Train Like a Toddler: Rediscover Natural Movement

Reclaiming Movement: Why Adult Bodies Need Toddler Instincts

What if your body’s most powerful training tools were already hardwired into your nervous system—just buried under decades of adulting?

We spend years learning to move like humans—crawling, climbing, squatting, rolling. And then, strangely, we spend our adulthood trying to move like machines—linear reps, rigid tempos, standardized form. Somewhere along the way, we traded curiosity for compliance. We stopped playing.

But the patterns we learned as toddlers? They never left. And reawakening them might be one of the smartest things you can do for mobility, coordination, and long-term movement health.

The adult body isn’t broken because of age—it’s often under-stimulated, over-braced, and lacking movement variety. Crawling, skipping, rolling, twisting—these primal movements stimulate parts of the brain and body that strength training and cardio often neglect. And bringing them back isn’t regression. It’s restoration.

Let’s break down why these patterns matter, what they activate, and how to bring them back into grown-up training without sacrificing challenge or purpose.

Crawling isn’t just cute. It’s foundational. For a baby, crawling is the first true full-body coordination challenge. For an adult, it’s a reset for posture, gait, and core engagement. It activates cross-body coordination—right hand with left knee—reinforcing communication between the brain’s hemispheres. Crawling also improves scapular control, pelvic stability, deep core activation, and shoulder-to-hip mobility.

In athletic performance, crawling helps reintegrate gait mechanics that have been dulled by too much sitting and too many isolated movements. It wakes up reflexive strength—the kind of real-world stability you don’t have to think about. Start with basic quadruped crawls, then move to bear crawls, lateral crawls, and crawling ladders. Add tempo changes. Introduce load. Turn it into both a movement screen and a conditioning tool.

Skipping and galloping reintroduce rhythm, bounce, and unilateral control. These are elastic movements, powered by coordination and timing. And they feel good—because they tap into something fundamentally joyful about movement.

Adults spend so much time bracing and stabilizing that we lose our ability to spring. Skipping restores it. It teaches pronation and supination through the feet, pelvic rhythm, arm-leg coordination, and responsive core tension. These aren’t “light cardio drills.” They’re neurological tune-ups.

Even galloping, often overlooked, trains asymmetry—where one side leads and the other reacts. This is critical for building adaptability in lateral movement, change of direction, and sports agility. Skipping and galloping can be used in warm-ups, agility circuits, or even conditioning blocks. They’re excellent for resetting between strength sets, waking up the nervous system, and keeping training lighthearted and mentally fresh.

Then there’s rolling—the anti-stiffness movement. Toddlers roll to explore space, to fall safely, to twist and bend in all directions. Adults, on the other hand, often lose thoracic mobility and spinal articulation. We become stiff in the mid-back, overly braced in the low back, and disconnected from the ground. Rolling brings us back.

Rolling improves proprioception, spatial awareness, and breath integration. It stimulates the vestibular system—our sense of balance—and helps re-pattern the spine’s ability to move segment by segment. You can start with baby rolls (supine to prone), side rolls, log rolls, or progress to floor-based flows that spiral the body in and out of positions. This isn’t about choreography—it’s about connection.

So why does any of this matter?

Because adults are stuck. We’ve been taught that movement must look serious to be valid. That play is childish. That fun doesn’t count. But from a neurological, hormonal, and biomechanical standpoint, play-based movement is some of the most potent training you can do.

When movement feels novel, your brain lights up. You retain motor patterns better. You move more freely. You recover faster—not just physically, but emotionally. Movement becomes a form of expression, not just exertion.

And it has staying power. Play is sticky. People don’t burn out from workouts that feel joyful. They burn out from rigid programs that disconnect them from their bodies.

So what does this look like in real life?

• Warm up with bear crawls, shoulder rolls, or ground-to-stand transitions

• Use skipping drills as part of dynamic warm-ups or sprint primers

• Program agility ladders, partner mirroring games, or ball-based reflex work

• Introduce movement puzzles: “get from the floor to standing using 5 points of contact”

• Cue rolling into transitions between sets or during mobility cooldowns

• Use open-ended movement play as conditioning: “Move like an animal for 30 seconds”

If you’re a coach, this isn’t about making workouts less serious—it’s about making them more complete. If you’re training solo, think of this as unlocking parts of yourself that traditional training forgot to invite in.

This is how toddlers move—not because they’re trying to improve their mobility scores or increase glute engagement, but because they’re learning, responding, and exploring in real time.

And what if that’s what your body needs, too?

You’re not moving backward. You’re returning to the foundation you built long ago—before the reps, the plans, and the programs. When movement wasn’t measured. It was just yours.

^{Written by: L.R. Marshall}