Areas › Your body › Moving your body
Learn a long sequence in small pieces and join them up afterwards. Nobody should be holding twelve steps in their head at once.
Take the first two moves until they are boring, then add the third. It feels slower and it is not, because the version learned this way stops falling apart under pressure. It also means most of your practice is spent succeeding rather than failing, which changes how it feels to turn up. The same approach works for a prayer you are memorising or a route you are learning.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Rivers and paths so that you may find your way (Quran 16:15). A path is a long distance broken into ground you can actually cover.
وَأَلۡقَىٰ فِي ٱلۡأَرۡضِ رَوَٰسِيَ أَن تَمِيدَ بِكُمۡ وَأَنۡهَٰرࣰ ا وَسُبُلࣰ ا لَّعَلَّكُمۡ تَهۡتَدُونَ
He has made mountains stand firm on the earth, to prevent it shaking under you, and rivers and paths so that you may find your way
Qur’an 16:15read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
An overview of Cochrane reviews concluded that exercise for chronic pain is safe and may modestly improve pain and function, with the quality of the evidence generally low. None of that tests how movement should be taught. The useful part here is the safety finding, which says there is room to go slowly without losing the benefit.
Geneen LJ, Moore RA, Clarke C, Martin D, Colvin LA, Smith BH. (2017). Physical activity and exercise for chronic pain in adults: an overview of Cochrane Reviews.. The Cochrane database of systematic reviews doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
You can only rehearse what you can hold in mind, so smaller pieces mean more of the practice actually lands.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Do not stop dead. Give the end of anything energetic a few minutes of winding down, so the change of gear is a routine rather than a demand.
When a child starts martial arts and their maths marks go up, the maths did not improve. Their attention did, and timed maths tests measure attention as much as arithmetic.
Doing the identical sequence every time is not boring for everyone. For some people the sameness is precisely what settles them.