Climbing and quadrupedal patterns . . .

video: 14 year old “sends” V15 , a 30 move roof climb in Hiei, Japan, called “Horizon”.

Look closely. In the video, a then 9 year old Ashima is climbing upside down, a roof climb, defying gravity’s push. Spin this picture 180 and she is crawling, finding points of “fixation” or “punctum fixum”. What is neat about climbing is that you can have one, two, three or four points of fixation, unlike walking (one or two points) and crawling (two, three or four points of fixation). The difference in climbing is that gravity is a bear, wearing you down, little by little. A deep similarity in climbing to any variety of crawling is that both involve pulling and pushing, compressing and extending over fixation points. Other common principles are those of fixation, stability, mobility and neurologic crawling patterns in order to progress. This is one of the reasons why I respect and love Jiu jitsu so much, rolling, tumbling, crawling, pulling and pushing, compressing and extending over fixation points.

“the present work showed that human QL (quadrupedal locomotion) may spontaneously occur in humans with an unimpaired brain, probably using the ancestral locomotor networks for the diagonal sequence preserved for about the last 400 million years.” - 2005 Shapiro and Raichien

In climbing there is suspicion of a shift in the central pattern generators because of the extraordinary demand by pseudo-quadrupedal gait climbing due to the demand on the upper limbs and their motorneuron pools to mobilize the organism up the mountain. We know these quadrupedal circuits exist. In 2005 Shapiro and Raichien wrote “the present work showed that human QL (quadrupedal locomotion) may spontaneously occur in humans with an unimpaired brain, probably using the ancestral locomotor networks for the diagonal sequence preserved for about the last 400 million years.”

read our whole piece here, on our site . . . .

https://www.thegaitguys.com/thedailyblog/gait-and-climbing-and-dns-part-2-introducing?fbclid=IwAR1RtpRJyVzpd5EZ-lv-2vvI76nBjcRcW-KZANN7_wFzAYENtscDPNLBwLU