Using natural movement to reduce the risk of falls
The other day someone close to me sent me this message. They were talking about their mother who had just had a fall.
“The wind grabbed the metal door as mum was trying to shut it and threw her to the ground. Over an hour she spent sliding from the backyard to the back door to call me. She is bruised but ok.
”
As a natural movement coach I teach people a lot of different types of movement. One of the things that I teach people is how to crawl efficiently. It sometimes gets weird looks from people when I first introduce it; and that's totally understandable. I get that crawling around on the floor isn't common. However, situations like what happened to this person's mother show why it's so valuable.
Before I go on, I'd just like to add that a natural movement approach to fitness would have helped to prevent the fall and helped the lady in question to get back up more easily, but I'm just going to address only the crawling aspect in this blog.
What really gets me about this situation is that it took this lady over an hour to get to a position where she could call for help. I can only imagine how helpless she must have felt.
The kicker for me though is that I know where she fell and where she moved to in order to call for help. That crawl would have taken me less than 15 seconds. Even taking her condition and level of fitness into account, with an understanding of the right technique it should have taken this lady less than 5 minutes. But it took her an hour.
This is why we train things like crawling in natural movement. While we don't use most of these skills on a daily basis in modern life the way our ancestors did, we do eventually need to use almost every one of the skills of natural movement from time to time in the modern world. The problem is, if you haven't practised them recently, you won't know how to do it when the time comes.
That's one of the reasons that in natural movement we practice these skills which aren't common. I can't promise you that you'll need every one of these skills today or tomorrow, but I can't promise you that you'll need almost all of them at some point. Wouldn't it be nice to be prepared when the time comes?
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