Are You Asking Your Body the Right Questions?

You get from your body what you ask of it, but nothing more.

Your body is many things, one of which, is an adaptation machine. It attunes itself and adapts to the input it receives, carefully deploying its resources in this process. In some cases, the catalyst for adaptation can come from your environment, such as sun burning your skin, causing it to brown, or as a result of the repeated use of tools, calluses forming on your hands. In both cases, the body adapts to a question asked of it, so as to be better prepared next time.

In the same way, you can provide the catalyst for your body’s adaptation by ensuring you continue to move in the way your body is designed. By providing it with the right input (exercise), you can directly tailor specific adaptations that will immediately improve the quality of your life.

For example, squatting through a full range of motion or moving through the rotational plane, keeps those movement pathways open.  However, and this is the important part, avoiding such movement planes (i.e. not asking those questions of the body) causes an adaptation too: a downregulation, and eventually, a shut-down of your ability to squat deep or twist.  The tightness you may feel throughout your body due to lack of movement is this downregulation process unfolding.  This process, left unchecked, will ultimately leave you disabled and in chronic pain.

Your body is not in the business of allocating resources to movement pathways that are not used. So, to open these pathways (and to keep them open) you simply must keep performing the movements. That is, keep asking the questions, keep providing the input that you know will result in your body’s adaptation. Even if your range of motion is not perfect, it is the attempt to do it that lets your body know that such movements will be needed in the future, and to therefore keep upregulating your ability to do so.  This is what we mean by asking the right questions of your body. 

Conversely, a systematic reduction in a certain movement is tantamount to telling your body “I no longer need to move in this way”, and it will respond by downregulating your ability to do so.

Mobility training is how we will teach you what questions to ask and show you how to ask them.  The result for you will be a supple, mobile and pain-free body.  Now, they are adaptations worth striving for.

James Gleeson

If this piques your interest, we’d love to hear from you at

support@futureimpactfitness.com

www.futureimpactfitness.com