If you have been to the gym lately, you might have seen some people crawling around on the floor. Did you wonder what the world they were doing and if there is some sort of trend you’re missing out on? Maybe thought they completely lost their mind, but crawling has become an important part of many exercise regimens.
Crawling isn’t just some weird fad that people do to look different or to stand out. There’s good reason why someone might incorporate crawling into their workout sessions. I’m going to talk to you about some of the benefits of crawling for adults and why you may want to add it to your own physical fitness regimen.
Of course, we all spent a lot of time crawling around in our hands and knees when we were younger. That’s just a natural step in development that takes place between rolling around on the bed and walking upright. There’s good reason to go back to crawling, though, and reap some of the health benefits that it offers.
Ground Competence
We don’t spend a lot of time on the ground, because we don’t have to. There’s no reason for us to crawl around on the floor most days, so we lose the ability to crawl effectively and use these natural body movements. If you get knocked down or if you need to crawl for some reason, you ought to be able to move in this way comfortably and skillfully.
A lot of us have lost our ground competence. We simply don’t know how to navigate at that level and to move affectively and skillfully. Spending a little time crawling during your exercise regimen can help to adjust your body to moving in this way and make you more competent for those times in your life when it could come in useful.
What Muscles Does Crawling Work
If crawling isn’t a part of your workout training, then it’s probably not a position you’re in often. That means that it could work some muscles that might not be worked in your normal training sessions. If you really want to see the value of crawling as an exercise, then try crawling for about 10 or 15 minutes.
See how sore you feel in the minutes and hours afterwards and the next day. If there’s some soreness there, that means you’ve been working muscles that don’t normally get a workout.
Are you starting to see some of the benefit of crawling as an exercise? You can work muscle groups that may often go completely neglected. Those muscles can get a workout that is sorely needed, and this gives you better overall physicality, better health, and improved strength. It makes you less likely to suffer from a muscle injury or muscle soreness as well.
Crawling works a lot of muscles at once. It’s not just working ones that might hardly get used. It works a lot of the ones that you use every day, making it a pretty great full body exercise.
Don’t think you’re targeting just muscles that you almost never use when you crawl. It’s very helpful for building up arm and leg strength as well as working other areas of the body.
Relieves Stiffness
A lot of us lead very sedentary lifestyles. We tend to spend a lot of the day sitting down in chairs and doing very little activity. This can really do a lot of damage to our joints. It can make them feel tired, sore, and painful. Those joints that don’t get much use may become stiff over time, which is why exercising is so important for people who have desk jobs or otherwise live mostly sedentary lifestyles.
If you’re not using your joints, they will become weak and it’ll be tough to use them properly. They will lose their stability and their mobility, and many times your body will end up relying on other muscles to help support those stiff and tired joints.
What crawling does is work a lot of joints at once. It works knee and shoulder joints that may not get much of a workout during the day for most people. It helps to improve stability and to boost your mobility. When you crawl, you will be placing the weight of gravity on your joints, compressing them slightly. This should not be dangerous to your joints, but it puts some extra pressure on them and ignites your muscles into activity.
As you work your muscles through crawling, you’ll improve your body’s ability to be flexible, agile and mobile.
You’ll be activating muscles that might not be activated very often otherwise and helping them to work more competently. You’ll be loosening up your joints to relieve stiffness and to help avoid stiffness in the future.
Does Crawling Work Your Core Muscles
Your core is made up of your trunk, shoulders, hips and how they all work together. When you do an exercise like floor crawling, your core will be engaged, and all these core muscles will have to work together to complete the actions. Your shoulders are engaged every time your hands touch the floor and some pressure is placed on them. The hips have to engage as well whenever your knees are moving.
What your core does as you crawl is ensure that energy is moved throughout the body where it needs to be in a continuous supply and in a smooth transition of power.
If you have poor core stability, you’ll probably have some difficulty crawling at first. You may notice that your hips are wiggling a lot as you crawl and that your stability is off. You may feel kind of wobbly at first. All of this should improve over time, unless there’s some underlying health condition.
Building up your core improves your balance, posture, movement, and overall strength. Crawling is a safe, low impact way to build up your core and improve all the aspects of your body’s health that correlate to the core.
Is Crawling a Good Exercise for Me
I want to say not everyone can benefit from all the advantages crawling has to offer, but it’s really not an exercise for everybody. If you really do struggle with mobility and you have severe joint issues, crawling might not be something you should incorporate into your exercise regimen.
If you have health concerns about how difficult this exercise will be for you and how it may affect your medical conditions, you should talk to your doctor or personal trainer before trying crawling as an exercise.
For everyone else, I highly recommend crawling, and I think it’s a simple and effective way to provide benefits to a lot of your body. It does more than just build muscle. It helps to improve your confidence, reduce soreness and stiffness, and work areas of the body that might not be worked as much as they ought to be.
You can target those parts of your body that are often overlooked or underserved. Give crawling a try and see how it works for you.
My name is Ellis Francis and I have been a personal fitness trainer, sports nutritionalist and health and fitness advisor for over 25 years. I am the lead health and fitness advisor at https://awellnessbody.com.
