Meg found out the hard way. She found out just how important it is to understand how to improve strength with the Feldenkrais Method after a shocking surprise. No one, least of all Meg, could have imagined how her life would change. Meg walked into surgery more or less fine. But she walked out with a spinal cord injury.
Meg had no idea she had anything wrong with her spine. She only discovered the issue when she had to undergo a scan for a completely different reason. It was then that they found she had a problem. She had a massive bulging disc that was compressing her spinal cord.
It was a surprise to everyone as she didn’t have any neurological symptoms.
But, within a couple of years, she started noticing some odd things. She, with her doctors, decided she needed to have spinal surgery to prevent a possible catastrophe that could result in her having paraplegia.
Things didn’t go as well as hoped, as the surgery left Meg with a spinal cord injury. She had severe neurological deficits in one leg. Initially, she couldn’t tell where that leg was. And she couldn’t move it on her own.
Meg asked if I could come and help. After a few months of working with her, she did incredibly well.
During those early days, one of the movements Meg had trouble with was bending her knee. She told a colleague, Gwendolyn, that she needed to “strengthen” that hamstring muscle. And she made plans to do a whole bunch of strengthening exercises in physiotherapy.
Gwendolyn gently suggested that maybe it wasn’t a “strength” issue. In fact, it was more about how her brain was organising movement and whether or not her brain was causing that muscle to fire in the first place. Gwendolyn suggested she let me know about this hamstring/knee bending issue to see what we could do with FeldenkraisⓇ lessons.
After the very next lesson, she could bend that knee exponentially better, no strengthening needed.
Strengthening the muscle wasn’t the issue. Improving the motor plans at the level of her brain was.
If the brain doesn’t signal for that muscle to contract without conflicting or inhibiting messages, no amount of strengthening will make a real-life difference.
When we first started, I didn’t know if we could help her find that movement of her leg that Meg thought she needed “strengthening” for. If her spinal cord injury was severe enough and there was no longer a connection between her brain and her muscles, then we likely wouldn’t have seen any difference no matter how many lessons she had.
Obviously, Meg’s spinal cord was not that severely damaged. And so, she made tremendous gains every day.
Meg had a long way to go, but her progress was remarkable. She inspires everyone who knows her: staff, other patients, family and friends and me, too!
Exactly How Can the Feldenkrais Method Improve Strength?
You don’t have to have the severity of Meg’s issues to feel a difference in real-life strength: ability to do work and/or take a load.
When you improve the way you coordinate your movements, you can significantly improve your ability to do work and/or take a load (strength).
To explain how this works, I have to get a little nerdy. If you really want to nerd out, you can read this article in the Journal of Neurophysiology.
Strength isn’t just a factor of pure, raw muscle strength. Pure, raw muscle strength is easily seen as an increase in the diameter of the muscle itself because of the increased size of the muscle cells making up that muscle.
But you can also increase strength (ability to do work/take load) by recruiting more motor units and improving the rate of motor unit recruitment.
A motor unit is made up of a motor neuron (nerve) and the muscle fibres that the terminal ends of that nerve supply.
So, let’s pretend you have 100,000 muscle fibres in a muscle. One motor unit might include only 1,000 muscle fibres. For the sake of simplicity, let’s pretend every motor unit of that muscle includes 1,000 muscle fibres.
To get all the muscle fibres to contract, you’d have to recruit 100 motor units. If you only recruit ten motor units, you’ll only get 10,000 muscle fibres in that muscle to contract. That is only 10% of the possible muscle contraction for that muscle.
The more motor units you can recruit, the greater the number of muscle fibres you’ll contract. And the greater the strength of muscle contraction.
Your brain controls the recruitment of your motor units. If your movements are precise, harmonious, and coherent throughout your system, you’ll recruit motor units without the inhibition that is so common with confused movement patterns. This is how to improve strength with the Feldenkrais Method.
The better your coordination, the more coherent and harmonious your movements, and the stronger you’ll feel.
You’ll move with greater efficiency and grace.
As an added bonus, when you organise yourself this way, pure, raw muscle strength is much easier to come by too!
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*Name changed to protect the identity of the client.
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