Over the last I’d say 12-18 months, one of the biggest impact/change/addition to my thinking of training is the tri-planar movement approach that I have learned from Todd Wright and T4TG.Without a lot of song and dance, here’s why I think the 87.5% of the system that I use works and has had so much traction in the movement, medball, and metabolic training that I now believe in and use for myself and for others. Notice I don’t believe in everything. I think there’s some pieces that just go too far in terms of duplicating inefficient movement in training just because it happens in “function” or real-life daily or athletic situations. I think that’s a huge mistake.

So there is a strong lesson that always prevails that we can accept or reject bits and pieces of excellent messages and still strongly honor the overall intent. There’s some level of backhandedness to this line of thought, but the fact of the matter is that I was incredibly moved by the learning and acceptance of what I was shown. The T4TG mentorship in Austin is something everyone should attend.



1. The stuff is downright athletic.
The very first time I was coached in the matrix patterns, I was in Austin for a Physical Medicine conference, and I was training in khakis and a polo shirt. The line I remember the most was Todd saying, “Charlie moves well for a big guy.” Add that to the list of the many things Todd is correct about. I do move well…………in my lower half at least.
Another line that I remember the most was at one point when I stopped or finished one of the drills. I stood like Sonic the Hedgehog for a moment, and I was like, “This is teaching athleticism.”


I felt the instructions with built in progressions that demanded the body to move athletically. I think most of us in some way would say you can’t really teach athleticism. I’m sure there’s pieces that we can all modulate, but at some point, there are physical gifts that make some of use better than others. I really think drilling this style of movement training can fill in some blanks. Drilling, like mindless repetitions, that also drives other pieces of the puzzle like mobility and stability and joint centration.
I see and feel real life positions that I think we are always caught in during movement; we just don’t rep them out or think about them all the time.
I just think if there is a way to somehow teach something like TO jumping backwards off 1 foot and catching a pass with 1 hand reaching 2 feet behind his body, this is it. If there is a way to teach stability outside of neutral of the mobile ankles, I think this is it.

2. It drives the Joint by Joint.
Due in no small part to watching the magic of DNS right in front of my face for the last few years, I would say we do not have body parts. We have a body.
We do not have body systems. We have a body.
Everything is connected. Physiological body systems are all interconnected, and even the slightest lack of integrity in any one joint can affect the nervous system at rest and the musculoskeletal system during movement. It all matters, all the time, whether we feel it or not. I think it all tracks back to the Autonomic Nervous System and measures of preparedness or recovery.
So when coached appropriately and not allowing huge momentum to take us out of the ideal joint positions of centration, these T4TG methods of movement all drive the joint by joint via the whole body’s linkage and patterns.
The more creative the variables are managed the more unique interactions all of the joints can sustain.
Now make no mistake about it. You can coach this stuff with momentum and loads that take your body into awful, terribly flexed, rotated, and sheared positions. This is a mistake.
What holds gravity to me is that when you develop deeper excursions of the ankles, hips, t-spine, and shoulders, the core will stabilize reflexively and allow for free and stable movement. The choices you make can drive the joint by joint for more mobility, stability, or more performance qualities. It just depends on you coach it. If you coach through the biomechanical stiffness that the Joint by Joint champions, you are feeding the entire body very valuable proprioception, and you’ll be doing in all 3 planes and with literally infinite combinations.
Forcing reactions of muscles is a very authentic approach to developing and harnessing movement. This approach gets that done with rehab and training goals.

3. Crossing midline
Good, bad, or indifferent, this triplanar approach to training has gotten a lot of traction over the last few decades, and many folks swear by it.
Well aside from the above 2 tenets above that lend to results, I think there is a more abstract tenet that is an enormous piece to success with these moves. Many of the movements in the frontal and transverse planes involve the arm or leg crossing midline, which has a far more powerful impact than the athleticism it demonstrates or its potential biomechanical integrity.
Please consider that upon birth, we actually have 2 separate brains, a right brain and left brain. The corpus collosum, in a lay way, is the bundle neural fibers that connect the right and left brains. We know that many nerve tracts cross in different parts of the brain or the spinal cord. Sometimes control from or injury to one side affects the other side. This neural bundle, the corpus collosum, does not fully develop and transmit signals until around 6 weeks of age. Until that point, we actually have 2 brains.
So what does all this have to do with crossing our legs in skipping sideways in a circle?

