IQ? What about your KQ
By: Alex Pennington | March 2022
KQ, your Kinesthetic Quotient. Your ability to feel, understand, and use your physical body. From articulating your fingers to changing your direction in mid-sprint. KQ is possibly the most important intelligence to attain in order to get out of aches and pains, become a high-level athlete, lift a weight more efficiently, or improve musculoskeletal deformities. These things all can be improved by increasing your KQ.
The role of KQ in modern society
Improving KQ is easier said than done. Since the industrial revolution, our society has put the importance of KQ on the backburner. Growing up as children in the education system we were reinforced to stay seated and still to focus on learning specific subjects, and then go home and stay still again while studying. Throughout schooling, year by year we began to further ignore the importance of our own body’s feelings. The ignoring resulted in an increase of compression in our ribcages and the loss of functionality of our internal core musculature. In turn, creating posture imbalances and poor movement habits. At least for the high majority of people. The children who had the opportunity to play sports got the better stick in our education system and were able to maintain and even strengthen their KQ through childhood.
What separates the good from the best in sports?
Why do the kids who play sports and other physical activities still get injured? Why are certain children and adults unable to get past certain athletic plateaus? This can be contributed to many factors, but here we will cover the importance of a plateau in KQ and the level of the individuals KQ.
Even with high-level coaches, video studying, exercise, meditation, and physical therapy, it seems as though each person has a certain level they can get to in their physical ability. Is this true? Let’s talk about the top athletes, the LeBron’s and Jordan’s, the Bolt’s and Lewis’. Why are they so much better? This is the importance of studying the highest level of athletes: the genetic freaks. If everyone is doing the same things in training, why are these individuals so much better? Genetics.
At a certain point competition weeds out the good movers and the best movers in the world. The best athletes, 99.9% of the time have superior genetics. Superior genes that allow their bodies and mind to connect at high levels and create the ability to move powerfully with ease. In most cases, these individuals need much less sports training than most. This is because they already have the body connections needed to move well dynamically. They have better KQ. This higher KQ allows them to avoid more injuries and have longer careers. You can say these individuals have the highest “natural” KQs in the world.
KQ in the general population
As we grow from teenagers to adults, we start to see the habits we created with our bodies begin to catch up to us. Little strains here, little discomforts there. If we are lucky, we’ll get to our 30s without any major injuries or pains. But then it begins! All of a sudden, we moved wrong and hurt our neck or back, we decided to go play a friendly pick-up game and injured our shoulder. We’ve all seen the internet memes making some joke about being in pain and in their 30s. It’s the time when it all starts to catch up to us. This is when strengthening our KQ can make the biggest difference in our physical lives. Knowing how to understand where your movement habits have limited you and how you can change those habits for the better. But how do we do this?
KQ and our Gait Cycle
To understand how to move better and more intelligently. We need to understand the foundation for all our movements. Humans foundation for all movements come from our gait cycle. The way our body moves during walking/running are the same connections associated an all other movements(including lifting objects, jumping over your pet, and bending over to load laundry. These all tie into your individual gait cycle. To go deeper, each person has different combinations of habits that lie within their gait. These habits over time create overcompensations and incorrect use of muscles. Typically, the more incorrect someone walks, the more often they are in pain. If we have trouble connecting our hips properly while talking a step, guess what happens when we decide to bend over? A disconnect from our hips. And this happens over and over and over every single day.
So, if we want to build a strong KQ, we need to focus on the intricacies of our gait cycles. Where are we losing connection during walking? What muscles do you feel working when you walk? These are very important questions to ask when beginning the journey of enhancing KQ.
Remember the better your KQ ,the better you will move, and in turn, the better you will feel. Just think, does your body feel amazing? Do you feel strong and vital through every muscle in your body? If you greatly feel physically amazing all day long, what else would that do for you? Relieve stress? Anxiety? Depression? Allow you to work harder for longer periods? Allow you to think more clearly in general? There’s a lot of benefits to having a high KQ that can snowball into other positives.
How to start on your journey into improving your KQ
Functional Patterns. As a Functional Patterns Human Biomechanics Specialist, I may be a bit biased. But through my years of being an athlete, personal trainer, physical therapy client, and student of many other training modalities. I can confidently say that Functional Patterns is the best system to get you to step by step understand how to better your body and correct poor movement habits. It is not easy, but if done correctly you can get your body back to what it once was and even beyond that. To begin your journey to functionality, start by downloading their 10-week course or find a Functional Patterns practitioner near you. For a link to their practitioner’s map go here: https://practitioners.functionalpatterns.com/
“Train intentionally, not habitually” – Naudi Aguilar