The Importance of Good Habits

So this fun video demonstrates how habits get ingrained into our subconscious, every day life.  Once the brain learns how to move, and recognizes it needs to remember a specific pattern, it creates neurological pathways to become more efficient.  Like riding a bike, for example.  Kids fall over again and again until their brain learns how to balance the bike, then it creates a neurological pathway to remember that pattern so each time the kid gets back on the bike, the body knows how to balance.  As the video shows, changing those ingrained patterns can be very difficult.  The man took over 8 months to learn how to ride the backwards bike, while his young son only took a couple weeks.  It's true kids brains are easier to mold, but even the young boy took a long time to change his movement pattern to adapt to this new bike.  This didn't happen in one day or only a few tries.  Even with the young, eager to learn brain, many attempts at defeating failure had to be done over and over again.  As we get older, it only takes longer and longer to break the old habit and learn a new one.

How does this relate to sports performance?  The body knows how to run and move, but it doesn't always know how to properly do everything it should.  For example, the motion of a squat can be accomplished in many ways, but few people or kids can do them correctly.  An improper squat pattern can mean you never reach for full strength potential, or worse, create injuries.  So we must break bad habits and ingrain new ones.  This takes time and many trials of repeated effort.  Supplemental sports performance training helps the body learn the best movement patterns and helps the brain build those correct neurological pathways.  This gives young athletes a huge advantage over their peers that are not doing anything to correct bad habits.  Those that are working to better their movement patterns will only learn skills faster, perform better in competition, and decrease their chance of injury.