A fitness test will tell you a number of things about your stamina, suppleness and strength. But one thing it won’t tell you is whether you are moving as well as you could. Are you using too much effort causing execessive wear on your joints and increasing the risk of injury. Try this ultimate fitness test and it may surprise you just how your habits may be limiting your fitness.

Habit and feeling fitness test

1. Fold your arms and note the position of your hands and which arm is on the outside.

2. Now unfold them and fold them again but this time the opposite way. Note your reaction to how this feels.

Does it feel odd or

even wrong? In the first step you used your habitual folding the arms pattern. You did not have to think about how you did it because you have an existing pattern, its automatic and feels right.

Did you have to think for a moment before carrying out the second instruction? It may even have taken several attempts to achieve. This is because you do not have an existing pattern for this movement and it has to be consciously worked out. It will probably feel wrong because you will not have done it like this before so the sensations from the muscles and joints will be new.

The important lesson from this experiment is how the two positions feel.

Your habitual pattern feels right and is easy to do, your n on-habitual opposite way feels wrong and is not quite so easy to perform. There is obviously nothing wrong with the opposite arm-fold but that is exactly how it will feel.

Would you normally choose to fold your arms in this manner? What feels right and wrong is therefore determined by habits that may be working for you but also against you. The actions you take are governed by this sense because you would not usually perform a move deliberately to feel wrong certainly not in the heat of competition. So if all your training and practise is done because of the way it feels, your progress

will be limited by the boundaries dictated by your existing habitual patterns.

The next time you want to fold your arms, see if you can change the pattern, go into the unknown, and fold them the opposite way. You will invariably find your arms are already folded before you have had chance to try the opposite, non-habitual way. This represents the challenge you are up against when you want to raise your performance. A standard fitness test will not test your reliance on habit.

Habit and effort fitness test

1. Sit on a chair and get ready to stand up.

2. Before you move, observe what preparations you want to make. Do you hold your breath? Do you push forward

with the lower back and raise the chest? Do the muscles in your neck stiffen and pull back the head? Do you feel the need to push with your hands on your legs? Spend a little time to study this movement before attempting the next step.

3. Now try to stand up from the chair without doing what you have just noted (it may be necessary to ask someone to observe your actions to give you feedback). How far can you execute the move before one, or all of these patterns appear?

To successfully execute step 3 can be difficult because the usual preparations you make are a part of your habitual getting out of a chair programme

and are ready to go before you even begin to move. You would not attempt to start the move until the familiar conditions such as the sensation of muscle tension associated with the act are present.

From a biomechanical point of view the common actions mentioned in step 2 actually reduce the efficiency of the movement. If your preparation and subsequent actions for this exercise are unnecessary, why do you do them? Why are you not aware that the amount of effort applied was inappropriate placing unnecessary stress on joints and ligaments?

This is because you do not have a reliable mechanism that rings an alarm bell when an appropriate limit with regard to effort is exceeded. You continue to

do it like this because it is a habit.

The presence of one or more of those actions in step 2 of this experiment suggests inefficient preparatory patterns are likely to be present in others. Whilst they remain, attempts to improve performance will have limited results because the same patterns will be used as a basis for every technique.

My point is that conventional training and exercise systems do not recognise the role of the most fundamental aspect influencing performance and therefore do not adequately address it. This aspect is habit. It dominates life, is active in all actions, yet we are barely conscious of its presence. Does your fitness test check for these? Probably not, a conventional fitness test

will only tell you what your current capacity is based on your existing habitual patterns. You may have discovered that these patterns may be limiting your progress towards peak fitness. So rather than work on your fitness, first experiment with different ways of performing your sporting techniques.

Roy Palmer is a teacher of The Alexander Technique and has studied performance enhancement in sport for the last 10 years. In 2001 he published a book called ‘The Performance Paradox: Challenging the conventional methods of sports training and exercise’ and is currently working on a new project about The Zone. More information about his unique approach to training can be found at [http://www.fitness-programs-for-life.com/]http://www.fitness-programs-for-life.com