Do we teach babies how to crawl, stand and then walk? or is it mainly task driven trial and error by the baby, with great encouragement (mostly) from us and sometimes the provision of some useful/useless mechanical devices. If babies learn this way, what facilitates the skill acquisition and how do they retain it.
The term “Muscle Memory” has great currency in athletic circles and could be the process by which babies learn motor skills. But at the very least it is a misnomer as muscles do not have brains (so no memory in the conventional sense) which suggests another answer for babies and for bigger babies like us!
Neurologists studying human movement talk more and more now about proprioception and the different proprioceptors located in joints, ligaments, tendons and muscles in the body (as well as other places like the skin). The way these proprioceptors behave and communicate with each other, with the spinal cord and with the brain is growing field of study and understanding.
The relevant digestible information for those of us non scientists, involved in helping others acquire, restore and develop motor skills, is the following as I understand it.
Proprioceptors are located in different parts of the body and monitor and react to different internal and external stimuli, passing their information on to each other, to the spinal cord and the brain. The purpose of all this neurological activity is to elicit the right timely response, in movement terms, to the information received/perceived by the proprioceptors.
The idea that proprioceptors pass information to each other suggests systems, within the neurological system, that pass information and effect a movement independently from active brain function. This understanding starts to resemble the idea of “Muscle Memory’ although to be more accurate it should be called “proprioceptive memory”.
We all understand or have experienced physical movement that seems not to need conscious thought beforehand. Most sports at most levels require automatic responses as there is rarely time to think. Responses to immediate sensations like heat or dangers like collision are similar “no time to think” scenarios
So it seems that proprioceptors are located in different parts of the body, reacting to different stimuli, at different speeds, passing information to each other and beyond, that produce movement in muscles and joints…but what type of movement.
It is not just random movement at the location of a group of proprioceptors. It seems more like a coordinated action throughout the body… a chain reaction. Think of touching something hot. Pulling your hand away will involve your shoulders, your hips and your feet, a chain reaction throughout the body.
This starts to suggest a pre assembled response that has been learnt, stored and is capable of retrieval instantaneously without recourse to the brain! I do a lot of things like that!
I hope I have established in your mind, as one non scientist to another, that human movement is a response to the information gathered and shared by proprioceptors which can become a conditioned response, or chain reaction, in an activity like learning to walk or hitting a tennis ball as well as a lot of other activities we pursue .
Does it then mean that trying to learn motor skills through conscious thought, or using training and conditioning regimes the don’t mirror the activity you want to pursue, are less effective ways of acquiring and retaining motor skills?
In part 11 How should we teach/coach movement. I will address these ideas and pass on some of the truths and strategies of function I have studied with the Gray Institute.
To give a flavour of part11, Gary Gray (Founding Father of Function) says repeatedly ” If your golf training does not smell like golf or look like golf, it probably wont help your golf very much.