Confidence in Movement

How can I become more confident in/about moving my body?
The answer starts with the motor cortex…and ends with CARs. 

To answer this question, let us begin by agreeing on a definition of confidence. I like the 3rd definition offered by Oxford Dictionary for our purposes:

Confidence: a feeling of self-assurance arising from one’s appreciation of one’s own abilities or qualities.

Therefore, confidence in the movement of one’s body arises from an adequate appreciation of one’s own physical abilities and physical qualities (that relate to movement). The key word here is appreciation; in order to appreciate something, we have to be familiar with it; in order to be familiar with something, we have to have perceived it (probably a lot of times). If we want to feel assurance that a particular movement task we are about to attempt is going to go well, we need to have already repeatedly perceived the physical capabilities of the body parts we are going to use to accomplish that movement task.

For the rest of this post, we are going to examine, and explain, exactly how one can safely create this feeling of assurance in/about the movement of one’s body. By the end, you should understand what you have to do in order to create and maintain this feeling of assurance.

One’s familiarity with one’s abilities to move is represented in the structure of one’s brain’s motor cortex. The motor cortex has a rough “somatotopic organization,” not predetermined maps that correspond one-to-one to different body regions. Basically, the default relationship between your body parts and this specific area of the brain is that there is only a very simple, rough map of your body and its movable parts. It is this brain structure where our understanding of our own physical possibilities for movement exists. Similarly, it is also the structure from which the coordination pattern for any bodily movement ultimately originates.

The motor cortex is absolutely subject to the general neurological principle of “what fires together, wires together;” it is plastic, changeable, adaptable. Changes in the motor cortex occur over time due, most importantly, to changes in the information it receives from the musculoskeletal system through the nervous system. The points of first perception are called mechanoreceptors. This information that flows from mechanoreceptors to the central nervous system is called afference.

Afference comes enormously disproportionately from the tissues that make up our joints themselves, especially capsular/ligamentous tissue, the tissues at the deepest layer of joints. Compared to other musculoskeletal tissues, joints are mind-bogglingly richly innervated. Additionally, the afference from joint tissues are of such high informational priority, that it always goes directly to our motor cortex, skipping a “checkpoint” at the spinal cord that all other musculoskeletal afference must go through. We know without a doubt that the tissues that make up our joints are of the utmost importance to how the brain understands how the body can move and how it “decides” to move (coordinates) the body.

There is always some afference from one kind of mechanoreceptor in our joints (Type I), even when we are not moving. However, a great deal more afference is created only when we initiate movement (Type II), or when we approach end-range (Type III), or when a pain signal is being sent (Type IV). Functional Range Systems Instructor Dr. Michael Chivers sums it up this way: “the brain doesn’t know about you unless you move.”

So, movement (critically, including end-range movement) creates most of the information that could inform your cortically represented understanding of your own ability to move.

Furthermore, all this afference can be of various degrees of ‘quality.’ Roughly speaking, quality here refers to the accuracy and “signal-to-noise ratio”, or clarity, of the information. As it turns out, high quality information comes from tissues of high biological quality. Basically, biological quality refers to the health of a tissue. What is the empirically established, single greatest predictor of tissue quality/health? Whether or not it regularly moves.

Do you want your motor cortex to represent your actual capabilities to move so that it can coordinate efficiently, and safely, based upon those possibilities?
Do you want the feeling of self-assurance that comes from this neuro-biological condition persisting over time?

If so, you need to consistently deliver high quality information from your joints: move them in such a way that you carefully stimulate as many receptors as possible (do CARs: controlled articular rotations). Also, those tissues need to be healthy: again, move carefully to stimulate as many tissues as possible (again do CARs). CARs, done within certain parameters and with proper intent, create and maintain a high degree of biological quality throughout our musculoskeletal system. At the same time, they stimulate the maximal number of our mechanoreceptors.

After a month (or several) of well-performed CARs every day (or even better, multiple times per day), you may become very familiar with your physical self. You may deeply appreciate what you can and cannot do with your joints, how you can and cannot move them. There may then appear to you something that you want to do but that you cannot do (with appropriate articulation, anyway). At that point, with the help of a coach to program for and guide you, we can change the biology itself to make new movement possible, which creates the potential to then teach your brain what those new possibilities are, so that you can get familiar with these new possibilities. And on the process goes, until you are confident in all you want to do with movement. At which point, we maintain that familiarity by continuing to regularly stimulate as many tissues and mechanoreceptors as possible (by doing CARs). 

In summary, confidence comes from: frequent intentional movement that utilizes as much of the body's tissues as possible; the expansion of movement possibilities through specific training; and the never-ending process of (re)familiarization with these possibilities through more intentional movement.