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movement habits that harm
and how to kick them |
 Whatever your thoughts about your own signature, like it or loathe it, have you ever considered what a miracle of biology and functional habit this tiny gesture really is? Well I have and I’d like to share my amazement with you now, and hopefully after you’ve read the next few pages you will not only have learned something about how we acquire movement habits (some of which can harm us) but also be as mind blown as I am about this whole signature thing. Here’s my signature, it’s a little piece of me.  My signature can vary somewhat, according to my mood, the feel of the writing implement on the surface I am signing or what it is that I’m signing, but its essential, unique characteristics remain consistent enough for it to carry almost the same legal authority as my fingerprint. Unlike my fingerprint, though it’s not genetic. I wasn’t born with my signature ready formed, it’s something I’ve learned, a personal flourish that I consciously practised at first and then perfected over the years. My signature reliably and uniquely represents me. So much so, that any handwriting experts among you, may already have made some pretty accurate guesses about my personality, my proclivities, how I voted on Brexit and where I’ve hidden the gold …….. My signature is a tiny fragment of who I am, and I will admit to being rather fond of it.
In 1820 the number of people who could read or write was around 12% of the entire world population. Today the share has reversed, and 84% of the world population are literate. That’s a happy statistic, but still, it remains a fact that some 775 million people can't read or write. So must do better, I guess! https://ourworldindata.org/literacy https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/global-rate-of-adult-literacy-84-per-cent-but-775-million-people-still-cant-read/article4528932/ How many muscles does it take to make your mark? First off, let’s imagine that you are just simply signing your name at the end of a letter…… Ok showing my age here, maybe some of you have never done that? Signing a cheque then….oops! No same problem. Get into the 21st-century man FFS! So imagine that you are signing a birthday card, people still do that right? How many of your perfectly toned muscles do you think that involves? Well, all muscles work in slightly different ways of course and that after all is partly what this series of blogs is about, but taking in general terms, the muscles that you are likely to use to sign your name on that Birthday card will include most of the muscles in your hand and arm, which are as follows:
That’s 37 muscles involved to some degree in helping you hold the pen onto the card and move it through space to make your recognisable mark.  Not all of these muscles will be active at the same time and for every muscle that contracts another will need to lengthen or let go while some will just need to do nothing. Over the short blip of time that it takes to make your mark, these combinations of muscle activity will change constantly. Then there’s the other hand steadying the card, your shoulder muscles, many core postural muscles holding you upright in gravity, the eye muscles and maybe the jaw muscles too?
So in total we probably have about 40 or 50 muscles doing something which is one hell of a lot of effort just for you to add your name to that card. I think you’ll agree that this fact in itself is pretty impressive, but nowhere near the “mind-blowing” that I promised. Trust me though that wind of awesomeness is coming.  So, let’s zoom in to that whole “some muscles working, others letting go" thing shall we? If all the muscles worked together, they would kind of cancel each other out, and we’d look a bit like rigourmortis’d corpses.  For example, unlike Popeye here, when your mighty biceps on the front of our arm flex to bend the elbow joint, your equally potent triceps on the back which are there to straighten the arm have to relax and lengthen to allow the biceps to do their job.  While this is happening, some other muscles in the shoulder need to help support the weight of your arm, and yet other muscles just need to butt out and do nothing. This is actually quite clever and makes me wonder how are the muscles orchestrating that symphony of subtleness? It also reminds me of....... THE AIKIDO UNBENDING ARM TRICK When I studied Aikido for a short while back in the ’80s, the sensei would show new students the power of the mystical internal energy known as “Ki” that aikido masters use to overcome any opponent no matter how big with graceful ease. Several methods were used to demonstrate the use of Ki, but the “unbending arm” was by far the favourite. A novice would be chosen to stand with their arm outstretched. Another member of the group would then be instructed to try and bend that outstretched arm. The person whose arm was to be bent was told to, “stand strong, use all your strength, don’t let your arm bend ”. After a few seconds of determined resistance, the arm would bend. This we were told (incorrectly) showed just how unreliable an asset strength is in a martial situation.  