We are discussing today the idea of developing cognitive flexibility for our clients. We’ve been discussing, for the last couple of weeks the idea of implementing cognitive training into our movement practices. Not spending a ton of time on the research on this, but I want you to understand that everything that we see for the last five or six years, particularly even up to a decade, is that if we want the best results for people’s brains, we have to teach them to move and think at the same time.
This is actually a problem. A huge problem that we see as people age with cognitive decline is their fall risk go up whenever we give them mental challenges that must be performed while they are also in motion. And then if you think about athletics. Sports, what is sports? Sports is problem solving while moving.
So we wanna make sure that we are encouraging our clients to maintain cognitive skills. And whenever you get into this whole idea of developing better cognition with movement. You start breaking things into domains. There’s a lot of different cognitive domains, and the one we’re talking about today is cognitive flexibility.
What is that? Very simply put, it’s your ability to think differently, to think outside the box, to remain resilient and adaptable in the face of cognitive challenges. So there are a lot of different ways that we can work on this. And there are subsets of cognitive flexibility. So the one that we’re gonna work on today in combination with movement is called verbal fluency.
Now, verbal fluency is a huge topic because if we have people that have had brain injuries, they’re in stroke rehab, maybe there’s some cognitive decline is beginning. What is one of the things that is most, burdensome? Is losing the ability to articulate things , as you wish, right? To be able to speak fluently, speak comfortably.
And again, as we start thinking about. How do I improve this for people? Well, I have to challenge it. I have to make it harder for them. So a basic example of a verbal fluency, cognitive flexibility test would be I have the client sitting say, okay, we’re gonna do a little test. I’m gonna set my timer for 30 seconds and I want you to in 30 seconds tell me as many words as you can think of that begin with a letter T or the letter F or the letter C. It doesn’t matter what letter you choose, but what does matter is that you give them a time, 30 seconds, and you say, I want you to tell me as many words as you can think of that begin with that letter.
What you will sometimes see is people will get two or three words out and then they will freeze. They will get stuck, right? Maybe you’re doing the letter T and they go, okay, T tree t. That. That. And they will get stuck. That is a huge problem, right? So we have to train them to continue. What you will sometimes see is a startle response.
So you can actually go, okay, let’s take a quick break. Let’s have you do a little bit of breathing. Let’s have you relax, and then you start working in again. Now, the key for us as movement professionals is that just working on verbal fluency by itself may apply for people who have had a traumatic brain injury and they’re just trying to relearn how to speak or improve this whole idea of, of language flexibility through cognitive flexibility. But we want to include movement to this because whenever we add movement, it becomes much, much, much more complicated. So rather than just having them talk, we now want them to think. Create words. Speak them out loud. That’s a motor activity. And then we want to include body movements to it.
So here is the basic progression I want you to do, and let’s see how well you do it. The basics are gonna be this. You’re gonna set your timer for 30 seconds. Whenever you hit go, you’re gonna begin doing. Body weight, squats. All right?
But you need to be watching a stopwatch because as you’re doing the squats, you’re also going through all the words that you can think of that begin with a letter T or F, or whatever, letter you have chosen. When your timer hits 10 seconds, you’re going to go away from body weight squats and immediately shift into a left leg forward or right leg forward lunge, continuing to speak, and then at 20 seconds, you’re gonna shift to the other lunge.
Again, continuing to work on the verbal fluency. Sounds easy when you hear it described, but when you give it a try, don’t be surprised if you get frustrated. If at a point as you’re making the transition into the lunge, you might get stuck and go, I cannot remember another word that begins with a letter T.
That’s all normal. Whenever we are combining cognitive work with motor activity. We are gonna find people struggle very often, and this is why we need to be training it because again, if we look at the literature. If we want what we’re doing in the gym or what we’re doing in the rehab room to transfer over to the sporting environment, to the real life environment. The blending of cognitive tasks with movement is absolutely critical.
One of the reasons we see so many research studies show, I would call, not failure failures. But, kind of ambiguous results in terms of like, we do this therapy, we do this exercise, and sometimes people get better and sometimes they don’t. It’s because we remove, we kind of take them outta the real world environment with real world tasking. And so it makes sense that if I’m working on rehabbing my knee and I wanna prevent my knee from moving oddly after an ACL reconstruction, that if at some point in the rehab process I’m not also required to think while jumping and landing, it’s not going to equate to what I have to do on the soccer pitch.
So over and over, I’m gonna keep emphasizing this fact that the future of movement training is the blending of cognitive skills with movement and verbal fluency is a really fun one that you can add into literally anything that you do. The key is make it difficult, make it challenging, and do it often.
That’s how our brains are gonna grow, is through a little bit of additional stress. All right. We’re super excited to announce the fact that we have just released our Cognitive Training module from our Brain-Based Practitioners Guide. If you are interested in blending cognition with movement training from a cutting edge perspective. Make sure to check it out. If you’re new to Z Health, we are a brain-based education company. We blend movement, performance, pain,, rehabilitation, using cutting edge neuroscience with biomechanics. If that is something that you are interested in, if you’re a movement professional and you’re looking for new ways to help your clients, make sure to subscribe to the channel. Check out our free resources and contact us ’cause we’d love to talk to you. All right, take care.
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