Daily Tip #28 - Making Use of Novelty
0:01 - Intro
Hello again! I'm Shane from MATRIX. Bringing you Daily Tip #28 today. And I'm bringing this Tip to you at a different time. We're an hour earlier because I have a training that starts at 11. And I'm going to argue that this is a good thing, starting earlier. Today's Tip is going to be all about novelty, which is what starting earlier is. And this is keeping in the same vein that we've been working on this week, about how to really apply all the different Tips that you've learned into a more daily routine. Into using them as ways to really help you improve the things that you're most interested in. And novelty is a really important part of that.
0:46 – Why Novelty Matters
When we get good at something, our brain starts to essentially turn off. It starts making it subconscious, which is part of the reason that we've become really good at it. The problem with that is that once we're starting to hit those levels, we're no longer improving. In fact, we are even starting to take the risk that we're going to start regressing a little bit. Because, if this is where we're currently working, our brain is always looking to make things a little bit easier to save energy. And so, we might start to lose some skill as we just go into maintenance mode. The most important way to keep things from going into just maintenance, in this slow decline, to keep them where they are or actually improve them, is to introduce novelty into your routine. And I'm going to offer you four different ways to do that for each and every one of the different Tips that we have in the program.
1:43 – Change Your Environment
The first way to introduce novelty is to change your environment. By changing your environment -- this applies to a number of the different drills that we've given -- it might provide the different stimulus you need to keep things new and interesting so your brain keeps paying attention. Where this might apply the most is in peripheral walking and puff walking. If you're going outside, and you're walking in a new and different area, you have different stimulus going by that might keep things interesting. Changing your environment can be applied in a number of other Tips as well. But that's the main example of this first bit of novelty, change your environment.
2:24 – Change Your Body Position
Option number two, is to change your body position. This pretty much applies to all of the Tips. Whether it's some of the mobility work that we did in the warm-up or in the low back releases. If it was the strengthening drills that we did and learning how to squeeze our muscles. If you change your body position, all of a sudden, those skills that seemed routine and easy become that much more challenging. So, simple ways to do this. If you are doing your warm-up in a basic neutral stance, maybe you're stepping into a lunge and adding a little bit of rotation as you're trying to do some of the different exercises listed in that drill. If you're working on the muscle squeezes and you're doing your full ranges of motion, maybe now you inhibit where you can move to and you try to learn how to squeeze in that position, isolating into a muscle. So, changing your body position is another way to make things novel, but also very relevant because we don't only use our joints and our muscles in a neutral stance.
3:31 – Change Your Speed
The third one applies to those same types of drills as well. And that's changing your speed. We have a natural speed that we work at. It's different for everybody, but there's a natural rhythm that you tend to fall into with your movement. So, another way to create novelty is to break out of that and start to work on doing things very slow -- this would be a shoulder circle from the warm-up -- or maybe trying to bring them in and doing them very, very fast. Just by changing the speed at which you're doing different movements, different contractions, maybe the speed at which you're doing your breathing can really make a difference in creating some novelty and some different stimulus into what you're doing.
4:21 – Change Your Perspective
The last Tip for this is to change your perspective on why you're doing the different movements. This might mean the same exercise that you've been doing -- the same Tip that you've been working on -- but changing the relevance of it. Let's use a breathing Tip for that one. Say I'm doing bag breathing. And originally, the reason I'm doing this is because I want to build up my CO2 level because previously I was a little unbalanced -- if you remember me talking about that -- and I just want to get that back into a normal balance so that my body's working a little bit more optimally. We can then shift this. And it's something that I personally do. Because I teach group exercise classes. I want to have a better breathing capacity so that I can still keep working out while explaining what I'm doing to other people. So, that same drill and getting used to having more CO2 in the body, being able to work at higher levels of CO2 will enable me to achieve that goal of coaching better while moving. It's the exact same drill, but I've changed the purpose of it. By changing the purpose my brain pays more attention. And because it pays more attention, it's more likely to create a lasting change.
5:45 - Summary
In summary, novelty is really important if you want to maintain and improve what you're doing in all these different Tips and activities that I've given you. Four ways to introduce novelty. Change the setting. Change the speed. Change your body position. Change the purpose. As you start to go back through using these Tips, as you move forward using these Tips out into the future, keep this lesson in mind, keep this Tip in mind and constantly just tweak and change. Little shifts in what you're doing so that it's staying new and exciting to your brain.
6:22 - Farewell
That's it for today. I will see you back again tomorrow at 10 o'clock, where we'll do Daily Tip #29.