Where does balance come from?

Proprioception is a fancy science word for body awareness. This is how you know you’re on dry land and not in water, are at home and not in a box, and why it’s very hard to move you to an undisclosed location while you sleep. Increased proprioception means we keep neural connections live and flowing with information for the brain to use. Issues arise when the brain is overwhelmed with work and has a shortage of workers. When this happens, the brain loses the ability to do things that were once commonplace. (Remember spinning to nausea on a g-force carnival ride after 12 beers and 3 corndogs then running a ½ mile home because you’re two hours late for curfew?) Me either.

If you imagine the brain as a security guard with the option of watching one big screen displaying the entire property, or many screens allowing more detailed examinations of bloodspots and shadows, the preference seems clear. This is not unlike how the brain uses proprioception to move. When it comes to fluid movement, the more information the better. Unfortunately, balance and proprioception fade with age, as does our ability to move. But there are ways to prevent this.

To maintain balance we have to be balanced. As Zen as that sounds, it’s not far from the truth. Imagine you have imbalanced tires. The car drives, but pulls to the right or left. Now misaligned, it creates drag and is much less fuel-efficient. Over time, the tires wear uneven increasing the chance of blowout. But that’s hardly the only problem. The struts, shocks, wheel wells, brakes, frame, and any number of other things are threatened by the imbalance. The car will have to work harder and consume more fuel to get the same done, and this worsens unless it’s realigned.

Now imagine a muscle is off. This happens when a muscle adaptively shortens or lengthens in response to repetition. Do something enough times and the brain adapts muscles to the length or breadth demanded most. This is why we need to work change of direction into our training.

The RAMP Method creates directional changes using the pivot, or rotation on the ball of the foot. Pivoting is essential to rotating the body, as doing so from anywhere else opens us up to compensation. The shoulder joint is also a fantastic place to create massive force, yet few lack the requisite reach to create such power.

Creating rotation from the joints best suited remains essential. At Meso Fit Boca, we believe rotating from the spine or creating any force with this structure is contraindicated. Rotation is a powerful force that when harnessed creates the kinds of athleticism we are in awe of and wish to emulate. But we are warned by the likes of Sahrmann and McGill that the spine needs stability above all else. 

So what is it that athletes tend to have that we lack?

Balance.

It might be a stretch to say only imbalanced bodies injure. But if the balanced body is destabilized, it shouldn’t topple without blunt force. Ask any quarterback, goalie, or sprinter, and they’ll agree if something is out of whack, production suffers. Most professional athletes have body workers working around the clock on their recovery.

Notice I didn’t say training.

Although training is paramount, if the body cannot recover fully from performance to performance, it cannot sustain optimal levels of output. Diet is helpful, but only when applied to fully recovered bodies. So how do bodies become balanced?

Balance is a lot more nuanced and cannot be applied to single situations. Physics tells us if you keep falling off the earth, something maybe wrong with how your body relates to the laws of gravity. When athletes dazzle us with feats across fields of ice and snow, we see perfectly balanced bodies adapting to multiple destabilizing forces. Can you imagine being crosschecked and come out with anything less than permanent brain damage?

So why can they and we can’t?

Each client presents a lifetime of movement. Some of that movement, depending on the amount of trauma the body sustained, is compensated. To the extent that it’s compensated, movement integrity suffers and is replaced with uncoordinated movement.  This body will produce very little power but will still produce. Now imagine taking this body onto a field, court, or mall parking lot and you’ll see why orthopedists and physical therapists aren’t in low demand.

But to say our idols walk away unharmed is ignorant as any pro-athlete will tell you the price for waging daily war on their bodies is tagged high. As the long-term effects of this lifestyle become more and more apparent, we’ll be able to learn more about what happens to those of us focused on recovery and balance.

Our focus is looking at each client and asking; what would make them better? To answer, we have to know what the body in front of us is capable of producing. Overloading an imbalanced body with more work is completely counterproductive and counterintuitive to the brain.  Exercise becomes endless beatings applied to a misaligned body.  

At Meso Fit Boca, our assessment answers simple questions as we detect what might hinder your progress. We’ll explain what we find and how to fix it. We do not place demands on misaligned bodies until they show an ability to align; and we cannot progress any client without proof our interventions are maintained from week to week. We do that with constant check-ups to make sure our programming is working. If it isn’t, we know early, and make course adjustments that get you back on track.