Habits are seductive. We like to think that we could keep exercising or playing sports and maintain all of our old habits. The dilemma is that old habits can become dangerous to our joints by overstressing ligaments and causing strains, injuries, and tears in our muscles. In fact, exercise could be a dangerous thing. When we exercise, we become inflamed and overheated. The aftereffects can be either uplifting and energizing or fatiguing and uninspiring. This all depends on who you are and how you move. We do have a saving grace: If we exercise with awareness, we can prevent most injuries and improve our movement habits and the elegance of our posture and bearing.
Many people believe that exercise is not really good for them unless they feel hyperstimulated or have some background fatigue, which they often identify as relaxing because they have worn out their muscles. Overexercising and the stresses that ensue lead to metabolic changes from the creation of more free radicals that age all our cells. We also get micro-tears in our connective tissues and micro-fractures in our skeletons, which contribute to lost mobility over time and can lead to premature aging. Many yoga teachers have stretched for too long or too far and, slowly, lengthened their ligaments. When we stretch too much, our ligaments become loose so our joints become too loose and they lose their stability. This unstable joint condition, known as hypermobility, arises from moving the joint too far and too often.Similarly, runners, as they get older, find themselves getting tight in the calves and hamstrings, developing knee injuries, and then having to do a lot of stretching to help defray the feeling of tightness.
StartFragmentHere are four quick questions to help you assess whether overstressing is a problem in your exercise routines:
• Do you exercise beyond the point of pain and stress?
• Do you feel that you have not exercised enough if you don’t feel pain?
• While you exercise, do you feel yourself straining?
• How do you feel the next day?
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THE PATH OF MOST RESISTANCE
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Many forms of exercise use increasing resistance as the only path to building strength. Thousands of repetitions against greater and greater resistance eventually increases the strength and size of our muscles.
Some people lift weights or spend hours on machines that exercise the same muscle group in the same fashion over and over again. The very feeling of intramuscular stress or tired muscles is considered an indication of a good workout.
This approach, however, can result in more problems than benefits: When our muscles can contract more powerfully, any existing muscular-skeletal imbalance or faulty movement habit becomes exaggerated and amplified. If you haven’t learned to lift properly, you are at greater risk for stress-related pain and damage to your ligaments and tendons with strong muscles than with weak ones. If you use too much effort in getting up, standing, running, and so on, stronger muscles only mask the problem. These sorts of ineffective movement habits overwork certain muscles and joints while neglecting or ignoring the use of others, thus leading to a limited range of movement and gross inefficiency. The brain might be engaging far more muscle cells to perform simple activities like sitting in a chair than are necessary to perform the action required.
For example, some people can sit in a chair engaging 20 percent or more of the muscle fibers in their back, while other people can sit in the same posture using as little as 2 percent of these brain-to-muscle connections (called motor units). This disparity in effort obviously leads to tremendous differences in how long people can sit comfortably without compressing their spine and overworking their back muscles.
In the long run, limitations in awareness and coordination can lead to severe physical difficulties and prematurely age us. Parts of our articulations or joints can fill with fibrous tissues, especially between vertebrae, where there is little movement in general. Ligaments shorten or become hyper-elastic. Some muscle fibers become too strong, while others in the same muscle group atrophy. In time, deformation sets in. Without body awareness, we exercise our worst habits.
Strength is not simply a function of our muscles. We can strengthen all of our muscles, but if we don’t use our brain to improve their organization and coordination, we do not significantly improve our posture, deftness, performance, or stability.
Consider the amount of resistance in your current exercise routine.
• Does your exercise routine value strength over mobility or flexibility?
• Do you pay attention to your posture while either doing resistance exercises or running and cycling?
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WORK VERSUS EFFORT
A major goal in life could be to accomplish the same amount of work with less effort. The distinction between work and the amount of effort required to produce the work needs to be felt in our body. Lifting your weight out of a chair and lifting your handbag from the floor are both actions that involve measurable amounts of work depending on your weight and on what’s in the handbag. The amount of effort required to get out of a chair or to lift a handbag can vary from person to person tremendously. Some people strain, hold their breath, and grunt when picking up almost anything, while others are so efficient and relaxed while performing the same work that they display little effort.
