The problem with getting really good at movement
"Brainy What-Why-How"
Your weekly nibble of science-backed goodness to help you move better and feel unstoppable.
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What (the TL:DR)
There are several reasons why not working with weights can leave your movement practice with an unscratched itch.
But my personal favourite is this:
Weights can literally perturb you.
They're the easiest way to keep challenging yourself and avoiding veering into the "Stagnation Lane".
Weights can knock you slightly off balance, pull you in a direction you weren’t expecting, or change how your body has to organise itself from one moment to the next.
And perturbation is one of the best--and most accessible--ways to keep your reflexive stability in shape 💪
Think: all the anti-gravity, “OH GOD DON’T FALL OVER” muscles and brain systems that keep you upright while you’re busy doing something else.
Why (the geeky neurology)
Old news if you’ve been reading my blogs for a while, but it’s worth reiterating:
A surprisingly tiny amount of what your nervous system does to create movement is the movement you actually think about.
You decide to wave at a friend.
You decide to lift your leg for a pistol squat.
You decide to move from tree pose into Warrior III.
That’s the bit you experience as “I am moving my body.”
Meanwhile, your brain is doing an absolutely ridiculous amount of work behind the scenes to make sure that movement doesn’t result in you face-planting into the floor.
Every movement comes with a constant stream of tiny checks, adjustments and corrections--many of them completely imperceptible to you--keeping your head where it ought to be, your centre of mass where it needs to be, and your body generally obeying the laws of gravity.
Because one of your brain’s major priorities is, unsurprisingly, keeping itself attached to the rest of you.
The cerebellum, brainstem and vestibular system are all heavily involved in this beautiful background choreography.
And when these systems are working well...
Movement just tends to feel better.
More adaptable. More responsive. More coordinated. More you can throw something weird at me and I’ll figure it out.
And, like pretty much everything else in your nervous system:
This is use it or lose it.
Which brings us to weights.
Because eventually, bodyweight movement gets easier.
If 10 squats is challenging, you can make them harder by doing more. Or slowing them down. Or finding a more difficult variation.
But once that's easy, you can end up doing an increasingly ridiculous number of repetitions simply to create enough stimulus to make your body go:
“Oh. We have to work now.”
Adding resistance is just a very practical way of increasing the challenge without spending your entire afternoon doing squats.
But there’s another, much more interesting thing weights can do.
They can change the rules while you’re moving:
🏋️♀️ Do a squat holding a weight in one hand.
Now the weight is pulling you sideways. Your brain has to figure out how to keep you upright while you squat.
🏋️ Do a Trikonasana with a weight in the upper hand.
Now, as you lower into the pose and come back out, your shoulder, spine and trunk have to respond to a changing load.
🏋🏾♂️ Move from Tree Pose into Warrior 3 with ankle weights.
Now your leg is behaving slightly differently in space, and your brain has to work out how to balance this new version of you.
None of these things are just “making the muscles work harder.”
They’re asking your nervous system to solve a new problem.
And that’s the part I love 😍
Because you don’t want to spend your entire movement practice doing things that are already easy.
You want to occasionally give your brain something it can’t quite predict.
Something that makes it go:
“Oh. Hang on. What are we doing here?”
That’s perturbation.
And that little bit of instability is exactly what gives your reflexive stability systems something interesting to practise.
How (apply it to your life)
Add some weights to your movement practice.
Not just to make familiar exercises harder.
Have fun finding ways to make them slightly weird.
Hold the weight on one side.
Add it to a limb that’s moving through space.
Change the position.
Change the direction.
Make your body solve a problem it hasn’t solved a thousand times before.
And if you want some inspiration, check out the Weights and Resistance Bands classes I’ve made.
Go forth and mildly inconvenience your nervous system.
Adell xx
P.S. I wrote this because I KEEP GETTING MESSAGES from people asking me "Do I really need to work with weights?" And no..you don't NEED to but it's my understanding based on everything I know from the science literature AND my own experience that your future self will thank you if you do.
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