Today we’re going to talk about why you need to make more circles in your movement training. If you are new to Z-Health, we are a brain based education company and we specialize in working with doctors, coaches, and therapists around the world, showing them how to bring neurology, merge it with biomechanics, and ultimately create a better result for clients.
A few years ago, we started seeing some research come out looking at the individual control of given directions of movement by the brain. And actually they call this neuronal tuning. And basically what it means is that whenever we do some scans of the brain and we have people do simple motions, like, Oh, I want you to raise your arm from here to here, what they were able to see is that different neurons, different populations of neurons in the what’s called motor cortex of the brain,
lit up. In other words, they got more active. So from this, they have this idea now that, uh, we call directional tuning. And so we know that there are certain populations of neurons that are dedicated to making your, your arm go up and others to make it go down. And others to make it go on angles in different, uh, directions.
Now, why this is really important to us is that as movement coaches, our job is to increase intelligently areas of the brain, uh, to become more active so that we can hopefully drive more learning and more plasticity within those areas. So for us, from a movement perspective, what we’ve also looked at is how much brain activation do we see when subjects are asked to do a simple movement
versus a complex movement. And complex movements in the brain cause more activation. And we see that by increased blood flow. So those are really good things. So when we talk about movement, whenever we teach movement, obviously you’ll hear people in the Z Health community outside of the Z Health community talk a lot about mobility.
We want to work on mobility. Well, honestly, we would be more accurate with our language if we shifted that to say we’re not so much interested in mobility because by definition, mobility is really how far can a joint go through its range of motion. And in fact, some, in some cases, researchers will say passively.
So you’re not even doing anything. You’re just sitting there and someone’s moving your arm through a range of motion. That’s your actual mobility. What we prefer to tell people is we want you to work on control. So we call a lot of what we do motor control exercises. Here’s an example. If I was working on my neck, I might do rotations.
And I might do lateral flexions. And flexions and extensions. Right? So we tend to have people do things in single planes of motion.
We want to drive more brain activation, we want to make the movement more complex. We want to take those and we want to join them together and create circles. So let’s say I have a client doing protraction and retraction of the cervical spine. And I say, okay, can you do, um, lateral glides of the cervical spine.
This is much harder because it actually is a combination of the bottom of the neck tilting to one side and the upper neck tilting the other side and holding that as you go through the motion. So it’s more complex. Again, good thing for the brain. So if we take those, two movements and we put them together.
We now start to have kind of a bobbing and weaving motion that you might see in a boxer. We want you to do that at every joint, right? It’s really important that you start working on this type of control because as we do that, it’s going to increase activation in the brain. It will also begin to help you build what we’d like to call a reserve of capacity or a reserve of competence.
It’s awesome when you get to a point when you’re trying to learn something new that you don’t have to figure out how to make your shoulder move a new way. Or your head and neck move a new way because you are constantly practicing and challenging your brain to move in the most complex ways so that simple stuff becomes even easier.
If you’re looking at anti aging capabilities, if you want to make sure that your brain is staying healthy and active, we have to challenge it. We can’t do the same thing all the time. We need novelty. We need complexity. And just adding circles to all of your mobility work can work wonders. We’ve seen it for the last 25 years.
Now we’re starting to see some research coming out about it. So we just wanted to share that with you. Um, if you have questions about this, look through the blogs. We have over 500 blogs here, I think. Lots of them demonstrate different movements. We obviously have 12 certifications. We have free courses.
We have all kinds of information available to help you begin building better control into your life and the work, your client’s lives. So check all that stuff out. And if you find this interesting, subscribe and we’ll see you again soon.
