Did You Know?
You can build muscle just by thinking about it.
You can do a lot of things, if you only just think about them. This isn’t just my opinion, although I have held it for a long time, but researchers in 2004 found that people could increase the size of a particular set of muscles by 35% by just imagining that they were doing an activity that targeted that specific muscle group. In this research, the muscle group was the muscles that allow your pinkie finger to move away from the rest of your fingers and hand. However in attempting the same thing with the biceps muscle, they still found a gain of 13.5%. Nonetheless, in either case, the participants of the study were able to gain muscle by just thinking it, not by physically doing the activity.
This has huge impacts and implications, especially for chronic pain. An intervention I use frequently is to imagine a painful activity as painfree. You do this while your body is resting in a painfree comfortable position. The neuroscience of chronic pain has shown that if an individual can imagine themselves doing an activity without pain, then often that pain free patterning will translate into real time and into physical activity.
I knew this without knowing this during my dance training as a child. I had one instructor who would always have us lie on the floor and perform the dance in our mind’s eye. I learned that when I could imagine doing the dance, then I could do all the moves of the dance in real physical time, or sometimes I would mess up in my mind’s eye and that was always the place I would also mess up in real or physical time.
The biggest key to this imagined movement is that you place yourself into first person imagery using all of your senses. This means that you have to feel yourself in the activity you are imagining, not feel yourself imagining the activity you are doing. Look out for an invitation to try this technique in upcoming weeks right here on our blog page.
References:
Ranganathan VK, Siemionow V, Liu JZ, Sahgal V, Yue GH. From mental power to muscle power--gaining strength by using the mind. Neuropsychologia. 2004;42(7):944-56. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2003.11.018. PMID: 14998709.
Slimani M, Tod D, Chaabene H, Miarka B, Chamari K. Effects of Mental Imagery on Muscular Strength in Healthy and Patient Participants: A Systematic Review. J Sports Sci Med. 2016 Aug 5;15(3):434-450. PMID: 27803622; PMCID: PMC4974856.
The body doesn’t have pain receptors.
This is not saying the same thing as the body doesn’t experience pain, but pain is a product of the brain’s interpretation of the sensory information it is receiving. That being said, there are some specific receptors, nociceptors, that often get termed “pain receptors,” but calling them pain receptors isn’t quite right. Nociceptors sense noxious stimuli, chemical, mechanical, or thermal stimuli that are noxious, meaning they have the potential to cause significant damage and/or death. This can often be subjective, such as the experience of cold and heat, and what people consider extreme temperatures. For example, anything under 40 degrees is pretty deathly cold for me, yet I have a friend who loves to ice climb. In my body, the extreme temperatures that come with ice climbing, will make my brain think I’m in danger, while for my friend, his body is quite at home and content. Therefore my friend and I will differ in our brain’s belief of pain when it comes to temperature. The good news in this is that you can change your brain’s interpretation of pain by changing your relationship with the stimulus. There are multiple effective ways to approach changing this relationship in order to treat chronic pain.
Nerves are forever growing and pruning.
Disclosure, I am an anatomy Geek (with a capital G)! When I first went to the Bodies exhibit, I was blown away. One of the most notable pieces included in the exhibit was a fully intact human nervous system. Our nervous systems literally looks like trees, or vines. Like trees, our nervous system can grow new branches, and it can also prune non used branches. This is why children can more easily learn foreign languages, and why brain training became such a big thing, to combat mental decline as we age. They are evidence of the growth and pruning of one’s nervous system.
Now there are some pros and cons of such a dynamic nervous system. The pros are that you can always learn a new skill and develop new nervous system branches, a concept often referred to as neuro plasticity. The con is that when it comes to chronic pain, the nervous system will also grow more nervous system branches. As a quick explanation, the body, when experiencing high levels of pain, will feel it is missing vital information and therefore will grow new nerves in hopes that increased nerve information will help clarify why there is so much pain. Yet the unfortunate outcome usually just means more pain from more nerves signaling the same information and being interpreted by the brain as pain (see the post on the body doesn’t have pain receptors). Yet don’t despair, this extra growth can prune when you change your relationship to the stimuli, or signaling, of these nerves.