A great way to develop an understanding of Motor Engrams, is to just to take a look at your day. Maybe not just today but an average day. How many hours a day are you sitting. Sitting at a desk, sitting at a car, sitting on a couch, whatever the case may be. That’s a certain Motor Engram, so we would call that your Sitting Motor Engram, and to the degree that you have what we will consider, poor posture (your shoulders are slumped, your head is protruding forward), that\’s your Motor Engram for sitting. Look around your office and hopefully you\’ll see someone with tall posture, head back, shoulders back, all those things that we consider to be good posture. That’s their Sitting Engram. So to the degree, that you do something repetitively, you create a Motor Engram. It\’s not just about, what muscles get tight, and what muscles get over stretched. It’s about a neurological program that you’re running in your brain, every time you repeat that pattern. That’s why we are so impressed when we watch professional athletes. Look at a pro golfer, they have practiced their swing millions, and millions of times. So they have a very, very, deeply embedded and a very strong neural net, associated with a golf swing. They have worked a lifetime to develop a golf swing engram, verses say someone like myself who has golfed, maybe half a dozen times in my life. I have no engram for that, so my swing looks different every time. That’s not true, it looks horrible every time, but it looks horrible in different ways. The more you practice something, the more permanent it becomes in your body. That’s why it is of the utmost importance, that when we practice something, we’re working to develop a skill opposed to just getting through the activity. When we relate this to exercise we want to pay extremely close attention to our technique, and the more fatigued one becomes, the worst your technique is going to get, and the more you are likely to make that your new engram due to the effects of stress hormones you release when you become fatigued. These stress hormones more deeply imprint these fatigued/stressed motor engrams. So pushing through extra sets, or extra reps in any exercise, is not a good idea. That’s not what we do when we train. When we need to push through, it’s perhaps out on the field, or whatever your competition is. That’s when we push through fatigue. That’s when we push through pain, when you’re in a competition, but not when you’re training. Training is about creating perfection in these patterns so that when you go to use them, they’re efficient.
more great information on movement engrams to come…..
