How SLOW should you Go?

Pandiculation exercises make you stronger by calibrating your brain- muscle communication. Also known as Somatic Movement Exercises, these slow contraction and super slow release activities do what I call “nervous system punctuation”. Just like in writing, a sentence starts with a capital letter and ends with a period (or something else like a question or exclamation mark).

Your brain and muscles need to know where the starting and ending points are. Every now and again, I will encounter someone who moves in conjunction with my counting so the releasing contraction is more like morse code: stop-start-stop-stop-start-stop. This type of movement defeats the intention of the exercise and results in less than optimal results.

The goal of the Somatic exercise is to make your muscles SMART, meaning that your brain can sense the target muscle and knows how to CONTROL it. Strength is more complex than “muscle on” and “muscle off”.

It’s like training a group of people to play a symphony; each instrument needs to be in tune and each musician needs mastery of his/her own instrument. Only then can they create beautiful music as they learn to play together!