Muscle Memory: How to Hack the Mind-Body Connection for Longevity

by | May 28, 2020

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A Battle at Birth

When a baby giraffe is born it immediately tries to stand up, unassisted, on its own four awkwardly long legs. It moves deliberately, fighting through the tremors and shakes pulsing through his muscles, set off by its surging nervous system.

This is a battle fought not only within its own body, but a battle fought for survival.

If it doesn’t learn to walk and run almost immediately it’ll end up a meal for a hungry predator. For a giraffe, this internal battle is the difference between life and death.

Like the giraffe, we humans are born into a similar battlefield, but the battle before us is fought over a much longer period.

It’s fair to say that we fight a war, a war of attrition.

Giraffes’ nervous systems are just about fully functional at birth. They learn to walk 10,000 times faster than the typical human. A human baby, on the other hand, comes out of the womb and takes up to a year to learn these movement patterns.

You’ve most likely heard of muscle memory.

While muscles themselves don’t have memory per se, the neurological connections going from your brain to body and the body’s tissues are constantly being improved.

Effectively, every move you make teaches your body how to move through space going forward.

It works very simply, you see, the brain only sends your muscles signals to contract; it does not signal muscles to relax. Therefore, the ability of muscles to relax is dependent on the frequency with which the brain sends the contract signal. 

If this signal is sent too frequently then relaxation won’t happen fully and muscle tension builds up. If this occurs you won’t be able to maintain “proper posture” (you could argue that there is no one proper posture and that the body in motion is best).

If this continues, you’ll develop problems and pain if the WRONG movements become patterns and the WRONG postures become the norm.

This happens because your body likes to be as efficient as possible, and adapts to the stresses that are continuously placed upon it. Or in certain cases, the stresses that are no longer placed upon it.

When a range of motion is no longer continuously utilized, the body adapts by replacing energy-consuming tissues and mechanoreceptors with stiff, tight tissues (like scar tissue) that don’t consume energy.

So when it comes to certain types of movement, If you don’t use it, you lose it!

This is what people mean when they say that they’re “getting rusty” at something.

As your body adapts, you’ll begin distributing energy differently.

Pain

Why is it that modern medicine has started to catch on in certain holistic areas: like eating healthy to prevent diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol, but when we go and see a doctor we take joint degeneration and pain as a foregone conclusion as we age?

Per a 2012 study at Johns Hopkins, Health economists have reported the annual cost of chronic pain in the United States is as high as $635 billion a year, which is more than the yearly costs for cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.

Sadly, more than one-third of the population is in some form of chronic pain.

Certain types of pain, like the acute pain of slamming your finger in a car door, actually serve very important functions, like preventing further bodily harm and initiating the healing process.

So it’s sad because chronic pain, where muscles become chronically tight for example, serves no purpose in the body.

It does not protect or heal the body in any way, it only leads to further degradation.

Pitfalls

Stress and Posture:

Stress increases overall muscle tension/tone and triggers defensive muscular patterns to protect yourself from harm.

This can result in what’s known as Hyperkyphotic Posture. 

Hyperkyphotic Posture is caused often by the distress response where the abdominals are hyper contracted and they pull your chest, rib cage, and shoulders down into a rounded posture (think of the fetal position).

Spending hours and hours at a computer, like many in modern-day society, is one way to develop this posture.

When most people type, they are typically in a forward head posture. This causes the suboccipital muscles behind the head to have to engage to keep one looking straight forward.

Every 15 degrees that your head leans past your body creates an additional 10-15 pounds of pressure that these suboccipital muscles have to withstand.

This counteracts the forward momentum and quite literally stops you from falling forward.

Oftentimes this is coupled with having to arch the lower back to offset the forward lean created by hyper tight abdominal muscles.

Therefore attempts to cure the resulting lower back pain often fail as they don’t address hyper tight abdominal muscles.

This posture also prevents a person from taking a full breath and using their diaphragm properly. This creates shallow breathing and can lead to further anxiousness and stress.

Reaction to Injury:

When you injure an ankle it may take months for it to recover. In that time you will naturally lean towards your other side to protect the injury.

Your pain perception system works with your vestibular system and your proprioceptive system to adjust posture automatically.

This effectively minimizes your pain but over time, this will change your habitual movement patterns.

Like previously mentioned, your body responds automatically to prevent pain to prevent further damage. This is thanks to your flexor reflex.

For example, when you step on a nail your body has an instant reaction to the acute pain is to engage the flexor muscles on the opposite side of the body and activate the extensor muscles on the side of the body where the injury may occur.

