4. QUANTITY VERSUS QUALITY
The study of human motion—quantifying the human
body by measuring how much and how many times people can move—emerged as
the industrial age took hold and virtually all bodies began to move in
harmony with assembly lines and other machinery or equipment.
At this time, exercise as a formal discipline
began to be studied as something quantifiable. Whether health-related or
work-related, the key issues became how much, how many times, how far,
how fast, how big, and how strong.
As research into the human body and exercise
continued, it became more and more necessary for researchers to focus
their studies on the quantification of movement. The question of how far
or how long a person should run was researched endlessly, but how
a person runs—the quality of the running—was not investigated. When we
watch wide receivers on football teams who are famously graceful; or
sleek, long-limbed guards in the NBA; or runners whose stride is
beautifully smooth; the quality of their movement or their grace may
attract our attention and capture our hearts. But today many people
don’t value the same grace of movement in their own exercise: They focus
on the quantity of their movement (“How far did I walk?” “Did I
exercise enough?”) rather than the quality.
Aiming to achieve goals that are easy to quantify
can create excessive tension in the effort to achieve those goals, which
ends up being counterproductive. In the Change Your Age Program, I
won’t emphasize the number of repetitions you need to do, but rather the
quality of your movements and your awareness of them. Evaluate the role
that quantity and quality of motion play in your current exercise
routines.
• Are measurable quantities—repetitions, time, weight, speed—more important to you than your quality of motion?
• Can you assess your typical workout’s success to include your gracefulness in performing the movement?
• When you move, do you
feel you move more like a machine or an animal? What image of a graceful
animal could you bring to your workout?
5. THE PATH OF MOST RESISTANCE
Many forms of exercise use increasing resistance
as the only path to building strength. Thousands of repetitions against
greater and greater resistance eventually increases the strength and
size of our muscles.
Some people lift weights or spend hours on
machines that exercise the same muscle group in the same fashion over
and over again. The very feeling of intramuscular stress or tired
muscles is considered an indication of a good workout.
This approach, however, can result in more
problems than benefits: When our muscles can contract more powerfully,
any existing muscular-skeletal imbalance or faulty movement habit
becomes exaggerated and amplified. If you haven’t learned to lift
properly, you are at greater risk for stress-related pain and damage to
your ligaments and tendons with strong muscles than with weak ones. If
you use too much effort in getting up, standing, running, and so on,
stronger muscles only mask the problem. These sorts of ineffective
movement habits overwork certain muscles and joints while neglecting or
ignoring the use of others, thus leading to a limited range of movement
and gross inefficiency. The brain might be engaging far more muscle
cells to perform simple activities like sitting in a chair than are
necessary to perform the action required.
For example, some people can sit in a chair
engaging 20 percent or more of the muscle fibers in their back, while
other people can sit in the same posture using as little as 2 percent of
these brain-to-muscle connections (called motor units). This disparity
in effort obviously leads to tremendous differences in how long people
can sit comfortably without compressing their spine and overworking
their back muscles.
In the long run, limitations in awareness and
coordination can lead to severe physical difficulties and prematurely
age us. Parts of our articulations or joints can fill with fibrous
tissues, especially between vertebrae, where there is little movement in
general. Ligaments shorten or become hyper-elastic. Some muscle fibers
become too strong, while others in the same muscle group atrophy. In
time, deformation sets in. Without body awareness, we exercise our worst
habits.
Strength is not simply a function of our muscles.
We can strengthen all of our muscles, but if we don’t use our brain to
improve their organization and coordination, we do not significantly
improve our posture, deftness, performance, or stability.
Consider the amount of resistance in your current exercise routine.
• Does your exercise routine value strength over mobility or flexibility?
• Do you pay attention to your posture while either doing resistance exercises or running and cycling?
6. WORK VERSUS EFFORT
A major goal in life could be to accomplish the
same amount of work with less effort. The distinction between work and
the amount of effort required to produce the work needs to be felt in
our body. Lifting your weight out of a chair and lifting your handbag
from the floor are both actions that involve measurable amounts of work
depending on your weight and on what’s in the handbag. The amount of
effort required to get out of a chair or to lift a handbag can vary from
person to person tremendously. Some people strain, hold their breath,
and grunt when picking up almost anything, while others are so efficient
and relaxed while performing the same work that they display little
effort.
In all movements, groups of agonist muscles and
antagonist muscles are at work. Agonist muscles are the primary
muscles—the ones doing the contracting—in movement. When you lift
something in front of yourself with your arms, the biceps are the main
actors, the agonist muscles. Antagonist muscles oppose the agonists.
They are the muscle fibers on the other side of the joint, and they work
opposite to the action. When lifting something in front of yourself
with your arms, the triceps are the antagonists.
If you operate with 10 percent of the antagonists
opposing the action of the agonists, your muscles have to work harder
and exert more effort, owing to this internal resistance. You may not
feel the tug-of-war between the muscle groups, how hard your antagonist
muscle groups are contradicting your intended direction of motion.
Ideally, you want to reduce the internal resistance of your antagonist
muscles so that more force can be available for your daily actions
through your agonist muscles.
If you lack the ability to reduce your internal
resistance, you will always feel the need to be stronger and will feel
less effective at exerting mechanical force on the outside world, such
as when you lift objects, open doors, climb stairs, or dance.
Injuries and the resulting pain often create
neuromuscular inefficiency that increases resistance in the area that
hurts. One of the best strategies is to learn to move the painful area
easily, lightly, and slowly so that the brain can learn comfort in
relation to the intended movement. Doing less is actually more! This is
one goal of the lessons of the Change Your Age Program.
You could race through the entire Change Your Age
Program, get a workout, build up a sweat, and feel quite good in that
familiar way, maybe even proud of yourself for having accomplished all
of the movements quickly. However, if you never learn to do these
movements slowly and comfortably, if you do not decrease your internal
resistance, and if you do not increase your felt sense of the
movements—your body awareness—then you will finish the program having
learned absolutely nothing. Your brain will probably make no changes,
and so your body, as if it had no brain, will get no benefit from the
program beyond the one workout.
Consider the amount of effort required to
accomplish your usual workout routine as well as ordinary activities of
daily life like walking up stairs and carrying groceries from the car.
• Do you catch yourself straining or grunting to accomplish a task?
• Can you feel your antagonist muscles at work?
For example, do you feel strain in your triceps when you are using your
biceps to lift something?
• Pick several of your
normal daily activities and think about how much work is required to
carry them out. Can you imagine performing the same amount of work doing
these activities with less effort?
7. CREATING MORE VITAL HABITS
So far, I have asked you to reflect on whether
you are susceptible to any of the dangers of exercise described here.
Now I’d like to introduce you to some possibly unfamiliar movement
concepts that are central to the Change Your Age Program. These ideas
can help you mitigate the dangers and damaging habits of your current
exercise routine by helping you develop a sensory tool that enables you
to feel what you are doing and to discern what might be dangerous or
simply too difficult for you. With this sensory tool, called human
awareness, you’ll fall away from dull, repetitive, and harmful routines
and engage in more youthful movement.
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