physiobox October Newsletter: Neuroplasticity and Exercise Routines that Stick
- Mark Austin
- 5 minutes ago
- 8 min read
Hello everyone,
What's the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the most common barrier to someone's success in physio? Aside from dealing with pain and discomfort, I think most people would say sticking to the exercise piece – I think most private practice physios would easily agree on this.
I'm the last to judge when someone doesn't get their exercises done between visits. As long as there is an overall level of effort being put in, it's okay and normal to fall off track from time to time. Sometimes just making and attending an appointment is already a lot of effort during times when life feels hectic. Your physio's job is to support you in finding an approach to getting exercises done that works for you and where you are right now.
For this month's newsletter, let's take a look at making exercise routines that succeed through the lens of neuroscience and behavioural psychology, in a practical, easy-to-implement manner. - Mark
Neuroplasticity and Exercise Routines that Stick
Let’s be honest. Pretty much everyone reading this has struggled with maintaining consistency at some point, whether it’s regular exercise, training for a competition or sport, or actually doing those exercises from your physio. Despite our best intentions, or even the strong desire to make change happen, a common pattern emerges. We sit back and wait for that moment to come along where our motivation feels super-charged. Once it hits, we proceed to make ambitious plans, launch into an explosive start, only to find ourselves feeling guilty and back to where we started from in short order.
In the early moments of this cycle of all-or-nothing, it’s easy to tell ourselves that we can just willpower our way through all the things that might get in our way down the road. Too bad it never really works out that way once we actually encounter these obstacles.
That’s because making changes and routines that stick is rarely about willpower. From a neuroscience perspective, change is never an overnight, all-or-nothing shift. It’s really about neuroplasticity– in this context the gradual re-wiring of our brain’s neural pathways over time when we repeat patterns of behavior.
How Ease and Repetition Hard-Wire Change
With every decision you make, especially when it comes to things that create a sense of friction or discomfort, energy and effort are required by our brain’s executive function system (the part that helps us make grown-up choices) to follow through on that decision. With new habits and activities, our brain is also adapting; mapping out new feelings and responses to stimuli, refining timing, and predicting various outcomes.
The more consistently the pattern is performed, the more efficient your brain becomes at activating the neural pathways required to carry out the task. What’s challenging is that in the early stages of a new routine, what ultimately becomes an easy task over time starts out feeling like a mountain to climb. On top of that, new habits sometimes feel awkward in the moment and our efforts clumsy, because our brain hasn’t yet decided that this course of action is worth keeping long-term.
Neuroplasticity is selective. The brain conserves and builds stronger connections around what’s repeated and prunes away the pathways of what’s neglected. Our environments, existing habits, and subconscious thoughts and beliefs may all influence what direction our brain will try to take things as well.
So, rather than relying on pure motivation, which often comes and goes with the wind, and trying to make massive, overnight shifts in our behaviour, we are much more likely to find success by focusing on creating neuroplastic change; nurturing habits and routines that are easier to stay consistent with and being conscious of our existing day-to-day patterns of behaviour and how they might influence our choices. This includes not just our outward actions, but the thoughts and beliefs we often associate with the things we are trying to change.
So, the question isn’t “am I motivated enough today to get moving?” — it’s “how much movement am I most likely to consistently pull off, even on a bad day?” or even deeper, “what are my patterns, and are they working in my favour?”
Knowing Your Patterns
Recognizing our patterns of behaviour, and being present enough to shift them towards patterns that are more likely to serve us in achieving our goals plays a huge role in making exercise or training routines that actually stick. Making new habits, such as getting up earlier in the morning to exercise, might be challenging first step for some of us. Inserting a new habit into an existing routine, such as consistently going for a walk immediately after you eat dinner, can help to make new habits easier to implement and more automatic over time. Finishing dinner becomes the cue that helps to trigger the walk, and getting that walk in can start to happen without much thought or effort.
We don’t necessarily need to focus solely on creating totally new patterns of behaviour, there are also lots of ways we can shift existing ones. This might be something as simple as changing the way you talk about exercise when it comes time to get moving. Reflecting further, you might notice that you are far more likely to skip on those training plans when you’ve had a hectic day at work; once you leave the office you might feel so fried that the rest of your evening plays out on autopilot: heading straight home and to the couch, and not feeling any regret over bailing on your goals until you look back the next day. Solutions such as scheduling your workout before the day starts, or taking five minutes in your car to breathe and regulate yourself before driving home are some simple ways of disrupting patterns like this that don’t serve us well in achieving our goals.
On the flip side, you might notice existing patterns that already trigger positive behaviour, such as spending time with friends and family members who motivate or inspire you, or practice habits you're trying to model. Seeking out more frequent interactions with these sorts of people may reduce the friction you feel when it comes to going to the gym. Additionally, some positive routines might already be in place and easy to build upon; maybe you already get up earlier than you have to in the morning for some quiet time before the day starts, and you can allocate some of that time to getting more movement in before the day starts and other tasks pile on.
