At four months of age the new born is expected to have matured enough to- roll over: front to back and back to front. It’s the first major milestone the parents look for. This ability is an accumulation of experience between eyes tracking movement, ears tracking people’s voices (especially mom) and movement. The new muscles along the spine are specifically set up to help sequential rotation, and they develop as the eyes become the leaders of all trunk movement.
From the ability to roll over comes the coordination of learning direction in that we learn directionality: right ,left, up, down, over, under. Very important prepositions for humans to understand in all phases of learning and in all learning of motor behavior. Our brains have a very old segment called our primitive brain, which by evolution evolved into our present highly differentiated mammalian brain. The difference between the new and old brain shows up especially in the fact that mammals can roll over and salamanders (primitive brain) cannot. So, the fact that a baby at four months can pull eyes, head, muscles, need for people, need for noises, need to move by rotating together into an integrated nervous system is a very big step in becoming human.
This one fact of integrating rotation leads to:
The ability of the pelvis to rotate around the spine, and the ability of the shoulder girdle to rotate around the spine and do so in opposition, so we can walk upright in gravity with a reciprocal gait pattern. The reciprocal gait pattern propels the our center (center of gravity and spine) forward in a straight line.
The ability of the 5 year old to roll down the hill.
The ability of the beginning and practiced athlete to throw a baseball; a football, swing a golf club; swing a tennis racket; play table tennis; climb a tree; sweep a floor with a broom or a sweeper; roll over in bed to change position or just reach into the refrigerator for a carton of milk.
If we stop rotating around our spine and hold ourselves at attention all the time with stiffness, those initial reflexes become unorganized and unintegrated. We lose our ability to walk with ease or balance on any surface without supreme effort. Our initial primitive reflexes require eye, head rotation across midline in order to remain fully operational.
Working at a computer all day is our one enemy in terms of no spinal rotation across the day; day after day and with a lot of holding tension and stressed muscles. Without freedom of rotation across the spine balance changes and joints become stressed; tension increases to hold positions that should naturally require no extra effort.
I have been tracking 4 reflexes across my older clients and have found that they are unintegrated in most people: the vestibular spinal reflex, the vestibular ocular reflex, the head righting reflex and the step cross over reflex.These reflexes require spinal rotation and pelvic mobility in order to be used. If they are not functioning than protections against falling and ability to catch oneself during falling are not present. Walking is not reciprocal. The ability to stand upright without stress and extra effort is gone and the skeleton sits in flexion and head forward with the body weight momentum forward.
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