The term "reflexes" refers to the reaction time to an external stimulus. Reaction to an external stimulus means to elaborate and implement a motor response in the face of a need of any kind: dodging a punch, “discarding” an opponent in football, etc. The step that our body takes is the following:
- Reception of a sensory stimulus of various kinds: seeing something move or hearing a noise
- Information transport to the higher nerve centers (this path includes several synapses, always 3 for the sensory pathways, but it is not necessary to go into detail)
- Response processing
- Sending action signal to the effector
- Execution of the upper command
There are motor reactions in which the decision-making intervention of the higher centers is Bypassed. An example is the spinal reflexes in which the higher nerve centers intervene only as inhibitors of the automatic motor response, or other reflexes that contribute, for example, to the equilibrium in which the action is unconsciously imposed in order to be faster.
How to make the system efficient
Indicatively, the conduction speed of a myelinated nerve fiber is given by its diameter multiplied by 60 million. For example a 15 micron myelinated fiber has the ability to conduct a
electrical (and therefore nervous) signal at a speed of about 90 meters per second. There is little to do about these elements: the thickness of the axons of one's nerve cells is almost identical in every healthy human being and can hardly be changed.
What can be done, however, is to make the reaction system more efficient: the automatic replies take much less time to be made. For this reason, a professional boxer is able to dodge a blow much more easily: it is a situation that his nervous system has dealt with a lot of times and the reaction is practically automatic.
A very practical way to be better in some activity is therefore to practice daily in the precise gesture.
Food context
The food aspect must absolutely not be underestimated. If you are in a severe energy deficit it is difficult to react quickly to any stimulus. Nerve cells use energy to perform their functions, as do all the cells of the body, a lack of fuel makes the engine inefficient.
Even a lack of minerals can make the transport of the nerve impulse inefficient: the electric potential is established following a flow of ions in the membrane of the axon. In particular, Sodium and Potassium ions are the main ions (and therefore minerals) involved.
A lack of these can make it difficult to propagate the potential difference or even to establish it.
Habit
Habit also plays an important role: if you are used to slow activities it is as if our nervous system were "used" to work slowly. On the contrary if you are used to doing things
frantically one is used to faster rhythms. A practical conclusion could be to carry out exercises that require you to have a certain speed. Here are three of them:
- Use a coin and place it on the back of your hand. From here, rotate your hand so that the coin falls. The goal of this exercise is to collect the coin without it touching the ground. If you can easily perform the exercise, you can switch to two coins and then to three.
- Use a small rubber ball. Throw this against the wall, with some force, and try to grab the ball. To make the exercise more difficult, you can throw the ball with more force
(risky if there are delicate objects nearby) or approach the wall. - Use any fairly light object and get ready on a free stretch to sprint. Bring the object to shoulder height and drop it. When the object touches the ground sprint, the lighter the object and the longer it takes to fall and the more attention needs to be.
These two exercises require virtually no special equipment. There are others such as employing a pungi? Ball like boxers and getting used to delivering blows at ever higher speeds. Or train in the middle of a ring where ropes are pulled at the height of the sternum in order to continually dodge the ropes by lowering.
Reaction time has both a good deal of specificity in movement (dodging a punch) and a general component of the nervous system's habit of reacting quickly. If you want to excel in this aspect it is a good idea to train them both.
