The Science Behind Habit Formation and Movement Training

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Habits in Motion: The Science Behind Consistency and Skill

Welcome to What I’m Reading, What I’m Thinking—where I share the research shaping my upcoming book and how it’s influencing the way I think about fascia, structure, and movement.

What role does consistency play in habit formation and movement training?

Habits Are Motor Automaticity

Let’s start with the big idea from the paper The Relationship Between Habits and Motor Skills in Humans.
The claim?

Habits are motor automaticity.

That means the things we repeat—whether postural habits or movement patterns—become faster, more efficient, and often less flexible over time.

In structural work, that duality matters. We want stability without rigidity. Deliberate practice is how we reshape those automatic patterns, and fascia responds to that input.

The Striatum: Where Skills and Habits Meet

The next paper, The Striatum: Where Skills and Habits Meet, zooms in on brain function. Specifically, the striatum helps refine action selection and shape habitual motor responses. This is your nervous system optimizing behavior through repetition.

If you’ve ever coached someone through a new joint alignment or breath cue, this is why repetition matters—no consistency, no sticking power.

The Three Stages of Skill Learning

The paper Stages of Motor Skill Learning gives us the classic model:

1. Acquisition

2. Consolidation

3. Retention

You can’t skip the reps. Repetition is what moves a skill from fragile to fluid. And once it's fluid, the body owns it.

Brain Structures That Build Habit

In The Neurobiology of Skill and Habit Learning, we see how the basal ganglia and cerebellum aren’t just passive players—they encode and refine motor habits.

Again: no consistency, no structure.

Environment Shapes Habit

The behavior-focused paper The Force of Habit: Creating and Sustaining a Wellness Lifestyle highlights something critical:

If your environment doesn’t support consistency, your nervous system can’t either.

That means the layout of your day, your workspace, and your mental focus matters. Small wins tracked consistently lead to change.

Movement in Development

The final paper, The Importance of Motor Skills for Development, zooms out.

Repetitive movement in early life—crawling, walking, reaching—builds the scaffolding for everything that comes after. That same principle applies to adults relearning how to move well: consistency is what wires the system.

What’s the Through Line?

Consistency builds automaticity.
Automaticity builds skill.
And skill gives us options.

But when we want to change a habit—whether postural, behavioral, or emotional—we have to disrupt the current pattern and lay down a new one. That’s where bodywork, breathwork, and intelligent movement queuing come in.

Thanks for reading. If you’re enjoying this process and want to follow how all this connects in my upcoming work, hit subscribe and stay tuned. There’s a lot more coming.