Crawling Like a Baby

My son is working through a therapy called, "Neurological Reorganization."  When I was in elementary school, the whole school did some of the same stuff, and the program had been around since the 1940s.  To get him to be more motivated, I did everything with him, including lying on my belly on the kitchen floor, and crawling.  We began the program when I'd been having a lot of low back pain, and even rolling over in bed was agony.  Getting down on my front on the kitchen floor looked like a huge sacrifice of my dignity, as well as a lot more pain.  For the first week, my knees and elbows grew bruises and (when I crawled on the carpet) blisters.  Then I got smarter, and put on knee and elbow pads.

One morning found myself without back pain - and rejoiced that I had found something I could do with my son that helped me out, as well.  We laughed at one another, listened to goofy CDs of Bill Cosby, Terry Foy, and others, and played games of hiding small cat toys around the house.  I felt my waistline beginning to come back into the shape I remembered fondly from photographs...but had not seen for four or five years.

As we crawled on the wooden floor of the kitchen, I thought about the motions my body made, and how the core muscles were being used to slide, lift and propel my body forward, but without much weight resting on my spine.  The twisting of the torso and the alternating arm/leg movements were a decent workout, and I worked up a sweat.  If nothing else, it was 40 minutes of exercise I could get at home, while doing things with my child.  The mouse-eye perspective of my cabinets and floor gave me some inspiration to collect the pet fur and drips more often.

For about a week, our schedule seemed way too hectic for me to get my crawling in before breakfast, and with my 51-year-old body, I just don't want to lie on my tummy after eating.  One weekend vigorous gardening and the next Monday morning, I woke up with a sore back again.

I'm back at crawling again, even with my nearing-teen-age child asking me to not be in the same room, or not do my work-out at the same time he does.  (Sigh.  He's getting to THAT age.)  I miss a day now and then, but getting my old bones down on the floor looks a lot better after knowing what it does for me.  This core-body work-out needs no special equipment and you don't need to leave home.   For us, NR is now a family exercise.