History & Professional Lineage
Ontogenesis refers to the body’s innate developmental process that guides early-life milestones and underpins all human movement.
This healthcare service uses precise body positioning and biomechanical inputs to stimulate ontogenetic (developmental) physiology in order to reduce pain, restore function, and enhance performance across the lifespan.
Founded by physiotherapist Ryan Craig, Clinical Ontogenesis integrates established scientific principles and rehabilitation methods into a distinct clinical approach grounded in a multi-generational professional lineage
In the 1930s, a global reformation in the care of poliomyelitis was being pioneered by an untrained Australian bush nurse named Sister Elizabeth Kenny, working out of Toowoomba, Queensland.
Rather than immobilising limbs, which was common practice, she treated patients with heat, movement, and attention to the body’s own healing responses. Challenging the prevailing orthodoxy of paralysis care, she was widely opposed at first, but her methods would eventually shape modern physical rehabilitation.
She directly influenced Professor Vladimír Janda, who as a young first-year medical student in 1947 served as Sister Kenny’s interpreter during her visit to Czechoslovakia to share her polio treatment methods. A survivor of polio himself, Janda was deeply impacted by her approach. Her philosophy helped shape what would later become his integrated approach to neuromuscular rehabilitation, and played a key role in setting the trajectory for Czech rehabilitation medicine.
Sister Kenny educating a group of nurses
From this foundation, the Prague School of Rehabilitation, particularly through Václav Vojta, MD, a Czech neurologist and paediatrician, advanced a new framework for understanding human movement. Vojta was among the first to formally describe the role of developmental kinesiology – the study of how movement unfolds during early human development – and its implications for clinical care.
This gave rise to the therapeutic use of ontogenesis: the innate, ordered unfolding of motor patterns from infancy. Vojta’s work recognised that movement emerges reflexively from deep postural patterns, and that this physiology was important to clinical rehabilitation.
On Professor Vojta and the First Generation Vojta Methodology
The Vojta Method of Reflex Locomotion was founded by Czech Neurologist Vaclav Vojta in the 1950s.
Professor Vaclav Vojta was born in the Czech Republic in 1917 and graduated medical school in 1947. He studied paediatric neurology and worked under a Professor Karel Hener from 1948-1956. In 1954 he began substantial work with children with central movement deficits and empirically developed the reflex locomotion system of rehabilitation (Vojta method) and a brand new approach to physiotherapy began to take shape.
In 1961 he began working at the Charles Square Clinic in Prague as a physician in paediatric neurology. Throughout his career he was intensively dedicated to the field of developmental kinesiology and diagnostics. In 1968 he immigrated to Germany where he continued his work and remained in contact with Czech colleagues.
In 1984 the International Vojta Society was established to promote the implementation of the reflex locomotion principle in diagnosis and treatment at the national and international level, conduct research and facilitate the education of physicians and physical therapists. Professor Vojta published over 100 research articles and multiple textbooks and was recognised with many honours.
Vojta Method or ‘Reflex Locomotion’
In the 1950’s, through his work with infants with cerebral palsy and developmental coordination disorder, Professor Vojta discovered and developed the system of reflex stimulation of innate, physiological motor patterns which has utility in the rehabilitation or optimisation of locomotor function throughout the lifespan.
The definition of the basic rotational stereotype of reflex turning emerged between 1954 when resistance to reflexive movement was utilised in rehabilitation and 1967 when the ‘invention’ of the chest zone was made possible by observation of the global turning reaction in response to its stimulation in multiple paediatric patients.
The stimulated motor function belongs to a ‘booting’ or ‘repair’ program cluster that exists within the central nervous system control of automatic regulation of posture, gait mechanism, ocular movement, speech and swallowing, respiration and grasp at a subconscious level. The program of Reflex Locomotion, initiated with Vojta method audits the state of the motor function and works to repair or optimise the function of the basic operating system. This neuronal control provides the basis for the execution of extension application programs which are varied and involve specific motor learning processes which can be pursued unto virtuosity with various disciplines after the initial period of ontogenesis.
“The ingenious thing Dr. V. Vojta discovered is that there is something like an innate ‘backup repair program’ in the brain, with which we come equipped at birth. This given property can generally be grouped with the other so-called auto-restoration mechanisms of the body such as the ability of a broken bone to heal or the repair of damaged skin. [As in the case of other auto-restoration mechanisms] certain conditions are also necessary for the ‘start’ and successful course of treatment of the musculoskeletal apparatus with this backup program.” – Vaclav Krucky – Vojta Method of the Second Generation
Clinical practice has shown that the body should be brought into a previously specified position to initiate the repair program and subsequently, some of the several ‘trigger reflex zones’ should be stimulated… Figuratively speaking, the aforementioned possibilities of stimulation and positions constitute a system of keys and locks for movement programs.” – Vaclav Krucky – Vojta Method of the Second Generation
“Dr. Vaclav Vojta had started to publish his first findings about the use of ‘reflex locomotion’ from the beginning of the 1950’s. Over the years, the original diagnostic and therapeutic concept primarily targeted at children suffering from cerebral palsy had been established. Gradually, the spectrum of diagnoses treated with Vojta method became wider and the early diagnostic measures were refined as well. A risk of cerebral impairment can be detected during the first year of life of the child, which is early enough to prevent a range of possible harmful outcomes by well-timed therapy.” – Vaclav Krucky – Vojta Method of the Second Generation
“As early as the mid-fifties, Dr. V. Vojta discovered during his observations the possibility to invoke the muscular reflexes that could spread throughout the whole body. He called them global reflexes and started to use them to treat children suffering from cerebral palsy. The method known as “reflex locomotion” or the Vojta method has spread into several countries and its use has appeard to be successful in many other diagnoses.” – Vaclav Krucky – Vojta Method of the Second Generation
On Vaclav Krucky and the Second Generation Vojta Methodology
Vaclav Krucky
A successor of Professor Vojta, Physiotherapist Vaclav Krucky graduated in 1989 and attended lectures on the Vojta method under leadership of Dr. Vojta in 1990. He graduated alongside classmate Professor Pavel Kolar or the Prague School. Since 1992 he has operated his own clinical practice in Prague and held roles as head of the outpatient and inpatient rehabilitation department of the hospitals in Astrov and Ohri in Prague. He has assisted in teaching activities at multiple medical school universities in Prague. Throughout his career he has gradually specialised in the application of the Vojta rehabilitative method both in children and adult patients.