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In all movements, groups of agonist muscles and antagonist muscles are at work. Agonist muscles are the primary muscles—the ones doing the contracting—in movement. When you lift something in front of yourself with your arms, the biceps are the main actors, the agonist muscles. Antagonist muscles oppose the agonists. They are the muscle fibers on the other side of the joint, and they work opposite to the action. When lifting something in front of yourself with your arms, the triceps are the antagonists.
If you operate with 10 percent of the antagonists opposing the action of the agonists, your muscles have to work harder and exert more effort, owing to this internal resistance. You may not feel the tug-of-war between the muscle groups, how hard your antagonist muscle groups are contradicting your intended direction of motion. Ideally, you want to reduce the internal resistance of your antagonist muscles so that more force can be available for your daily actions through your agonist muscles.
If you lack the ability to reduce your internal resistance, you will always feel the need to be stronger and will feel less effective at exerting mechanical force on the outside world, such as when you lift objects, open doors, climb stairs, or dance.
Injuries and the resulting pain often create neuromuscular inefficiency that increases resistance in the area that hurts. One of the best strategies is to learn to move the painful area easily, lightly, and slowly so that the brain can learn comfort in relation to the intended movement. Doing less is actually more!
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You could race through a workout, build up a sweat, and feel quite good in that familiar way, maybe even proud of yourself for having accomplished all of the movements quickly. However, if you never learn to do these movements slowly and comfortably, if you do not decrease your internal resistance, and if you do not increase your felt sense of the movements—your body awareness—then you will finish the program having learned absolutely nothing. Your brain will probably make no changes, and so your body, as if it had no brain, will get no benefit from the program beyond the one workout.
Consider the amount of effort required to accomplish your usual workout routine as well as ordinary activities of daily life like walking up stairs and carrying groceries from the car.
• Do you catch yourself straining or grunting to accomplish a task?
• Can you feel your antagonist muscles at work? For example, do you feel strain in your triceps when you are using your biceps to lift something?
• Pick several of your normal daily activities and think about how much work is required to carry them out. Can you imagine performing the same amount of work doing these activities with less effort?
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THE LIMITS OF LEARNING BY
IMITATION
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Knowing how you move your body, arrange your posture, or perform repeated actions that created or contributed to your pain or injury is a valuable thing to know. Knowing why you’re uncoordinated might not help you to be more coordinated, but learning how to move differently will address the situation directly. Knowing why might not be useful to you; knowing how is a physical tool you can acquire and use.
You can become skilled at dance or sports but have no idea how you acquired that skill. (This is a primary reason why highly skilled professionals often cannot teach others.) It may be that you have very limited body awareness, but that you can mimic movement very well. Most people learn to move by visual imitation—that is, by watching other people’s movements and imitating them. This is the way classes are taught in dance, theater, and sports. Even social interactions usually involve visual imitation.
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EndFragmentStartFragmentLearning by visual imitation does not require that we advance our body awareness; instead, it requires that we perform what we already know how to do, usually by trying to conform our bodies to the instructor’s body. That’s why many people start learning very quickly; their lack of body awareness, however, makes them unable to improve continuously. Visually, they can see what to do, and their body can imitate and mimic very well, but this capacity to mimic does not tell them how they learned the movement. We can perform a movement through imitation if our body already understands how to do it. If our body doesn’t already know how to do a movement, we can’t progress or improve beyond that point without improving our body awareness.EndFragment
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Ask yourself the following questions as they relate to your current exercise routine.
• Is it difficult for me to learn new movement skills?
• Can I easily teach others new ways to move?
• Do new challenges in movement make you feel excited or anxious?
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• Are measurable quantities—repetitions, time, weight, speed—more important to you than your quality of motion?
• Can you assess your typical workout’s success to include your gracefulness in performing the movement?
• When you move, do you feel you move more like a machine or an animal? What image of a graceful animal could you bring to your workout?