You do not have to be a victim to your pain, It really can be as simple as changing your movement patterns, changing your habits. It does not have to be heavy hours of rehabilitative work, sweat, blood and tears, that old cliché. You need practice and you need perfect practice, and that’s what going to make these changes. We want to make these changes little by little, we want to periodize these changes. That’s something we’ll discuss in a few blogs down the road. The main points that I would like to get across, is (1) Your body and movement patterns run off engrams. Engrams are predisposed movement patterns via a neural network in your brain. (2) These Motor Engrams change to avoid pain. So anytime you’ve had an injury, or had trauma, you have found a new way to move. You have created a new engram to move around that pain. (3) Once the pain has subsided we need to reintegrate. We need to rewire our brains to a more efficient pattern, to a non-pain avoidance pattern. (4) The literature is all over the place, as to how long the process is going to take. Again, anywhere from 3000-10,000 repetitions. Again the intensity, at least in the early stages, isn’t so important. It isn’t as important as the consistency, and the consistency is not as important as the quality. When I write a program for someone, I would much rather that they do half of the reps that I’m asking correctly than do all of them poorly, or even half of them correctly, and the other half poorly. Because for every poor repetition you do, you cancel out a good repetition. Your brain is constantly in a state of rewiring, and it will wire to what you do the most. So make sure that you practice, and make sure that you practice perfectly.
This was the final installment on motor engrams, check back next week for an exciting new topic on……
