Spend some time paying attention to neurological stuff
This will be a shortish post with a few observations:
- A few months ago, a friend told me he’d gone from not being able to touch his toes to putting his palms on the floor in a couple of weeks by following a stretching routine that was based on the idea that flexibility is mostly neurological: when our nervous system detects that we’re approaching the boundaries of our range of motion, it tenses our muscles automatically to stop the movement. You can address this first by doing mild strength training at the edge your range of motion, and second by alternately clenching and relaxing the relevant muscles as you stretch. The strength training teaches your body that it can actually handle loads in this range and it’s not in danger. Clenching the muscle intentionally and then relaxing it briefly overrides your neurological brakes and allows you to stretch much more effectively.
- Also a few months ago, I saw a cool YouTube video where a PRI-trained physical therapist named Conor Harris explains how he discovered that a patient’s glasses were making his peripheral vision worse on one side, so whenever the patient took a step on that side half of his body would tense up. The patient claims to have experienced debilitating pain for years before seeing Harris; his problem ended up being entirely neurological (in a way that most specialists never would have solved).
- Since a few weeks ago, I’ve been doing Harris’ excellent Beginner Body Restoration course. It’s a 6-week course where you do 3 sets of 5 exercises every day, with the exercises changing every other week. As you might expect, all of the exercises are done at a 3/10 intensity, with the goal of training your brain and nervous system to safely reproduce various motion patterns rather than pure strength training. The Beginner Body Restoration course has made a bigger difference for me than any other exercise thing I’ve tried, by far
- Last week, I read (most of) Peter Nobes’ Mindfulness in 3D, which is essentially a sales pitch for the Alexander Technique. I read it mostly because Peter Nobes is Michael Ashcroft’s AT teacher, and Michael Ashcroft has some great stuff, but I disliked it very much, and I try not to do book reviews of books I don’t think have a lot to offer. That said, one really surprising thing from the book was when Nobes mentioned that during his sessions, he often asks people where they think the joints between their hips and femurs are, and where the joint between the top of the cervical spine and the skull is. If you don’t already know, you can take a second and guess. Nobes points out that most people think their spine-skull joint is essentially on the back of their neck, and that their hip joints are up near the iliac crest. You can look up images of where they actually are once you’re ready. And the strange thing was, knowing where my spine actually met my skull changed the way I held my head. Not exactly neurological, but neurological/mental?
So now I’m planning to see a PRI therapist and then an AT teacher. But more importantly, I’m totally blown away by the fact that this never came up before. I’ve been to physical therapy many times and talked to lots of doctors about joint problems; everyone talked about strength, some people talked about range of motion, and no one talked about neurology or repatterning movement. Paying attention to neurological stuff seems like an effective fitness force multiplier - maybe literally, in some cases.