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Three Reasons It Matters Why A Treatment Works

Why exactly does someone feel better after massage? Or acupuncture? Or foam rolling? Or a chiropractic adjustment, or wearing K-tape, or doing mobility drills, or a hamstring stretch? There are some good answers to these questions, and the interesting thing I’d like to point out in this post is that quite often, the therapist doesn’t know them. Or even care about them

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Play, Variability and Motor Learning

I recently had the privilege of attending a continuing education class at Athletes Performance in Arizona, which is one of the top athletic training facilities in the country, run by Mark Verstegen. It's a beautiful facility, with a nice grass field, an amazing workout room, and lots of elite athletes walking around and training. It was a very fun atmosphere and I was all geeked out. There are many things that I would like to write about from this experience (including the excellent DNSclasses that I was attending while there), but for now I just wanted to make a few brief observations about the way the athletes spent their time.

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Developmental Movements: Part Two

In the previous post I pointed out that the developmental movement patterns learned in infancy are building blocks for the more complex movements that we use in our daily lives as adults. These simple patterns are combined to form sophisticated movements, just as words and letters are combined to make sentences. 

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Developmental Movements: Part One

Infants develop movement by progressively learning a series of fundamental movement patterns, which form the building blocks for more complex movements. For example, while lying on the ground and sitting in various positions, an infant learns to stabilize her head so she can see the world. Her head stabilization skills are a building block for the postural control required in standing and walking. While reaching to grab interesting objects, she learns the arm/trunk coordination patterns that are also used to crawl and walk, and eventually throw and climb.

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