81Chapter 6
YOGA FOR MOTOR
PLANNING FOR SPEECH
A goal without a plan is just a wish.
attributed to Antoine de Saint-ExupéryIntroduction to motor planning
Motor planning, also called praxis, is the brain’s ability to create,
organize, and execute a coordinated and properly timed sequence
of movements with the body (Ayres 1995). Motor planning is
critical for performing daily activities such as writing, eating,
brushing teeth, dressing, and tying shoes. The simple act of hand
washing, for example, requires the planned execution of seven
steps, namely turning on the water, obtaining soap, wetting hands,
rubbing them together, rinsing hands under the water, turning
off the water, and, finally, drying hands. The performance of yoga
poses and speech production also require the planning of body
movements in specific sequences. These motor plans must be
stored in memory so that they can be retrieved when needed
for future movements (O’Sullivan and Schmitz 2001). Motor
planning challenges cause difficulty with initiating movements
or performing them in a coordinated manner.
The production of phonetically and prosodically normal
speech can be divided into four stages, namely linguistic-symbolic