Why some corrections don't last

Picture a seven-year-old trying to catch a ball: he misses, he recalibrates, he catches it. A little further on, a forty-year-old adult is working to regain balance on one leg after several months off. And on a pitch, a player repeats for the tenth time a lateral step that his coach cannot manage to correct, despite six weeks of serious work.

In all three cases, the same mechanism is at play, and as long as it isn't treated at the source, everything you do downstream stays partial, temporary, something to start over.

The signal that comes from upstream

Your client, whether a child, an athlete or someone returning from a break, comes because something in the way they perceive their body and their environment no longer lets them move as they would like. The correction that doesn't hold from one session to the next, the pattern that comes back, the plateau that settled in for no apparent reason: these are signals that something upstream has not been looked at.

Most interventions work on the movement directly: you strengthen it, repeat it, correct it. If the problem lies in the quality of the sensory information that precedes and builds it, you are then working on the consequences of a cause nobody has looked at.

Perceive to move, move to perceive

The brain does not passively receive information and then decide on a movement. It generates predictions, sends commands, and uses the movement itself to refine its map of the body in space: this is the perception-action loop (what the sensorimotor loop is).

If the map is wrong, the movement will be too, and you can work on it for months: it will become approximate again as soon as the context changes, fatigue sets in or attention goes elsewhere.

This map is built from three systems: the inner ear, vision and sensations from the body (internal mapping). If one of them is imprecise or in conflict with the others, the brain compensates, and you see it every day: the stiffness that comes back, the athlete who "knows" without yet "feeling" the foot strike, the child who visually compensates for what he cannot perceive from the inside.

Three professions, one loop

In training, almost every session, professionals who share neither the same vocabulary nor the same clientele realize they are describing the same thing. The coach talks about a player who doesn't feel the foot strike in sprint starts, the physio about a person whose joint sensations are slow to return, the psychomotor therapist about a child whose body schema remains blurred (the body schema).

When they see it together, a particular silence settles in: that of someone who understands why certain interventions never held, and that their tools were not the cause. A part of the map was missing.

What determines whether your client progresses is the point of the loop where you choose to enter.

To understand how this map is built, the pathway "How we learn to move" is free, and if you work with children, so is the children's masterclass.

You are a movement professional: discover the training. You are looking to understand your own body or that of someone close to you: request an assessment.