Gray Cook: Movement Literacy

from Gray Cook & Greg Rose: Three Principles You Can Apply to Any Movement

Gray Cook: If numeric literacy is working with numbers—addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, balancing your checkbook, calculating a tip—and if language and written literacy is about reading, writing, speaking and communicating, then isn’t movement literacy the ability to read and write movement patterns?

If you can’t reproduce a movement pattern, an overhead squat, a push-up, or lunge—fundamental patterns that three-year-olds can do—then you’re not movement literate.

If I drop you into a movement experience and out of the seven fundamental movement patterns we’ve been checking, you only do four of them well, isn’t that comparable to attending a music appreciation workshop or going to an architectural or art show with a profound lack of understanding?

If I allow you into my movement environment, my movement experience, and three out of seven of your movement learning pathways are closed because you don’t have the pattern, I let the wrong organism into this environment. You don’t have what it takes to read and write movement patterns.

My first order of business is to protect you from anything that will not give you nice feedback. I didn’t say you’ve got to be successful, but you’ve got to know when you fail and you’ve got to know when you pass.

For more from Gray and Greg on Organism and Environment, here are a few segments from the same lecture.

Free talks from Gray Cook:
Movement Principles, CK-FMS 2013
IFOMPT Keynote Address