Fitness Begins With Muscle Memory


By Bob Condor, Columnist
Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer

DR. DEEPAK CHOPRA, the best-selling author and holistic physician, likes to say this about the human body: "It is the place that memories call home."

If coordination, balance and athletic ability are the subject, some of those memories are good and some bad.

Real bad.

"We are all programmable," says Alexander Lees, a clinical counselor in Surrey, B.C., who works with recreational athletes. "We are affected by environment, parents, teachers. We are especially pro- grammed by what people in author- ity say to us (such as a coach or physical education teacher). Those memories can be limiting and last for a lifetime. People can convince us we are not coordinated."

Good news from researchers: It's never too late in life to become more coordinated, improve your balance and, yes, become a better athlete.

Begin with the work of William J. Evans, who runs the Nutrition, Metabolism and Exercise Laboratory at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. He has written landmark government-funded studies showing people can improve strength, balance and fitness well into their 80s and 90s.

"That's into the 10th decade of life," said Evans, who consults with NASA on astronaut fitness and optimal readiness for space travel.

His experiments were simple enough. Volunteers trained three times each week on weights - sometimes as little as one-pound dumbbells. Within weeks, strength gains were significant and, more importantly, people were regaining independence.

"It's a quality of life issue," said Vincent Nethery, a professor of exercise science at Central Washington University. "Not relying on someone to help you go to the bathroom or making a trip to the grocery store are vital capabilities we don't realize how much we miss until we don't have them anymore."

Nethery and other exercise scientists embrace the notion of muscle memory. Your body remembers how to swing a golf club or stroke your arms in a swimming pool. Part of regaining coordination - or achieving it for the first time - is about trusting that anyone can build muscle memory.

Practice may not make us perfect, but we can get a lot better.

Nethery said training with free weights or pursuing any activity that requires agility (rock climbing, tennis, volleyball, inline skating) promotes more coordination because a greater number of muscles are recruited to balance and stabilize the load of the free weights or your body. The term for this sensory recruitment of "stabilizer" and "neutralizer" muscles is "proprioception."

So let's review. We have no excuse about being too old or out of shape. We can become more coordinated through the old- fashioned hard work of practice. We can train more efficiently by using free weights, even starting modestly with light dumbbells.

So what's stopping us from passage into the Land of the More Coordinated?

Probably that nagging thought about not being coordinated put in the head by a PE zealot in canvas hightops or perhaps a schoolmate. Or maybe, sadly, an older sibling or parent. Perhaps even a spouse who believes old is old and physical activity is for the young.

Lees helps clients clear any limiting memories with an approach called emotional freedom technique or EFT (www. emofree.com). It combines acupressure and psychotherapy to help "tune up" the mind- body connection.

There are hundreds of meridian points used by acupuncturists to move energy in the body. Lees said a select few relate directly to the emotions. Those are the ones he taps while asking clients to address their problems or concerns, such as the tennis player struggling to get her serve into play. Lees said a five-minute session can "tap out the glitch" in the nervous system and improve performance.

Lees recognizes that people doubt his claims. During one stop of a recent lecture tour in Spain, a local radio commentator for the English-language station attended an EFT workshop on one condition: That he could report the whole approach as bunk if that was what he determined it to be.

No problem, said Lees. He asked the man to hit 10 golf balls to determine the normal state of his swing. Then Lees tapped the commentator's acupressure points while the man made statements about having a wicked slice off the tee in his golf game. After the short session, the man teed up another 10 balls and hit them straighter and longer. He went on air and raved about EFT.

Candace Pert is a research professor at Georgetown University's Department of Physiology and Biophysics. She contends our thoughts convert to emotions that in turn become neuropeptides. Those neuropeptides, which are strings of amino acids, communicate with the body on the biochemical level.

Lees sees his EFT work as rearranging those neuropeptide chains and not allowing the negative emotions to continue signaling the body. It follows that we can do our own rearranging by finding a way to eliminate negative thoughts about coordination and athleticism. Not clinging to critical voices from the past is one possibility. Visualizing success (and not failure) is another option. Simply deciding not to be afraid about making mistakes is valuable.

We can start by heeding the advice of legendary football coach Vince Lombardi. When he first joined the Green Bay Packers, he told his coaches and team: We're not starting with a clean slate, we're starting with a whole new slate.

----

Bob Condor writes about health and quality of life. He is editor of the Seattle-based Evergreen Monthly, which covers health, environment, food, social good, spirituality and personal growth (visit www.evergreen monthly.com). Send e-mails to bobcondor@aol.com with any questions or ideas for the Living Well column.

(C) 2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved