Feldenkrais, Sherrington, and Why Studying the Underlying Principles of Movement Matters
I was doing a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement (ATM) lesson last week, my first one in a while. I did them weekly for years (well, more accurately, I did thirty to forty minutes of Feldenkrais ATMs weekly, for years. It turns out that unless I am really, really tired, I have a difficult time moving slowly on the floor for an entire hour). I was reminded, like I often am during ATMs, how forward thinking Feldenkrais’s work was. When I was doing lessons consistently, I began to notice recurring themes, things like the importance of pelvis movement, the role of coordination and motor control in the experience of movement efficiency, how touch can be used to alter body image and proprioception… These concepts piqued my curiosity, and drove me to dive deeper into my studies of topics like proprioception and body schema.
I have always been fascinated by the simplicity of his cueing. The lack of explanation, other than usually an external cue, gives the student space to try the movement on without over-complicating things. It helps that most of the lessons begin on the floor, in a position that feels very safe and secure; by the end of the more advanced lessons, it’s not unusual to find yourself in a curious looking position you probably wouldn’t attempt on a regular Sunday, illustrating how simplicity can be as effective for producing complex movement as complicated instructions.
Moshe Feldenkrais was born in 1904. He used the principles that eventually became the foundations of the ATM lessons to heal and walk without pain after injuring his knee playing soccer. His work, he said, was based on the idea that humans have the ability to learn how to learn. A number of physiologists influenced the ideas he explored, including Sherrington who, as you will see in the next paragraph, was a pioneer in his own right.
Sir Charles Scott Sherrington was born in England in 1857. He trained as a physician and was originally interested in infectious disease. His interests segued into the neuropathology of the human brain, where eventually he shifted his focus from the cortex to the spinal cord. He coined the term proprioceptive, introduced the term synapse, and developed the principle of irradiation, though as you will see in a moment, his original idea of how irradiation worked wasn’t entirely accurate. If you are following along and you are a movement person, Sherrington laid the ground work for many of the fundaamental concepts we use today to improve body awareness, mobility, and strength.
The principle of irradiation is basically this: when you activate muscles that are already strong, this leads to the activation of muscles that are weak and injured. So, contracting facilitates contraction. Sherrington believed irradiation only happened in agonist muscles, but that has since been challenged. One researcher actually found the most significant effects of irradiation were seen in contralateral limb muscles.
Quick anatomy review: agonist muscles are the ones causing a movement. When you flex your elbow, your elbow flexors are the agonist muscles, causing the movement to occur. Antagonist muscles oppose the agonist muscles, changing length in the opposite direction. In the elbow flexion example, your elbow extensors are the antagonist muscles, changing length because the elbow flexors initiated a movement, not because they are directing force upon the elbow joint and causing a change in joint position.
There used to be this idea that when movement happened, the agonist muscles were “on” and the antagonist muscles were “off,” as though muscles on only one side of the joint could work at any given time. However, we now understand that’s not how it works. Muscles co-contract to maintain joint stability, and besides, muscles are three dimensional, and everything affects everything else, so the idea that a muscle group would just check out and not fire at all during movement is kind of silly. This, of course, is all in hindsight, but it explains why Sherrington’s original view that irradiation only happened in agonists and that activating one muscle group shuts off the opposing muscle, a view that spawned rehabilitation techniques and is still firmly held in certain circles, doesn’t work the way he initially thought.
One of the benefits of learning and continued curiosity is that beliefs can change and evolve over time. This doesn’t make the original work any less important. In fact, it makes me more curious about the early researchers because they laid the foundation for further exploration, shaping modern neuroscience and motor control theories used today.
(And a (more) brief example of practical applications of irradiation can be found here.)
What’s interesting about irradiation (or, at least, what I find interesting about irradiation), is it’s the basis for several rehabilitation techniques, potentially the most influential of which is proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF). PNF principles form the basis of several modern modalities, including PRI and GMB’s focused flexibility program.
