One of the most common things I hear my GYROTONIC® clients say to me is that there are too many things to keep in mind. Admittedly, there are a whole bunch of things to think about. Aside from the basics of the motion, there is also the breathing, the narrowing, the connection to the ground, the particular position of all your various appendages. Yeah, it's a lot but in no way is it “too much”. Proof can be found in the fact that I can demonstrate it for you with all the details. But what is the purpose of so many small details?
Your body is always doing something. All of your appendages are always doing something. So long as your blood is pumping, there is activity of some nature in every cubic centimeter of your body. The question is, is the majority of the activity conscious or unconscious? One of the major points of GYROTONIC® is to make more of the movements and more of the activity conscious.
Let's start at the bottom, the feet. Whenever you're seated in GYROTONIC® or GYROINESIS®, your feet are connected to the ground with your toes lifted. Ball of the foot down, but the toes up. Why? That small detail, the conscious lifting of the toes, binds your mental activity to your feet, even when they are not a primary mover in the exercise, such as when doing Arch & Curl. If you aren't lifting your toes, are you putting any focus at all into your feet? Are you consciously asking your brain to keep track of your body all the way to it's ends? Most likely, no. So the lifting of the toes, while seeming to be an extraneous detail, actually ensures that the exercise is full body. (There is actually even more purpose in the foot details, but this is the relevant one for this post.)
This kind of detail while doing GYROTONIC® has a carryover effect throughout your daily life, whether exercising or not. For example, when I see people running, either at the gym or outside, I have the habit of watching their stride and noticing if they are landing well with their feet, if they are externally rotating their legs (duck walking) or pronating their feet (arches falling in). Through doing GYROTONIC® for the last 13 years, when I'm running, I'm able to keep a constant dialog going between my brain and the entirety of my body to check in on whether my feet are landing squarely, if I'm properly rolling through the foot, if my shoulders are elevated or relaxed, etc. It's the same idea of the onboard computer in your car doing constant systems checks on the various parts of your engine. Your brain is more powerful than the computer in your car. Enormous volumes of information regarding the position and movement of your body are constantly coming into your brain, whether you have conscious awareness of this or not. However, unless you purposefully program/train your brain to be able to consciously process all this information coming in, the majority of this information is not of any use to you in any purposeful way.
Another example is your posture. Bad posture is endemic in this computerized world. Good posture, however, is not an accident. If your brain has been trained, through the seemingly endless series of details your GYROTONIC® instructor asks you for, there will be that background processing of positional information that will keep you, at a conscious level, aware of the seated position of your entire body. So no matter how intensely you're focused on the computer task at hand, you will maintain a proper posture without any external reminders.
So next time your trainer is asking you to pay attention to what your pinky toe is doing while you're doing an upper body exercise, they have a reason... and your body will let you know you made the effort.