Why Full Body Motion?

To maximize our abilities it makes sense to attempt to use the different components of our bodies (arms, legs,..) together in cooperation. But since our bodies are composed of many semi independent objects linked by joints, this is not neccessarily an easy thing to do.

Nevertheless, for many things we know how to do this fairly easily. Of course, this ability is not inate, we must learn most of it and do so rather quickly beginning at an early age.

Despite our ability to improve our body coordination quickly as children, as adults there are many types of motion which we have not mastered. This becomes rather evident as soon as we try a new physical activity which we have never tried before. But even within an activity such as a sport which we might be quite adept at, there is often a lot of room for improvement.

Motion Types

Some of the physical principles which guide the type of motion that we perform are: linear motion, rotation, wave propagtion, oscillation, reflection, dissapation, rising, sinking, Pendulous Motion, elastic motion, centrifugal and centripetal motion.

No matter how we move, we are probably moving using some combination of the principals above to move even if it is not readily apparent. The reason that it is not always apparent is due to the combination of types of motion mentioned along with the fact that our bodies are complex machines with many moving parts. Every piece of our bodies is physically linked to the whole and therefore affected by every other piece. What's more, we can link up with other bodies and make the entire system even more complex!

So how can we use this acknowledgement of motion principals to help us move efficiently? To start with it helps to determine what are some of the types of things that we would like to be able to do or, what we are trying to maximize our potential to do.

Motion Objectives

Some fundamental characteristics of things that we might want to use the coordination of our full bodies to mazimize are: speed, momemtum, force, maintaining upright balance, directional acurracy, speed modulation, travel distance modulation, work generation (displacing other objects).

Since there are an infinite amount of skills that we can improve at, it can be helpfull to practice and experiment with some of the specific abstract ideas mentioned above. By attempting to understand what is required to achieve abstractly defined motions we can easily improve our overall abilities by focusing on the individual components that can be used to describe our motion.