How We Move: Book 1

"How We Move" is the first book in the Young Athletic Movement Series. It focuses on helping children aged 2-6 gain a rudimentary understanding of how we as humans move, then helps them to create good subconscious movement habits of four of our most basic movements. These movements are breathing, sitting standing, and walking. Young Athletic Movement is a media company dedicated to promoting better health in young people. We believe that movement is essential to a healthy life and that understanding how humans move and the importance of proper movement can lead to better living. Our mission is to provide resources and tools to help young people achieve their health goals.

After years of thinking he was athletic and strong, the author Ray Terry started losing the ability to walk properly in 2009. He didn't acknowledge it (although thinking back he'd had symptoms as early as elementary school) until sometime in 2015. By 2018 he needed a cane to walk. He was 49 years old, way too young. Even then, he blamed the dysfunction on possible traumatic injuries he'd received in the past and present. This, he believes, turns out to be only partially true. While working with a group of Performance trainers known as The FootDoctor Sports he began studying, attending conferences, and talking to professionals from a variety of specializations to try and find solutions to his dysfunctions. Dysfunctions are simply deviations from what are considered normal behaviors. Most of them occur over time. The more time spent behaving dysfunctionally, the more dysfunctional the behaviors become in the future. All those years he had been practicing to move incorrectly. He could have been stronger and more athletic if he had been taught to move correctly.

While trauma certainly changes movement and other behaviors, our automatic reset must have a base. It must go back to a particular place and time. This starts with subconscious behaviors (basic operating systems), which coupled with our genetics (hardware) produce our familiar traits. For instance "That's Ray over there, I'd know that walk anywhere." These traits are trained and can be retrained. They can also be influenced and built upon by the conscious mind. The younger the better, the older the harder, and the best range to train and make it stick is from two to six years of age. This is how we create the base.

Young Athletic Movement is meant to be an open platform style of bringing valuable basic operating movements to young people aged two to six years old. We offer a few simple important movements that are based on human anatomy and physiology. These are put into media to capture a young person's attention and help them to repeat good basic movements until they have good basic habits. Why ages two to six, because most experts and stakeholders in child development believe in Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development Theory. They also believe that 90% of a child's brain development takes place from two to seven years of age. Teaching this early on not only will create good everyday habits but should also govern their behavior in "fight or flight" situations like rough play and youth sports games. The goal is to mitigate traumatic injury that is based on dysfunctional movement patterns over time.

The one thing we at Young Athletic Movement do not want to instill in children (as a base) is hate in any way, shape, or form. We will never cover any movements involved with hate because we believe that behaviors should always move in a positive direction.