Elements of Efficient Movement to Prevent Falls

Professional athletes make movement look graceful, flawless, effortless.  We're not professional athlete's but your brain's ultimate goal of movement is efficiency.  Efficient movement requires less energy and your brain likes to conserve energy.

So how does your movement become efficient?  Practice, practice, practice!!!  Practice solidifies neural pathways with myelin and your brain (and body) get good at that movement.

But here's the kicker;

your body gets good at whatever it does

exactly how it does it.  

What that means is that if you're practicing sloppy, compensated movements, your body will get good at bad, inefficient form.

This is why you need to practice movements in perfect form. Dr. Cobb, creator of Z-Health, has identified four elements of efficiency that must be present in the "PERFECT REP".  And they are:

1. Perfect Form
2. Dynamic Postural Alignment
3. Synchronized Respiration
4. Balanced Tension and Relaxation 

What does that look like?  Well, perfect form begins in Lengthened Spine.  Dynamic Postural Alignment means that all joints are relaxed and properly aligned.  You're sitting, or standing, tall and relaxed.  Feet, knees, hips and shoulders all facing forward.

Synchronized Respiration is relaxed nasal inhale into your belly and nasal or mouth exhalation.  This breathing pattern continues throughout the movements.  It will change as energy requirements increase but you SHOULD NOT HOLD YOUR BREATH AT ANY TIME!

The final element of efficiency is the ability to maintain balanced Tension and Relaxation in your body.  This means no contraction, flexion, forward bending, locking of arms when doing movements, no tension.  This is a challenge when a person is asked to move a joint in directions and speeds they haven't done in....forever!

IT's very common to see people tighten up when trying to move a body part in isolation that has never been moved before.  It takes concentration!  Concentration can rob your body of efficiency because all your brain wants is to do the movement and not look stupid.  This should be easy.  But it's not.

One perfect rep means doing whatever drill with all the forms of efficiency present.  Breathing.  Relaxed.  Postural aligned and perfect form.  In my Brains and Balance Training classes, we practice drills that should be easy. You would think three circles clockwise and three circles counterclockwise would be easy.  But it's not always the case!

Learn how to control your body with the elements of efficiency.  Get good at good movement.  Quit living your life in bad form!  Say goodbye to poor posture and instability.   Learn how to move each joint in isolation so you can move them all together efficiently.

Brain-based training: The future of Fitness.
If you're not training your senses, half your brain is dying.  Use it or lose it.

If You Stare at the Floor, You'll End Up on the Floor

    Our posture is 90% habitual.  Basically we walk through life on auto-pilot; unaware of our surroundings, not thinking about each carefully planned step or the balance skills and total body integration required to remain upright.

We take our balance for granted.  We take effortless movement for granted.  We take our brain's ability to receive billions of messages each second, understand and analyze that data and send a message to the rest of the body at just the right time, at just the right strength, and with just the right coordination for granted.   In actuality, movement is amazing.

Because most of our movement through life is habitual and because your body gets good at whatever it does, exactly how it does it, our posture is the result of our daily habits.  Vision and vestibular inputs have a tremendous impact on how your carry your head because all the brain wants is a horizontal horizon.

There was a very tall gentleman in my Brains and Balance Training class at Fair Oaks United Methodist Church.  He is a retired pharmacist.  Those two factors have resulted in very poor posture; hunched over shoulders, jutted out chin, head tilt forward, hips tucked forward, inches of his Thoracic spine are bend forward in kyphosis.

This typical forward head carriage is due to muscle imbalances caused by downward vision staring at the floor due to his fear of falling.  After eight sessions, things are looking up!

During the first two weeks of class, he would get very frustrated when I would correct his downward stare with, "Look at your vertical target".  He would shrug his shoulders and begrudgingly look up and correct his posture.  This is going to take some time because we've got 79 years of poor postural habits.

Good postural habits begin in lengthened spine; Spine long, chin slightly down and tucked back.  Every time you even think about your posture, lengthen spine and drop the chin and push back. Find the vertical target.

By the last session, this tall, lanky man was standing on a tightrope, ears in line with shoulders, shoulders in line with hips, hips in line with heels and weight equally distributed between the front and the back foot.  And he wasn't staring at the floor!!!

When asked what the best part of the class was, he said, "the ladies!".   It was amazing what he noticed when he quit looking at the floor.  The lone ranger in a class of ten women including his wife, this guy hung in there and noticed all the pretty face in the room.

Quit letting life pass you by.  Look around, pay attention to your surroundings.  Peripheral vision training can increase your reaction speeds by 25%; start paying attention to what you're not looking at!

Posture is dependent on where you're looking.  If you don't want "old age posture", look forward at vertical targets and stand upright.

The Fall Prevention Lady