Neuroplasticity. Your new BFF.
I’m a big fan of the nervous system. It helps me breathe. It helps me to know when I’m happy. It allows me to feel the soft and rough texture of my dog’s fur when I pet him.
One of the best miracles of the nervous system is neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to make changes in response to the demands placed on it.
To be sure, neuroplasticity is having a moment. Many people may have heard of it as “brain training” -- a way to quit smoking, lose weight, increase productivity, stay away from bad relationships.
Essentially it means our brains can change. At any age.
Old dogs can, indeed, learn new tricks! And that is great news.
In the same way you can learn to play the piano by practicing, your body can also learn to move in ways that are more efficient and potentially cause less pain, irritation or inflammation.
One of the reasons this is so great is that the habits my body has acquired — like tensing my shoulders for no reason except maybe I’m thinking too hard— that have ended up causing me pain and other issues, can be “unlearned”. And those patterns can be reprogrammed.
How can we encourage neuroplasticity? In a very simplistic way- just thinking about how a movement feels when you do it can help reinforce it, embedding into your brain and into your body. The neurons fire together to make those connections. And paying attention to that helps them “wire together”, and make those connections again and again. A little faster and easier every time.
There are many great books about how this works and how to apply it to many things. A couple of popular ones are by psychiatrist and researcher Norman Doidge: The Brain’s Way Of Healing and The Brain That Changes Itself. And the primer Neuroplasticity by Moheb Costandi from the MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series.
Training the body and the brain together makes for a true “mind body connection”. It’s why we teach our Hip Love programs the way we do – to help the brain understand what we’re doing with the body. The more the brain understands it the more the body gets it. That’s why it works.
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Wishing you happy hips!