When I work privately with clients, the question that I hear most often is:
“how does this look?”
I usually replace it with “How does it feel?”
Why “feeling it” is so important?
There’s one major difference between how professional athletes perform any movement, and how you and I – the general folk, the weekend warrior, the occasional yogi – do it.
That difference is body awareness.
Professional athletes are able to recognize and correct movement errors with only their own feelings – their internal radar. They work hard to develop the felt sense of the body, and even harder to tune into the body as their train to move better and prevent injuries.
Most of us – general folk – lack this tuned-in and dialed-up body awareness to be able to recognize and correct movement errors on our own.
Let’s say you have a particular compensation pattern – it might be hiding in your walking gait, in hip joint restrictions, in how you breathe, or maybe in how your use your computer mouse – and you sign up for a Zumba class. Or a boot camp. Or weightlifting. Or running.
Without this felt sense of how your body moves and an ability to correct the creaky movement patterns on the fly, you will bring all of your familiar compensation monsters with you to your next class.
Now you are combining poor movement patterns with increased loads and creating two of the possible scenarios:
~ you body may adapt by compensating some more;
~ or you may hurt yourself because the tissues cannot adapt any longer.
I don’t like like either one of those outcomes. How about you?
That’s why I put together the CORE RESTORE class curriculum.
CORE RESTORE idea is simple: whether optimal health or better performance is the goal, better movement patterning always equals better output and fewer injuries.
You can read more and register here.
P. S. In the military, there’s a saying on this subject: “Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.”
We’ve become too used to applying our go-go-go lifestyle to our physical activity.
We struggle to slow down and pay attention to what’s happening inside of us, and to our detriment. This mantra means that developing body awareness and applying enough effort to perform any movement – even breathing or walking – smoothly will pay off with better outcomes {less pain for some, improved performance for others}.
