Body Memory
I have thought for years that is a beautiful thing. We all have used the expression that its like riding a bike, meaning that we will never forget how to ride a bike once we have done it since the body rememberers the intricacies of the balance and movements necessary to stay on a moving bicycle. We often call it muscle memory, but it is more than that since it involves all the fascia and connective tissues involved with muscular movement. I’m not sure I was as aware of connective tissue when I was younger, but as I have aged, it seems to be as or more important than muscle tissue. At very least, it is the part that seems to get the most sore and gives me the various aches and pains that come from trying to overextend my muscular functionality. It might well be that the muscles are as supple and adaptive as they ever have been, but that damn connective tissue ain’t what it used to be.
I have played golf since I can remember. It was one of my mother’s favorite games, so she had me out there knocking the ball around from a very young age. She did likewise with tennis and skiing, both of which were also big sports for her in her youth in Upstate New York. But golf is one of the most unnatural activities for the human body and the movement of hitting a golf ball properly requires a very coordinated full-body motion that uses a majority of the body’s muscles and therefore a majority of its connective tissues as well. You use both arms and legs. You have to twist the core in fairly extreme fashion. You have to keep your head down to retain focus on this little ball that you are trying to hit. And then you have to follow through high above your head so that even your neck and shoulders get plenty of stress and strain. You can really screw yourself up trying to hit a golf ball and I do mean “screw” since the motion is very much a twisting, wrenching and release motion, much like tightening and releasing a spring.
One of the things I have always noticed on the golf course is the difference in the swings of people who have played golf since their youth and those who took the game up at a later age. The former tend to have a fairly fluid swing motion where the later never seem as smooth and their motion is either somewhat awkward or damnably unnatural and jerky. We have all seen a natural athlete who perhaps grew up playing baseball take a golf swing that looks a lot more like a baseball is trying to be hit than the smoother and more fluid motion needed to hit a golf ball. I’ve commented about this muscle memory trait of the golf swing on many occasions and I really believe it is a tell about one’s upbringing with regard to playing golf. Some might think this is just the Outlier Malcolm Gladwell effect of not having practiced enough, but I contend that no amount of practice makes up for the lack of muscle memory imbued into the young body and lodged there for future use.
If we take that theory and extrapolate it to general movements, I suspect that it is the connective tissue that is really holding on to all this memory, less so than the muscles themselves. I guess I am suggesting that the muscles are the dumb member of the team that just contract and release as requested, but that the connective tissue directs that motion and makes it smooth and is therefore the smart member of the team. I wonder whether all these kinesiology students and graduates that attend to my training and stretching these days are taught anything about this concept. They should because from what I can tell, it is this connective tissue that really needs all the remedial work as we age.
This is on my mind this morning because two days ago I started again at the gym with a new trainer after two weeks of holiday hiatus. The holidays coincided with my old trainer moving gyms, so I took two weeks off from training. It has taken me some urging to recognize that I need strength training in addition to cardio and stretching, but I am now sold on the idea and want to continue the progress I feel I made in the past six months. I agreed to this new trainer because I have watched her in action in the gym and I sense that she would handle my needs wisely and judiciously. In other words, she would not be so macho that she would strive to emphasize the no-pain, no-gain philosophy. I want gain and am prepared to have that occur gradually so that the pain is manageable and tolerable. For our first training session, I arrived early and decided to do my quadricep exercises (sit-to-stand and step-ups) on my own. That added about 15 minutes to my otherwise 50-minute session. As a first session, the trainer wanted to give me full value and after listening carefully to my various bodily issues (which knee was wobbly, which hip tend to be stiffer, etc.) she put me onto a whole new array of exercises, many of which seemed very reasonable and not too testosterone-prone. That was clearly a misjudgment on my part.
I understand that the day after a workout is usually visited by some pain if the workout tested the limits, but this was a whole new level for me. These new exercises were so new that they must have engaged muscles that had not only been dormant for two weeks, but perhaps some that had been dormant for much longer and not been tested in the last six months of training. In other words, I am sore in places that I don’t recall being sore before. The medicine ball crunches for example have brought me a whole new mid and lower back sensation that implies that something back there has finally been awakened. Naturally, when the trainer gave me free weights to heft this way or that, and then asked how the weight was, I truly believed that the initial weights were light and told her so. She upped them a bit, but seemed hesitant to add as much as my “pshaws” would suggest. Thank you for that. I can tell now that even with the muscle groups that I thought had been well-trained, I took them to new levels that are still inflicting soreness on me, on this, the third morning after.
In between I have had a two-hour deep tissue massage and specifically directed my therapist to the parts that hurt. When lying on the table, I am able to tell the difference between muscle aches and connective tissue aches and let me just say that the muscle aches are minor compared to the fascia aches and pains. My personal favorite (Not!) is the IT Band. This is the iliotibial band, which is thick fibrous tissue stretching from the outer knee to the hip. I used to feel this thing get inflamed from skiing, but now all the sit-to-stand, squatting and step-up work is doing a number on it. When my massage therapist gets to the IT Band, he can see me start to wince and knows to find ways to lessen the immediate pain of working it. He vibrates his hand and does various things to make it all bearable.
What strikes me is that my muscles may have some memory, but I think it is my connective tissues like my IT Band that carry the grudges of inactivity now that I’m getting older. They remind me every day of something that I haven’t used or need to use more. They say use it or lose it, but I think it might better be use it or suffer with trying to regain it. I guess I should be happy that there is body memory since it is unclear that anything I need to use these muscles for would bother me until I found myself unable to get up out of a chair or something. So, I will add my connective tissues in my daily prayers of the things for which I am most grateful.