Creeping and Crawling

Before you ever walked, you crawled. Or maybe you didn't. Either way, those months on the floor were some of the most important training your nervous system ever did. Crawling is one of the first big conversations between your brain and your body, and it is a conversation you can go back and have again, at any age.

Crawling and creeping are two different things. In the developmental world, crawling means moving on your belly, pulling yourself forward with your arms and pushing with your legs, like a commando. Creeping means moving on your hands and knees with your belly off the floor. Most babies belly crawl first and then creep, and most people call both of them crawling. In this lesson we train both.

Crawling teaches the two sides of your body to work together. When a baby creeps, the right hand and the left knee move together, then the left hand and the right knee. That diagonal pattern is called a contralateral pattern, and it is the same pattern you use to walk, run, and sprint: opposite arm, opposite leg. Every time you creep, the left and right sides of your brain have to coordinate, your hands cross in front of your body, your eyes shift between your hands and the space ahead, and your shoulders, hips, and core learn to stabilize under load. It is coordination, strength, balance, and body awareness all built in one movement.

Moving yourself changes your brain. In a well known study, researchers Martha Ann Bell and Nathan Fox recorded the brain activity of eight month old babies. Babies who had just started crawling showed a burst of new connection between brain areas compared to babies who were not crawling yet. Then, as crawling became routine, that activity settled down again, which the researchers linked to the brain building new connections and then pruning the ones it did not need. A large review led by David Anderson and Joseph Campos found that once babies start moving themselves, a lot changes: how they perceive depth and distance, how they remember where things are, how wary they become of heights, and how they read the people around them. Moving through the world is how the brain learns the world.

Crawling helps integrate your baby reflexes. You were born with primitive reflexes, automatic movements wired in to help you survive and develop, like the startle reflex and the reflex where turning your head makes the arm on that side straighten out. As you rolled, rocked on your hands and knees, crawled, and crept, those reflexes were supposed to fade into the background so that your thinking brain could take over the steering. When some of them stick around, which is called a retained reflex, researchers have found it is more common in children with attention and learning challenges. Studies by Konicarova and Bob found that children with ADHD showed more retained reflexes than children without ADHD. In a randomized controlled trial published in The Lancet, children with reading difficulties who practiced specific reflex based floor movements every day showed a significant drop in a retained reflex, while the comparison groups did not.

What happens when the crawling stage gets skipped or rushed. Many movement practitioners and pediatric therapists believe that when a baby skips crawling, or is rushed onto their feet too early, the nervous system misses a stage of practice, and the two sides of the body do not learn to communicate as well for movement. Some of the research points the same way. Babies who spent more time in baby walkers crawled, stood, and walked on their own later. A Danish study following tens of thousands of children found that differences in motor development as early as six months were among the early signs linked to a later ADHD diagnosis.

Here is the honest part. The research shows links, not proof. No study has shown that skipping crawling causes ADHD, and plenty of babies who never crawled grow up with no problems at all. ADHD is strongly genetic, and early movement differences may be one of the first signs of how a brain is wired rather than the cause of it. In the 1960s, a crawling program was promoted as a cure for brain disorders, and pediatric organizations rejected it because the evidence was not there. So crawling is not a cure. What crawling is, is a foundation: one of the ways the brain and body learn to talk to each other, and one you can keep building on.

Why this matters for you now. Your nervous system never stops changing. In one study, adults who did quadrupedal movement training, moving on their hands and feet, for just four weeks improved their cognitive flexibility, the ability to switch between ideas and adjust to new rules, and improved their sense of where their joints were in space, while a group that did not train showed no change. For an athlete that means a few minutes on the floor can train coordination, core and shoulder strength, the diagonal pattern you sprint with, and the connection between your brain and your body. Go back to the floor. Your body remembers how.

If you are a parent with concerns about a young child's development, talk to your pediatrician or a pediatric physical or occupational therapist. This lesson is educational and is not a treatment for ADHD or any other condition.

Bell and Fox, 1996 (crawling experience and EEG coherence); Anderson, Campos and colleagues, 2013 (the role of locomotion in psychological development); Konicarova and Bob, 2012 and 2013 (retained primitive reflexes and ADHD); McPhillips, Hepper and Mulhern, 2000, The Lancet (reflex movements and reading difficulties); Garrett and colleagues, 2002, BMJ (baby walkers and motor milestones); Lemcke and colleagues, 2016 (early development in the Danish National Birth Cohort and later ADHD); Matthews and colleagues, 2016, Human Movement Science (quadrupedal movement training and cognition). Educational, not medical advice.