Well, for the same reason the Diagonal patterns of the PNF methods yield rehabilitation and corrective goals, when we cross a limb, I think the brain “lights up” if you will. Positive feedforward neural flow streams across the corpus collosum, and motor patterns are regained, improved, or reinforced. There is a real reason why movement improves, and people feel better with the atypical sagittal and transverse plane patterns. That reason is that we are using more mature or lesser used motor units, ones that cross the corpus collosum, ones that tell our brain that we should continue to move like that. The brain responds with what I believe to be decreased sympathetic or protective tone, and we move freely.
This is how some of PNF works; it’s part of why Indian Clubs work; it’s why correctly performed chops and lifts work; it’s why Turkish Getups work. Crossing midline is a powerful neurological tool, and moving often with this approach I think has wild neural uptake and benefit.

4. Foot positions
Part of the messages that I’ve talked about in the past such as the Core Pendulum Theory and Joint Centration have a common foundation of appreciation. That foundation is the mechanoreceptors that lie in and around joints in muscles, tendons, ligaments, capsules, etc. are constantly having conversations with the brain. It’s like a monster GPS system that is always pinging back to the satellite non-stop. The satellite, the brain, then yields or pushes tone through the muscles of the body and grades levels of centration.
Well, each foot has 26 bones that are often bound into compensated, constricted, or even locked positions through all of our daily and athletic acitivies. When we can add positive input, good stresses of mobility and stability as referenced by the Joint by Joint, I think, similar to crossing midline, there is a wealth of neurological uptake.
When we move sideways, we add different exteroceptive input to the lateral heel, the 5th metatarsal, the cuboid. There is a new and different demand to stabilize the midfoot, especially if we are managing these movements in an unsupported shoe or barefoot. If the challenges are healthy, the relative slack and tension of the capsules and long flexor tendons not only drive athletic movement and biomechanics, but also feed the brain “candy” in terms of proprioceptive input.
Aside from the neural mechanism, the different transient positions of the foot will demand similarly unique transient patterns all the way through the body. I see this as ideal for open-loop movement training, static and dynamic, but there is a fine line that should not be crossed into strength training.  Don’t put the foot or any part of the body in dumb positions with load.
With this mechanical approach also comes risk of form closure/bony approximation for stability through the foot which then degenerates biomechancis, and reverses neural flow to high tone for protection and rejection. So there’s a ton of good things that moving in multi-planes can do for the foot, but it’s not a guarantee that it’s right most ideal input, and just bouncing around like a jumping bean may not be the best answer for movement skills.

5. Metabolic Demands
My recent thinking of cardiovascular (probably not even the best word to describe it) training or conditioning really relies a lot on heart rate. Testing and then programming intensities that meet the appropriate heart rate demands forces proper variables including exercise selection. My article which was moved by reading Joel Jamieson’s book gives plenty of examples, but now with the literally infinite options that the T4TG program provides, you have even more.
Heart rate may not only graded by the movement and intensity, but also the mental challenge to organize the movement. That also is clearly a stress that has to be integrated. We can now perhaps get a higher or lower heart rate response with repetitive movement by asking for an atypical pattern or combining the different movements of the limbs or implements.
Creating that organization can be stressful and adapted for in a general way. There are going to be situations where we get more with less, and there will be situations where we can continue to push good movement variability as long as the skills being chosen are centrally located in the individual’s “movement box.” This may be a place where we get better at what we’re good at, and corrective stuff or warmup is where we get better at what we’re not good at.

6. Principle-Based Categories
The principles of moving in 3 planes can be applied to many of the stages of a functionally dense program. Legit strength training is not one of them. I almost think of the applications lending more towards specific and general stiffness changes and open-loop training such as locomotion, med ball throws, and movement- or landing-based plyometrics.
Static Mobility – Multi-planar positions using the floor to fix the lower half, and a bar or cage to fix the upper half. The off-arm, the neck, or breathing can be used to challenge the position. This is using an artificial fixed point to drive mobility.

