HOW AND HOW FREQUENTLY WE HAVE TO TRAIN? STRESS RELATED ASPECT.

During our life we all frequently experience stressful situations we have to overcome. These situations can create harmful permanent muscular contraction or muscular armoring, accompanying chronic stress.

Many of us experienced this kind of armoring, chronic muscles contraction. This happens especially often in the areas of shoulders and neck as a result of psychological stress, but many suffer from this problem in other parts of the body. As a result, we experience muscle pain, headache, general tiredness, disturbed posture and movement and many other health problems.

Some other examples can include physical injuries and their accompanying compensation mechanism, mostly a muscular contractions and postural compensational changes.

There are a lot of articles and publications explaining us why this or that muscle or ligament is so crucially important and what we have to do if we want to fix this issue.

The problem is that muscular armoring never restricted to one specific area in the body. If any specific muscles group is overly contracted actually all other muscles have to compensate this potential disturbance of balance. All these muscles build up body armor all over the body.

When we specifically work on "trouble making" group of the muscles we don't recover original dynamic balance in the body but rather create new disbalance. The body can't "recall" the previous natural balance because the new and old movement patterns or motor automations will not die by themselves. We have to replace them.

Any motor task, including stances or postures, will apply these movement patterns and their appropriate muscles contractions.

So how can we resolve this problem? How to dissolve body armor?

We already realize that working on any individual muscle group will only create new problem instead of the old one.

The only way we can recover natural balance in our movement and posture is to learn and practice it. Then previously acquired unnatural movement patterns will be replaced and finally die out. This is the only way to recover natural dynamic and harmonic cooperation of the muscles in our body.

How can we know that some movement patterns are more natural than others?  The more natural and harmonious movement patterns are felt as more effortless and flowing. They are the source of our "bodily happiness", especially if we reach high proficiency in movement which is always accompanied by feeling of lightness and effortlessness.

The most effortless motion is called SAIM – Self Annihilating Inertial Motion. This motion is a result of billions of years of R&D (Research and Development) work of Mather Nature. SAIM maximally uses inertia and reaction forces not only during its active phase of the motion but also for its changing and stopping. Fast SAIM of arms and legs look, felt like whiplash and produces loud cracking sound.  

The problem is that the heavier and thicker our body armor the more difficult and narrow the way to recover SAIM. It happens because the stronger muscular contraction causes lesser sensitivity for contraction changes. For example, imagine that we keep in the hand 25 kg dumbbell. Add 25 gr. to the dumbbell and you will not feel any difference. The situation will be completely different if wee grab the weight of 25 gr. and put 25 gr. more. In this case we will immediately feel great change in the load.

This phenomenon is known as Weber-Fechner law. It means, to put it simply, that for highly tensed individuals the task of being relaxed is very difficult because they have very low sensitivity for muscular tension changes. These individuals have to make great progress before they feel changes in tension.

Therefore, this Weber-Fechner law sometimes makes our life difficult, but there is a way out of this magic circle.   

Chronic tension develops bad and incorrect motion, including the posture. The first thing we can observe in any motion is its general trajectory. We already know, as a result of our research, that there is some general natural motion trajectory, even its parameters can change according to circumstances. This trajectory includes motions of all body parts and their relative arrangement. We found that mastering this natural general trajectory leads to efficient and fast dynamic relaxation.

At first glance this task looks enormously complicated. Once again, Mother Nature provided us with simple solution.

The natural and highly efficient way to overcome this problem is to follow the sequence of the motion development during the evolution. This sequence in general repeats itself even after the child was born during his individual motion development (phylogenetic motor skills development). The sequence has 8 evolutionary steps, it starts from the movements of the torso and progresses towards the fingers, tongue and then finally towards whole the body.

Dynamical character of the SAIM defines sequences of accelerations and decelerations of the different body parts and their combinations. These combinations constantly repeat themselves in the body in whole as well as in every part of it, including the fingers.

Therefore, the process of recovering our natural harmonic muscular tension and dissolving body armor can be comparatively fast and easy.

After recovery of SAIM one gradually changes all individual movement patterns to make them as close to SAIM as possible.

At this stage of training every performance of any movement related skill or art becomes much more efficient, fluent, enjoyable and esthetic. One will feel that movements just happen by themselves, without any effort, like a magic.      

How often we have to practice if we want to prevent rebuilding of body armor?

Tension and body armor are constantly created every moment. Our social activities and rules, wrong movements, devices we use, the place of work where we spend hours every day, our shoes and clothes – all these constantly create tensions and muscle armoring all over the body. We have to avoid high level of tension and to dissolve body armor frequently during the day.  

Mother Nature provided us with the easiest and most effective method for dissolving body armor and releasing the tension. There are pandiculation and yawning.

Unfortunately, these natural reflexes are mostly suppressed in many cultures. This suppression is one of the main reasons for the creation of body armor and causes great damage to our health.

Pandiculation and yawning can be initiated repeatedly by simple voluntary movements. We have to practice them at least 3 times daily and every time we feel tension. After short period of practice, they will happen naturally and automatically every time the tension is high or gets higher. Pandiculation and yawning produce also great general and specific positive influence on creativity, health and develop great strength. If combined with above mentioned training they recover their natural shape and become even more effective and useful.