Most training methods for athletes and hobby sportsmen/women take place in an upright position (like exercises before). The so-called ground-based exercises and workout flow on the ground are a beneficial alternative for every training program. These exercises are postures and movements that are not performed standing. They are done for instance by horizontally or crawling.

That’s why they’re called animal athletics, too. Postures and patterns of early childhood phase and animals are part of the training, as examples consider the locomotion of crabs, monkeys or lizards.

It provides a better movement intelligence, control and dynamic. The reactivation of former patterns, which we once learned and now unlearned, again is a central part of this diversified body weight training. As mentioned above functional movement is controlled by input of proprioceptors.

The position and location of the body are communicated in fractions of seconds via feedback loops to the spinal cord and the body reacts. Meanwhile receptors will be trained in the movements and body positions for which they are created, for us human beings this is the upright posture. In the physical education this is called proprioceptive integrity. The motor driven development take place in a more or less chronologically sequence (neuro musculo skeletal developmental sequence):

• Lift head up in prone position (lying on stomach), 1-2 months
• Good control of head, 4 months
• Stomach position (prone), using their forearms for support, 6 months
• Stomach position (prone), with arms locked, 6 months
• Role into side positon (postural reflex), 1-2 months
• Role from side to stomach position, 4-5 months
• Role from stomach to supine position
• Role from supine in prone position, 6-8 months

In contrast to many other mammals it takes approximately 18 months until a human is able to walk – starting from bottom near movements (rolling, leaning, creeping, crawling) to more or less reliable and controlled upright movement. This time the body needs to mature its nervous, muscular- and skeleton system.

What exactly is Animal Athletics and why should you make it part of your exercise routine?

In ground based training we adults go back to where we as children learned our motor driven and neurologic patterns (fundamental Movement patterns). There the segments which are required to fulfill each movement had to offer a high mobility and stability. Thus we work in a lower movement level to therefore improve the movement quality of the next level (upright posture). That is comparable with a very experienced pianist, who is consequently doing finger exercises at the clavier to better play his demanding symphonies analogue to the complex movement patterns of the human.

Our movement is driven by external impacts of impulses and sensations. That includes physical and biological driver. Physical driver are all forces which impact our body, like its mass itself (body weight), the affecting impulse (colloquial “momentum/swing of the body”), gravity, ground reaction force (force which impacts the body when touching the ground). Gravity pulls our body (mass) towards earth and creates literally a groundwards/ downwards directed compression of our body. The body has to counteract the gravity force. The whole musculature reacts in a way of a chain reaction to prevent that we fall and thereby make a focused locomotion possible. All these forces differ in upright and ground positions. Because all four extremities and the swing of our body must intercept and decelerate differently, to prevent falling down. This is used in ground based training. Furthermore different aspects like changed joint angles, different muscular control and physiological compentent like respiration and blood circulation, which operate different in upright position.

Benefits of ground-based training:

• Maximized activation of receptors
• Increase of mobility
• Conscious usage of gravity
• A minor load of the spine
• Improved blood circulation
• Improved digestive system
• Improved respiration