“You are who you are because of the life you’ve led so far.”

While it may not seem it sometimes, we are all unique. Your memories, experiences, feelings and pain are all completely unique to you. No one else on the planet experiences life as you do, moves like you do, or runs like you do.

You are shaped by everything that has come before, which means that when you have a challenge to overcome, a pain to resolve, or a race to run. You need to do it your way.

This may sound like some poetic claptrap, but it is in fact the scientific truth. Everything you are and everything you do is a product of your nervous system. You are a compensation built upon many earlier compensations, as your brain, nervous system and body adapt to the environment around you.

Every moment of every day offers your brain a chance to change. It is constantly undergoing a process of rewiring called neuroplasticity. This rewiring is shaping your future even though you are not yet aware of it. Everything you do right now is helping to make your future moments what they are.

What does that really mean?

The opening paragraphs do sound a bit philosophical, but everything in them is based on neuroscience. Although we are still only scratching the surface, we now know a lot more about how the brain works than ever before. We know for example, that the brain is a predictive decision engine, using predictive models based on our lives so far: what we’ve experienced first hand and through others and what we’ve learned in every form along the way. Those predictive models shape who you are right now; they influence how you experience life now and in the future; and they are updated constantly by new experiences and learnings.

In a practical sense, this means that in order to change any aspect of your life you need to be rewiring your brain. This isn’t as hard as it may sound – after all, your brain is rewiring itself constantly in a non-deliberate way, so aren’t you better doing it on purpose to help you reach your goals?

What about pain?

Pain is a very complicated topic, but it’s one where great strides have been made in recent years. This means we have a good understanding of what pain is and how it works, and this all helps as we try to resolve it.

Without diving in too deeply, pain is a construct created by your brain in response to one or more threats. It used to be believed that we had pain receptors throughout our body and a pain centre in our brain. This has now been proven to be incorrect, and just isn’t how pain works at all. Instead, we have special nerve endings called nociceptors that react to actual or potential threat to the body’s tissues. When the threat signals are sent to your brain via your system, they are considered along with a wealth of other information that your brain consults, including those predictive models mentioned earlier.

All of this information helps your brain decide whether to produce an experience of pain, and where you are going to experience it: this may not be the same physical location as the threat, which can add to the difficulty in resolving pain.

If you have a physical injury such as a cut, broken bones, or even a sprained ankle, the nociceptors are triggered to send the threat signals up to your brain. However, it’s only if your brain decides those signals are important enough to warrant action that you’ll feel any pain at all. Just because you have damage to your tissues doesn’t automatically mean you’ll experience pain. To understand this a bit better, think of a time when you’ve looked down at your hand and noticed a cut you didn’t feel happening at the time – only to start experiencing pain as soon as you looked at it.

Your brain prioritises your threat signals based on how safe it decides you are at any given moment. If you are about to be run over by a bus, a cut finger goes down to the bottom of the pile while getting out of the way of the bus comes first. Conversely, if you are sitting at home flicking through some papers and get a cut, there is no other threat to take priority so you experience pain right then and there.

You can read more about pain in this free article.

What about performance and gait?

Because your brain and nervous system determine who you are, it is also determining how you move and how you run. How well you race is partly influenced by how you think, move and breath: all products of your nervous system. It is also partly influenced by external forces you can’t do anything about: so let’s place our focus on what you can work on.

Movement is fascinating. It is both an output from your nervous system and also acts as an input into your nervous system. This is fantastic as you can actually use movement exercises and drills to influence how you move and run!

If you want to improve your running gait, you need to review things like motor control, accuracy and  error checking. These are all functions of your brain and they can all be improved by upregulating or inhibiting certain brain areas. For example, as an alternative to spending several hours a week lifting weights to activate your strength for running, you could use some very targeted, specific protocols that will yield better results in a fraction of the time. This doesn’t necessarily replace that weight-based strength work, it compliments it and sets a much better foundation for you to get great results there as well.

Likewise, rather than many hours practicing certain movement patterns to correct your running form, first stimulate the areas of your brain that are involved in accuracy and motor control. Then, when you do your corrective exercises you’ll actually get the results you want.

Working at the level of your nervous system like this is called neural priming and it’s what we specialise in. By designing variations of exercises and drills specifically for your nervous system, and then stacking them in specific ways, you can achieve results you never thought possible.
As I like to say: my mission is to solve the problems that others can’t or won’t solve.

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