The novice was then instructed to stand aside as the sensie stepped in to demonstrate the power of Ki. He would show that he was totally relaxed and tell us that he was simply imagining Ki energy coursing down his arm, out of the fingers and splashing forcefully on the wall opposite. With only a few disappointing and rather embarrassing (for the sensei) exceptions the arm would this time not yield to the red-faced and grunting assailant. Therefore proving the power of Ki over brute strength. (Not) The simple truth of the trick (and trick it is I’m afraid is that to keep the arm straight, the triceps only need to be engaged. 9 times out of 10 that’s enough to keep the arm from bending. By telling the unsuspecting novice to “be strong”, “use all your strength” the beginner will invariably switch on all the muscles of the arm. In doing this, the biceps, whose job it is to bend our arms turn on, cancelling out the power of the triceps and actually assisting the opponent in his or her task. I’m not saying I don’t believe in ki, chi, prana, or whatever you choose to call internal energy because I do, but this aikido favourite isn’t a demonstration of it. This is, I'm afraid just another example of Bullshido at its finest. Check out the Youtube links below for examples of Ki masters matched up against real fighting skill if you need further proof What the unbending arm trick does show, however, is that perception has a significant effect on how our muscles work and is a clue to how we develop movement habits in the first place. More of which later. Symphony of subtleness But getting back to my question, how do muscles so cleverly graduate the amount of power they make available? A bit of anatomy coming up. Skeletal muscles are made up of a series of bundles within bundles within bundles. With all the bundles being very, VERY neatly wrapped in connective tissue. I can't emphasise enough just how neatly wrapped all the different elements of our muscles are. If you imagine your TV, Wifi, Sound system, computer, Games console, in fact, all the electrical appliances in your entire house fitted neatly into one colossal cabinet in your living room and then imagine the spaghetti nightmare that would exist at the rear of this cabinet.  But the person who installed it all was the most OCD, anal person on the entire planet and he or she had managed to bind all the cables, cords and wires into one very neat, and rather beautiful insulation tape wrapped trunk. Not only that but she or he had done the same for every house in your street and then combined all those beautifully wrapped trunks into another massive and equally beautifully wrapped bigger trunk. How amazed and satisfied you would you feel at the sheer neatness of it all?  Now multiply that by several thousand, and you will be getting somewhere close to understanding just how neatly wrapped the bundles which make up your muscles really are. So let us name these incredible myofascial bundles, starting big and getting smaller. The entire muscle, let's say the bicep again, is the first bag. Fascicles The bundles found inside the first bag are known as Fascicles. Fascicles are connective tissue bags which contain bundles of muscle cells or muscles fibres as they are also known. This arrangement lends strength to the muscle in the same way that rope is much stronger than a single thread.  Muscle cells or fibres The number of fibres contained within each fascicle can range from just a few to over 100. The biceps contain around 580,000 individual muscle cells or fibres so these could be bundled into around 5,800 fascicles.  Next, let’s zoom into The Muscle cell To give you some kind of visual scale reference for all of this, the size of an average muscle cell is 40mm long by 100 microns thick. As it happens, a sheet of 80gsm photocopy paper is also 100 microns thick. It might surprise you, therefore, to learn that even these tiny tubes contain bundles of even tinier fibres called myofibrils.  Myofibrils A myofibril or a muscle fibril is a rod-like unit of a muscle cell. And astonishingly myofibrils also contain bundles of even smaller fibres called myofilaments.  Myofilaments AND ……HOLD ON TO YOUR HATS……. A typical muscle cell can contain as many as 100,000 myofilaments. Wow! how does nature engineer stuff that small? And we’re not even close to mind-blowing yet, but I bet you feel that breeze picking up? Myofilaments are basically protein chains which are organized into thick and thin long filaments. Thin myofilaments consist primarily of actin protein, while thick filaments consist of myosin protein.  It’s at this microscopic myofilament level where most of the action takes place. When given the right stimulus (which I’ll come on to later) these little fellas get to work contracting on mass to shorten the muscle fibre. No ifs or buts they are either entirely off, or they are fully on. “Hang on a minute”, I hear you say? “If the myofilaments are either fully off or fully on, that’s not helping me understand how muscles graduate the amount of power they deliver at all?”. How come we don’t crush everything we pick up or punch ourselves in the nose when we flex our biceps? How do we control muscles to do intricate, delicate stuff? Answer: Not all of the muscle fibres in a muscle turn on at once. Our muscles are capable of generating just the right amount of force to hold a pen without dropping it or crushing it by turning on the exact number of muscle cells necessary. Q: So how do you turn on a myofilament? Answer: electricity Enter The Motor Unit Skeletal muscle fibres in mammals are innervated by two types of nerves. Sensory nerves that feed information about what we are feeling back to the sensory cortex part of the brain and Motor nerves which come from the motor cortex part of the brain and tell the muscle what to do by delivering an electric charge called an “action potential” to a certain number of muscle fibres.  