The Beauty of Human Movement

What can't the body learn to do?

As exercise physiologists we are trained to understand and explain the physiology of human movement. Together with that, how the body can adapt to training stress and improve performance is of great interest to us, and in most cases "performance" means running or cycling or some other endurance sport (save our annual forays into tennis, soccer and rugby).

But it never ceases to amaze us how the body can adapt and learn. Again, mostly we look at how it "learns" to run faster or pace better by making adaptations to the muscular, neuro-muscular system and other physiological systems. The result is beautiful because it is an outstanding performance or a world record or just an amazing race (see the London men's race for all of the above!).

However part of understanding exercise physiology and how the body responds to endurance training is also understanding how the brain controls movement in the first place, because after all exercise is just a complex series controlled movements that produce running or cycling or swimming or anythign else, for example how it can activate the muscles in my hands and fingers in such a manner that I can type this post you are now reading. So any way you slice it, human movement and the adaptations the body makes are amazing on many levels.

I came across an amazing video that illustrates just how amazing the body can be. It is of "trials rider" Danny MacAskill and has been doing the rounds on several blogs and probably forums. The sport consists of riders jumping/leaping/riding in all sorts of manners on and over all kinds of obstacles----really, anything is game. I suspect that anyone who watches, regardless of their background, can appreciate the level of fine and gross control it takes to pull off these kinds of movements.

Call it part of our (belated) birthday celebrations, or call it a positive view of cycling, but from time to time we try to depart from the doom and gloom of doping (especially now in light of the recent CERA postives from Beijing), or the current sporting news cycle, or the performance analyses that you have come to know, and take a lighter look at exercise physiology.

So enjoy the video and hopefully you are inspired by what we can do!



Jonathan