Crawl, walk, run. The progressive method for becoming better at anything. This is used throughout our lives from childhood to adulthood to develop our skills, knowledge, and capability in whatever it is we are trying to do. It is also something that many of us gloss over in our sport-specific strength and speed training. By skipping past this slow development process, we ultimately hinder ourselves from achieving the level of performance we wish to achieve.

 

A few months after you are first born, your only method of movement is to crawl. It’s an innate feature that no parent really has to teach you. As you continuously practice this crawling movement, you are able to crawl faster, further, and with more balance. At some point, you start to notice others around you walking on two feet rather than crawling on the ground. Like how you copied the sounds of those around you when you were prompted to blurt out your first words of, “Mama” or  “Papa”, and like how you copied the movements of those around you by waving your hand back at others waving at you, you eventually figure out that crawling isn’t the only way to get from point A to point B. So now, you try to walk.

 

The first few times don’t go as planned. You likely fell over multiple times but each time you try, you get better at maintaining your balance. This goes on for weeks, maybe months, until one day, you spring up on your own and start walking. The first time you walk is the same as the first time you crawled. You maintain it for a short amount of time then eventually fall over. You keep practicing until after a few months you are able to freely navigate on your own with much greater balance. 

 

You keep walking until walking isn’t fast enough for you. Now, it’s time to start running. This doesn’t work out at first. You fall over like you did when you first stood up and walked. As you keep trying to run, eventually you are able to maintain the pace, pick up your speed, and learn how to not fall over. 

 

Many of us don’t consider the importance of our slow progression from crawling to walking to running. Though, if as newborn babies we were to attempt to sprint across the crib rather than crawl, our movement development would be derailed and delayed due to the excess difficulty of our chosen starter movement. 

 

“Crawl, Walk, Run” is used throughout our lives to build us up. When you are first learning a language you don’t start by trying to interpret foreign films and novels. You start by first learning a few words, then short phrases, and eventually short paragraphs. On the first day of any class, you wouldn’t start by taking the final exam. You start by learning the basics and get through several quizzes and homework to eventually accumulate all that you’ve learned by the end of the course for one last test.

 

Where many athletes get their training wrong is that they attempt to run before they’ve learned to crawl (figuratively speaking). In this social media era, it could be someone finding a cool exercise or plyometric that professional athletes are doing online and adding the exercise to their own training regimen without any knowledge of how to actually perform the exercise. It could be someone increasing their back squat max from 200 lbs to 300 lbs over the course of a week while never having correctly done a single squat.

 

Anything we do in our training should translate to our performance. Otherwise, it is wasted time. Our training is meant to develop and hone our strength and skill. By missing steps and immediately doing high-level plyometrics or lifting weights we aren’t capable of lifting with correct form, we not only risk injury but also limit the potential of growth we’ll get from our training.

 

All young athletes see elite athletes performing highly technical lifts and movements but don’t consider the amount of training it took those professional athletes to develop their movement skills or the years spent enduring various strength programs to lift such high loads. The reason professional athletes get so much out of their training is because of their more disciplined and precise progressions from crawling to walking to running in every facet of their training. Rather than skipping to the final stage, most athletes will get more out of staying on level one until they are ready for level two and so on. If trying to increase a max lift, rather than lifting at your max intensity each week, this could instead be lifting 70% of your current max week 1 and progressing over the course of multiple weeks to higher intensities until you are finally lifting above your max weight. If trying to jump higher, rather than jumping as high as you can every single day, this could be a progression from low-intensity plyometrics like shorts hops and depth drops to higher-intensity plyometrics such as depth jumps and penultimate-step jumps when you are ready and capable to perform them.

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When crafting a program for yourself or another athlete, it is important to recognize the end goal (increased force production, more efficient energy expenditure, decreased run times, etc.) and how, with the appropriate coaching and progression of exercises over the span of weeks or months, you will get there. When trying to improve or accomplish anything, recognize the end goal and reverse-engineer each step you’ll need to get past to reach that ultimate objective.

 

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“Visualizing the process — breaking a big goal down into the steps

needed to achieve it — helps engage

the strategic thinking you need to plan for and

achieve extraordinary results.”

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Gary Keller, The One Thing