Original Strength and Pressing Reset
In The Well Balanced Child, Ewout Van-Manen points out that “…physical movement is the basis for cognitive, social and emotional development.â€
Not only does movement improve your proprioception, it actually physically changes and improves your brain! Physical activity develops brain tissue! Inside your brain, there are millions of nerve connections, or nerve networks. Moveent improves the communication between these connections and cements new connections. The better you move, the more efficient your brain becomes. The more efficient your brain becomes, the better you move. It’s a two-way street.
Movement is health or healthy living. It shapes everything about us: our brains, our bodies, who we are as people, our emotions, our hormones, even our mental health. Movement is the key to health, every facet of health. BUT, by the age of five, we do something very unnatural; we learn to sit six to eight hours a day while we begin 'learning' in school. Movement, the very thing that shapes our brains and our life, is halted so we can begin to shape our brains through our wonderful education process. The movements and patterns we developed as a child are suddenly put aside and we learn a new pattern: sitting.
We spend years sitting: at a computer, in a car, in a chair, on the couch. We have become very, very good at sitting. We get so good at sitting we become stuck in the seated position, or the ‘adult fetal position,’ because all of our flexor muscles become so tight. We are not designed to sit still for six to eight hours everyday, or any day. It’s not natural!
The ironic thing is we all know we should stay fit and healthy so we go to the local fitness center that allows us to ‘train’ and workout while we are sitting!!! What?! Do you want to know how to make a movement pattern stick, good or bad? Load it with weight. Yes, we go the ‘health’ club, sit down on a machine and lift a weight or ride a bike. We cement our ability to sit by exercising in the seated position, and we further lose our ability to be bulletproof.
We are made to move. Yet, most of us don’t. We sit instead. So, we lose our movement patterns, or we replace them with sitting. We slow our brain development. In some ways, our brain development regresses. This process is called neuronal fitness or neuronal pruning. Just as movement can shape and develop our brains, not moving can also shape our brains. Simply put, our brains prune out the nerve connections we don’t need or the ones we don’t use often.
We need to move again as seamlessly as infants and toddlers. We need to wake up to the fact that we ruined our physical bodies and the only way to restore our health is by moving again. No one can do it for us. Only we can do it for ourselves. It’s time to start moving, to reset, to become bulletproof, and to regain our original strength. Once you regain your physical health, you open up to an entirely new world of exploration, the Self or Spirit.