Vojta Method of the 2nd Generation (VM2G)
In 2003 Krucky founded a non-profit organisation called ‘Developmental Rehabilitation Company’, to support and develop the innovative implementation of the Vojta method. Becoming increasingly aware of the incompatibility between the perspectives on human movement expressed in the writings of Dr Vojta and the conventional view, and with several important interpretive questions surrounding the theoretical foundation of the Vojta method itself, Krucky pursued a continuation of Vojta’s work and in 2016 founded the Vojta Method 2nd Generation (VM2G).
VM2G represents technological advancement in the performance of the classical Vojta Method or ‘Reflex Locomotion’. The therapy utilises labilising and stimulating tools including robotic tables, exercise suits, stimulating balls which are held in place with specialised equipment in addition the the use of the therapists hands. These tools along with advancement in the theoretical foundation of reflexology, human movement and 3D functional anatomy have potentiated reflex locomotion therapy in that the innovations allow greater induction and efficacy of reflex stimulation. The therapy has acquired new attributes and revealed several new characteristics of the Vojta method.
“Diagnostic and therapeutic interventions find their overwhelming justification only when the movements relate to the posture of the torso and the autonomic regulation of the posture of the body respectively.” – Vaclav Krucky – Vojta Method of the Second Generation
“As the generation of Dr. V. Vojta enters the history books, there is no choice but to accept the baton and the related responsibility. It is customary that every upcoming generation contributes something new to the good legacy of the previous one. My personal endeavour is to further foster and develop the extremely positive legacy left by Dr. Václav Vojta.” – Vaclav Krucky – Vojta Method of the Second Generation
Professor Vojta and Vaclav Krucky
Alongside later contributions from Pavel Kolar, these insights were formed into structured methods that aimed to stimulate the ontogenetic process, especially through the use of early developmental positions, as a foundation for rehabilitation. In doing so, they developed ways to access and reorganise the central nervous system through the body itself as physical therapy.
On the Prague School of Rehabilitation and Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilisation
Prague School of Rehabilitation
The work of Professors Vladamir Janda, Karel Lewit and others made a significant contribution to the Prague School of Rehabilitation and Manual Medicine where their successor, physiotherapist Pavel Kolar has organised the Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilisation (DNS) clinical protocols for rehabilitation of locomotor function. Today DNS is a contemporary and rapidly expanding approach to rehabilitation that is being embraced by clinicians, coaches and sports trainers worldwide.
“Reflex locomotion combines joint mobilisation, muscle facilitation, and muscle relaxation while centrating joints during the performance of primitive movement patterns. This has modernised all our techniques.” – Professor Karel Lewit
“The developemental model of stabilisation of the spine, chest and pelvis together with the stepping and support function of the extremities forms a program that originates in the central nervous system (innate motor pattern – similar to “primitive reflexes” – it is a function of higher level control centers). This system may be aroused reflexively by so called trigger zones. Induced locomotor movement corresponds to motor patterns that we see during physiological development of the CNS. Through afferentation by pressure stimulation of trigger zones, the thoracolumbar and pelvis stabilisation is facilitated in the CNS as well as stepping and support functions, including orofacial functions (eyes and tongue are moving toward the stepping forward upper extremity.” – Professor Pavel Kolar – Clinical Rehabilitation
Effectively, the combined multi-generational work of these health professionals helped develop systems that carried forward some of the root insights of Sister Kenny, with greater structure and academic legitimacy, while helping to build the science behind the physiological processes of human development.
In 2023, physiotherapist Ryan Craig travelled to Prague to become the first practitioner from the Western world to undertake formal training in Vojta’s Method of the Second Generation (VM2G). After returning to Australia, he established and led the national branch responsible for VM2G development and dissemination for two years.
Sketch of a patients posture before and after Sister Kenny’s physical therapy, taken from her book published in 1950 (left), images of same taken at VM2G clinic in Melbourne, 2024
During this period, ongoing investigation into clinical methods of ontogenetic stimulation expanded the kinesiological understanding of the ontogenetic program and clarified its role in human function. From this work, the foundations of Clinical Ontogenesis were established, forming the basis of the contemporary offering now available and advancing the application of developmental motor patterns in rehabilitation and physical culture.