Movement within the Nervous System

One of the most important things to understand about your body and the way we move it is largely regulated by the central nervous system (the “CNS”.) The CNS is composed of your brain, the spinal cord and the nerves. It is a lightning fast communication system that controls every aspect of your sensation and movement. The CNS is like the software for your body, and it determines how your hardware (the muscles, bones and joints) performs. The CNS gets to decide what muscles fire, how strong and fast they are, how far they will elongate, what motor patterns and postures you adopt, and whether you will experience pain – in short, everything that matters.

Another important thing to understand is that the preferences of the CNS are not necessarily your preferences. The main priority of the CNS is to keep you alive at all cost. While you might want to run a marathon, trek a mountain, lifting weights all weekend, or sit at your computer for eight hours a day without pain, your CNS is not really interested about any of that – it just wants to protect you from physical threats and ensure your survival.

Also, the CNS’s “beliefs” about what is a danger to survival are not always precise – they are based on millions of years of evolution in an environment in which one of the main dangers was getting eaten by predators such as wild animals. Back to our ancestors’ times, an injury such as an…