Natural Movement

Hey, this is Dr. Gangemi and in this Sock-Doc video, I want to talk about natural movement. Climbing, running, crawling, moving about your environment naturally. Hopefully barefoot, hopefully on a nice creek, pasture, sunny day where you are getting some good health benefits from being outside. We sort of develop some unnatural movements as we get older. We sit in chairs, we don’t move like we were intended to, we don’t move like kids anymore. We sit on the benches and watch our kids play in the playground rather than jump and run around with them.

So natural movements help get our instinctual patterns back. We develop functional movements, movement patterns that help us become more fit, more healthy people. They help to develop our proprioception, this is our sense of position. How our joints know where they are in relationship to one another and our environment, this helps our balance along with our eyes and our ears. Our equilibrium, how we move about the environment and interact well within ourselves and with the environment. It develops our kinesthetic sense, this is our sense of movement. Our feelers or sensory nerves throughout our body especially in our feet.

So hopefully you are barefoot watching this video. It is one of those requirements on the Sock-Doc site. You are able to move barefoot, stand barefoot, walk around barefoot if you are in a safe environment and maybe you are even able to run on a trail barefoot, on rocks and in stream and actually feel the Earth, feel the ground and you are not stuck inside or you are not training inside on something that is very unnatural like an elliptic or one of these machines that are designed only to give you some cardiovascular benefits but really no functional mobility, no functional movement, no health benefits aside from that perhaps calorie burning aspect of it.

Functional movements allow us to give our bodies back the dynamic motions that they are intended to do. So whether you are trying to improve your health, improve your fitness, whether you are trying to recover from an injury, these motions are so much more practical than any isolated movements. With functional natural movements we don’t isolate a body part. We don’t do bicep curls, we don’t do leg extensions, we are not interested in isolating the body part that is really going to not be practical and help us with efficiency and how we move about our lives carrying something or carrying someone perhaps to safety or maybe just building a rock wall around your yard by carrying rocks.

So with natural movements we develop total body fitness, total body health, cardiovascular benefits, strength benefits, flexibility benefits, all-in-one motion or all-in-one skill. And it’s fun, it is much more fun than just sitting at a gym and staring at a TV screen mindlessly. So think about natural movements, thing about health aspects of it, check out MovNat site. A lot of the skills and drills of natural movement. Obviously check out Sock-Doc, where I have lot of great articles on health, fitness, injury treatment, injury prevention, live barefoot walking, running, or moving about your environment in a natural aspect is going to benefit your health and your fitness.

Lots of new Sock-Doc videos coming out too. So check back often and see what I have got to offer and hope you are going outside today and moving about naturally. Thanks for watching.

Dr. Stephen Gangemi "Sock Doc"

I'm a board-certified chiropractic physician and clinical nutritionist with a passion for true natural health care. I implement dietary & nutritional therapies, exercise & movement practices, and lifestyle changes along with manual therapy techniques to help the body heal and prevent illness and injuries.