Miscellaneous: Righting Response

Because I am a responsible trainer and Pilates instructor, I keep up with my continuing education.  I often learn little tidbits that I like to pass along.  Recently, an instructor in a course I was taking said that when we are training balance, we actually want to lose our balance from time to time.

I thought:  WHAT?

 

Here is the thinking.  When we are unstable and we lose our balance in a safe environment, we train our righting response, or, in other words, our bodies learn how to catch us.  This, I think, is akin to learning how to fall in martial arts training.

 

The broader lesson is this:  learning comes through mistakes and failure.  If we are succeeding at everything we are doing in our workouts, we are limiting our growth.  I am NOT saying that we should do unsafe things, just that we can push ourselves just a little bit past our comfort zone in order to enlarge that very zone.