4 Gears
anthony bruni
This Week I wanted to focus on movement and share an idea I been working with to deepen my connection to how I move. .
One concept that I've been playing in my movement practice, is the concept of kinesthetic gears. It's my experience that whatever movement practice we do to stay healthy should incorporate our full range of velocities. As we increase the speed we move at, we gain some advantages while losing some other advantages that occur when we move slower. Likewise slowing down has its own advantages and drawbacks. Fluctuating our rhythm allows us to dynamically grow our physical abilities in ways that forever exercising at a constant pace won't allow. With this in mind, during my workouts I been categorizing all my movements into one of 4 speeds, or gears, each of which provides me with a distinct focus. So let's break down our gears.
1st Gear
The 1st speed is a sort of neutral, where we hold poses. It provides our foundation for the next 3 gears. Much of yoga can be placed within this gear. The only movement that occurs here comes from the oscillations of our breath. In this speed, our intention is to embody a certain pose the best we can while finding the calmness to maintain the pose. Our only movement should be to adjust our bodies to erase any blemishes we have in our pose. While in this gear our body gains muscle memory of what a particular pose feels like. We can learn where the endpoints of our stretches are and where we struggle with balance.
2nd Gear
The 2nd gear is all about slow motion. We slow our movements as much as possible. Our muscles cells operate on a binary logic much like neurons, or computer code. Muscles cells exist in either an activated or inactivated state. When we engage more muscular energy doing something it is not because our individual muscle cells are more engaged, but rather that more muscle cells are engaged. The slower our body moves the more opportunity our mind has to edit which muscle cells become engage allowing us to refine our movements. As we do this we can establish more refined neuro-muscular patterns that with practice will become our default movement patterns. This is our intention when we are in this gear.
3rd Gear
When we feel we made sufficient improvement to our movement patterns in gear 2 we can move to our 3rd gear. Here we are moving at the pace of anaerobic, or zoomba class. At this speed, our concern is cultivating endurance. We are striving to increase our endurance, the time we can be in continuous motion. In all 4 gears, we should be moving with breath*, but it is in this speed that it will become apparent if we are out of sync with our breath as we will tire out prematurely. We should only employ movements here that we have crafted to a sufficient degree in our second speed, as we don’t want to practice poor body mechanics for at least 2 reasons. We don’t want to learn how to misuse our bodies and we don’t want to risk an injury that comes with practicing bad body mechanics.
4th Gear
Our final speed can be thought of as a controlled frenzy. Our life may require us to perform a sudden all-out action. Maybe we may have to leap out of the way of a reckless driver, maybe we will be attacked, maybe who knows what we will be called to do. In short, what we are practicing here is flight or flight activity. I believe it is worth training our body's to perform under such pressure, for both physical and psychological reasons.
When we are in 4th speed we should only engage in activities we perfected** in the previous speeds. From gear 1 we should know the endpoints of our motions and be able to comfortably hold them. We should have worked out points of our imperfections motions while moving in our second speed. From our third speed, we should be able to have the stamina to engage in whatever activities we choose for a prolonged period of time.
I feel from my personal experience, a short duration of intense training promotes a deep calming afterward. If we look at this from an evolutionary perspective we can observe animal becoming calm after they are chased. We can also view this from a biochemical perspective. Stress causes us to produce more epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol which gives us the ability to move with greater intensity. As we deplete these hormones through intense movement we enter a deep internal calm.
I understand why this 4th gear speed of movement is underutilized as it easy to injure ourselves here, but I do believe not practicing a somewhat frantic movement pattern keeps us in a film of stress hormones that can only be released through practicing the all-out motion. Just as the precise neuromuscular pattern we establish is our second speed can be transposed into our 3rd gear, we can just as easily rachet up the intensity a gear. As long as our movement patterns are biomechanically in check we should be able to move safely and gain greater mastery over our bodies.
Anthony Bruni
* or rather we should allow our breath to be the catalyst for our motion.
* * So nothing is truly perfected, but our movements should be as close as we can conceive to being perfected in this stage.