Today, we’re going to talk about how to make your brain smarter at stopping things. All right. Uh, in the neuro world, we call this inhibition. And actually when you look at movement, when we look at sports performance, when we look at our ability to function as a CEO, whatever it is, most of our life is about stopping ourselves from doing stupid stuff.
Right. Uh, and that is actually a result of what we call executive function. That had a lot of that has to do with our frontal lobe. We tell people one of its primary jobs Is inhibiting the rest of the brain. So in other words, stopping us from doing things more reflexively, more primally, and this allows us to make plans.
It also plays a huge role in movement and pain because whenever we look at people who are great movers and great athletes, they are often extremely responsive to the smallest stimuli so that they can change their plans immediately. And that requires a lot of inhibition. A lot of people that have listened to us for years, they know we talk about brains and neurons.
We say the brain needs two things to stay alive and needs fuel and needs activation. Well, activation, uh, sounds like we’re always turning stuff on. Well, in fact, when we talk about activation, it is a blend of turning on the right things and turning off the right things, right? So it’s really activation and inhibition, but we shorten it because it sounds cooler.
But in terms of making ourselves better athletes, better movers, better coaches, better people We want to continually be challenging our ability to inhibit today We’re going to focus on a super simple way to work on inhibitory control with movement using a coach. So Maika is here, she’s behind the camera.
Um, she is going to be my coach for this particular exercise. What you’re going to do is you’re going to pick a movement drill. You’re going to use a coach if you have one, and this is going to be a version of what we kind of call a go no go drill. It’s really not. It’s basically, um, going to require me to stop what I’m currently doing and do the opposite.
So the way the drill works is this. I’m going to be just doing a very simple motor control exercise, a shoulder circle. Now, at some point as I’m doing this, and you can notice that I’m going In one direction, she’s going to flash her finger up, and I’m going to have to immediately change direction. And so at random, she’s going to do that, and I have to see it, and then I have to inhibit what I’ve currently been doing, and then change directions again.
Now, why this is really interesting, and really useful. It seems so simple, but it’s way more challenging than most people realize, is that the way our motor systems work is that as we’re practicing something, we are priming a bunch of neurons in our brain to keep doing that. So we kind of developed this path, we wake it up, and then all of a sudden it gets interrupted.
I have to see the interruption coming. I have to go, what does that mean? I have to stop what I’m currently doing, go the opposite direction. That’s actually all really, really challenging neurologically. We can make it feel effortless, but a lot of people really struggle with this. If you have clients that have had traumatic brain injuries, uh, strokes, people that have other neurodegenerative disorders, inhibition becomes a really big thing.
And we will also see often inhibitory issues with people with neurodegenerative disorders. So this is something I want you to start adding into your training. You can do it with literally any exercise. Uh, coach can be there. They can be giving you the, you know, change signal. That’s fine. Let’s say you don’t have a coach.
How do I do this on my own? I, I’m, I’m like doc. I like to just be in my, garage by myself. Uh, you have a couple of super, super simple options. Number one, buy a metronome, uh, for your phone. When you buy the metronome, it needs to have the option of doing random silent, um, notes. So metronome click, click, click, click, click, click.
Click, click. There’s a lot of them out there. They will cost you a great deal of money, like 3 dollars a year for a subscription. I use pro metronome is the one I use on my iPhone. Uh, and it allows me to use kind of a rhythm setting so that I can take in notes and take out notes at random. It will, the phone will do it for me so that I can be doing my drills and then all of a sudden it’ll go silent and I have to change direction or I have to change the, the movement that I’m doing.
So many different ways you can set that up. If you don’t even want to buy a 3 dollar app you can also stand in front of your TV. Start doing an exercise and every time the scene changes, you have to change direction. That is actually super hard to do because the cuts are so fast in most television shows.
You’ll be every two and a half to three seconds or even faster. You’ll have to alter the directions that you’re going. There’s no money associated with this, but the ability to inhibit motion On demand in any area of your body is an enormously important skill. Something I recommend that you work on a lot.
Just want to make sure you were kind of aware of this particular idea. I think it’s a great one to include in any form of movement, coaching, pain, uh, pain work, rehabilitative work. Uh, make sure that you understand that. rationale behind it that most of what we do, if we do it well, it’s because we’re great at stopping ourselves from doing stupid stuff.
And that is a skill that we can train in a lot of different ways.
If you are new to Z-Health, we are a brain-based education company. We specialize in coaching doctors, coaches, and therapists from all over the world. We have people in about 115 different countries now over 5,000 certified trainers. So if you’re interested in, In bridging a gap between cutting edge neuroscience and what most of us grew up doing in the manual therapy and exercise world, uh, we might be a great fit for you.
We have a bunch of free resources. You can check out obviously here in YouTube, uh, check out our free mini-course, subscribe to the channel, whatever else we do, you know, our other channels, we have Instagram and all kinds of stuff. So check us out. If you have any questions, please reach out.
