“Me thinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.”

The famous quote, penned by Henry David Thoreau in the 1800s, was the first slide instructor Sean Fitzpatrick’s showed during “The True Meaning of ‘Move It or Lose It”’ class at the C.H. Booth Library on February 28.

Mr Fitzpatrick explained that movement directly connects the body and the brain, and moving can help ensure optimal function during the aging process.

Having worked in the fitness industry for nearly two decades as a personal biomechanics trainer, holistic nutrition and health coach, and yoga instructor, Mr Fitzpatrick’s passion is teaching clients how to discover their health and vitality.

At the start of the program, he asked those in attendance to sit perfectly still for ten seconds.

“We have a minimum of about 50,000 new cells [forming] every ten seconds,” he said when the exercise was completed. “Even in the stillness that you are sitting there, the body is constantly shedding, recreating, and reproducing.”

This is so, because despite the body trying to hold still, everyone continues to blink, breathe, and have the heart pump blood throughout the body.

Even by simply walking, the body is constantly redeveloping cells.

“Every step that we take is turning on muscles, turning on nerves, getting spinal fluid to pump, and getting our eyes to move and scan our environment,” Mr Fitzpatrick said.

Rewiring The Brain

While speaking about a story from the international bestseller The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, MD, Mr Fitzpatrick emphasized how simple movements can make an incredible impact on the body’s ability to regain lost function.

He spoke about how when an adult male was diagnosed with irreversible brain damage, his two sons decided to take matters into their own hands and help rehabilitate him.

The sons consistently worked with him each day, doing movements that he would have done as a child to jog his brain’s memory (like walking on his hands and knees, crawling, sitting up, etc).

Those movements helped the man learn to control in his body, activate his core muscles, and work on motor skills.

“The brain started to repair, and eventually, in three months, he was able to speak again,” Mr Fitzpatrick said. “He went from a prognosis of not getting any better to going through these fundamental, old patterns from his first six months of life that started to redevelop the neuro-muscular patterns.”

Six months after that prognosis, the man was able to walk, and after a year, he was back at the university where he was a professor.

When the man passed away, Mr Fitzpatrick said, his brain was scanned, and doctors found that despite 97 percent of the man’s brainstem being damaged, through his three percent capacity of communication to the rest of his body, he was able to rewire his brain.

Mr Fitzpatrick described this in his slideshow as “Neuroplasticity: the ability of your brain to recognize itself, both physically and functionally, throughout your life due to your environment, behavior, thinking, and emotions. You can literally rewire your brain.”

Childlike Enthusiasm

The way children move and the way adults move are vastly different, Mr Fitzpatrick explained.

While children, like his 4½-year-old son Luke, have the energy to constantly be jumping, spinning, riding bikes, and so on, most adults tend to move more cautiously to avoid accidents like falls, especially in the wintertime.

Mr Fitzpatrick described this as “activities versus exercise” or “subconscious versus conscious.” When children move, it is subconscious through play activities, but adults move consciously and schedule exercise to get movement into their day.

To encourage more activity, he did a demonstration tossing a tennis ball back and forth with a participant in the crowd and led the class in a series of arm stretches and leg lunges.

Proprioceptors

In addition to doing different exercises with the class, Mr Fitzpatrick explained how the body’s proprioceptors “control the coordination of all body parts for effective and efficient movement.”

The proprioceptors are what sense, feel, and give feedback to the brain to prepare an action.

Types of proprioceptors he went over were muscle spindles (muscle fibers) for length, the Golgi tendon organs for tension, Ruffini endings (in the joint capsule) for speed, Golgi-Mazzoni corpuscles (in the joint capsule) for end range of motion, free nerve endings (found everywhere) for pain and relative position, Pacinian corpuscles (in the skin, ligaments, and joint capsule) for speed and pressure, and fascial proprioceptors (fascia) for connectors.

“The more you activate these proprioceptors on a daily basis in your activities, the sharper they activate,” Mr Fitzpatrick said. “If they are asleep and haven’t been activated in weeks, months, years, decades, when you go to use them, they’re not as fresh.”

For more information on Sean Fitzpatrick’s coaching forums, visit 33vfitness.com.