(CS^3): Sleep and Brain Connections

I am going to embrace my nerdiness once again and  hope to share some knowledge about how the brain and body work together to learn new movements (in Crossfit we learn lots of new movements w00t!).

Lets say you come into the gym one day and there is double unders in the workout, and you’re like f#ck s!*t balls d@mn i hate double unders I suck at them! Then you calm down and grab a jump rope and try it a few times and WHOA your first double under ever — HOLY SMOKES BATMAN! One day you had no idea how to do double unders, and the next day you figured it out.

So what actually happened between those days? Well you went to work, maybe did a couple of workouts, had a social gathering with Crossfit buddies, ran away from a hobo who was winking at you with only 3 teeth left on strand because he was asking you for money for karate lessons.

There is also one major thing you did during that time which was sleep. Sleeping is obviously the bodies way to regenerate, among lots of other things. When you sleep at night your brain is working away increasing brain plasticity (this is the brains ability to create and destroy synapses between neurons). Research shows that when you learn a new task, be it physical, mental, problem solving, cognitive understanding, or whatever, a major role in the brain solidifying that. Furthermore the brain will build new connections to increase the performance and ability of whatever was attempted or learned during those days. This is why it may take several trys to learn something like double unders, because each time you try and then go and sleep, your brain is increasing both it’s and the bodies ability to perform at this task.

Lets break down what is actually going on. What is a neuron? A neuron is a type of cell which occurs in extreme density in the brain and also throughout the whole body, and they send electrical and chemical signals through “synapses” (connections to other neurons) to make a big chain of command to tell the body what to do. The neurons are connected through chains to other neurons all throughout the body, and the connections are built specifically to do what we do as humans. So lets say we sit on our ass all day watching TV, well sh!t batman I don’t need all my synapse connections anymore because all I’m doing is sitting my @$$ on the couch watching reruns of star trek from the 80′s because there is nothing else on at 1PM when I just woke up.

This is another implementation of brain plasticity, when you don’t use it, you loose it. It applies to muscle mass, muscle force, neuron connections, and a whole slew of other things. The flip side of the brain plasticity is that it builds new stuff in virtually unlimited quantities, so you can run, jump, think, and even move things with your mind!!! (maybe if you stare it long enough and think really hard…… ok maybe not).

So how does this apply to double unders? Think about the speed of your wrists, the height of your jump, where you visually see the rope pass in front of you before you jump. and when to lower your feet to land. This all has to be synchronized correctly for the double under to work, and it’s not easy. When you sleep; what your brain has done is build new connections all throughout your body and A LOT in the brain, to synchronize all these effects, it knows what your trying to do the first time you tried right? I mean isn’t that how we learn. We see someone else get up and walk, so as babies we try, the brain understands what walking is, it knows what the legs are supposed to do, but it hasn’t built those connections and muscle firing order to put it all together. It needs more synapses throughout the body to give the brain feedback, and then it can analyze that feedback and send signals back to tell the muscles what to do.

I hope this all makes sense, it’s a tad bit difficult to explain, but hopefully some of it can be related to the baby walking analogy.

Conclusion: Sleep – it’s important to learn new things.

WOD 4/30/2010

A. Deadlift 5-5-5 60% 1RM

B. AMRAP 12
5 Deadlift
10 Wall Ball
15 Sit-ups