Steve Cairns
Steve Cairns is the founder of The Movement Project and a brain injury movement rehabilitation specialist whose work combines decades of experience in physical performance, coaching and instruction with the lived experience of rebuilding his own movement after catastrophic brain injury.
Before his injury, Steve’s background was shaped by environments in which movement, physical capability and problem-solving under pressure mattered. He served for 14 years in the British military, including two years Airborne and 12 years in Special Forces, before leaving in 2011. He was also an accomplished ultra-endurance athlete, completing events including the 100-mile West Highland Way Race, the Caballo Blanco Ultra, the 80-mile Ridgeway Challenge, the Taff Trail 50 and the Marathon des Sables — approximately 150 miles across the Sahara desert.
His interest in movement extended beyond performance. Steve became increasingly focused on the developmental hierarchy through which human movement is built — progressing through patterns such as rolling, crawling, kneeling and squatting before more complex upright movement. He developed this approach within his coaching and further studied functional movement principles, including training with Gray Cook and Functional Movement Systems.
In 2017, aged 47, Steve suffered a severe brain haemorrhage after which he could no longer walk, followed two weeks later by ten hours of brainstem surgery which left him without the movement skills to even crawl. Having lost fundamental movement abilities, he was given a prognosis of 2-3 years with permanent deficits.
Rather than making immediate and repeated attempts at walking, as advocated by the rehab team, Steve applied the same hierarchical movement principles he had previously used in his own physical training, rebuilding movement from its developmental foundations. His progress dramatically exceeded the expectations initially set for him and changed the direction of his professional work.
This led Steve to challenge two assumptions he repeatedly encountered in conventional neurological rehabilitation: firstly, that walking should be the first functional skill pursued in rehabilitation, and also that significant improvement is no longer possible once 3–6 months post serious brain injury.
He subsequently developed a structured rehabilitation strategy based on developmental movement patterns and tested it with people whose formal rehabilitation had already finished or was no longer producing meaningful progress. The success of this research formed the basis of his presentation at the World Congress for Neurorehabilitation, co-authored with his neurosurgeon, and ultimately led to the creation of The Movement Project.
Today, Steve leads The Movement Project from a perspective shaped by movement science, coaching, research and lived experience. Rather than asking participants simply to practise the movement they have lost, his work focuses on identifying and rebuilding the underlying capacities on which more complex function depends. The aim is to provide a structured platform from which improvement can continue, including for people who have previously been told that their rehabilitation has delivered all that can reasonably be expected.
Steve also served on the External Advisory Medical Board of the Hypertrophic Olivary Degeneration Association, supporting work relating to hypertrophic olivary degeneration, a neurological condition associated with movement, coordination and ataxic impairment following injury to specific brainstem pathways.
