The 4 Phases of Re-Learning How to Move

Nearly every movement you make is driven by an underlying movement pattern that you have developed over the course of your lifetime. These patterns develop to make movements easier to coordinate and protect you from perceived vulnerabilities. From time to time these patterns can cause certain tissues to be strained or overused and eventually lead to pain. If you want to better understand this process please look back at my last few posts. When movement patterns lead to pain you can get stuck in a cycle of injury, rest, recovery, and re-injury. This happens because you have not changed the movement leading to your pain. When this happens, you need to take active steps to change your movement patterns. Patterns develop slowly over time and therefore require thoughtfulness, diligence, and patience to rewire. While there is no specific timeframe that governs this process there are 4 phases that you will go through when successfully retraining yourself to move differently.

Unconscious Inability – Your body is moving on autopilot and you are blissfully unaware of the patterns and strategies you are using to achieve all of your movement goals. This is your default state. We often remain in this phase until something compels us to change, like trying a new physical activity or feeling pain with a regular activity. 

Conscious Inability – In this phase you begin to recognize a movement preference that you have but you are unable to figure out how to do something different. You are stuck, or beholden to an existing pattern and can’t figure out a new way of moving. I like to refer to this as the “That’s impossible” phase. When I identify a persistent pattern with one of my patients and ask them to try to do something else, they often tell me what I’m asking is impossible. Sometimes it is a leg lift without arching their back, or raising an arm without shrugging their shoulder. It depends on the individual. These are always things within their physical ability to do, but coordinating their muscles to act in that specific sequence is so foreign it feels impossible. Generally, after a few training exercises, they suddenly begin to turn the impossible into the possible, albeit with quite a bit of mental and physical effort. This phase is often the most frustrating, but I believe this to be the most important. Any conscious change has to be preceded by awareness of a problem. Without that awareness, the odds of change are slim no matter what exercises you do,  pills you take, or fancy creams you buy.

Conscious Ability – Once you have identified a challenging or “impossible” pattern you can begin to teach yourself how to perform that movement. After some minutes, days, weeks, or even months, you begin to rewire your brain to so you become familiar with this new pattern of movement. I call this the “Unnatural” phase. This is when patients decide that sure it is possible to move this way, but it’s not natural. Obviously, the movements are within their body’s physiologic ability. I am not asking anyone to spin their head around 360 degrees. By unnatural what they really mean is unfamiliar. What feels natural to you are the things you do all the time. In this case, unnatural movements are just unfamiliar movements. This phase is all about rehearsing a new movement enough that it feels less foreign. Typically, this is the slowest phase of the four. It’s a journey.

Unconscious Ability – Well this Nirvana, the reward for all the effort you have put in. When you have practiced a new pattern so much and got to understand it so well that it isn’t new anymore. It is an old familiar pattern just like the others and your brain will integrate it into your movement vocabulary without thought or effort. This is where lasting changes occur allowing you to break the recurring pain cycle. This is an unconscious process, so you are unaware of when it starts to happen and how it progresses over time. Think about a movement you may have rehearsed over time, say, for example, folding a t-shirt out of the laundry. if you are the one that does the folding every week I bet you look smooth and easy when you do it. Your movements are obviously rehearsed. You likely don't remember when you got good at it, it just happened slowly over time. If you're not sure how smooth you are, ask a family member who rarely helps with the laundry to fold and see how clunky it looks. If you're the clunky one, try to help out around the house a little more. Unfortunately, our patterns don’t live in this phase forever, they only last as long as they are rehearsed. It is necessary to practice conscious movement training activities from time to time to reinforce a new pattern, especially if you feel an old familiar pain start to creep up.

That is how you take movements from impossible to possible, possible to easy, and easy to effortless.

If you’ve been following my writing for the past few weeks you now understand what movement patterns are, why they are a necessity for life, how they can become pain generators, and the process by which we make changes. Next week I’ll cover the 4 principles of creating healthy and useful movement.