In our second video, we’re going to talk about how your nervous system is designed to control your movement.
In our last video, we talked about the idea that if you have any kind of goal for your body that you need to understand a little bit about how your body works in order to improve it. We talked about this whole idea that that the body you currently have is the body that you’ve earned through the way that you move.
Many people have movement issues, not because it’s their fault, but because they were never taught or trained to move differently. In Z-Health we then focus on the controller of the movement, which is the nervous system.
In today’s video, I want to briefly help you understand how the organization of the nervous system is so important to improving your results.
We’re going to talk about what we call Neuro 101 in our classes. It’s a super simple idea. Basically, what we’re going to look at is the idea that we have a brain.
All right? That’s a really badly drawn brain, but that’s what it is. Brain, and then we have a spinal cord, and then coming off the spinal cord we have these little peripheral nerves that go out and basically, if you were Mickey Mouse, they would go to your Mickey Mouse foot.
Now, a pretty simple idea. Here’s how the nervous system works; it only does three things. The first thing that it does is that it receives input. It receives input. This is going to be really important.
In fact, it’s so important our next video is all about input because as a Z-Health practitioner, as a Z-Health athlete, one of your primary points of focus is going to be on input, changing and altering them.
The second thing is that once inputs come into the central nervous system, to give you an example, let’s say you’re walking around on your Mickey Mouse foot, every time your foot hits the ground you’re getting input.
You have these little nerve endings in your foot that are going to sense the amount of pressure, the amount of force that you’re pushing into the ground with, if you have on shoes versus if you are barefoot versus if you are a diabetic.
All of that’s going to change the amount and type of information it’s signaling, that’s coming in from the foot, because as that information comes in, it’s going to move up into the spinal cord and into the brain. That’s our input pathway. It’s headed up this way to the brain.
Now, once that information reaches the brain, we have something else that has to go on. The brain has to interpret. It has to interpret the input because whenever you’re walking around you are not just getting information from our feet; you’re getting information from your arms because they are moving. You’re getting information from your eyes. Your inner ear is giving you the information about your balance. All of that is being sent to the brain.
The brain is having to take all that information, join it together, interpret what it means, and then it has to make a decision.
If I’m out for a walk, I’m walking down the street, I’m walking down the sidewalk, I see someone walking toward me, there is a dog on a leash. I look at the dog. I try to decide is it a big dog, a little dog. Is it a happy dog, a mad dog. All of that is going to go to my brain.
My brain is going to make a decision to either stay on my path, move over a little bit to get away from that large, scary dog, cross the street, turn around, go the other way. There’s a lot of different things that can come into play.
Finally, once my brain has decided what to do, it then creates what we call the output. Remember, your brain only does three things, or your nervous system only does three things. It takes in input. It interprets and decides what that input means, and then it creates an output as a result of the input.
Now, the issue that we have is that when we look at a lot of programs and processes out there, most people get very overly focused on the output part. You go to someone and they love teaching you how to squat or how to lunge. Their big focus is on the actual performance of the movement, so they are working on a squat or they’re working on a lunge.
If you’re working, let’s say you have elbow pain. You’re seeing someone for the elbow pain, and they’re constantly saying, “Okay, how does it feel? How does it feel? How does it feel,” that is an output focused mentality because in general, all of the stuff that we see people do is the end result of a lot of things that have come before.
In Z-Health, what we’re going to show you in the next video is how inputs can be incredibly important because if we understand this process, the simple process of the nervous system, input, interpret/decide, output, it changes everything about how we most efficiently can reach our goals.
Like I said, in our next video we’re going to talk about input, and why looking at the eyes, why looking at the inner ear, why looking at different joints and muscles and tendons, why all of those things can matter in creating the result that you’re looking for.
Now that you’ve passed your Neuro 101 class and understand a little bit about the nervous system, in our next video, video three, we’re going to talk about inputs and how they can be the missing pieces to optimizing your training.