Dynamic Mobility – One half is fixed, and the other half is moving through a plane.
General Warmup – Up and down, side to side, circles, squares, 8′s, T’s, game-specific patterning in all the different moves of walking, shuffling, skipping, and running
Airborne – All the combinations of squatting (off 2, land on 2), hopping (off 1, land on same), leaping (off 1, land on the other), jopping (off 1 or 2, landing on 2 or 1), combination of hurdles and boxes
Medball – Throwing with steps, lunges, airborne movements, and all combinations there of

7. It fits into the training system
In a full program of managing ideal human movement, improving specific or special patterns, and pushing general horsepower, using what many of us have learned from Todd, there is huge mileage in the 2nd category. There is also a very useful bridge between the general movements that are the basis for everything that comes above it. Looking at complex and dynamic or multi-planar movements without a general more static and ground-based appraisal is a terrible mistake because errors in the more mature patterns may or may not be from deficient base.
But this doesn’t devalue the huge money that is in training these movements in the full program. We have useful part to whole replication of terminal movements, enormous movement variability, neurological inputs, and it’s just straight fun.

Fun is fun.
Effective is effective.
Form is everything.
This is all why I think it works.

If you had asked me about a year or so ago what my thoughts were on cardio, I would have told you most of the the following…….
1) Just go hard, and you’ll be fine.
I would have gone on to say I’m sure there is a lot more to it than that, but as long as you push yourself, you’ll be fine.
2) Always intervals.
Look at the big cats.  They run and stop.  They run some more and stop.  It’s not about max HR.  It’s about HRV, how fast you can get your HR back down to resting when you rest.  Intervals are how you should train.
3) You can still go long distances and do intervals.
If you insist on running 5 miles, how about you show me 2 intervals of 14 minute 2.5 miles.  Just give me a rest during each of them and tell me which one was harder.
4)  Train slow, be slow.
Enough said.
This Strengthcoach.com article by Dr. Mark Smith sums it all up.

So to say any of these are wildly off base or that I’ve done a 180 on anything would not be correct.
However, from a combination from recently reading Joel Jamieson’s Ultimate MMA Conditioning, spending a day with David Tenney in Seattle, nad always communicating with Dr. Michael Martino, who has about as good a cardio as anyone 40+ not named Randy Couture, I feel a lot better and refined about some of the how’s and why’s to cardio training.

The following are some of the turns in what I’ve learned and a little bit of exposure/explanation from the 3 folks above that are a lot smarter than me in terms of cardio.

I got there over a year ago with 1-4) above, and I did it with nutrition guided by Thomas Phillips’ Ultimate Transformation Challenge.  Honestly, I got on board simply because I thought I was going to have shoulder surgery, and I was trying to get into the best shape of my life.  Low and behold, 4 months later there was no surgery.  I used pretty much exclusively ropes, sprints, prowler, and sled for my HIIT.
The program that Tom has can be dialed up or down in levels of specificity, but for the key is HIIT and coupling it with different nutrition plans on the day(s) you go hard for hormone optimization.
The point is that I wasn’t particularly specific in my intervals or even HR, and I got the job done.  The progression was the poster child for HIIT being ideal for fat loss.

Overall, I haven’t really hasn’t changed my thought process, but keep in mind that my primary athletic endeavor is powerlifting where the capacities of the different metabolic systems, are not part of my regular challenges.  I really didn’t need to become more specific because my goals were not particular specific or even really movement or performance-based.
Also during my times in basketball, I was always skewed towards movement and strength rather than speed and endurance.  They were already maximally explosive, at least most players, and I felt that cardio was drawn out of the practices during the season.  In rehabbing folks, cardio would typically take a back seat to pain and movement or at least not warrant specific programming when restoring the body was the priority.
But when I moved on to the Marine Corps, I recognized that the basics probably weren’t going to be good enough, but I still didn’t really have a recipe for more than short-order cook work.  I needed to figure some things out.

Taking in all of the limiting factors in developing a program really forced me to become more cerebral and just flat out get smarter at training for cardio.  And all the while keeping in mind that ALL training is cardio at some level.  Everything from foam rolling to huge doubles with 5 wheels on your back all fit into “metabolic” factors.  Everything is cardio when it comes down to it.  It’s just which system dominates the activity of choice, and how do you bundle them together.  Some situations are much easier than others depending on the schedule and definable events.

Here’s what I’ve learned…………..

