Routine: the Killer of Brain Fitness?
May 28th, 2009
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by Mark Nutting · Filed Under: Fitness and Weight Loss · Personal Training Business
Routine can be a great thing, or it can cause your brain to deteriorate.
In fitness, creating a routine of exercising regularly is great, but, if that exercise routine is… well… routine (same thing over and over again) results stop and benefits diminish. Your exercise program needs to change regularly to promote continued progress.
The same is true with brain fitness. If you do the same thing day in and day out, have the same experiences everyday with little or no variation, you set yourself up for a loss in memory capacity and a decline in cognitiveabilities. Do you know anyone where this is the case. As parents and loved ones get older (us too, for that matter) are they falling into a rut of experiences? Do they talk about and tell the same stories to the same people over and over? Are their physical challenges the same day to day?
What if we could help to jump start their lives again? Get them up and out of their “comfort zone” for a new physical and mental challenge on a regular basis?
In Brain Fitness, according to Lawrence Katz and Manning Rubin, our activities should do one or more of the following:
1. Involve one or more senses in a new context.
2. Involve your full attention.
3. Break your routine in a significant way.
I’ve come up with a couple of ideas to point you in the right direction for ideas of your own:
Learn to Dance - Step class – learn Martial Arts (classes in which you have to learn and remember changing physical patterns)
Take a cooking class (even better if you can learn a language at the same time. i.e. Italian)
Take a walking tour/lecture at a museum
Etc… the idea, in essence, is to layer the learning, physical and mental.
So what can you come up with? I’d love to hear your ideas. Now go out and share a new brain fitness experience with others. Give them something new to talk and think about and get them wanting more.
Best wishes, Mark
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I have been working in the brain fitness space since 2001 and we have come along way. There has been significant scientific studies over the last 5 years that illustrate how we can maintain and develop our cognitive skills through our lifespan. Our company has started to launch pilots that provide more efficacy to our software. I truly believe the next 5 years will see a lot of positive developments in this area.
Michael
http://www.fitbrains.com
I have always said that when I travel I want to see it, hear it, touch it , taste it , and smell it. The more I involve my senses the more intense the experience, the more memorable. As an infant novelty is a very strong attractor. Novelty makes one more aware of their senses. So why should seeking novelty stop as an infant? We all fall into patterns that reinforce or highlight our strengths. That’s a good thing, but don’t let it define your boundaries. If we were a little bit less intimidated by failure we would be more able to , as adults, embrace novelty. I do boot camp twice a month not because I’m good at it, but because I’m terrible at it. I took hip hop, not because I’m a natural, but because I’m not. I study a language before I travel to foreign countries not because I have a gift for languages, but because I do not. Only by continuing to seek novelty can we truly challenge ourselves as if we were an infant, in our most expansive time of growth. Because I have sought novelty I can pop an arthritic looking hip hop move and stumble through a conversation with a slow 2 year old in four languages. My suggestion? Think OUTSIDE your comfort box and seek novelty, for the process of failing at something new, especially when the consequence of failure is low, is a process that can only enrich. And who knows … maybe you won’t fail at all. It’s not what you do, it’s the novelty of the process that’s important. Or better yet, engage yourself in an event that makes novelty an intrinsic component. Improv anyone? And you can’t travel, simply take a walk in your own town and pay attention to each one of your senses. Sit down, close your eyes, listen, inhale, touch, taste. Explore.
[...] Mark Nutting wrote an interesting post today onRoutine: the Killer of <b>Brain Fitness</b>?Here’s a quick excerpt [...]
[...] Mark Nutting wrote an interesting post today onRoutine: the Killer of Brain Fitness?Here’s a quick excerpt [...]
It is always a balancing act between ritual and novelty. Both are needed, but points well taken. The future is in the brain.
Rock on!
Mike T Nelson PhD(c)
http://www.ExtremeHumanPeformance.com