%20copy.png)
Ground Control is a functional meditation or sensorimotor integration practice, where an individual endures a specific, static multi-joint position which sends purposeful high-threshold sensory signals to the brain to achieve an intentional neuroplastic adaptation. Or simply put, to neurohack your body back to the primary movement strategy learned in infancy. We have the architecture in a sub-cortical program in our brain that we plug back into during this process.
The goals of the program are to:
Disarm protective mechanisms; withdrawal reflexes which are triggered by traumatic injury, nociceptive inputs or through biopsychosocial factors.
Re-establish ground contact points that are initiated on the developing infant via gravity. If we don’t load through the correct contact points, the body tries to “find the ground” by anchoring on the skeleton in non-functional ways, leading to dysfunctional movement patterns.
Reprogram the brain. Fostering neuroplastic changes in the Peripheral (PNS) and Central Nervous System (CNS) through focus, motivation and mass practice. Our bodies remember pain and even long after the tissues have healed, the brain can still protect due to an altered brain network organization through peripheral and central sensitization.
The building blocks of Ground Control begin with 6 positions, and variations (evolutions) on those positions. These positions progress from laying on our back to standing up. Maintaining breathing while dynamically stabilizing the spine is of the utmost importance throughout the progressions.
Centrepoint
Seesaw
Gargoyle
Bear Major
Straight Jacket
Sit Up
Superbug
________________________________________ (ground)
Of these 6 positions, we will naturally have difficulty with one or more of them due to insufficient development as an infant, which will show as difficulty in inter-muscular and intra-musculature coordination through the connecting slings and chains necessary to stabilize each position.
We will also have difficulty if we have had trauma, either physically through tissue damage, or emotionally through protective and withdrawal patterns from prior or current emotional trauma, or through anxiety of future events.
While maintaining long-duration holds of these positions, pain signals will be processed by the brain and during this time, it may take our executive, prefrontal executive network (focus) off-line and drive the limbic system network into action, occasionally re-experiencing the injury . If this happens, we tend to lose our technical positioning, our breathing changes and our physiology will adapt to the current reality our brain is perceiving.
This is what Ground Control is all about. This is an opportunity to catch ourselves entering this state, and drive executive function by stabilizing our target tissues to maintain ground contact points in a safe position.
This is when pain, and shaking enter the equation.
We must maintain our technical strategy, using a checklist of positioning that we anchor our attention to. We override the limbic hijack, and continue to drive the prefrontal areas of our brain to the real and current signals that are coming from our tissues to be reprocessed in the CNS.
This process can improve power in complex movements, correct posture and reduce pain. The process also creates an activation effect where the brain recruits the appropriate stabilizing muscles with greater effectiveness through high-threshold motor-unit recruitment. This effect is termed reactive stability, a core pillar of the Automatic State.
Ground Control is the process of relearning movement from the beginning, again to achieve sustainable postural endurance, increase executive function and decrease or eliminate chronic neuromuscular pain.
%201.avif)
%201.avif)