ABSTRACT
The perspective to be developed in this chapter and the two that follow might be termed the Bernstein perspective after the Soviet physiologist Nicolai AJeksandrovitch Bernstein (1896-] 966). In other perspectives, both traditional and contemporary, the contribution of the kinematic and dynamic aspects of movement to its control and coordination are either simply ignored or terribly underestimated. For Bernstein, the obvious fundamentality of these aspects led him to characterize the study of movements in terms of the problems of coordinating and controlling a complex system of biokinematic links. He recognized that the focus of analysis could not simpJy be the muscular forces provided by the animal but must necessarily include inertia and reactive forces. In a nutshelL Bernstein recognized that any theory that ignores the totality of forces and considers only those contributed by muscles in its functional description of movements wouJd be a theory of the miming of movements rather than a theory of movements themselves, for the very simple reason that any coordinated activity requires an environment of forces for its proper expression (Fowler & Turvey, 1978). The purpose of this first chapter is to identi fy the two major problems that shape the analysis of movement in the Bernstein perspective.
