The SR Book, SMART GUIDELINES FOR LEARNING

There are some guidelines to follow to get the most out of your Smartroller lessons.

  1. No Pain: Observe your comfort. Pain is not only a signal that tells you that you are doing something harmful; it can also be an attention-getter that distracts you from learning something new. If there is discomfort, try rehearsing the movement mentally or visualizing it. Did you know that you can improve simply by imagining your movements? When you mentally trace the patterns of your movements, you will find that you are able to make even more finely-tuned adjustments. Move Slowly - less is more. When you reduce the intensity of your movements, you are able to calibrate and refine how you move. This helps free you from poor movement patterns or habits.
  2. Move in Small Movements: Reduce effort and simplify your movements.  Excess effort interferes with how you can sense different qualities of movement. Our brains work more efficiently when they are working less, inhibiting unnecessary work. For example, when a person reduces their voice to a whisper, the listener needs to be more attentive to tune out other noises in order to listen better.
  3. Scanning: This practice is what helps create the physiological changes in your nervous system that supports new learning. Scanning is done before and after the movement sequences, but can also be done at anytime. By creating this observational process, you will find this practice allows more attentiveness with your movement. Scanning also helps clarify the details of your internal body map. “Formed early in life, they mature with experience and then continue to change, albeit less rapidly, for the rest of your life.”  Blakeslee, S. THE BODY HAS A MIND OF ITS OWN
  4. Reduce effort and simplify your movements: Excess effort interferes with how you can sense different qualities of movement. Our brains work more efficiently when they are working less, inhibiting unnecessary work. For example, when a person reduces their voice to a whisper, the listener needs to be more attentive to tune out other noises in order to listen better.
  5. Slow down to allow your brain time to register something new and different: Pause between each new movement change to create an opportunity to clarify one movement from the other. How slow? “This question can be answered by another question: “how slow do you need to go to discover something new?” Edward Yu, Author of the The Art of Slowing Down
  6. Reversibility: To reverse a movement is a sure way to improve efficiency. Simply put, it means there is such precision in the movement that you are able to stop a movement at any time and turn the movement around. This can only be done when movement is finely tuned. This also helps you map where you are to allow improvement through pattern recognition.