Exercise...for your brain

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Exercise for your brain. Not talking about Sudoku or NYT crosswords. I'm talking about finding and enhancing the connection between your brain and body through exercise.

You go to a personal trainer or physical therapist and watch them demonstrate an exercise; you then plop yourself down to repeat what you just saw. Suddenly you are bum-rushed with confusion, and inside your silently screaming, "But it looked so easy when they did it!"??

Body Awareness is an important concept which describes the ability of your brain to perceive where your body is in space at all times. Enhancing this mind-body connection can help you enhance performance and ensure proper form. And if you are a regular follower here at 101, you know, that this will lead to injury prevention and functional recruitment of muscles!

Studies* * * anybody?? These show that exercise can be used to keep the mind sharp as a tack and ward off disease in old age. Fabulous!

• Ankle Alphabet
  
  Do you suffer from frequent ankle sprains? How about poor balance?
  
  Poor proprioception may be to blame. Proprioception is the actual awareness of where your body is in space via messages sent to the brain by joint receptors, muscle receptors and sensory receptors located in the inner ear. With injury, these receptors can often times get turned off or blocked, leading to lack of communication with the affected body part.
  
  The ankle alphabet is a great exercise to do to wake up the proprioceptors in your ankle to enhance your balance performance and re-connect your brain to be aware of potential injurious situations
  
  HOW:
  
  
  
  1. Place your calf on a small table or chair so that your foot and ankle hang off the end.
     
  2. Begin tracing the Alphabet with your toes in the air (letters about one foot tall). Perform the entirety of the alphabet in upper case letters.
     
  3. Repeat with lower case letters.
     
  4. Repeat on opposite foot.
     
  
  
• Learn to Juggle
  
  Learning to juggle is not just a cool party trick. It can help boost your reaction times, hand-eye coordination and manual dexterity!
  
  Golfing, pitching, swimming and billiards (hubby would argue it is a sport) are all sports in which you can see a significant carry over from learning to juggle! When I learned, (insert joke here) I found that I could multitask in the kitchen with ease and I struggled less with upper extremity strengthening and form in the gym.


• Shoot for muscle confusion
  
  You read blog after blog which mentions the importance of switching your routine to promote muscle confusion. Why is it important and what the heck does it mean really?
  
  When you learn a new exercise, it tends to be challenging. This is your muscles saying, "What the heck? I've never done this before!" So you work at it, and eventually it becomes easy. This is your body learning and your muscles growing based on the demands you are placing on it daily.
  
  Muscle confusion is a process by which you are constantly challenging your body in order to build a greater bridge between your mind and body through this learning process.
  
  TIPS for muscle confusion
  
  
  
  • Replace one exercise with another every other week.
  
  
  • The exercise you replace should be in your routine for at least 4 weeks before it gets the boot.
  
  
  • Reach for a goal of a specified number of repetitions, once you reach that number (in good form) up the ante by adding an element of balance, un-level surfaces or weight.
  
  
  • Get out there and try something new! Yoga, pilates, frisbee golf, cricket... or whatever, just do it!

What do you folks need to work on as it pertains to body awareness? We all have something, for example when I started to do exercises on all fours, I used to have a hard time lining up my knees under my hips and hands under my shoulders without a mirror. How about you!?