Neurological Fitness and Exercise

February 15, 2020June 13, 2021 Stan

Neurological fitness has to do with your nervous system and how it learns and adapts. It is a critical component in your quest to be in your best physical fitness condition as possible which can include losing weight, developing lean muscle mass, and other healthy qualities.

We want to become neurologically sophisticated.

What does it mean to become neurologically sophisticated? It means we become tactically fit. Now, what does it mean to become tactically fit? It means that we have our fitness skills to adapt and improvise just like the special operation forces. Our bodies will not be neurologically sophisticated or tactically fit if we just do the same movements such as regular push-ups every time. Push-ups are a great exercise- but we can elevate our fitness more by adding new movements to this basic foundational exercise. This is what neurological fitness is all about.

In order to build our neurological fitness, we can build on basic movement to compound movements to complex movements.

From basic to compound to complex will empower our neurological fitness and our physical fitness. Our bodies can adapt quickly. We need to improvise our exercises to become challenging so that our neurological (nervous) system will become “smarter” (for lack of a better word).

Just like school, we need to have prerequisite course before we get into calculus. We need to have basic knowledge in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Then, we need to build compound knowledge in algebra, trigonometry, etc. Then, we apply those knowledge to do complex calculus problems in order to develop our math skills. Physical fitness and neurological fitness is similar to that.

For the push-ups, we can learn the basic exercise movement (with strict form such as keeping the back straight). Then, we can learn compound movements such as the corkscrew push-ups where we keep our right arm straight but bend the left elbow (resting briefly on the left elbow). Then, go back to the starting push-up position. Then, do the same on the right side. We need to keep our form by pushing from the elbows. Then, the guard push-up is a complex movement. It is similar to the corkscrew push-up but you bring your hands to your head like you are doing a bicep curl while doing this exercise movement.

Neurological fitness will elevate your fitness level especially when you continually learn new movements and exercises. This in turn will empower and enable you to be at your physical best.