By practicing self-awareness, honesty, and taking some time to reflect, I’m sure you can identify many patterns in your day-to-day experiences, good and bad, and ranging from incredibly subtle to glaringly obvious once observed. Any potential discomfort experienced in exploring this part of ourselves is far outweighed by the insight gained and positive impact it can have on our progress.
Let’s Talk Dopamine
Dopamine is the neurotransmitter responsible for motivation and reinforcement. In the last few years, the word ‘dopamine’ has become well integrated into our lexicon as something that makes us feel positive, motivated, and focused. However, dopamine isn’t just a feel-good or focus hormone; amongst several other roles in other regions of the brain, it’s responsible for all goal-directed behaviour and acts as a teaching signal to reinforce actions that have a short-term benefit. It directs our brain towards and reinforces actions that it perceives as meaningful or beneficial, i.e. leading to a positive outcome or immediate reward, reinforcing the neural pathways and patterns of behaviour discussed earlier.
Dopamine can act as both an ally and a saboteur in our pursuit of better habits and routines. Our brain is designed to a fault to conserve energy and find its way back to a sense of homeostasis. Even if a certain pattern of behaviour is bad for us long-term, our dopamine system works against us by trying to reinforce this behaviour because it makes us feel safe, gratified, or saves energy in the short-term. When we make that exercise or training plan too ambitious, as soon as our sense of motivation dips or life gets hectic, this dopamine system activates familiar old pathways: chasing instant gratification and bringing us back to where things feel comfortable and easier to carry out on auto-pilot.
Although it might not be the situation we actually wanted, it’s the one our brain knows best and requires the least amount of energy to achieve. Soon we find ourselves back at square one, along with some newfound guilt and negative-self talk over falling off track, which doesn’t help us either.
In comparison, when changes to our exercise and training routines are small and realistic, requiring less brain power and therefore easier to consistently pull off, dopamine starts to work for us. Even small changes provide a sense of immediate gratification when we pull them off. Small changes also still lead to progress over time, and even small amounts of progress trigger even more positive emotions and a strong sense of reward. With repetition, our dopamine system, treating the new habit as a low-cost, high-return course of action, starts to reinforce these neural pathways, helping them to grow stronger.
If we are talking about those physio exercises you haven’t logged in to review yet, this might mean picking just 1-2 exercises to do each day, rather than all of them. This is still better than doing no exercises, keeps us moving forward, and over time you might even start to find it easy to do all of your exercises at once.
This approach is much easier to hard-wire into our brain, and much less likely to be influenced by day-to-day fluctuations in our feelings and emotions. Keeping in mind that small changes can grow into more profound shifts over time, what started out as a brief, twice weekly workout becomes long-term adherence to a daily exercise routine that you pull off with ease on most days. The desired outcome is a lot farther away, sure, but we are far more likely to achieve it with this approach.
Sticking it Out
The paradox of progress is that as time goes on and it takes us longer and longer to get from one goal post to the next, the time in between feels boring and drawn out. It’s important to embrace the grind, while also choosing habits we are comfortable with maintaining long-term. Repetition isn’t glamorous, but it’s how the brain learns. Celebrate consistency, especially through plateaus in your progress. ‘Boring’ beats ‘regressing’ any day. Congratulate yourself on even small achievements, and let yourself feel good about what you’re already putting into the pot rather than how much you’ve got left to fill up.
Recognize that one off day – or even year – won’t make or break you as long as the greater pattern is working in your favour. If your plan of action fails, it just means you need to break it down into something easier first, and work your way up. Even if your starting point feels pointless relative to your long-term goals, we all have to start somewhere, it still means we are moving forward. Long-term healthy habits, physical and emotional strength, and self-trust are built the same way: through small, deliberate, repeated experiences and patterns of behaviour that the nervous system hard-wires and automates over time.
Rather than chasing motivation, build and maintain a rhythm. If you’re just starting out, this might be one workout a week. If you’re a seasoned athlete with a busy home life and struggling to take things to the next level, it might mean adding in a single, shorter training session every week. Avoid things that might trigger less helpful patterns, such as negative self-talk. Try to develop some consistent cues such as exercising at the same time each day so your brain starts recognizing context as an almost-automatic ‘go’ signal to get going. Remember that every action, if repeated enough, has the ability to shift your brain’s wiring, so on the days where your actions feel small or insignificant, remind yourself this still matters.
Over time, exercise routines, training programs, and rehab exercises stop being a task you have to exert considerable willpower to perform, and shift into a language spoken effortlessly by your body. This is how our team at physiobox approaches training and rehab: not as an intense, all-or-nothing rally, but rather a thoughtful, steady and consistent approach that develops into bigger and better things over time, getting us moving and performing well, again and again, with relative ease.
Thanks for trusting us with your care. The best compliment is always the referral of a friend or family member, or by supporting your practitioner and leaving a review.
Wishing you all happiness and good health!
- Your physiobox Team
physiobox: Grow Outside the Box
