Crawl Daily To Stay Young!

On a scale of “can get up off the floor without using one’s hands” to “winning breakdancing competitions”, crawling is somewhere in the middle in terms of mobility.

Since the former is a critical predictor of healthy longevity (and the latter is not too important for most of us), crawling means we stay well within the mobility “safe zone”.

Which, after all, is where we need to be. But how? Will any kind of crawling do it? How much do we need to crawl?

Foundational moves

For the most part, modern adults have lost the ability to move naturally on the ground, and this omission accelerates physical aging when it comes to loss of mobility.

However, we not be motivated only by fear of loss of movement, there are positive gains to be made too; Vanja (in the video) lists the following benefits, and we have some thoughts on them too:

• Improves hip, ankle, and shoulder mobility
  • This one’s quite self-explanatory; these are commonly-lost things with big impacts!
• Builds wrist and core strength through weight-bearing positions
  • Grip strength is very strongly inversely correlated with frailty in older age
• Trains lateral movement and cross-body coordination
  • This may seem like something that only a gym-bunny might care about, but this also means “don’t put your back out while putting the groceries away”
• Improves spinal mobility and reflexes
  • This way you also don’t put your back out while, for example, reflexively catching a falling object
• Boosts agility, stability, and athletic carryover
  • Be the kind of person who doesn’t “have a fall” and see a rapid decline of health thereafter
• Creates (well-founded) confidence due to learning to fall safely
  • Meaning that if you do fall, you can laugh it off instead of getting an ambulance ride

Now, on to how to do it. Of course, we’re sure you know the basics of how to crawl, but to get a full range of motion, consider adding:

• Forward crab: builds hip flexion, ankle mobility, wrist and shoulder integrity, and resilience.
• Side crab: strengthens obliques and hips, improves knee stability, and restores lateral agility.
• Quadrupedal walk: reconnects opposite hand and foot coordination, enhances spinal mobility, and builds total-body endurance.
• Forward scoot: trains shoulder extension, posterior chain activation, and core synchronization.
• Sideways scoot: develops lateral hip and oblique strength, and dynamic shoulder stability.
• Handstand kick-up: builds balance, shoulder extension, proprioception, and resilience under inversion ← ok, this one’s a bit more advanced, but when was the last time you did a handstand, and don’t you want to enjoy some of that youthfulness still?

Writer’s anecdote: the last time I did a handstand was about a year ago; I was writing an article for 10almonds, and wondered if I could do a handstand, just against the wall. So, I tried, and the good news is, I could! The bad news is, I was wearing a dress, the dress of course fell promptly around my head, I couldn’t see where to safely return to the ground normally (so many bookcases in this room), so I had to crumple directly downwards instead, laughing at my lack of foresight :p

For more on all of this (apart from my antics) plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

Want to learn more?

You might also like:

Mobility For Now & For Later: Train For The Marathon That Is Your Life!

Take care!