Good quality of movement is grounded. You may wonder how grounded the dancer who floats above the ground is, but what is meant here is the person is aware of the ground and knows how to use it. A dancer or athlete pushes off the ground in order to perform amazing feats in the air. They are also aware of the ground before they land, are grounded in their own bodies, and know-how the ground and the body perform together.
They use the ground for efficient, graceful movements. The following exercise lets you explore your relationship to the ground. This is grounding. Know how you and the ground interact. Since the grounding in your body. This is important when you start doing the asana later in this book as well as in any activity you perform. Have you ever thought about how you use the ground when you are walking? Play with it! A quality movement blends stability and mobility, is distributed through the body, is coordinated, and is grounded. Effective, efficient, quality movements set the stage for a long, healthy, active life.
Quality Movement Is Grounded
In the cognitive stage, your movements are slow and inefficient, even though they might still be effective. You move stiffly because you are decreasing the degrees of freedom. That is to say, the nervous system is trying to stiffen as many joints as possible so that it doesn’t have to coordinate the actions of many different muscles. Think about a person learning how to ice skate.
The new skater tightens as many muscles as possible and looks stiff, tight, and clumsy because she really has to think about how to do the movement. Because there are few degrees of freedom, there is little variability in movement at the initial cognitive stage of learning. This learning phase is mentally and physically fatiguing. As you move into the associative stage, there are more degrees of freedom avail when you are practicing a new movement or want to improve a habitual pattern, try to practice the movement in a controlled, reversible way.
That is, you should be able to stop the movement at any time and reverse it.ble, so more of the body is involved in the movement. The movement is smoother and becomes more efficient because it does not take as much thinking or physical effort to perform. The person learning to skate may start to appear graceful and be better able to maneuver across the ice. The movement is not quite automatic though; that happens in stage three of learning.
Learning New Activities and Improving Old Ones
The third stage, the autonomous, or motor stage, demonstrates precise movements. You reach the desired outcome in a consistent and efficient manner. You move smoothly and comfortably so there are more degrees of freedom, which means you can vary the movement more. The ice skater applies those available degrees of freedom to do pirouettes, jumps, and intricate footwork
The movement is good enough and effective enough to accomplish the desired outcome consistently, so it becomes habitual and automatic. Why not continue to explore movements to make the desired actions even more efficient To relearn a movement in a more efficient way requires you to go through all of the stages of learning again. Although sometimes the movement pattern needs a complete overhaul, typically each of the stages will not last as long as they initially did because all that is needed is a refinement of the basic movement pattern that has already been developed.
Last word
When you are practicing a new movement or want to improve a habitual pattern, try to practice the movement in a controlled, reversible way. That is, you should be able to stop the movement at any time and reverse it.
