Before I ever met Warren Lamb, I recognized that movement occurs in patterns. While the stream of everyday motion appears to be a turbulent jumble, there is an underlying pattern of change. My pattern is not like your pattern. Everyone’s movement pattern is a little different and consequently individually distinctive, like a fingerprint.
These individual patterns only become apparent over time. To capture an individual’s movement fingerprint requires patience, for the pattern emerges gradually. For this reason, the interview used to collect data for a Movement Pattern Analysis profile is lengthy, running close to two hours.
By now I have been making Movement Pattern Analysis profiles for 35 years. I am no longer a nervous beginner. Nevertheless, I still feel like a beginner at the start of each interview with each new person. It takes time to get used to the individual’s movement. What jumps out at me as a observer during the first moments of the interview seldom turns out to be the most prominent feature of the person’s movement style. I have had to learn to suspend judgment and to be patient.
Most adults have an adequate range of motion, meaning access to all the effort qualities and planes of motion. But some of these kinds of movements occur more frequently than others. This is the key to individual variation. It takes time to accurately discern the relative frequency of different movements. I am seldom able to detect redundancy — the steady recurrence of certain kinds of motions and the relative absence of others — until I have been observing an individual for at least 90 minutes.
Establishing principles of good practice is part of Lamb’s legacy to the movement analysis community. One principle I would like to see more widely adopted is the following: generalizations about an individual’s character should be based upon an adequate sample of movement behavior. Enough said.