Aerobic Training
The aerobic system is very important.  Plenty of people are going to read that, and be like, “Oh, I’ve been saying that the whole time.”
Well I was not saying it the whole time, and being a powerlifter and HIIT guy as well as a believer in the Gibala study, I probably really did push the aerobic piece to the side.
So I don’t think I was totally wrong.  If you are looking to be healthy, lose weight, and in a sport that is relatively one and done, the stuff I used in my training was the answer.  And using speed of recovery of HR in terms of HRV is clearly the best way to measure out intervals.
But in appreciating the message from Joel, Martino, and David Tenney, the expression of the HRV, the rest of the interval, is a function of the aerobic system, not anaerobic.  You can’t get better at the recovery part quickly without having a great aerobic piece.  That aerobic piece comes from when you’re breathing hard in the off interval, trying to use oxygen to refuel the system.  And when you are in an activity or sport that requires longer duration of action and shorter to no rest periods, there is more to it that just quick bursts.  Just like we have slow and fast strength, we can also have slow and fast cardio.
Using me as an example, particularly before training for the RKC, using some of Joel’s terminologies in his book, I would have great Lactic Power, but very poor Lactic Capacity.  I can go hard for a few intervals before I lose power performance second to limited recovery.
So in order to improve my anaerobic tolerance, to do more intervals, or harder intervals, or take less time to recovery, I would need a better aerobic system.
And training the aerobic system uses a different complement of exercises that keep the HR to lower levels.  Higher HR likely shifts to the lactic and alactic systems.
But with the different exercises and HR, I don’t think there is a dismissal of intervals.  The intervals are just longer.  The key is continuous training to train the aerobic system, but still not “going out for a run.”  If you can go 10 miles in under 60 minutes, then you are in some nice condition, and you should be working other systems.  It’s not go slow and long.  It’s still not LSD; it’s still intervals simply at a different capacity.
So the answer that I employed at MARSOC was 2x/week HIIT using balls out bodyweight and KB training progressing from 30/45, 30/30, 30/20, and 20/10 and then 2x/week of reps of 400s and 800s getting down to 1:1 and 25yd shuttles starting @ 1000 yds progressing down to 300 for testing.
The keys for me were 1) long-chain movements that disallow plodding and short ranges, 2) 2 weekly efforts of lactic capacity, and 3) 2 weekly efforts of lactic power.  These guys already proved on a regular basis that they can go out and run a marathon with a full kit.  They had some level of the “aerobic base” in slow efforts like long runs.
So when I talk about this kind of stuff with Dr. Martino, he’s like duh, but as a PhD in this stuff AND a trainer of others and himself, he’s had this put together for some time.  The biggest piece that you get from the longer or more continuous intervals is the vascular changes at the celluar level that don’t occur during anaerobic training.

Anaerobic Training
Something that clicked enormously for me was when I understood what David Tenney meant when he said you really don’t want glycolysis (or glycogenolysis) during “glycolytic” training.
It’s obviously an oxymoron, but I think the key is the appreciation that aerobic efficiency pushes the anaerobic threshold to the right.  This allows for greater duration and/or intensity before anaerobic systems dominate.  The less we have to rely on the anaerobic system, the less demand for recovery, yielding a quicker return to baseline and ready to go again.  There will be less of a refractory period, better HRV, when the threshold is pushed right.
I think the basic premise is that the best way to improve recovery in anaerobic-style intervals that train lactic capacity is through showing up for those intervals with a very well trained aerobic capacity.  And again, you get that with different kinds of intervals.

Joel’s book has specific recommendations and even further breakdowns of each system (aerobic, lactic, and alactic).  They apply to a typical MMA training schedule, but just appreciating the specific differences in targeting a weak link allows the information to translate to other sports.  This book was the kicker for me to appreciate how to map things out in terms of cardio.
What I’m actually really struggling with is separating the metabolic demands of the movement and strength training with the goals of the cardiovascular training for each workout.  They can’t be separated, and I think if they’re antagonistic, the end product is cheapened.  I know landscapes and practical limiting factors will prevail, but I do think you need to know all the rules before you start to break the rules.

Breathing
Ever since I became exposed to DNS, breathing has been on the forefront of how I think about everything from getting rid of pain to lifting very heavy things and putting them down.
But well before that, as a powerlifter, learning to hold your breath and push the belly out brought about great lifts.  And being out of breath after some type of event meant that the activity you just did had to be anaerobic.
When you look at folks that are supposed to be in great condition, look at how they breath when they are “out of breath.”  When you see the folks that breath through their belly, you’ll see someone with more gas in the tank.  When you see someone breathing up high with their shoulders and in a labored position, that person is going to need some minutes before he delivers again.
The breathing has a whole host of inputs in terms of spinal stability and the autonomic nervous system, and it is no coincidence that this trainable ability to breath as a skill pushes overall capacity.  I suspect it’s a combination of pushing the threshold to the right and managing the governor the entire neuromuscular system.  I think chemo- and baroreception in an environment of improved removal of CO2 is somewhere in the scientific explanation, but that’s something for Martino to study.
Practical example: RKC Snatch Test
Synchronizing the breathing technique on each rep leaves you fatigued, but not mortally gassed.  I’ve seen studs curl up on the floor gasping for air after piss poor 70+ reps and then work on breathing, which begets technique, and nail the 100.  In my case, someone who is not to be confused with incredible lactic capacity, I have never walked away from the test like I was going to die, but I have felt like that after 60 some reps early on in my training when I was leaning on poor form and longer rests to catch my breath.  I found when you nail the breath the whole way, you don’t really need to recover.  You just go.
The more autonomous this breathing pattern becomes, I think all 3 systems are pushed to the right.

