Walking has many positive biological benefits, such as blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol regulation. It helps in body fat management, improves mood, reduces stress, and improves brain health, and so much more. Walking is good for the human body and mind in so many ways it should be a part of our daily routine. But it’s kind of a passive movement. It’s so natural, we’re sort of on autopilot, even though our brain is calculating and coordinating so many functions to move us forward.
Our brain tells our body how to move. Movement improves the health of our brain. MOVMNT by Burke encourages the focused, active interaction between the brain and the body and the benefits are beyond measure.
How?
- Kinesthesia, of course. What?! Kinesiology is the study of movement and kinesthesia is the ability to know where parts of our body are and how they are moving. Spatial awareness, timing, coordination, focus, precision, and adjustments in real time.
The more we do it, the better we become. This is kinesthetic learning.
According to an article by the National Math Foundation, kinesthetic learning encourages, physical activity, bolsters cognitive, social, and emotional development, enhances the brain’s capacity to retain information, and develops not just individual capacities and strengths, but also self-confidence in those capacities.
- When we focus our attention while moving, neurons stop signaling in sync with one another and start firing out of sync. This sounds bad, but it’s a good thing. This helps us to respond accordingly to different types of sensory information, allowing us to identify, categorize, and respond to sensory input that’s more important or less worthy of our attention.
This is our cholinergic system at work, which is involved in the regulation of attention and higher-order cognitive processing. When we “exercise” our cholinergic system, we improve brain health and stave off cognitive decline. It improves skill, reaction time, decisive action, visual acuity, hand-eye coordination, physical ability, problem solving, reflexes, and so much more.
- Then there’s neuroplasticity, the brain’s capacity to continue growing and evolving in response to life experiences. Our continued ability to form new connections in learning, maintain a healthy brain, and improve cognition. Functional neuroplasticity is how well our neuronal connections are performing. While all forms of exercise and movement improve neuroplasticity, focused, attentive movement, engaging the mind and body together can be even better.
Focused attentive movement engages the mind and body together to perform physically skilled tasks. MOVMNT encourages, engages, and exercises our cholinergic system, kinesthesia, and neuroplasticity. It burns calories, and improves our strength, flexibility, and cardiovascular health.
We hear and see the lighted button, quickly move towards it, position ourselves to perform a spatially aware skill that involves dynamic focus to effectively press the button to score and immediately get ready for the next one.
In other words, it’s fun and really good for us. So, let’s MOV!