The new frontier in training: the link between neurophysiology and sport

Edited by Prof. Guido M. Filippi

The reported situation is well known to anyone familiar with physical activity.

But muscle play, or rather, more properly neuromuscular, has a series of implications in terms of performance: in fact, if the "extensor - flexor interaction (therefore agonists - antagonists in leg extension) is essential to protect the lever system," on the other hand it causes a reduced production of force and speed, and therefore causes a considerable energy expenditure. The same phenomenon will occur in the “return” of the leg, when the extensors will oppose the flexors. Figure 7 summarizes the problem.

The problem of the Central Nervous System is then to find a balance between the activation of the muscles with stabilizing tasks with respect to those which, in a given movement, must give the power. it is not well fixed you will have injuries and the Central Nervous System will not allow the muscle to generate all its power. If the joint is too fixed there will be energy expenditure and reduced strength and speed of execution.
Technically, joint fixation is called "stiffness" and the term "joint stiffness" is commonly used. The regulation of joint stiffness, complex in the elementary flexion extension movement of the leg, becomes difficult for us to imagine when the movement is multi-joint and, even more so, when the movement is fast and powerful.
The regulation of stiffness is the central problem of the nervous system in the performance of motor execution.
The trainer and the athlete, empirically, know very well how true this is and how much what is called “the fluidity of the athletic gesture” counts in the performance.

The fluidity of the athletic gesture is an optimal regulation of joint stiffness.

Here, then, is that the difference between training that aims at musculation and training that aims at the fluidity of the gesture, that is, at the development of motor control, is more clearly outlined. Athletes with lower muscle masses can therefore have performances, also in terms of power, higher than those of athletes with higher masses.
The Central Nervous System collects a huge number of information at any given moment from within us (eg bones, joints, muscles) and from the outside. It processes them and decides how to manage the joint control strategy. We could say that, to some extent , as with computers, it is a problem of processing capacity and calculation capacity.
How much the nervous system and its work weigh in performance is detectable as it happens in subjects who take cocaine or amphetamines, substances capable of enhancing the processing performance of the Central Nervous System. Within a few hours, these molecules make the control system hyperactive and motor performance literally transforms. So much is the nervous command and so little is the muscular system. Then the molecule is metabolized and the system "shuts down". These drugs have a "profoundly non-specific action, that is, they activate not only the nervous network that controls the muscles and joints, but also that which controls the cardiovascular system, the breath, the psyche, and so on. creating significant and potentially fatal damage.

But, leaving aside chemistry and molecules, how can you train the nervous system to increase control?
In reality, empirically, this is already done and the coaches know a multitude of techniques, in current use, which actually act on the Central Nervous System.
Proposing a sequence of exercises aimed at improving not simply the mass, but the athletic gesture, means acting, indirectly, on the nerve centers (Figure 8) which they will gradually learn. In other words, the trainer "invents" or adopts a particular sequence of exercises which, in order to be carried out, force the motor control system to learn and implement a series of strategies in which he improves, which he progressively memorizes reaching a "guide Effective muscle machine. Like a car or motorcycle racer, he memorizes a circuit. In this sense, it is also understood why learning to optimize a particular exercise does not mean also optimizing other movements in which the same muscles are activated, because the Central Nervous System becomes "good" at doing what it is practiced on: kicking penalty is not like taking a corner kick.