/her own, then propping them into position is skipping the development of their own postural muscles needed to sit up.
Excessive Parental Walking Assistance - Like the two examples above, parents themselves can unwittingly act as external supports for their children. Think of a child learning to walk. Do you grab their arms, holding them up? Or do you let them grab your fingers to help themselves along? Although there is a balance when it comes to helpful parenting, we don’t want to do too much overt helping; we want to encourage their underlying innate core muscles to develop strength to do it themselves.
Infant Shoes - Babies are at a very special time in development where they must feel proprioception with their feet. Using shoes (and even socks) too much, reduces their sensory feedback from their environment, which can reduce their proper infant motor development.
The challenge with at least some of these kinds of items is that we live in a busy world, and it’s so often just more convenient to put our kid into a baby exerciser because (a) it can be fun for them, and (b) it holds them in place for us to go to work, cook, clean, and everything else.
Is the trade-off of postural, functional and mental-emotional issues down the road worth it? The truth is that – depending on your circumstances – it may be, at times, necessary to use devices like these even though we know that they are not ideal in our child’s current stage of development. But now that you understand more deeply about infant development, you can begin looking for ways to adjust toward more helpful habits wherever possible.
Summary of Infant Development Exercises for Adults
Our very first movements have been honed by mother nature over the course of a looooooooong time, and they appear to have a very particular purpose in human development.
Physically, similar to how ‘core exercises’ have been identified as the foundation for fitness & performance, it appears that even the core musculature has its own underlying core neuromuscular programming. Infant development exercises for adults set the foundation beneath the foundation. They are poised to be the deeper – and potentially more important – stability & corrective exercises for our clients.
Emotionally, infant development movements for adults could be wired with our most subconscious awareness of self. What if pushing in the gym really does help a battered spouse to finally “say no” and leave that situation? What if loss or blockage of physical spine mobility really does correlate to a breakdown in our psychological health? What if serpentine-like movements really do allow us to ground, or find our flow in life more easily?
And what if infant development exercises were one surprising and useful solution for years-long imbalance, in ourselves or in our clients?
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“Exercise is the most research-proven epigenetic action for living vibrantly before passing away peacefully in your bed one night.”
James Goodlatte is a Father, Holistic Health Coach, Corrective Exercise Practitioner, Speaker, Author, Professional Educator, and the founder of Exercise For Longevity. His practice was established in 2000 after graduating from University of MD with a Kinesiology Degree. He maintains his CPT with NASM. As the founder of Fit For Birth, James has provided continuing education credits to thousands of fitness professionals in 52 countries. As a hired longevity researcher and educator, James oversees the corrective exercise programming for trainers who would love to work with you today! We offer these options:
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