The Omegawave
I would really like to use the Omegawave.  If I had enough of some kind of data that could show a head coach that maybe a bench guy should get 32 minutes on a given night, or if a Marine should feel good about a workout that doesn’t leave them thrashed, then that’s something that could make my job better.
The Omegawave measures for a whole mess of things, Heart Rate Variability being just one of them.  I won’t dare give it justice to try to explain because bottom line, I’m not even sure even the most experienced users that I’ve encountered know how every piece is measured or how the device reads the body and spits back data.  What I am confident of is that the information I am hearing from folks like David and Joel is that this thing works.
What leaves me sold is less about how the machine works, but that I think the Omegawave is measuring an expression of the Autonomic nervous system, which is exactly the same thing that the DNS tests measure, and what I believe the the FMS and SFMA to measuring.
For each of the profiles Tim Vagen and I looked at on David’s computers in Seattle that demonstrated injury when a player kept up intensity despite poor Omegawave profiles, there was an injury.  David didn’t have an FMS on every single player, but he was very clear that this player “is always tight,” and this player “doesn’t move well.”
The Omegawave is like a report card on the programming you’re doing, and it allows you to change on the fly if you need to go to Plan B.  The problem is that the athlete doesn’t always feel sympathetic or parasympathetic despite measuring in the red.
So even the best laid out aerobic-anaerobic stuff from above along with the strength and speed training can have a tool to check against them.
And it seems to me that it is a tool that measures the same expressions, just through a different viewer.  Recovery can always be manipulated by your programming, but when you can keep a temporal tab on it, it’s worth the time to measure it.
Options to do this include the Omegawave, %max HR during a given training intensity, simpler measures of HRV, testing out for >90% lifts on a Tendo or other similar device, lunge matrix testing, the RKC Snatch Test, and the FMS w/HR measures.  Obviously some of these tests apply more to a daily basis and others to a 3-6 time frame.

In summary………..
1) Performing short bursts of HIIT all the time will help you lose fat and be healthy, but it may leave quick recovery with preserved power output during sport-based time frames.
2) Improving the aerobic system will push the effectiveness of anaerobic training.  These are intervals of movements that support longer time and lower heart rate.  This is not LSD training.
3) Breathing diaphragmatically will support movement/tone, strength, cardio, and long-chain technique.
4) Measuring for recovery can tell you when it’s really time for Plan B.

The talk on Trying to Define the Core this summer has really been all about how “the core” can have so many different definitions partly based on what is the expertise of the individual looking at the system.  Regardless of the angle you look, all measures of training and recovery, inputs and outputs, track back to the autonomic nervous system.
I think these cardiovascular training methods have gravity to me because it’s just looking through a different pair of glasses at the same things I already value in putting together the pieces of Training and Rehab.

Often in my training logs or through other discussions, I have referenced 3 1/2 month old breathing or Baby Breathing.
This is a developmental kinesiology progression that I have learned in the DNS methodology that usually begins the spinal stabilization process.  The methodology suggests similarly to others that stabilization in the sagittal plane should precede stability in other planes.

As Baby develops int the first few months, and the Joint by Joint begins to govern, the first fixed point of stability that Baby uses to establish purposeful movement is the Thoraco-Lumbar junction.  This is ideally T12-L1, but I would not be so presumptuous that there isn’t safe and successful variability among different folks’ anatomies.

Skipping some steps here, the T-L junction’s stability is probably easier to understand via the uprighting and vertical positions.  Consider anti-extension positions.  These include quadruped and plank challenges, any kneeling position, anything with 1 or 2 arms overhead, among others.  These are all positions where if we give in to gravity, the lower back will drop into extension.  Successful motor control of the movement or exercise will prevent extension.
This Steve Smith article on Mike Reinold’s site has some other brilliant pictures and the DNS background on this topic.

