American Movement Illiteracy Plagues

Abs and biceps aside, most Americans are movement illiterate. This means most of us don’t have a relationship with our body that is competent enough to learn new things quickly or competent enough to combine movement expressions to say something new.

It might jam you up to read that you could “say something new” with your body. Without getting too in the clouds, the reference to movement literacy assumes that understanding how we move is like a language. Coach, friend, and New York Times Best Seller, Carl Paoli, encourages students to realize that once you understand the movement equivalent of the alphabet, then you can read and write movement of your own.

If more Americans knew basic movement patterns from gymnastics, locomotion, weightlifting, and so on, we’d be able to navigate the world with great physical competency that would have a ripple effect beyond measure.

Logan Gelbrich  

@functionalcoach