After an injury, did you receive any instruction on how to move more effectively? I injured my neck when I was two or three years old, and as a result, I soon began to experience fainting spells whenever I made rapid upward or downward or circling movements. Doctors said it was a heart murmur, but the fainting persisted even after the heart murmur went away. At a young age, I was quite stiff, I wanted to be a ballerina, but my body just would not cooperate, and I really struggled when I tried to do pirouettes because I would often pass out!
I continued to experience stiffness and fainting as an adult, which limited any activity I tried. Many people agreed with my assumption that my stiffness was simply a product of my birth. Today I know it is not normal to be stiff at any age. Early in my life, I was in an accident that had an impact on how I moved throughout every activity. I was destined to never be “great” at physical skills that require excellent balance and flexibility. Fortunately, because I discovered the root of the issues and how to resolve them, I am no longer stiff and constrained by significant limitations.
How many of the millions of us can relate to my clients’ tragic car accidents when they were four years old or their need for lower leg casts when they were just a year old? And then there are those who excelled at a skill they learned very early in life, only to suffer an injury that made it nearly impossible for them to regain that skill.
Injuries frequently result in the end of sports careers, but do they have to? Every healthy baby spontaneously picks up new skills without conscious effort. If an injury or neurological event cause some part or all of a movement skill to be lost, we can rarely relearn it on our own because we don’t consciously know how we learned it in the first place. Tiger Woods, a golfer, has blown through a number of instructors in an effort to regain his once-impressive talent, but it is proving elusive.
Technique-focused methods are currently used to improve, regain, or learn a skill. We attempt to imitate the mechanics of a movement pattern by first observing how it is done, such as the “ideal” golf swing. We concentrate on which muscles to use, when to move different body parts, and how to do so. Our brains don’t function like this, though.
- First, our vision has no relationship to what we feel. To check if what they feel and what they see while moving are in sync, dancers and people learning a movement must look in a mirror while performing the movement.
- A muscle is being misused if you can feel it working. Why would your brain “pat your back” by letting you know the muscle you are using is “right”. If you don’t feel muscles working When you are operating at your peak, AND you have full range of motion and flexibility in a movement.
- Third, if you have habituated the movement so that your brain perceives it as “normal,” you do not yet have full range of motion and flexibility. What you do not feel cannot be changed. You must employ techniques to feel muscles that are chronically contracted.
- Four, in order to improve your movement, you must comprehend how the body is best arranged for movement.
- The entire body is impacted by each movement you make, number five. You cannot use a machine to isolate movement to specific body parts. To get trajectory, timing, what causes another part to move and so on cannot be learned just by watching, it must be felt.
Check out the new book Move to Excel to move your body and mind to learn in the best possible way. It contains the explanations and techniques that form the basis for how your mind and body work together seamlessly to learn or re-learn any skill. Since what you learn forms the basis of every skill you use or movement you make, the book does not address any particular skills. You can consciously re-learn how to move, just as you did when you were a very young child, thanks to Move to Excel.