Skill Acquisition Tests: Backwards Running&Bear Crawls?

So i met up with a friend of mine and we got into a discussion about motor learning and i brought up something that Coach Sommer talked about at the Gymbodies course in May of last year. He said something peculiar (and i hope i'm paraphrasing correctly). He said that when he screens young kids to see if they have the basic motor competency to learn future skills he has found two tests to correlate the most--the bear crawl and the backwards run. If they can do those things, they have the capacity to learn higher level skills. Anybody have any thoughts as to why? 

 

 Curious,

 

 Charlie

Probably because are elementary movements that need to coordinate upper and lower body, especially the backward run is undervalued. People who manifest the necessity to look backward or sideward to have some spatial reference usually have less ability to move freely over the space. The ability to understand where you are basing up your velocity, the distance that you can cover with a feet etc it's something innate.also for the bear crawl you can ask to change the type of motion as right leg coordinated with right arm, or ask to,coordinate the opposite body parts...the changing from one configuration to others is a symptom of good ability to mind changes during a skill and adapt over non natural patterns. This is a sign of synaptic plasticity that for definition is the only solution to adapt to new and unknown movements.

Extremely well put Alex!