5 Hidden Habits That Make Movement Harder

Hi, did you know that some of the biggest obstacles to easier, more fluid movement aren't age or arthritis or even old injuries, right? They're actually the small things you do over and over again every day, every single day, and the same is true for your horse or your dog.

But here's the best part.

Once you become aware of them, you can change them surprisingly quickly.

So let's talk about what the first one is.

The first one is not noticing if you're comfortable or not, like not being able to say, "Yes, this is comfortable," or, "No, it's not comfortable." It's like you, you just ignore comfort.

You just overlook it.

And the reason we do that is because we, we feel the same way over and over, whether that's comfortable or not, and so it just becomes normal.

Our nervous system doesn't register that we're uncomfortable, and it's just familiar, and the nervous system tends to repeat what feels familiar.

So yeah, you kind of ignore comfort.

It's like you don't even think about whether a position or a movement is comfortable or not.

You just do it, right? So that's number one.

Number two is you're moving too fast, right? It's very difficult to notice subtle, important differences when you're moving too fast, right? You know, as a matter of fact, here, let's do this.

Don't do this if you're listening to this while you're driving a car or a tractor or something, but if you're in a place to do this, just very slowly turn your head just a little bit from side to side, and notice if one direction feels a little freer, a little easier.

Maybe you just naturally go a little further in that direction than the other.

Now, if you did...

And then just let that go.

Now, if you did that quickly, which I don't recommend, if you did it quickly, your brain wouldn't have time and space to notice whether one direction was easier or, or not.

And it's important that we do notice differences because that's how we learn, and we can start to, um, you'll, you'll see as, as I go through the episode today that there's other ways then of helping the more challenging side feel more like the freer side.

So hidden habit number three is trying harder instead of noticing more.

Okay, so let's use our head-turning example.

Maybe you notice that one direction was easier than the other.

Some people would tell you you need to stretch and strain so both sides are, are equal.

I would discourage you from doing that because trying harder, what you're probably doing is you're just creating more strain in your system, more things to compensate for, more things your nervous system has to protect against, and it ends up backfiring, right? So that is not, in my opinion, a good strategy at all, just to simply push through and try harder.

That backfires.

Instead, again, if you slow down, do less, do smaller movements, you'll notice more, and that's when you can say, "Oh, wait a minute, that's not quite comfortable." And then, and this is what I teach in my, in my, both in my horse programs and my dog programs, right? We pa- put a lot of emphasis on the human portion of it for you because improving your movement will help you help your horse or your dog more effectively.