Dr. Kelly Starrett

That's why we get our kids into swim teams, because there's okay to layer in some technical skills early on.

As the child moves into sort of middle school, we might start to add in a few things where it looks like, hey, we're doing work on pull-ups.

Or can you control your body weight in space?

We're not worried about loading children because children are loading themselves.

But it's okay to start to say, hey, we also should have some formal movement training on top of this play structure training.

And now when you get out there, you'll see that there are lots of people who have good play models.

Um, I'll point out, you know, portal, I'll point out gold medal, body fitness, GMB, um, you know, move Nat.

There are so many ways where we can be a little bit more formal in our movement play where we're exposing, um, Irwan LaCour, who's the originator of move Nat started to ask people who can do a pull up.

how many of you who can do pull-ups had a tree in your backyard that you could climb?

And there was like a one-to-one correlation.

I grew up climbing, grew up playing, can still do a pull-up.

So let's think in those terms, how do we change the environment so that there's better exposure?

Because what we're seeing is we just, kids don't tumble.

You know, Juliet and I worked at a, we worked field day for our school, our middle school.

And there were like fifth graders who couldn't do a two-foot hop,

Fifth graders who couldn't do a forward somersault, right?

It was shocking to us.

And we were talking about doing like we were doing the sack race, right?

And the kids struggle to have enough hip range of motion to put the sack on.

So by the time fifth grade has come around, we're really starting to see these patterns set up where we don't have a lot of movement fluency, movement control, just because the environment isn't asking for it.