The Science of FlexAware^®

FlexAware is based on the way very young children move and learn, so it's very different than yoga, stretching, strength-training, aerobics, Pilates, and Tai Chi. In addition, FlexAware applies facts of anatomy and physiology that are often overlooked, plus core principles of neuroscience.

The way very young children move and learn

Recall a time when you watched a very young child, perhaps your son or daughter or grandchild.

Do you remember anything about his or her breathing? In young children, breathing involves movement throughout the trunk, from the pelvis to the base of the neck, front, sides, and back. You've seen that. You've felt it when holding your child or grandchild. Do you remember?

Also: When reaching for a toy or treat, very young children move from the pelvis and hip joints, not just with the arm and hand. Have you noticed that?

Young children are much more flexible than adults. They're stronger for their size and weight. They have much greater stamina. If you're a parent, you know how hard it can be to keep up with your kids. Yet children don’t exercise like adults. They don’t set goals, follow schedules, or count repetitions. They don't use treadmills or stationary bikes. They never focus on stretching or strengthening individual muscles.

How are they so flexible and strong? Where do they get their stamina? It has to be from moving naturally, their muscles working harmoniously and efficiently.

Very young children learn to crawl and walk and run, and so on, through an innate self-directed process. Guided always by comfort and motivated mostly by curiosity, they actively explore the world, starting with the world of their immediate sensory-kinesthetic experience. Brains and muscles develop together. And 99.99 percent of children succeed in learning to walk. As they learn to walk, they leave crawling behind. They "outgrow" crawling.¹

As we mature, however, each of us develops habits of straining, stiffening, and holding our breath. Those habits mostly obscure or override our natural skill and sense of ease.

FlexAware applies these observations by:

1. Helping you rediscover your youthful feeling of ease and delight.
2. Guiding you to move more comfortably in your everyday activities.
3. Encouraging you to be more curious and playful, and therefore better at acquiring new skills.

Ready to experience the FlexAware difference? Start now for greater youthfulness and vitality!

Facts of anatomy and physiology

Your head, hands, pelvis, feet, and everything else are always responding to gravity. Most of the time, however, we take gravity for granted, neither thinking about it nor consciously sensing it.

Very young children naturally align with gravity. Their weight is supported by their bones, their skeletons, not their muscles. Aligning and moving with gravity is fundamental to their strength and flexibility and stamina.

Every skeletal muscle attaches, either directly or through a tendon, to two or more bones. As a muscle contracts, it pulls the attached bones toward each other. In order for either bone to move, opposite muscles must lengthen. When opposite muscles coordinate well and have relatively equal tone, moving is easy and feels good. Movement is impaired when muscles are tight.²

This logic of opposite muscles applies also to breathing. Many muscles attach to the ribs and participate in every breath. There's the diaphragm, of course, along with the intercostals, the four abdominal muscles, and many muscles in back. Some of those muscles contract when you inhale, and lengthen and relax when you exhale; other muscles do the reverse. Breathing is most free, full, easy, natural, and effective when muscles throughout the trunk coordinate nicely and have nearly equal relaxed tone.

Moving easily and comfortably facilitates the circulation of blood and lymph, aids digestion and other vital functions, and helps regulate the activity of the nervous system.

FlexAware applies these facts by:

1. Guiding you in aligning with gravity. That's a key to effortless good posture. 
2. Enhancing your awareness of your bones and skeleton. That helps your muscles relax, so you move more easily.
3. Promoting good, natural, effortless coordination of muscles throughout your body, particularly the muscles you use for breathing. That helps you feel lighter, with better balance.

Ready for greater ease and skill? Get started now with FlexAware to increase your strength and flexibility, and make breathing easier!

Principles of neuroscience

Your brain constantly monitors, coordinates, and directs all aspects of your experience. That includes which muscles are contracting, which are lengthening, the position and motion of every bone and joint relative to gravity, and your perception of whatever and whoever is nearby. Every experience involves all of you. Your conscious mind only processes a tiny fraction of your experience.

