What is Muscle Memory?
The process that allows you to make movements without having to think.
Remember when learning to drive?
It’s difficult at first, but once learned it’s very easy. Now you can listen to music, chat with a passenger and navigate traffic as well as drive your car. In fact, driving the car seems to happen automatically. It’s something that goes on in the background and you’re barely consciousness of it.
This happens with everything you learn. What you intentionally learn begins as often seeming impossible, then difficult, then to manageable, to easy, finally to automatic. For some reason though we tend not to apply this thinking to our movement. Even though you learned to walk! Without any help at all. Before you could even think!
You have the ability to learn or relearn how you move at ANY age.
Sensory-Motor Amnesia (SMA)
This is a condition when the sensory- motor neurons in the conscious part of your brain has partially lost the ability to control all or some of the muscles of your body.
This has very little to do with ageing and a lot to do with most of us not intentionally practicing or maintaining varied movement. We also tend to use our bodies to move in repetitive ways eg. driving, sitting at a computer, using an iPhone, protecting an injury etc. So our brains forget - we develop Sensory Motor Amnesia (SMA). We have just forgotten how to sense and move certain muscle patterns - which in time presents as tension, structural damage and more often pain.
If you can’t feel it you can’t control it.
Everything we learn needs to be practiced in order to maintain that ability whether it’s a language, playing a musical instrument, riding a bike, or even working an excel spreadsheet. If you don’t practice these things you’ll forget and lose the ability to do them or do them with less skill.
This is because those neural pathways not used regularly will shrink and die away. Meantime, your brain will strengthen and consolidate pathways that are regularly used. ‘Use it, or lose it’.
Many of the basic movement patterns we tend to lose, (either through lack of use or via stress, trauma, accidents and injuries) are the ones we need the most!
The main movements of the trunk and spine that are essential in order to walk freely and move well generally - extension, flexion, side bending and rotation, are the most fundamental movement patterns we need to do any activity. It’s these areas that we tend to suffer SMA most because we repetitively use them the most. Which is problematic because it’s the centre of our body that initiates movement and our periphery (neck, shoulders, arms, hands, legs, knees, feet etc) then responds in order to follow the movement through.
When your centre gets ‘stuck’ due to SMA your periphery has to work harder - the the knock on effect of SMA then continues and spreads.
Practicing Clinical Somatics is powerfully successful in regaining control of your muscles with the deliberate and conscious movement technique of pandiculation.