Keep in mind that stability is the control of a system in the presence of potential change.  The ideal is what we see in the stiff plank above, but one of the aberrant choices for stability is approximating lumbar vertebrae at key points.  This can lead to success at maintaining a position, but it can happen at a cost.  Decreasing joint space anywhere can lead to DJD, and in the lumbar spine, DDD as well.  Stability isn’t always a good thing if it is not gained from an efficient and active position.  ”Hanging” on passive restraint can garner stability.  However, it is not ideal for maximal force production/transmission or durability.

What makes the T-L junction maybe a little more critical is that there is ribcage attachment at this level.  Rotation @ this level pulls the rib cage superiorly effectively changing the puntum fixum of the diaphragm.  I believe the PRI folks would call this some alteration of the Zone of Apposition.  Dysfunction @ T12-L1 in terms of hyperextension yields both hip and t-spine dysfunction as the pelvis runs into the “open scissors” posture.  The anterior tilt of the pelvis and posterior tilt of the rib cage creates a visual of an open scissors in the lateral view.  You will really fold into Upper- and Lower-Crossed with a hinging @ this T-L junction.

So when pain or dysfunction sets in, the suggestion is that one of the brain’s first options to set off compensations is destabilizing the T-L junction.  It is not a conscious choice.  It is rather one that is mediated below our volitional control.  It is similar to when you have knee pain, and you simply can not put weight through the knee and foot no matter how hard you try.  Think of when you sleep wrong, and your neck is wry, until it releases, moving your head diagonally backwards is not something you can push through.  Bad posture is protective, and it is not something that sets in by our own choice of motor programming.  When pain hits the system, we have some fair research that muscles become inhibited, others become unreliably facilitated, and the motor program inherits somewhat of a virus and begins to do its own thing.  The program has good intentions: to protect or compensate against a threat in the system.  Locomotion and primary movement may be preserved in the short-term, but there is an enormous cost, not just at the spine.  When it is inherent that you achieve a skill through movement at the T-L junction, there’s a good chance the whole thing is shot.

Now back to the beginning.

When Baby is in its first few months, supine is the preferred position.  And before the legs are able to kick around or arms reach up for something, there has to be a fixed point of stability for which Baby can move around.  That first point of stability in Baby’s development in the supine position is the T-L junction.  So through the different methods that espouse the Neuro-Developmental patterns, this supine position is an early option for both painful and non-painful individuals.  As you will see, it is almost a regression from the Leg Lowering 1 and 2 corrections for ASLR and MSF.  Given the reaching effects of the T-L junction, this supine stability position to establish intra-abdominal pressure can be be used to correct many postures and movements.  Using this segment as the link is far less efficient as using the 5-6 chains of the lumbar spine as the link.

The position is fairly simple to execute and is probably similar to some yoga positions that have names like Long Bird or Supine Flamingo.
Start supine with the neck packed.  The line from the crown of the head should be parallel to the floor that you are laying on.

At the initial position, the arms can be loose or at the sides or driven into the mat to deepen or establish the centration of the scapulae.  This may allow the t-spine and neck to lengthen further, which allows for a more appropriate breath.  Establishing the appropriate breathing pattern is the ultimate goal of these positions as the breath in these NDT positions can trigger a release of tone and restore centration and stability.

Hands can touch as far as……

the floor, random (holokinetic) reaching  @ 3.5 months,
the groin or private area @ 4 months,
the feet @ 6 months, and
the feet into the mouth @ 7 months.
The furthering of the reach pulls the shoulders out of centration which gives Baby a reason to reset them back over the posterior ribcage.  It is a brilliant of example of what we know as RNT in the FM System.  We stabilize and learn to move based on having a reason.  The reason in this case are the urge to explore the sensory-rich regions of the body.  The flexion moment is met with upper quarter stability, and the T-L junction reacting to the floor allows for this occur.

The feet will contact……..

nothing @ 3 months,
big toes to each other @ 4 months,
medial edges to each other @ 5 months, and
via the soles to each other @ 6 months.
The feet progressions differ than the upper body in what the body is reacting to.  You can see that these progressions lead to a little more hip external rotation.  Slight hip external rotation is the centrated position of the hip.  With the appropriate muscle balance around the joint, the pelvis can set out of any anterior pelvic tilt and facilitate the breathing pattern.  You can grow mobility through the lower levels of breathing, or address the hips with manual therapy and come to these sagittal stability positions.