Imagine a world where you are only able to use 50 different words in your conversation. How limiting and uninteresting your conversation would be.
The same can be said about the way we move. Compare the beautiful, expansive range of movement that children use compared with the movement ‘vocab’ of a much older adult.
When we are children we are ‘playing’ with variations in movement all the time. Life is about learning and experiencing something new every day. Our movement vocabulary is expanding constantly.
Roughly speaking the balance, coordination and ability that children learn by age 10 is what they will have to carry them through life. Few adults can climb a rope, or balance on a log better than they could at age 10.
Children run, jump, roll and climb for the sheer pleasure of the kinesthetic sensations. In very young children there is little concern for how they might look to someone else.
The lack of concern a child has for how they look to others enables them to experiment with all kinds of body positions and movements and physical challenges.
However the social freedom to enjoy this spontaneous experimentation does not last long. Very soon the social pressure to look cool’ and in control prevents them from taking a chance on falling down or experimenting with unique physical activity.
As we move through life we are almost all caught up in perceptions of age that are based on physical appearance. This is what makes so many people extend themselves in unhealthy ways by striving for flat abs or a perfect butt.
When an individual loses the social freedom to enjoy spontaneous movement, this signals the end for improving basic physical abilities. The narrow range of physical activity within which individuals must live their lives has been set.
No wonder that by the time several decades have passed, our movement vocabulary has decreased and we are living a life with the same movement ‘words’ and ‘sentences’ we have used for years.
Many of our difficulties are caused by a lifetime of habitual ways of moving which are coming back to haunt us.
The movements we know (our habits) usually feel more comfortable, easy and acceptable to us because they are also the most deeply ingrained. We have been doing them for longer and so they tend to be strong.
Always choosing these habitual ways of moving can however be limiting.
You can become accustomed to not being able to turn your head more than a few degrees to the side, or raise your arms above your head, and you can find it comfortable to always get up out of chair with the help of your arms.
Allowing ourselves to accept and become accustomed to these familiar adaptations can become the basis for narrower and ever more restricted ways of moving as we age.
If you want to expand and vary the ways in which you move and have a more complete and easier access to your environment, it is important to practice the unfamiliar and the nonhabitual.
Remember that variations of movement through tendons, ligaments muscles and joints not only are good for the structures of your body but also greatly benefit the functioning of your mind.
Just as a lack of variation causes limitations in our joints, so it causes limitation in our feeling and imagination. Ultimately stiffness and lack of physical imagination lead to the appearance and actuality of premature aging.
We can expand our movement vocabulary in the same way as we can extend our vocabulary of words. Let’s play with unfamiliar/nonhabitual movements and learn to move with the ease and freedom of a child.
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