Neuromotor programming?
It is a physical training method to improve your brain by increasing synoptic connections.
Explain the process to me.
When you do any activity your brain monitors your body to look for a response to the environment. We are a whole. Every organ, muscle, bone, nerve and tissue works in an orchestrated way to move coherently.
Body and mind communicate.
The relationship is bidirectional, but there are three times as many roads from the body to the brain as there are from the brain to the body. Training the body is transforming the mind.
With?
First you need to work on your body awareness. Observe yourself: you will see unnatural postures that you repeat, damage your bones and condition your mind. It’s about choosing how to move.
Many movements are automatic.
By simply remaining still and silent, the brain gets 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 harm our health. Today the disconnect between body and mind is alarming.
Let’s fix it.
Body posture is a reflection of character and is correctable. Harvard professor Amy Cuddy showed that there are power poses and low-power poses: shoulders back and feet firmly on the floor is a power pose, like crossing your arms behind your head.
Being hunched over must be terrible.
It’s a low power pose, like sitting with your arms folded across your chest. Cuddy showed that when people adopt a power pose their testosterone levels increase and cortisol decreases.
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 the involuntary movements?
Brain activation was compared when we move 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 quad extension machine is a closed kinetic chain, doing squats is open because it’s not rigid, which allows your brain a lot of 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 play a game of pulleys between our pelvis and our shoulders. Movement is an orchestration, the locomotor system does not serve our muscles separately.
Should I be crawling at my age?
Yes, recover the movements you did as a child: crawling on the floor on your back allows many muscles that are stiff due to poor posture and lack of activity to begin to recover.
What is the best posture for walking?
The straightening does not depend on going with a high chest 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 our head, thus avoiding cervical pain.
What else harms us?
Being in shoes all day directly affects the muscles that support the body. It is convenient to spend time barefoot, to do strength with the toes and to flex the sole of the foot. The more joints we have in a part of the body, the more connections of the nervous system that are lost if they are not used.
Give me more advice.
Making gestures, new exercises, like tai chi, helps to keep you young longer.
A lot of people just make machines.
They get muscular but not cognitive stimulation. If you want to prevent neurodegenerative diseases, do open kinetic chain exercises that help generate more neural connections.
What kind of exercises?
Push-ups, squats, pull-ups, hanging and changing the grip, sitting and getting up from the ground without using your hands: something that is becoming more and more difficult for us not because of a muscle issue but 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. When we are standing, we need to breathe filling the back and not the belly.
