To the degree that you practice poorly, you’ll perform poorly. The research on Motor Engram reprogramming is all over the place. So I’ve read everything from as little as 300 repetitions to correct a faulty program, up to 10,000. The timeframe in which an engram can be improved depends on how quickly you learn, on how many repetitions you do, and how well you do the repetitions. Remember if you do one perfect rep, and you do one poor rep, it cancels out. It’s a zero, so your body has to decide which way, which engram, which neural pathway, are we gonna use for any given task. So again, the more efficient and the more perfect you are in your practice, the better the movement is going to be reproduced in competition and even in daily activity. Let\’s go back to our sitting example. In our society a majority of people are in office jobs, and are sitting. Personally I don’t have to do that. They\’re sitting, and they\’re sitting all day. When you sit for 8, 10, 12, however many hours a day, you’re running the same program over, and over, and over, and it’s wrecking your posture. It’s important to take into consideration, the effects that your posture has on your health.
When we sit excessively, we tend to see some common posture deviations. We see what’s widely known as forward head posture, where your head starts to push forward of your body. We see lots of protraction in the shoulder girdle. We also see a shortening of the upper abdominal musculature. In the textbooks we know this as the Upper Cross Syndrome, which is usually paired with Lower Cross Syndrome, which is a tightening of the hip flexors, a weakening of the glutes and lower abdominals paired with a tightening of your hamstrings, and your gastrocs. This affects your health on many levels. Let\’s look at it from a musculo-skeletal standpoint. The further your head drifts forward, the more stress it puts on your C7-T1 vertebral junction, forcing your body to follow Wolfe\’s law. Wolfe\’s law states that the larger a stress is to any given area the more tissue is produced in said area. This is exactly what happens when someone develops a Dowagers Hump. Look around your office and you will see varying sizes and stages of Dowengers humps. A Dowengers hump is a limp of tissue at the C7-T1 junction and is a result of long term forward head posture. It is the \”hunchback\” posture.
Another musculo-skeletal consideration is the protraction of your shoulder girdle. This greatly increases the tension in your pec major, and lat muscles. These muscles take you to what we call internal rotation of the humerus and abduction or drawing the humerus close to the body. Overtime this will lead to shoulder dysfunction. The dysfunction occurs due to the fact that the increase pull and tension by the internal rotators/adductors of the shoulder girdle lead to a weakness in the posterior rotators/abbduct ours of the shoulder. If your lucky and catch/treat it early enough you will simply experience some minor aches and pains. Leave it to long and a simple task like reaching to far will cause a tear in the rotator cuff and an unpleasant surgery and rehab. All just from having a faulty sitting engram.
sit up,straight and join me for more next week…
