The Central Nervous System

One of the most important things to understand about your body is that it is largely
governed by the central nervous system (the CNS.) The CNS is composed of your
brain, the spinal cord and the nerves. It is a lightning fast communication system that
controls every aspect of your sensation and movement. The CNS is like the software for
your body, and it determines how your hardware (the muscles, bones and joints)
performs. The CNS gets to decide what muscles fire, how strong and fast they are, how
far they will elongate, what motor patterns and postures you adopt, and whether you will
experience pain in short, everything that matters.

Another important thing to understand is that the priorities of the CNS are not necessarily
yours. The main priority of the CNS is to keep you alive at all costs. While you might
want to run a marathon, climb a mountain, play soccer all weekend, or sit at your
computer for eight hours a day without pain, your CNS doesnt really care about any of
that it just wants to protect you from physical threats and ensure your survival until you
procreate. Further, the CNSs beliefs about what is a danger to survival are not always
accurate they are based on millions of years of evolution in the environment. In this
environment, a seemingly minor injury such as an ankle sprain or even a pulled groin is a
very real threat to continued existence, and the CNS therefore takes it very seriously. As
such, your body is hardwired with a massive overabundance of reflexive and unconscious
mechanisms to protect your body from physical damage.

These mechanisms will be activated reflexively and unconsciously whenever you are
doing something that the CNS (not you) believes may be dangerous. Two of the most
obvious protective mechanisms are pain and the startle reflex, and some less obvious
ones are weakness, stiffness, and altered motor programs (e.g. limping.) These
mechanisms act like a parking brake, (or maybe an overprotective mother) in that they
keep you safe but prevent you from going anywhere.
 Movement
Movements of the body are brought about by the harmonious contraction and relaxation of
selected muscles. Contraction occurs when nerve impulses are transmitted across neuromuscular
junctions to the membrane covering each muscle fiber. Most muscles are not continuously
contracting but are kept in a state ready to contract. The slightest movement or even the intention
to move results in widespread activity of the muscles of the trunk and limbs.

STARTLE REFLEX

The startle reflex is a very primal survival mechanism that is hardwired into the nervous system
of all animals. Its purpose is to protect and guard against injury from an immediate physical
threat. The startle reflex in a human causes involuntary muscular contractions that: move the
head forward and down; tense the face and jaw; bring the shoulders up and forward; and tighten
the ribs and stomach. These actions basically make us small and protect our vital areas the
face, neck, head and internal organs.

The startle reflex is flagrantly obvious when a large physical threat comes our way but it is also
present to a subtle degree when the CNS senses even minor forms of physical danger. Thus,
your muscles will tense into a startled pattern when you are doing anything that your CNS is not
totally comfortable with like lifting a heavy weight, running with less than perfect form,
playing contact sports, doing a hard yoga pose, or sitting at a computer for a long time.
 STRENGTH

Most people consider strength to be solely a function of how big the muscle is. Size counts, but
the more important factor is usually how many fibers the CNS allows the muscle to fire at one
time. Most people cannot get their nervous system to fire more than 30% of available muscle
fibers in a particular muscle at one time.

Why? Mostly because strength is dangerous to the integrity of the joints and the CNS knows
it. If all the fibers fired at once, the contraction would be so strong that it would be dangerous to
the joints. This sometimes occurs when someone is struck by lightning, and the incredible
strength of the resulting muscular contraction can actually break bones. The CNS knows that
great strength is dangerous to tendons, joints and ligaments, and only to be deployed when
necessary. In this sense, weakness can be seen as a protective mechanism of the CNS, in that it
protects the body from applying sufficient force to cause injury.

COORDINATION

Another protective mechanism of the CNS is altered motor programs, in other words a change in
the way your muscular movements are coordinated by the CNS. One obvious example of an
altered motor program is limping. If you injure your ankle, your CNS will immediately begin
working beneath your conscious awareness to protect the ankle when walking. It does this by
using nearly all of the other muscles and joints in the body in a slightly different way to walk
without hurting the ankle. The same things go for any other pain in your body, even small subtle
pains - the CNS will immediately start working around the pain by changing movement patterns
in subtle or obvious ways. This is a good idea in the short term it protects the injured area and
gives it a chance to heal. But in the long term, the altered movement programs can persist as
habits even after they are useful. This means that anyone who has experienced an injury, even
years ago may be subtly guarding the injury even now as a result of persisting altered
compensatory patters.