Since there are more muscle fibres by far than motor neurons, the end of the motor neuron branches so that individual axons can synapse on to many different muscle fibres. An electrical impulse travelling down a single neurone can, therefore, activate many branching nerve fibres which in turn stimulate the muscle fibre they enervate to contract. A single motor neuron and its associated muscle fibres together constitute the smallest unit of force that can be activated to produce movement, and this arrangement is called a motor unit. And it's my activating only a proportion of the motor units in a given muscle that the muscle can graduate the force it generates, appropriate to the action required. Both motor units and the motor neurons themselves vary in size. Small motor neurons innervate relatively few muscle fibres and form motor units that generate small forces, whereas large motor neurons innervate larger, more powerful motor units.   Some other ways in which the body graduates muscle activity Motor units also differ in the types of muscle fibres that they innervate. In most skeletal muscles, the small motor units innervate tiny “red” muscle fibres that contract slowly and generate relatively small forces; but, because of their rich myoglobin content, plentiful mitochondria, and rich capillary beds, such tiny red fibres are resistant to fatigue. These small units are called slow (S) motor units and are especially important for activities that require sustained muscular contraction, such as the maintenance of an upright posture. Larger motor neurons innervate larger, pale muscle fibres that generate more force; however, these fibres have sparse mitochondria and are therefore easily fatigued. These units are called fast fatigable (FF) motor units and are especially important for brief exertions that require large forces, such as running or jumping.  A way to remember this is to think of a roast chicken. Legs = Dark meat, Breast = white meat. The chicken uses its legs all day so they need a steady blood supply to provide energy but it rarely flies and then only in short bursts, so its chest muscles are FF muscles These distinctions among different types of motor units is another way in which the nervous system produces graduated movements appropriate for different circumstances. The functional distinctions between the various classes of motor units also explain some structural differences among muscle groups. For example, a motor unit in the soleus (a muscle important for posture that comprises mostly small, slow units) has an average innervation ratio of 180 muscle fibres for each motor neuron. In contrast, the gastrocnemius, a muscle that comprises both small and larger units, has an innervation ratio of 1000–2000 muscle fibres per motor neuron and can generate forces needed for sudden changes in body position. For more on how muscles contract see Apendix (1)  More subtle variations are present in athletes on different training regimens. Thus, muscle biopsies show that sprinters have a larger proportion of powerful but rapidly fatiguing pale fibres in their bodies than do marathoners. Other differences are related to the highly specialized functions of particular muscles. For instance, the eyes require rapid, precise movements but little strength; in consequence, extraocular muscle motor units are extremely small (with an innervation ratio of only 3!) and have a very high proportion of muscle fibres capable of contracting with maximal velocity.  Ok, so lets just recap here for a minute Some more maths..... To contract a single muscle (let's use the biceps again) with just the right amount of force to enable you to pick up the pen without punching yourself in the face, the brain has to control approximately 580,000 muscle cells containing 100,000 myofibrils which adds up to 58 billion things. To put this in to some kind of perspective, lets imagine that each thing, (myofibrils in this case) is a human being.  There are currently 7.7 billion of us on the planet (give or take a few million)  So 58 billion things (if they where humans) would take up seven and a half Earths  The muscles used to write your signature on that birthday card are not all as big as your biceps, so let's say that on average there are only 200,000 muscle cells in each of the 50 muscles that we have identified and each of these contain not 100,000 but say 40,000 myofibrils. That's 200,000 x 50 = 10 million muscle fibres x 40,000 myofibrils = 400 billion things!! Translate that into 400 billion humans and you would need 51 planet Earths to hold them all.  400 billion things that the brain has to be in charge of. Not even including looking after your breathing, heart function, digestion, interpreting what you are hearing, feeling etc. etc. W.T.F.  