Neurologists are finding that the brain is designed for us to move – move it or lose it.
Two Brain Rules:
- All of the body, all of the brain, all of the time.
- We adapt completely and utterly to what we do everyday – refer back to rule one.
If we are not exercising, the reasons are complicated, individual and much deeper than a lack of will power, time, energy, money, clothes, shoes or any other excuse your brain is cooking up just now.
If so far nothing has helped you get into an exercise regime – or you repeatedly fail in improving a personal best – maybe it’s time to try something very different, something right at the forefront of knowledge, something that, in about 20 years, will be more common place. Maybe it is time to find out what your brain needs to know so you can achieve your exercise goals.
So in trying for a personal best – indeed, if trying to increase or even start exercise – the limiting factor is how safe the exercise feels to our brain.
The better the information into the brain, the safer it feels and the more it will let us do. The worse the information into the brain, the more the brain is uncertain about the environment/what the body is actually doing and it will increasingly slow us down and eventually have us stop the movement – to the point of throwing a good illness at us that leaves us bedbound.
The inputs the brain receives is simply brain boggling: air temperature, air movement, surface quality, our clothes and shoes, the position of every joint in the body, tension levels in every muscle, tendon and ligament in the body, where our head is in space, what we can see, what we can’t see, light levels, what we can hear and where it is in relation to us, information from our balance organs – a quick list of an astonishing amount of information the brain processes every single waking moment.
Now add to this mismatches: information from the balance organs frequently contradict information from the eyes (a good bang on the head is the most frequent cause of this); a previous injury blurs the various maps in the brain, making all movement of that joint less sure; extreme eye dominance; poor visual acuity (slightly blurry vision, often in one eye only); old scars or tattoos making the skin less sensitive or lose vital elasticity.
The brain knows all this stuff all the time!
Trainers who know how to work out what information the brain would like improving are as rare as hen’s teeth in the UK – this stuff is unknown to all except neurologists, and they only deal with people with big neurological problems like epilepsy or Parkinson’s Disease. If someone asked for an appointment with one of them, asking to improve their PB marathon time, they would be dumbfounded.
But there is a small band of us, and I’m one.
To make everything better – all of the body, all of the brain, all of the time – just pop along to see me.
