Shifting Gears

A while back I was writing about my movement practice as a way of complimenting massage. More precisely about how to best pair the tempo of our movement with our intention.

Some time ago, I noticed how in my movement practice, my intentions were influenced by the speed I was moving at. Different tempo best lent themselves to improving different, but equally important, aspects of my movement. Simply put the slower we move the more we can fine-tune my body mechanics. As we move faster we can improve our endurance and became open to flow states. To explain this idea I used the metaphor of gears. Of course, this is only an imperfect metaphor. For whatever reasons you may be called to bring different intentions to your movement.

That said I stand behind this general framework. Since employing this concept in my movement practice I have heightened my kinetic awareness. This increased awareness allows me to increase the intensity of my practice while decreasing any residual soreness the next day. But I do want to provide proper caveats. This is all based on my practice and experience. I share this only to be transparent with my practices as others might gain from thinking of movement in these terms. If this doesn't work for you please respect your intuition. If this does gel with you though I like to expound on it a bit more.

When I previously wrote about this concept of matching certain intentions with the speed of our movement, I omitted when we should shift our speed and intention. So let's go into that now the first three intentions now. Next week I'll get into the fourth gear /intention which is a bit of its own thing.

Let us begin our movement in gear 2 where we are moving slowly to focus on our biomechanics. One clue we may receive that we need to pause comes from our breath. Are we moving in accords with our breathing? If we are not, we are practicing bad movement.

The slower we move the longer our respiratory cycles will need to be in order to sync our breath up to our motion. This can be a challenge in and of itself. It's easy to run out of oxygen or to run out of lung space to take in new air in the time it takes to complete a movement when moving this slow. Rather than breathing out of sync we should take this time to pause. By stopping at this precise point to take a full breath before continuing allows us to keep out-breath correct throughout our moment which will train our bodies to move in sync with its breath.

Another clue that we should pause is if we cant reach all the endpoints of our range of movement. This can be because of deficiencies in areas of strength or flexibility. It could also be because our bodies lack the precision to perform an action or the balance needed to maintain stability. Either way, we should pause precisely at these challenging spots as they are the places where we can develop the most.

As for increasing the tempo of our moment, we should check in with each of these elements (breath, flexibility strength, precision, and balance ). When we are at the point when we can move through a moment without compromising each of these elements then we are ready to speed up. By increasing our tempo we can now work on increasing our stamina and endurance, with structurally solid movement patterns.

It's worth noting that our form will always be evolving. Our bodies vary from day to day. We will naturally be tighter in some spots on some days for various reasons. We will sometimes be stronger and sometimes weaker. The point is not to judge our moment by an external checklist but to examine it internally. By learning to acknowledge when we truly feel we are mastering all these elements (breath, strength, flexibility, precision, and balance ) we are training our neuromuscular system what to expect from our bodies.

I have found the deeper in my practice I go the more my body just does its own thing, switching tempos as needed. But I do encourage everyone to play around with these ideas. There are always places where we need to fine-tune our movement and there are movements we have mastered that we can use to push ourselves.

Anthony Bruni