Can we old dogs learn new tricks?

For many of us, our motivation to get involved in sport or physical activity is that we want to change something; our shape, our blood pressure, our energy levels or our mental health. When taking on new clients I’m always keen to know what they want from their Pilates practice and, happily, this is often something very general like wanting to feel stronger, more supple and overall healthier. But often in the fitness world we are encouraged to ask people to find very specific goals, on the assumption that we can then work on very targeted programmes that help them achieve these very objective ends. But does this really make a difference? Research suggests possibly not.

In a recent webinar I heard Dr Paul Bedford talk about his research in exercise adherence, he found that what can really motivate us to stick to exercise or training programmes is a strong emotional connection to what we want to be different. This often isn’t something objective like “lose two stone” but rather “feel like I fit in with the other people in my cycling club who are slimmer than me”.

This was echoed in Andrew Huberman’s podcast The Huberman Lab. He explains that whenever we want to make a change what we’re trying to do is change our nervous system and once we get past the age of around 25 this gets harder to do, but there are things we can do to help.

So, if you’re looking to be able to move differently, build a new habit or learn a new skill he suggests there are few things you can do to make the learning more likely:

• make sure you’re alert, maybe have a caffeinated drink before you start, this will release some of the necessary chemicals in your nervous system to prime it for change

• Consider why it is so important to you, again this needs to trigger the release of chemicals in the nervous system that enable plasticity

• Only practice for 7 to 30 minutes, small incremental bouts of learning are more effective

• Fully focus on the task at hand without distraction

• Try to see making errors as part of the process, if you feel frustrated that you can’t do something stick with it a little longer, this is triggering the release of chemicals that prime your nervous system to learn. Making errors is the learning in action.

In my own Pilates practice I’ve started to focus on just one skill at a time in my workout and only for a short period of time, knowing that not getting it or feeling like my body just won’t do what I’m asking of it is actually part of the change process. This means that for the rest of the workout I can let myself flow. I hope this means we can all recognise that trying to change something is scientifically proven to be really difficult! It’s not that we just don’t get it or that we’re not capable, more that we don’t always know how to build the right conditions for the change to take place. So the next time you feel fed up that what you’re trying feels like it’s not working try and enjoy the fact that you’re frustrated, it probably means it’s working.