Irradiation is a key aspect of other systems that are currently en vogue, specifically FRC and, I would argue, DNS (the DNS courses I took cited Hodges’s work, but the emphasis on creating tension beginning with the core area is very FRC-like. I took DNS years before FRC and it is entirely possible that things have changed, because how things are taught within systems tends to change over time, unless it’s Ashtanga yoga). While many people think of PNF as a stretching technique, if you have read Dorothy Voss’s book on the subject, you know that there are specific cross body patterns that are also used to develop strength and coordination throughout a full range of motion . This isn’t unlike Feldenkrais’s work which, while subtle and initially emphasizing a small range of motion, facilitates larger movements and patterns through the repetitive nature of exploring different angles and coordinations. Gray Cook’s work also utilizes PNF patterning and in a blog on his site, strength and conditioning coach extraordinaire Brett Jones explains that proximal stability for distal mobility (basically, irradiation) is a concept originally put forth by spine biomechanists McGill and Moreside in an article on hip joint ROM improvements based on the work of the founders of PNF.
That’s a lot of acronyms (fitness and rehabilitation systems love acronyms), but the moral of the story is this: if you spend enough time digging into why certain rehabilitation and neuromuscular training programs work, almost all paths lead back to PNF or irradiation.
There is a lot of argument about what core stability is, whether it’s important, and why it should even be taught, but what if the way core stability is often taught is actually just an example of irradiation and really, what people are doing when they teach core stability is generating a total body contraction to help the weak or injured muscles wake up and learn how to generate force? And what if we all just accepted that the principle of irradiation was a helpful principle that has been interpreted several ways and that muscles work together? I like to say the more of your self you can feel, the more of your self you can use. How you apply that concept is largely a matter of preference.
When you take a Feldenkrais ATM, there will be suggestions both to let the body move and keep the body still during the small movements. This is another example of using irradiation, though in a less obvious way, to facilitate differentiated movement. Feldenkrais used the idea of contracting and relaxing to initiate changes in position, though the contractions are small and not performed (usually) in a way that feels like effort or work. Which begs the question: what, exactly, is Feldenkrais good for and why did I feel the need to write a blog about two vaguely related topics?
Feldenkrais is a good way to increase your movement vocabulary. It’s like reading the dictionary. When you read the dictionary, you are exposing yourself to new words you will never, ever use again. You will also find yourself occasionally liking the way a word sounds or how it captures the essence of a feeling or sense better than any other word you know, so you imprint the word in your consciousness, allowing it become integrated into your verbal and written expression. Feldenkrais ATMs expose you to movement combinations you won’t ever need, but they also expose you to combinations that are interesting, ones that you may find yourself integrating and using to expand your movement vocabulary.
The thing about Feldenkrais lessons, though, is while they can teach you about yourself and introduce you to moving in more varied ways, they don’t replace strength, just like reading the dictionary doesn’t replace understanding basic sentence structure. The concepts from Feldenkrais ATMs are important, just like understanding the principles of irradiation are important (you didn’t think I was going to be able to tie this together, did you?). Using proprioception, neuroception, coordination, and principles of learning to create efficient movement are invaluable concepts to understand if you want to be an effective teacher; so is understanding how to give someone the sensation of stability through co-contraction.
But (and this is a big but), the ability to move easily is not the antithesis to being strong. To paraphrase the title of Joanne Elphinston’s new book, power and grace are both elements to finding ease and efficiency as we move throughout our daily lives.
The other thing, I think, that is important to remember is that understanding the foundational principles of systems makes the systems more palatable. It makes it easier to see why specific cues are applied and what the exercise is trying to accomplish. Additionally, the more you understand why the cues are used, the easier it becomes to see how different cues could be used to accomplish a similar result or how a different position or movement could be just as effective for achieving the desired outcome. Sherrington’s original idea of irradiation wasn’t entirely accurate, and it’s entirely possible that if Feldenkrais were alive today and studying pain science, his exercises would occasionally use external load. (A Feldenkrais lesson breaking down the snatch would actually be really fun to do. Someone should do that.)
What if successful movement coaching were less about the systems studied and more about the concepts understood? Maybe then practitioners would have more clarity about why they are doing what they are doing and feel more comfortable changing gears when their original plan isn’t working. I use exercises from every single modality I have ever studied, and I see influences of all of the things I have studied in my work and how I approach teaching. Because I have studied (and written extensively) about the why, I am comfortable not sticking to a script. Understand the concepts and if a system resonates with you, be all in, but don’t lose your curiosity about where things came from and why they were originally taught the way they are taught. Evolution makes you a better teacher and ensures your students’ long term success.
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