Train your nervous system. Super sexy slogan, sounds super interesting. It’s also one of the most vague comments that you can actually hear because a lot of people say it without really knowing what it means. It’s just because right now brains are in vogue, nervous system’s in vogue, everything you see, you know, you can go on your Apple News feed and there’ll be articles about brain science. Why? Because people are eventually or finally coming around to the idea that the brain is in charge and maybe we should know something about it. And oh yeah, by the way, brains change. We’ve been talking about neuroplasticity for a really long time now and we can shape our brains and change our brains and we can do it through a lot of different mechanisms and means and all that’s really cool and also incorrect. It’s kind of dumb to think that your brain can’t change because we’ve always known that it could and guess what? Everything that you do changes the brain.
So nervous system training sounds cool but it’s vague. Neuroplasticity people think is a good thing. It’s not. It’s just a thing. Your brain is always adapting. It’s always changing and guess what? An addiction is actually bad neuroplasticity. So I get very frustrated when I hear people talk about brain training and nervous system training in these vague terms. So we’re going to spend just a little bit of time explaining what this means from our perspective.
Because when you are a practitioner, the level of precision that you can bring to what you do makes all the difference in the type of results that you’re going to create for your clients. Because this has gotten interesting to people, there I see now on Instagram and on YouTube whenever I’m forced to be on there, I see all kinds of people teaching what I kind of call nervous system hack stuff. They’re like, okay well your hamstrings are tight so stand on this ball and rub your feet around or hey do this eye drill and look your hamstrings are more flexible. Ta-da! I’m magic. No you’re not magic. That’s just basic neuroscience. You’re manipulating the nervous system in a specific way to get a result and it’s cool to know that but it’s more important to understand how it all works because guess what? Try that on some people and they’ll get worse.
So nervous system training is a multifactorial and complex perspective that if you’re a professional you need to know more than a few tricks and if you are a client you need to understand that if something doesn’t work it doesn’t mean that your nervous system is broken it just means it’s the wrong stimulus.
So let’s take a broad view of this. I’m going to give you an overview. Before I do that however, if you are a movement professional, a doctor, a therapist, a coach, Pilates instructor, yoga instructor, CrossFit, you teach sports, teach martial arts, I don’t care what you do if you’re involved in human movement and you’re interested in blending what you’re already awesome at with neuroscience we would love to chat with you. You can go to the pinned comment, you can email us or set up a call because we are always looking for elite professionals who are interested like I said in including this material into what they do.
Now with that said, understanding nervous system training realistically means we have to start with the organ in charge which is the brain. Here’s what you have to know about your brain. Your brain is a predictive organ and it has one primary goal which is to keep you safe and alive. Your brain at its most primitive level doesn’t give a flying flip about your strength, your mobility, your capacity to do the splits, to do a high kick, to hit a tennis ball, it doesn’t care about any of that stuff. All that it really cares about is that you survive the next few moments. This goes way back probably into our evolutionary programming, the way the organ actually developed but we again are designed to survive. Now the way that your brain does this however is super interesting. It does it through predictive means. In other words, our brain is constantly looking at our internal environments, what’s going on in our body and around our body and our external environments and it is making predictions about what is about to happen. Why is that really important? Because if you can predict a bad thing’s going to happen, you can avoid it. If you’re taken by surprise, that’s typically when bad things happen to us.
