neuromotor programming?
It is a physical training method to improve your brain by increasing synoptic connections.
Explain the process to me.
When performing any activity, our brain monitors our body to find a response to the environment. We are a whole. Every organ, muscle, bone, nerve, and tissue works in an orchestrated way to keep you moving coherently.
Body and mind communicate.
The relationship is bidirectional, but there are three times as many highways from the body to the brain as from the brain to the body. Training the body is transforming the mind.
As?
The first thing is to work on your body awareness. Observe yourself: you will see unnatural postures that you repeat, they damage your body and condition your mind. It’s all about choosing how to move.
Many movements are automatic.
By simply remaining still and silent, the brain gathers more information in 30 seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years.
What is your proposal?
Recode the bad movements that we have been recording in the unconscious and that damage our health. Today the disconnection between body and mind is alarming.
Let’s remedy
Body posture is a reflection of character and is correctable. Amy Cuddy, a Harvard professor, demonstrated that there are power poses and low power poses: putting your arms on your hips, shoulders back, and feet firmly on the ground is a power pose, like crossing your arms behind your head.
Going hunched over must be terrible.
It’s a low power posture, like sitting with your arms crossed over your chest. Cuddy showed that when people take a power stance their testosterone levels go up and cortisol goes down.
Testosterone helps reduce the risk of anxiety or depression.
Yes, and cortisol is the main stress hormone. Another study from the University of Oxford shows how voluntary movements transform the brain.
Not so involuntary movements?
Brain activation was compared when moving a finger involuntarily using a servo motor attached to the finger and voluntarily. Voluntary movement activates many more areas of the brain.
What do you promote?
The open kinetic chain. Working on a quadriceps extension machine is a closed kinetic chain, squatting is open because it’s not rigid, allowing your brain endless combinations.
What does neuroscience say?
Many problems have developed during the growth stage. Standing up too soon, for example, affects cognitive development.
Because?
When we crawl we make a set of pulleys between our pelvis and our shoulders. The movement is an orchestration, the locomotor system does not attend to our muscles separately.
Should I crawl at my age?
Yes, recovering the movements you did as a child: crawling on the floor with your back allows a lot of the muscles that are stiff due to poor posture and lack of activity to begin to recover.
What is the good posture for walking?
Straightening does not depend on carrying the chest high but on imagining that we have a thread at the nape of the neck that pulls us up, as if a book were placed on top of your head, thus avoiding neck pain.
What else hurts us?
Being in shoes all day directly affects the muscles that support the body. You have to spend time barefoot, exert force with your toes and flex the sole of your foot. The more joints we have in a part of the body, the more nervous system connections that are lost if they are not used.
Give me more tips.
Making gestures, new exercises, such as tai chi, help you stay young for longer.
A lot of people make only machines.
They get a muscular but not a cognitive stimulus. If you want to prevent neurodegenerative diseases, do open kinetic chain exercises that help you generate more neural connections.
What kind of exercises?
Push-ups, squats, pull-ups, hanging and changing your grip, sitting down and getting up from the ground without using your hands: something that is increasingly difficult for us not because of a muscular issue but because of a brain issue, due to lack of use.
Breathing is also essential.
It affects stress levels and homeostasis, a cadence of six to twelve breaths per minute keeps us relaxed and neurotransmitters are regulated. Standing you have to breathe filling the back and not the gut.
