Rewiring Movement: Why Repetition is Key to Lasting Change

Building Better Habits Through Practice, Patience, and Perseverance

These days it seems like you can always find someone who is promoting a quick fix.  Rarely is it ever the case that you can do one thing and magically you will feel better.

You can certainly modify body positioning and activation patterns quickly through a variety of exercises which may help to immediately decrease pain and improve your ability to function.  But as creatures of habit, we typically revert to some of our typical patterns easily. 

Therefore, it takes repetition to build new neuronal circuits within our brain and create longer lasting changes of movement pattern and muscle activation within our bodies.  I’m going to break that down a little more because that terminology may be confusing to some people.

When we do an action, we have nerves within our bodies that carry messages from our brain down to the target muscles to help create that movement.  We have preprogrammed patterns that we automatically revert to when we do things, and this helps with efficiency.  Therefore, we don’t even have to think about every single thing when we do it. 

Think about walking while you are talking.  You don’t have to consciously think about how to lift each foot up, place it down and move forwards onto it.  You can do it automatically so that this frees up the mental capacity to be able to also talk during this or do anything else.  So these circuits fire automatically without us even thinking about it and this means that these are the same patterns that we are used to using out of habit.  If we want to change our movement patterns, we need to practice and repeat things over and over to help create a new connection within our brain and body so that when we do something automatically, we use the new pattern instead!

Another side of this includes the physical changes that happen within our bodies when we make these new changes.  Our tissues- think skin, muscle, fascia, and tendons— all need to accommodate for these changes.  They may have to lengthen or shorten based upon our new movement pattern and this takes time because they literally have to rebuild themselves to be in the structure that we are asking them to be in

So, if you don’t see changes immediately when you are beginning something new that is ok! It takes practice and repetition in order to make something a habit and then we don’t even have to think about it, it’s automatic.

Is there anything you’re working on to make a habit?