MOVE!

The body is smarter than the brain

I had a discussion with a friend that is a psychologist one night and the question came up whether the body is smarter than the brain. The psychologist claimed but made no argument that the brain is superior over the body. When you initially think about it, that makes sense. But I disagree. My argument to the contrary was that the body is smarter, the example I gave and ask you to think about is when you get a little paper cut or a bloody nose I want you to think really hard about stopping the bleeding..... Didn't work? Interesting.

Now, I could get all scientifical about how the body (on its own) stops the bleeding and creates a scar but I am not a biologist. In summary, the body SELF-ORGANIZES!

In a different way with similar principals, the body self-organizes with movement. The body will be attracted to certain movements that become stable so to ensure that we can have efficient movements that are adaptable (not repeatable, this is impossible) we need to train and engrain this!

Action should be a flexible process which should promote self-organization. When major external or internal cues are given, brain processes (which force an unstable movement to happen) will occur and self-organization stops happening.

This is why we throw different types of balls and clubs, we shake water balls around and we jump and throw. We are training to be adaptable and also promote the body to figure it out instead of trying to give the answers especially since we don't truly know how YOUR body is going to react, we are just bystanders.

For example, if we try to draw a sequential order of how the body should move and give it to an athlete and say, “This is how you are supposed to move, now go do it” more than likely they are going to be lost, unable to do it and generally lose interest.

When we give them freedom to figure it out by getting to know the athlete, constraining some movements here and there, giving them space to express movements through movement progressions, and asking questions, more efficient movements are more likely to come out and ACTUALLY transfer to the game. (Go read my post Motor Performance vs. Motor learning to learn more)

I would love to talk more about this and how we go about everyday training. The only thing that matters to us is if you get better and the training actually transfers to the playing field.