If that hasn’t blown you mind then stick around, there's more. Even allowing for the efficiency of the branching motor unit and if we say that each motor neurone controls say 500 muscle fibres, that is 20,000 motor units firing in perfect sequence as your pen choreographs its way across the card. I know, after all those 11 and 12 digit numbers, 20,000 sounds pretty unimpresive doesnt it? But consider this - 20,000 or more motor units all firing in perfect harmony is equivalent to trying to play 227 grand pianos, all at once!  How does it do that?Enter - The Engram* Answer: your nervous system has written a program for it. An automatic sequencer called an engram* which sparks into action the minute that it receives a message from your brain that you wish to perform your signature. It's not an off the shelf program its one specifically and intricately designed just for you to make your legally recognised mark time after time. (*not to be confused with an enneagram which is a Scientology thing) In our highly industrialised world, it's not difficult to imagine how this works. We have built robots that can do this too. Mechanical arms assembling cars, milking cows, harvesting crops. The tiny motors, pistons, hydraulic levers and spindles all controlled and sequenced by computer programs. Except that image couldn’t be further from the truth when it comes to us mammals and this for me (and I hope for you/) is the mind-blowing bit!.….. If the engram has been written to sequence just the 30 or so arm and hand muscles for signing that card, on a horizontal surface, how is it that your signature would look the same if you scaled it up and wrote it on a vertically placed blackboard?  Even if it was the first time, you had signed at this size your body and all the different muscles, fascicles and motor units that you would need to recruit would automatically know how to do this. I doubt whether the car assembly robot would perform as well if you sent a truck or a Boeing passenger jet down the line. How would the milking machine cope with a giraffe or a sperm whale instead of a cow?  How about making your mark in the snow or in the sand on the beach? Even bigger! Probably involving all 600+ muscles in your entire body and yet we would instinctively know how to do this.  Not instinctively like in, breathing, swallowing, blinking or coughing. These reflexes are hardwired into the system from birth and on the whole do not adapt to changes in scale, environment or to your conscious will. No, Engrams are like shapeshifting entities. They hover somewhere in the body, unseen but ready to coalesce at any given time to direct your actions, possess you almost until the task they are designed for is complete, then they just fade back into the warm, red undergrowth of your viscera. So if we are not a system of levers, pulleys and motors operated by preprogrammed electrical impulses how in motherlovin tarnation! Do our bodies perform these scaleable habits? When we think that only 200 years ago, only 12% of humanity would need this literary facility, let alone a scaleable one. Why has evolution made this circuitry available to everyone?  For many years it was thought that all our movements where controlled by nerve pathways that recieved orders form a part of the brain known as the The Motor Cortex . However, more recently, brain scans have shown that activity in this area does not increase as much as would be expected when we perform a learned habit like our signature. For more on this see Apendix (2) WARNING If you are squeamish and/or morally outraged by knowledge gained by experimenting on animals then please skip down past the text outlined in red Further proof that an engram does not live in the motor circuits of the nervous system is provided, I’m afraid by some gruesome monkey experiments. The experiments showed that even with increasingly large portions of the motor cortex removed, the monkey’s learned motor functions were hardly affected. Even when some of the muscles used to perform a learned habit were paralysed, the poor monkeys were able to automatically use alternative muscles to repeat the necessary sequence.(1) However, When the experiment was repeated with a different monkey but this time destroying cell bodies in the sensory cortex which correspond to the areas of muscles, skin and joints involved in the performance of the learned skill, the monkey lost all ability to repeat the skill.(2) A finding confirmed by modern brain scans which show increased activity in the sensory cortex whenever a learned sequence is performed. (1) Guyton, A.C., Textbook of Medical Physiology, p.668 (2) Motor control - habit control The basal ganglia is an interconnected set of regions in the interior of the brain which is involved in learned, habitual action. Whereas the prefrontal cortex is goal-directed, the basal ganglia seem mostly to replay past patterns while adapting them to the perceived environment. When you perform familiar action patterns without thinking about it, you are probably making extensive use of the basal ganglia. The components of the basal ganglia are the striatum, globus pallidus (GP), subthalamic nucleus (STN), and substantia nigra (SN). SAFE TO CONTINUE READING NOW So where does all this leave us? We talk of muscle memory as if we are machines learning a movement, but we are in fact conscious entities remembering a feeling, and the habits we acquire as we move through life are shaped by what we feel not by what we do. So that's it, that’s why humans are soooo different from robots. MIND BLOWN!! 
