Okay, it will be hard for me to resist going on a large tangent (see my other blog post from last year titled “A Movement Manifesto”). But I will try my best…
If you read the first blog post I wrote for Elevate, or you are familiar with Dr. Mark Latash, then you understood my silly title for this blog. If not that’s okay, it’s a bit esoteric. It effectively means that the human body is designed to solve movement problems AND it can do so in numerous ways. Additionally, the really trippy part is that this all comes from self-organization within the central nervous system. Let’s take a baby learning to walk as the analogy:
Baby is sitting on the floor
Baby wants a toy from across the room (motivation)
Baby has been crawling for a long time and recently practiced standing (redundancy)
Baby suddenly decides to take steps (emergent)
Baby bites the dust pretty hard (error)
Baby repeats until Baby gets toy (learning)
You’ll note I put fancy words next to the extremely simplistic steps a baby takes to learn to walk. But the truth remains: first comes motivation, then comes central processing to work with varying levels of redundancy to solve the problem, movement occurs, probably erroneously, and then the central nervous system processes the error and repeats slightly differently until success is achieved.
So what is the clinical pearl here? Not so fast super chief, we have one more extremely complicated topic to attempt to reduce down–Dynamical Systems Theory. It’s actually a fancy mathematics concept. The basic concept is that large, highly intricate systems are composed of networks of co-dependent subsystems. Those co-dependent subsystems are also composed of interacting components. Thus, finding a finite solution is hopeless; there are many. But from a system-wide perspective, there are trends in behaviors. These trends tend to revolve around fixed points, which are variables that don’t change over time (example: gravity). But that’s where the high-level math starts and I stop.
Okay, so what is the clinical pearl here?
Don’t. Tell. People. How. To. Move.
Or at the very least not during an assessment. Allow their movement system to consider the problem and attempt to solve it in the most efficient way it knows how. Your job is to sit back and watch. You’ll probably learn a lot. You might even figure out how you can help them…
But you’ll definitely learn more than if you cue them right out of the gate! Let your patients show you their emergent behaviors. And THEN you can start changing the inputs. And THEN let them solve the movement problem again.
I’m not saying you’ll get it right every time. Or even every third time. But constraining people to move in the way you prefer before seeing them move pretty much guarantees you’ll miss more than you’ll hit.
This concept (using Dynamical Systems Theory during an evaluation) also rolls really nicely into the next Trog Blog topic…
So come back for the next clinical pearl…and remember, don’t live in caves…
^this is the coolest thing ever. This is taken from Dr Latash's work (citation). It's called the uncontrolled manifold hypothesis. These graphs examine how many ways your body can successfully solve a simple task--to produce 40 N (about 10 lbs) of force with 2 fingers. the second picture highlights all of the successful ways to solve the problem: 40 on the R, 0 on the L...10 on the L, 30 on the R.... etc etc etc. Read our first here blog for more depth on this!
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