Depatterning your movement - our training looks "random" for a reason
If you've glanced at our approach to training, you might have noticed that elements of what we do look random. Yes, there is structure to it (e.g. each week has a theme running through all sessions) but if you've come to a class you might have seen us do exercises to get into 'random' positions. If you've seen our online programming through Movement and You, you might have noticed that we don't follow a strength cycle like bench and biceps Monday and legs on Tuesday. In this blog post we're going to explain why this 'random' aspect is deliberate, and why you need it.
Before we start, a quick note and then a story.
First up, while we're saying 'random' we don't actually mean 'totally random'. We mean random within safe and healthy limits. We call this concept of random within safe and healthy limits "bounded randomness".
And second, a story. This story will seem unrelated at first, but eventually it serves as a decent analogy for what we are talking about.
Have you ever wondered why humans are the only animals that deliberately go and get drunk, stoned or high?
It's a fair question, but as it turns out we're not the only species that does these things. Parrots get drunk on fermented fruit. Elephants have been known to raid brewers. Cats seek out catnip. Cows eat loco weed. And on and on and on explains author and journalist Steven Kotler in his audiobook Mapping Cloud Nine.
The actual question is why do so many animals get deliberately drunk, stoned and high?
The answer is something called depatterning. Essentially, all animals are pattern making machines. Evolutionarily we all are primed to try and find the easiest way to do things because less energy expenditure means more conserved and more chance of survival. That's done by finding and making patterns of behaviour (for example if I drive the same route to work each day).
Sometimes, over time, these patterns become ruts. Sometimes the pattern that once served you well, stops doing so (for example, if i always drive the same way home but the traffic is so much worse now that catching the train would be quicker).
However, actually making a change from one habit to another can be tough. It turns out that the evolutionary advantage of the occasional drunken night is its ability to depattern our habits. Now this is not to say that getting drunk, stoned or high is the only way to depattern (yoga retreats probably do a similar thing for example). Nor is it to say that they are the optimal way. Nor is it to suggest that you can’t have really bad side effects from them. It’s just to say that all animals get stuck in ruts, and that we sometimes need help forming new patterns to get out of them. And thats where we return to movement. As it turns out, we also get stuck in movement ruts.
Your body is evolutionarily primed to seek the easiest way to do things and then to form habits and patterns doing these things the same way over and over again.
Here's the problem. Our modern world is so totally lacking in movement variety that in modern life we form relatively few movement patterns and repeat them over and over again. We believe that this leads to overuse injuries.
In historical times this would likely have been less of an issue. Consider the difference between walking down the footpath and walking along a rough forest trail. On the footpath almost every step is the same. In the forest, relatively few steps are the same.as you step over trees, around rocks, on uneven ground. In a forest, even as your body tries to make patterns, it is constantly being depatterned by its environment. But in the modern world you make a few patterns, but then become stuck in them. Soon they become problems that need intervention in order to depattern. And that’s where our seemingly 'random' (but not really random) movement comes in.
We use the concept of bounded randomness in our movement to put you into safe movement positions and patterns that you don't regularly use. This helps to depattern your movement ruts and to lead you away from overuse injury. So when you see us play a game that causes you to squat in many different ways, we're not just doing it to keep the program interesting, we're doing it because it is exactly what your body requires.
AFTERWARD
DEPATTERNING MOVEMENT (WELL) IS MORE THAN JUST DOING SOMETHING DIFFERENT
Having read this post you might think that all we're saying is 'hey we think you need to depattern' so you should go do something different today. And while there is some truth in that, it's not the whole truth.
To understand more of how we think about depatterning movement it helps to think of movement as happening at different levels. For the purpose of discussion let's consider macro movement (e.g. playing b
Imagine someone with collapsed arches in their feet who likes to play basketball. Those collapsed arches probably put them at higher risk of their knees tracking inwards (towards each other) when they jump and hence is at higher risk of a knee injury (e.g. a torn ligament). This poor knee movement probably presents itself while playing basketball.
If you think of depatterning only at the macro level, you might think that the way to break this pattern would be to play another sport instead. And while there is merit in that, the truth of the matter is that this pattern of the knees tracking inward while jumping on the basketball court will probably present itself while jumping playing netball, high jump, long jump and any other jumping situation that we can think of, so that's not the solution.
On the other hand, if we think of depatterning at the micro level we might look at the knee tracking in and try and teach a new micro movement pattern (e.g. tracking correctly). This is what physiotherapists often do with corrective exercises, but this also runs into problems. This approach runs into problems because even if we do manage to learn a new movement pattern in those isolated exercises, the pattern of knee in while jumping on the basketball court is so strong that all that we just learnt in isolation can't overcome the poor jumping pattern.
Therefore, when we go about depatterning movement we need to make sure we do it at all levels (and of course those two levels were just an arbitrary example). We need to address the broad types of movements we do (run, jump, crawl etc), the packages we wrap them in (various sports, games, workouts etc) and what's going on at each body part (e.g. joints, limbs, torso etc). That's why in our training you see seemingly random elements in the skills we teach (run, jump, crawl etc), the ways we put them together (workouts, games, movement exploration etc) and the types of exercises we provide (solo, with partners, dynamic, static, creative, prescriptive etc). It's all building together to help you to build new movement patterns that serve you well!
That's why our training looks a bit random at times (but really isn't) and a little taste about how we think about incorporating that randomness.
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