So our brain is wired to predict and it depends on making accurate predictions and now this is where nervous system training gets really interesting because what happens is when your brain is unable to trust the quality of the information coming in, the inputs, its ability to make accurate predictions goes down. Simple way to conceive of this is let’s say I say, hey I want you to go over to your buddy’s house. You’ve driven there a thousand times. They live all the way across town. You get in your car, you turn on the radio, you’re jamming to whatever your favorite music is, you kind of zone out and you wind up at their house, right? You’ve driven it so many times that you can do it almost unconsciously. You know, you’re not having wrecks the entire time, but you get there, you do it efficiently, you do it very comfortably. You’re not stressed out, you’re not sweating. You get there easily because you’ve done it so many times. You have a very clear predictive process going on. Now let’s say I take you, same person, same car, but now I give you an address that I want you to go to that you’ve never been to before and I want you to do it at one or two o’clock in the morning during a heavy thunderstorm and the lights are out. So now you’re driving, you can’t trust what’s going on with the stoplights, right? There are other cars still on the road, the lights aren’t working, the street lights are out, there’s thunder, there’s lightning, there’s rain. How fast are you going to drive? Are you going to drive as fast as you did to your friend’s house? Are you going to be paying a lot more attention? Are you going to go slower? Yeah, because your ability to predict what’s about to happen has been dramatically reduced.
So if we look at that in physical terms, what does that mean? It means that if I have vision problems, whether that is my eyes don’t move correctly, I have problems with focusing near or far, I have poor binocular coordination, there’s a whole host of things that can go wrong with the visual system. Guess what? If you have visual problems or visual dysfunction, does that degrade your predictive capacity? The answer should be yes. If I cannot balance well, my inner ear doesn’t function well, as I’m trying to move through the world, I’m not getting clear signals about which way is up and which way am I going, guess what? That’s super scary. Your brain’s like, oh my gosh, your next step, you might fall and I, being the brain, am way up here off the ground and I don’t want to be smacked into the ground really hard because that’s bad for me. Is it going to change how you move?
And then we go internally into the body. Where am I in space? Do I know where my fingers are? Do I know where my feet are? How clearly can I feel where I am in space? That’s called proprioception. And then I have tactile sensitivity. Is my right hand as sensitive as my left hand? Is my right foot as sensitive as my left foot? Can I feel the same level of granularity on the ground when I’m barefoot? What about my breathing, my respiration? What’s called interoception. How does my heart feel? How do my lungs feel? How does movement in my internal organs feel? All of these different things, your brain is assessing all at once. It’s integrating that information and it is building your subsequent movement through the world based on all of that input. So if we have lost input quality in any of those systems, it can have tremendous ramifications in how we move, how we perform, and how much pain we feel. Because guess what? When your brain cannot predict what is going to happen, it wants to protect you from yourself. And it has a few tools at its disposal. What’s its favorite tool? Pain. What’s another good tool? Fatigue. What’s another good tool? Immobility, lack of range of motion. What’s a great tool? Lack of motivation, anxiety, depression. These are all actually things that your brain will use in order to protect you from yourself when it is unable to predict what is going to happen next.
Not knowing what your own body is about to do is one of the scariest things that your brain can confront. And when it is dealing with that, it’s going to protect you from yourself. So brain-based training, nervous system training, is about having a very structured sequential process of evaluating, assessing, and training every single input system, looking at how the brain responds to that input, seeing if the brain is capable of integrating that newfound quality input with existing input so that our eventual output, our movement, our pain, our performance can improve. That’s nervous system training. It’s not do an eye drill so your hamstrings get more flexible. It’s not, hey, try this cool little vestibular drill to see if it helps with your back pain. That’s how it translates to some degree in the real world. But if you only understand it at that level, you don’t understand it kind of at this global level, it’s very easy to deceive yourself that you’re awesome at doing nervous system training when in fact you’re just scratching the surface.
So this is what I wanted to tell people today. This is what nervous system training is really about. Hopefully you understand that. It’s not difficult. It’s not difficult to understand conceptually. It just takes time and effort to master it, right?
So again, if you’re a movement professional and you’re interested in blending this kind of depth and kind of type of information to what you already do, check the pinned comment, send us an email, click the link. We’d love to chat with you.
Sorry, I’m still thinking about brains, right? So my, I’m terrible at marketing, but I’m hell on wheels when it comes to neurology. All right. So if you’re interested in neurology and how this stuff actually works, make sure you get in contact with us. Otherwise, I hope you found this super interesting. Ponder it, think on it because it really will change your ability to improve yourself, improve your clients, and also change how you think about everything that you see in the fitness and movement world.