The fashion model’s leg Early on in my career as a Rolfer, a young woman in her late 20’s signed up to go through the Rolfing ten series. One of her goals, aside from better posture, was to see if we could get rid of the nagging pain in her left hip. My client’s tissues and posture responded well to the treatment, but as we progressed through the series, her hip pain seemed to become worse and her desire to be rid of it more urgent. I confess that after 8 sessions having unclipped, unwound, stretched and release the fascial system throughout her entire body, I was at a loss to know what I should do next. In a previous conversation, my client had revealed that she had actually come to hate the leg and hip that were hurting her and in the back of my mind I had a feeling that this emotional response must be something to do with why the pain persisted. The problem was, I didn’t know how to access this part of her being. In desperation for something to do towards the end of the 8th hour, I offered to measure her legs to see if they were the same length. If they were not equal by more than 15mm, I could then perhaps suggest a lift for the shoe of the shorter leg as an experiment to see if this eased the pain? Well, It turned out that one of her legs was indeed longer and it was the problem leg. Her reaction to this was a complete surprise to me. On hearing that her left leg was longer, she said, “longer?”, “like a fashion model’s leg, you mean?” I replied, “yeh I guess so” and we ended the session there. The next week she came into my clinic all smiles and, I noticed, moving with much more grace and ease. She told me that she had liked hearing that her leg was like a fashion model’s leg and had since started to love the leg. Guess what? Her hip pain disappeared! And it never came back. The original cause of the pain could have stemmed from the leg length difference or a hundred other things, who knows? Her body’s response to the pain would have been to figure out a way to work around the contracted muscles. Perhaps she shifted her weight across to the other leg, limped a little or tightened her glutes on the painful side. When the pain persisted, though, her emotional response gave meaning and importance to the pattern, and the nervous system set up a program to manage the new way of moving and holding herself. A simple shift in perception changed her feeling towards the leg, and that was enough to reset the engram, which had been controlling her movements and causing the pain to persist. “The engram is the cortex’s means of learning new skills and behavioural patterns and imposing them upon the primitive levels of motor organisation” Our structure and how we coordinate movement is influenced by how we perceive our world and the meaning that these incoming signals evoke in us. My task as a manual therapist then is not just to relax a muscle or unstick some facial layers. But to consciously evoke the kinds of thought and feeling states that produce feelings of flow, smooth movement and wellbeing, in other words, to build new sense memories which in turn will create healthy engrams. In my other blogs in this series, I talk about some of the more common faulty engrams that I have encountered and give ideas about how to fix them. As always I am grateful to receive your comments and feedback. Especially if anything in this blog has been of particular help to you. I am also happy to hear opposing views and opinions but please keep it polite and respectful. Watch this space for more Movement Habits That Harm and How to Kick Them
Appendix (1) Muscle contraction four-stage process In summary, the sliding filament theory of muscle contraction can be broken down into four distinct stages, these are; 1. Muscle activation: The motor nerve stimulates an action potential (impulse) to pass down a neuron to the neuromuscular junction. This stimulates the sarcoplasmic reticulum to release calcium into the muscle cell. 2. Muscle contraction: Calcium floods into the muscle cell binding with troponin allowing actin and myosin to bind. The actin and myosin cross bridges bind and contract using ATP as energy (ATP is an energy compound that all cells use to fuel their activity 3. Recharging: ATP is re-synthesised (re-manufactured) allowing actin and myosin to maintain their strong binding state 4. Relaxation: Relaxation occurs when stimulation of the nerve stops. Calcium is then pumped back into the sarcoplasmic reticulum, breaking the link between actin and myosin. Actin and myosin return to their unbound state, causing the muscle to relax. Alternatively, relaxation (failure) will also occur when ATP is no longer available. A spinal nerve is a mixed nerve, which carries the motor, sensory, and autonomic signals between the spinal cord and the body. In the human body, there are 31 pairs of spinal nerves, one on each side of the vertebral column. (2) Motor control - habit control The basal ganglia is an interconnected set of regions in the interior of the brain which is involved in learned, habitual action. Whereas the prefrontal cortex is goal-directed, the basal ganglia seem mostly to replay past patterns while adapting them to the perceived environment. When you perform familiar action patterns without thinking about it, you are probably making extensive use of the basal ganglia. The components of the basal ganglia are the striatum, globus pallidus (GP), subthalamic nucleus (STN), and substantia nigra (SN).
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December 2019
about meI’m Keith and I’m a graduate of the Dr. Ida Rolf Institute. I've also been a student of Tai chi for nearly 40 years .
As an Advanced Rolfer and Rolf movement coach, I help people to live more comfortably in their bodies. By learning how to align with gravity's flow my clients begin to move more efficiently and with less pain.
As a Tai Chi Instructor, I teach how to to find your line of balance, how to let go of unnecessary tension and to find the safe, still centre deep within us all from which all genuinely free movement springs. I thought that some of the information and experience I have collected over the years might be useful to pass on! So here we go. I sincerely hope that you find something of benefit for your life amongst my ramblings. |
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