This is great for acute instances of preventing pain, however when this occurs chronically, such as when you’re healing from a long-term injury or have a chronic condition, this can create permanent movement patterns and it becomes a problem.

Handedness:

There are many many examples of how handedness and the dominant side of your body can affect your movement patterns and posture and therefore cause imbalance and pain.

Examples of activities that create imbalance include sitting at a desk and using one hand to click a mouse, brushing your teeth every morning with the same hand, holding your phone up to your ear with the same hand, and carrying a bag on one shoulder.

Unfortunately, minute instances like these lead to larger unintended consequences.

Though estimates vary widely, a 2010 Johns Hopkins study in the American Journal of Neuroradiology found that 13 percent of people ages 46 to 60 had some degree of scoliosis, as did 39 percent of those over 60.

An earlier study in the journal Spine found an even higher rate—68 percent—in healthy people over 60.

Athletic Training:

By being an athlete actually what you’re doing is performing very habitual patterns through the performance of your sport and the performance of your training.

By doing these movements over and over again and moving in the same ways, you are not training your body with a variety of motions that could actually be contributing to many imbalances and issues down the line in terms of joint degeneration.

Solutions

So what can YOU do to avoid all these pitfalls and prevail in the lifelong battle against chronic tightness, joint degeneration, and pain?

1. Meditate/Breathe

Meditation and breathwork are great ways to reduce stress and release chronic muscle tightness.

Meditation decreases activity in the primary somatosensory cortex of the brain, the pain processing area, and increases activity in other regions associated with pain and emotion regulating areas of the brain.

If you’re a beginner to meditation and need some guidance it’s highly recommended that you check out the Waking Up app created by Sam Harris.

2. Movement is medicine

Every day you should move your joints through full ranges of motion. The systems developed by Functional Range Conditioning are the optimal starting point to get yourself limber and in motion.

 By moving joints through a full range of motion each day you can:

    • Signal for tissue remodeling to allow for maximal tissue elongation & range of motion maintenance

    • Engage/Train all articular mechanoreceptors regularly (“Afferent Training”)

    • Prevent maturation of fibrotic tissue

    • Increase articular health and longevity by delaying/preventing the onset of osteoarthritis

You should perform a daily joint mobility routine consisting of controlled articular rotations (CARs) EVERY DAY as a morning ritual or as a warmup before exercise or play.

Kelly Gonzalez has an awesome and simple breakdown of it on her website.

3. Utilize Principles of Progressive Adaptation for Joints

Through the concept of progressive adaptation, incremental loads imparted on tissue result in the adaptation of said tissue causing the load absorption and capacity to improve.

Adaptation can include the addition of new tissue and/or tissue of better/stronger quality.

We strength train the body to get nice looking beach muscles, but why don’t more people use these same principles to increase mobility and longevity?

Functional Range Conditioning is a system of joint health, and mobility training based upon scientific principles and research.  By bringing a joint into its passive end range of motion and then applying isometric loading, we’re able to override the stretch reflex, efficiently recruit motor units, and safely induce progressive tissue adaptation.

By improving joint health, range of motion, strength, and stability, we ensure that forces are correctly distributed in the body and provide injury protection.

The human body is a very complex machine. Social media is plagued with false prophets providing posts with titles like “try these 3 exercises to cure chronic back pain.” To best address your issues it’s important to find a professional who will be able to properly assess your issues and prescribe a plan for correcting them.

There is no quick fix. It will take consistent effort over significant periods of time to create adaptations. We often forget to remain vigilant of the battles happening within. And that’s why so many of us in society experience chronic, intense pain as we age.

It’s not because we humans are destined to be fragile and in pain with age. Unlike the newborn giraffe, who fights a battle at birth,
we fight a war
.

A war of attrition that lasts a lifetime, and those who remain unaware of their bodies’ patterns of motion are losing. After birth, the giraffe uses its body for survival for the rest of its life, and strangely, we’ve allowed society’s bubble to fool us into thinking we’re different.

To our bodies, society means nothing, survival is still at play.

So make the choice… don’t stop moving, never stop surviving.


 

Brendan Kittredge

Brendan Kittredge

Founder of "Mindful Mobility" , Certified Personal Trainer & (FRCms)

About the Author

Brendan Kittredge, the founder of Mindful Mobility is a Certified Personal Trainer and Function Range Conditioning Movement Specialist (FRCms) who helps people feel and move better through individualized programming.