What Are the Four Stages of Motor Control?

Stages of muscle control mean many things to various people, from experts in child development to gerontologists. A specific reference to the four stages of motor control falls into the realm of sports chiropractic, physiotherapists and even neurologists. The four stages are mobility, stability, controlled mobility and skill -- each more advanced than the last.

Motor Control

• Motor control is the process by which your brain coordinates your body's muscular activity -- including not only which muscles should move, but which should rest. Failure of motor control can produce results from paralysis to parkinsonism. Success and failure can also be more subtle. Posture, for example, does not seem to be a conscious activity, but proper posture relies on muscle control. Faulty motor control can mean that some muscles compensate for others, leading to slouching, pain or weakness.

The Four Stages

• The first stage, mobility, means that you can accomplish the motion. It may help to imagine the process as rehabilitation from an injury -- a torn knee ligament, for example. The first thing to do is gain mobility, the ability to flex your knee. Stability is the second stage, in which the muscle group -- here, the knee -- can withstand stress without failing. With respect to the knee, that could mean bearing body weight. Controlled mobility comes next, and that is the ability to make the knee do what it should, in this case walking. Finally, in the skill stage, the knee gets better at its task, and walking can become running.

  You can imagine the process without an injury now. If you are learning how to make a basketball free throw, for instance, in stage one, our muscles "learn" how to launch the ball toward the net. As our muscles become stronger and more stable you can throw the ball harder and farther. Stage three helps you focus your aim as you begin to control the fine movements that make the difference between a goal and a miss. Lastly, your skill improves and percentage of success rises.

Motor Skill Learning

• Motor-skill learning is training to improve at a task such as riding a bicycle, picking apples or hurling a javelin. In this sense, training can mean repeating the motion. Andreas R. Luft and Manuel M. Buitrago, in their paper "Stages of Motor Skill Learning" state that studies have shown that motor-skill learning, or muscle memory, produces changes in and is learned by the brain, not the muscles.

Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation

• Proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation, PNF, is a program of stretching that attempts to train specific muscle groups to execute sequences of movement -- increasing strength and flexibility. Physiotherapist Gudrun Hoelper puts the four stages into practice by using them to pinpoint and work on "superficial disorders of mobility and stability." Once the therapist identifies the stages that need work, he designs a personalized training program.