A Guide to Better Movement: The Science and Practice of Moving With More Skill and Less Pain

Although the weight is a form of resistance to the muscles, it is a form of assistance to the nervous system in finding the best movement pattern.

Moshe Feldenkrais claimed there is no such thing as an isolated emotion, thought, movement or sensation. Each mental output will always involve elements of the other three, so every thought has an associated movement, sensation and emotion; every emotion has a related movement, sensation, and thought, and so on.

If you take a snapshot of any elite mover in action, you’ll see a beautiful example of reciprocal use of the limbs for counterbalance. A dancer performing an arabesque, or a soccer player kicking a ball are perfect examples.

skill development is characterized not by adding new muscle contractions, but taking away the unnecessary ones. In the context of everyday emotional life, inhibition allows you to make measured responses to stressful events. When a car cuts you off in traffic, there is a flash of excitement in the muscles and heart rate, but the spread of excitemen

Stability is also necessary to optimize the channeling of force into a target. You may have heard the phrase, “You can’t shoot a cannon out of a canoe.” If the canoe is not stabilized, the force of the cannon will be wasted on moving the canoe backward instead of the cannonball forward. The same thing happens when the joint on one end of a moving b

With this in mind, it is interesting to consider the many stretching techniques that incorporate neurological “tricks,” such as PNF, contract/relax, post isometric relaxation, reciprocal inhibition, etc. Looking at these techniques through the lens of the central governor, we can see them as ways to convince the nervous system that the movement is

Although most of us are not consciously afraid of falling as we walk or squat, there is always some degree of unconscious nervous system activity devoted to preventing a fall. This may involve excess tension and restriction of uncontrolled mobility. To the extent that a developmental position can reduce this protective activity, it can facilitate t

First, the presence of pain will make it very difficult to retrain motor patterns, as the nervous system will tend to involuntarily adopt protective strategies that may be undesirable. Thus, trying to train movement in the presence of threat and pain is very problematic.

Inhibition is a higher-order skill than activation.