Movement Amnesia - You used to be great: what happened?
“My Favourite Childhood Memory is My Back Not Hurting…”
Memes like this are floating around on the internet, because to a large degree people have accepted the inevitability of becoming weak, immobile, and hurting regularly, because (often at 25…) they are getting old. How did this become a thing?
Most of us would suggest that a 25-year-old shouldn’t be experiencing crippling back pain; and intellectually, I feel like most people would also agree that a 35-year-old is too young to feel like their body should be breaking down and becoming feeble. So why is this becoming an increasingly common ailment for people of almost all ages… Even for kids in some instances?
Humans are exceptional at adapting. It’s why when we start a new thing, our body is unusually sore, or our brain is super worn out. It’s also why doing something with increased regularity will result in less stress from the same task, regardless of how hard it was initially, and also why, with a little practise we can do increasingly tougher things along the way. Our body experiences a stimulus, compensates, super-compensates, and then has adapted to better accommodate the stimulus.
So what if the stimulus that we feed into the system throughout a day is sitting slumped in our chair, followed by sitting slumped in our car, before sitting slumped on our couch? What is our body likely to adapt to at that stage?
A phrase that summarises this beautifully that you’ve probably heard before is “use it or lose it”.
Not all adaptations are universally beneficial. Through a process known as neural pruning, our brain essentially ignores pathways that don’t get used in order to increase the efficiency of the pathways that are being used. This process is mirrored throughout the body, probably most obviously seen when someone breaks an arm. After only a few weeks, the cast is cut away, inevitably revealing a drastically smaller, weaker and less coordinated limb. A phrase that summarises this beautifully that you’ve probably heard before is “use it or lose it”.
So… what does this have to do with back pain?
As kids, we move around and play a great deal. My 7-year-old daughter doesn’t struggle to hit ten to fifteen thousand steps a day, and she does it as she runs around, looks underneath things, squats, plays with things, and generally explores the world. She’s exercising both her body and her brain, helping them to be healthy and to adapt to a broad range of different stimuli. Is it any wonder that she doesn’t have the aches and pains of adulthood? On the other hand, seeing kids with phones, computer games, and tablets as their primary entertainment, I think that we are fast approaching an age where we are going to see people with sore backs and chronic pain earlier and earlier.
So what’s the answer? How do we maintain the awesome health of a kid? At this stage, I’d expect you already know… Get out and move more. I love the Original Strength resets - diaphragmatic breathing, different ranges of head control, rolling, rocking, crawling, and other gait movements like walking. These are things that anyone can do. At the end of the day though, get outside, try and find a hobby that lets you explore the world with wonder. Look under the table and try and figure out how things work. Do things that make you catch your breath out of excitement and interest instead of catching your breath because you’re trying to pay a penance for the rest of your sedentary week (the way most adults exercise!). Put simply, use your body and your brain to have fun and enjoy the world, and you’ll find that your body and brain will start to reignite the pathways that will help you to have fun and enjoy the world!
If you don’t know where to start, we have a great community that practises safe strength training where you can explore your body and enjoy movement. We’d love to have you, and if you’re not local, still get in touch so that we can help find somewhere near you that can do a similar thing!
