Why We Should Move
Why should we move? As human beings our brain wants two things, the first one is survival. It wants to make sure that we live each and every day, every hour, every second. This is done through pattern recognition and prediction. If you are walking down the street and you see a dog with no owner and that dog is showing his teeth and maybe barking at you, you're thinking “That doesn’t look or sound like a nice dog” (pattern recognition) and then you predict that if I go over there that dog will attack you. So what do you do? You cross the street and stay away from that dog. Now if that same thing happens but now that dog is wagging his tail and looks excited to see you, you predict that the dog isn’t going to attack you, so you feel safe walking over to it to pet it.
The second thing is movement. Think of movement as the currency of our brain. The more your brain trusts you the more it’s going to let you do. Think about when someone has limited range of motion in their shoulder. The reason isn't because the muscles aren’t letting the motion happen, it’s because the brain doesn’t trust them with that range of motion. So their brain goes “Hey muscles! Don’t let that range of motion happen because I’m either not familiar with that range of motion, or last time I let that range of motion happen something bad happened.” If your brain doesn’t trust you with that range of motion, it’s not going to let you have that range of motion. You have to teach your brain that the range of motion is safe (first thing your brain wants, safety. Is it safe?). When the brain feels like it is safe it will allow the movement to happen.
If we just don’t train different movement patterns or just don’t move in general our brains aren’t going to think of it as something important and we will lose that ability to move. That saying “If we don’t use it, we lose it” is 100% right. Think about someone who works in an office 8 hours a day, sitting for most of the time in a bad posture looking at a computer screen (office chair syndrome). Their brain starts to think that posture is normal and starts to make that the new norm for that person. Now all of a sudden that person is going “Man my hips are always tight, my neck is stiff, and I always have headaches.” Our brains will adapt to any stimulus that is provided, for good or bad. It doesn’t know the difference. This is called “the SAID Principle” which stands for Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand. It’s a fundamental law of human beings. The body will always adapt to what it does. So if you’re sitting in a chair all day looking at a computer screen then your brain thinks that is normal and will make you better at sitting in a chair.
Now let's get into something called proprioception. Proprioception is our brain awareness of our bodies in space. Right now think about your big toe on your left foot without looking at it. You know where it is, correct? That’s proprioception in a nutshell. It’s our movement as well as our awareness maps of our body. The more our brains understand different areas of our bodies the more comfortable it will be with us moving. In order to maximize performance we need to be able to move any joint in any direction at any speed. From super slow to super fast.
Try working on different movement patterns besides the traditional movements (forward, backward, up, and down) like a lot of people do in the gym, and add in more complex non linear movements (side to side, and rotational). Try doing an exercise like a squat but moving your legs into different positions (internal or external rotation of the hip, knee, feet, etc) this will get the brain to pay more attention to what is happening and will build more trust in you to allow you to move with better patterns. Something as simple as this can have a major impact on your performance.