The brain and nervous system are remarkably adaptable; neuroscientists call this “neural plasticity.” Changes occur, and can be positive and productive, throughout our lives. The brain and muscles have a reciprocal relationship; the brain coordinates muscles and movement, and movement stimulates the brain. Learning to move more skillfully produces changes in the nervous system, and those changes can facilitate even more skillful movements.³

It is easier to perceive differences between sensations when stimuli are less intense. This is called the Weber-Fechner law, named for the two scientists who first described it in the mid-1800s, or Stevens' power law for a 1950s refinement. This is true for all sensory activity, vision, sound, taste, smell, and touch, as well as weight or effort. Stated more formally: the ability to perceive differences, which is the basis for all sensory activity, is inversely proportional to the intensity of a stimulus. Stated more casually, in terms that apply directly to learning and fitness and healing: excess effort impairs perception.⁴

Many of us have bad posture, tense shoulders, back pain, arthritis, or other chronic musculoskeletal problems. Such conditions always involve excess effort, inefficient movement. The Weber-Fechner law helps us understand why pain and problems persist. The excess effort impairs our ability to perceive differences, and therefore impairs our ability to learn and heal. That's why, normally, we get only limited or temporary relief from common therapies and treatments.

Yet the Weber-Fechner law also provides the key to lasting progress: First, relax the tight muscles and relieve any inflammation. Then seek easier, more efficient, more effective ways to move. Both steps are necessary. That's how we can leave pain and problems behind. We learn to move more skillfully. We "outgrow" the pain.

FlexAware applies these principles by:

1. Giving you new ways to be mentally active throughout your life. 
2. Enhancing your ability to adapt and learn.
3. Helping you “outgrow” pain and problems.

Ready to have a healthier, more adaptable brain? Start FlexAware now for greater mental agility!

Notes: 
1. Research over the past few decades clearly demonstrates that motor skills and mental abilities develop through a dynamic process, simultaneously, as the maturing brain interacts with the physical and social environment. Some of the pioneering research is in A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action, by Esther Thelen and Linda B. Smith (MIT Press, 1994). 

2. These ideas about opposite muscles are clearly presented in high school and college anatomy texts. They're usually stated in popular books about fitness and exercise, too, but almost always obscured by an excessive focus on individual muscles.

3. "Neural plasticity" is a hot topic among neuroscientists; there's even an academic journal with that title. Two excellent popular books are The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, MD (Penguin, 2007) and The Body Has a Mind of its Own by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee (Random House, 2008). 

4. The Weber-Fechner law and Stevens' power law are laws, not hypotheses or theories, because they are so well-proved and have no known exceptions. Here's a way to understand them more fully, experientially: 

Get a bunch of pennies, paperclips, or other small objects. With your forearm in the air and horizontal, not resting on anything, turn your hand so the palm is up. Place one penny on your palm. Sense the weight by gently lifting and lowering it a bit. Add another penny and sense the weight. Can you detect the change? Of course you can. Do that again. And again. Can you still detect the added weight? 

After 16 pennies, almost no one can detect the change when you add one or subtract one. More weight, a more intense stimulus, impairs the ability to perceive differences. If you want to make this experiment more rigorous, you might ask a friend to add or remove the pennies while you keep your eyes closed.

Here's a second level to this experiment: Contract the muscles in your upper arm, the biceps, and keep your muscle contracted while repeating the process of sensing the weight of the pennies. The extra effort, you'll find, impairs your ability to detect changes. If you could previously detect the added weight of, say, the 8th penny but not the 9th, now you might be unable to sense the change with the 4th.

When muscles are tighter than necessary, for any reason, it's not just the weight of pennies that is more difficult to detect. We're also less able to sense discomfort, irritation, inflammation, and other early warning signs of tissue damage. In many cases, consequently, the damage worsens over time and with repeated use. That's how and why exercise can cause or exacerbate chronic pain. Moreover, because every experience involves the whole person, that's why exercises that focus on stretching or strengthening individual muscles can cause or exacerbate pain elsewhere. 

You can see why this is so important. To relieve and heal any musculoskeletal pain or problem, the key to progress is to move easily and comfortably, while actively seeking to detect differences and to further reduce your effort. Gentle movements relax tight muscles and mobilize stiff joints. Then it becomes easy to make larger, faster, more powerful movements. 

These are not just nice-sounding ideas. This is the law, the Weber-Fechner law, and FlexAware respects it and consistently applies it.