Working in Movement

To some, life is like a football game, with all the attendant metaphors about scoring, running interference, going for it, etc. And to a few, life is a football game: players in the National Football League (NFL) don’t need metaphors - they’re used to getting clobbered by very large, very fast men on a regular basis.

But are these guys really the luck ones? A new study of over 2,500 retired NFL players suggests that getting clobbered might not be so good for you later on. The study conducted by the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes (at the University of North Carolina) will be published in the Journal of the American College of Sports Medicine.

The study found a correlation between concussions during playing days and depression later in life. In fact, the depression in the concussed appears at three times the rate of those who were lucky enough to escape that dubious experience.

Even more troubling, this from the New York Times article about the study:

In January, a neuropathologist claimed that repeated concussions likely contributed to the November suicide of the former Philadelphia Eagles player Andre Waters. Three weeks later, the former New England Patriots linebacker Ted Johnson not only revealed that his significant depression and cognitive decline had been linked by a neurologist to on-field concussions, but also claimed that his most damaging concussion had been sustained after his coach, Bill Belichick, coerced him into practicing against the advice of team doctors.

Yeah. Without indicting Belichick or coaches in general, that doesn’t surprise me very much. And it brings to mind an image of Tom Hanks telling players “Crying! There’s no crying in baseball” in A League of Their Own. Sometimes you have to respect the time the nervous system needs to reorganize itself after a shock.

Not surprisingly, the NFL is at best luke warm about research like this, even if it has been peer reviewed. After all, there’s a lot of money riding on these sorts of issues for the league.

It’s unrelated, but this brought up a memory for me. When I was attending my first workshop in the Feldenkrais Method, I was having some problems with a few movements. The workshop leader advised me to do the movements with much less effort so that I could feel what was going on and make adjustments accordingly.

It was at that moment, thirty years after my last football experience, the thought came to mind,  “if coach sees me putting in less than full effort, I’ll have to run laps after practice, and I don’t want to do that!”

So these researchers had better be careful, or they might find themselves circling the field double time.