Perhaps it would be wise to start at the end, although the hundred or so people who make up the staff of The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential in Philadelphia have devoted all of their lives to starting at the very beginning. Still, a reader, it has always seemed to me, has a right to know from the first couple of pages what a book is going to say.

This book will demonstrate that being physically superb is not limited to a few rare children who, by virtue of some special genetic potential, have within them the seeds of physical genius.

This book says that every child born has, by virtue of his splendid gift of the genes of Homo sapiens, the inherent right to be physically superb.

The right to be physically superb is a birthright.

This book is in praise of the miracle called human mobility, which has preoccupied our lives since 1940. Since that time, in days that were more often twenty hours long than eight, and in weeks that were more often seven days long than five, and in months that were more often joyous than despairing, and in years that were divided about equally between awe of the miracle of human mobility and maddening perplexity as to why it sometimes didn’t happen at all, we have studied mobility in every way we could find to study it.

We have studied human mobility in the most practical and hardnosed way in tens of thousands of newborns, infants, babies, tiny kids, children, adults, and old people, from its beginnings, in the form of truncal movements in utero; through crawling in infants; creeping in babies; early walking in tiny kids; skilled walking; running and jumping in children; superbly skilled and breathtakingly beautiful athletic prowess in young people; through all its astonishing day-by-day ability to carry us through life; to its ultimate decline and fall in old age.

We have studied mobility in a more theoretical way from its earliest origins, perhaps three-and-a-half billion years ago, when the two great kingdoms of living matter took their separate paths to become the growing but physically immobile Kingdom of the Plants and the Kingdom of the Animals, which could move from one place to another at will.

We have studied the beginnings of human mobility in Australopithecusafricanus, discovered by our own Professor Raymond Dart, whose announcement of that discovery in 1923 stunned the entire world of anthropology. When these ancient creatures rose to walk on their feet, and thus freed their hands from the mobility role long enough to pick up a club as a weapon in one hand and a twig as a primitive tool in the other, the way opened for modern humans to be born.

Today that ancient club has become the horrendous nuclear weapon, and that ancient tool, the twig, has become the computer and all the other creations of human beings.

Since that beginning, human beings have walked upright on the earth with their hands free to use tools—the use of which has made them brighter. With greater brightness, the human race has been able to invent even more complex tools to use to learn and understand even more about the earth, and thus was modern human intelligence born.

Today we stand as the most brilliant and fearsome of all of the Creator’s creatures and the only one of them that has the ability to destroy the planet upon which we live, or to make it, as a product of our intelligence, a place nearer to the Paradise of which we have always dreamed.

That towering intelligence had its origins in human mobility and in human manual function.

That human mobility and manual function have become more skillful, more beautiful, more complex and more awesome with each succeeding decade.

This is no mere theoretical construction. It is clearly visible in each succeeding presentation of the Olympic Games. In every Olympic year, old records of human mobility and manual function are broken and new world records are set.

It is worth noting that most of the present-day gold medal winners are noticeably younger than were the previous winners.

Where will it all end? Today Olympian gymnasts in their teens perform gymnastic feats that were literally not even dreamed of by Olympians of fifty years ago.

It will not end.

Inextricably tied to human mobility and manual function is human intelligence.

Indeed, as we shall see, mobility and manual intelligence are two of the six kinds of human intelligence.

What, then, have we learned about human beings in the thousands of people-years that the staff of The Institutes has devoted to understanding and improving human physical performance? We can state it in a single paragraph.

We are totally persuaded that: Every child born has, at the instant of birth, a higher potential intelligence than Leonardo da Vinci ever used.

That potential intelligence, inherent at birth, includes, and indeed begins with, physical function.

This book will tell all parents who wish to know how to teach their babies to be physically superb and why, after a half-century of dramatically improving human physical ability in children, the authors believe it is a good idea to do so.