Human Engineering: A Systems Approach to Movement, Rehabilitation and Human Performance (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798176332193)

What if movement, rehabilitation and human performance were understood not as separate problems, but as expressions of the same adaptive human system?

Human beings are not machines assembled from independent parts. We are living, learning systems - continually sensing, responding, predicting, adapting and reorganising in response to our bodies, our environments and our experiences.

Human Engineering offers a different way of thinking about movement and rehabilitation.

Rather than beginning with "What exercise should we prescribe?", Mark Peters asks a deeper set of questions:

What is the system trying to achieve?
What information is it responding to?
What options does it have available?
And how can we create the conditions in which better solutions can emerge?

Drawing together ideas from systems thinking, movement science, rehabilitation, coaching and more than three decades of Tai Chi practice, Human Engineering explores how people maintain, lose, recover and develop capability throughout life.

At the heart of the book are six organising principles - Alignment, Relaxation, Centre, Breathing, Balance and Confidence - not as exercises to perform, but as lenses through which movement, learning and adaptation can be investigated.

Across three parts, the book explores:

• how the human system learns through feedback, experience and prediction;
• why apparently limiting patterns may once have been useful adaptations;
• the difference between prescribing movement and designing experiences for learning;
• why principles can transfer where individual exercises may not;
• how variability creates options rather than inconsistency;
• the relationship between adaptability, resilience and recovery; and
• why meaningful capability matters more than perfect movement.

Tai Chi provides an important practical thread throughout the book, but this is not a book about learning Tai Chi. Instead, its principles provide a laboratory for investigating balance, organisation, attention, weight transfer, unnecessary effort and the capacity to adapt.

Human Engineering is written for physiotherapists, occupational therapists, rehabilitation and movement professionals, coaches, Tai Chi and Qigong teachers, therapists, educators and anyone interested in how human beings learn, adapt and maintain capability.

It challenges the idea that successful rehabilitation is simply about restoring a particular movement or achieving compliance with an exercise programme. The larger question is whether the person develops resources and options that remain available when circumstances change.

The aim is not perfect movement.
It is a more adaptable human being.

Understand the system. Develop the options. Expand the capability.

This is the version I'd use for KDP rather than simply reproducing the back-cover copy. It communicates the actual scope of the finished book while naturally incorporating search-relevant terms such as rehabilitation, movement, Tai Chi, Qigong, balance, adaptability, resilience, physiotherapy and occupational therapy without turning the description into obvious keyword stuffing.