Drum boxing — training the brain to heal motor planning deficiencies and improve focus
Embraced by the towering oaks at Calamigos Ranch, they gathered on a gorgeous Malibu morning at a quintessential healing space, Milestones Recovery Center, a dual diagnosis rehabilitation program, whose apt motto is “recovery is beautiful.”
“Drumboxing is not the next Zumba class.” said volleyball Olympian Christina Hinds of Malibu, who co-founded Drumboxing, an innovative fitness, energizing, empowering, yet calming fitness regime that combines boxing moves with ever-varying rhythmic beats inherent in drumming to help participants achieve flow state, the ultimate state of consciousness where one is most creative and energetically empowered.
“Everyone can improve their neuroplasticity,” Hinds said, referring to the ability of one’s brain to form and reorganize synaptic connections crossing his corpus callosum, an area of the brain that connects the two hemispheres and plays a critical role in motor planning.
Hinds and co-founder, percussionist John Wakefield, note that improving neuroplasticity offers the hope of healing thought clarity to everyone from dyslexics and victims of stroke, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease to those who simply want to euphemistically clear cobwebs in their mental processing.
“Rhythm is the mind identifying and living with patterns — our heartbeat, our breath, the cadence of our speech andour pace of walking,” Wakefield explains, adding that without participants making processing mistakes, drumboxingtraining wouldn’t be effective because the process is not about preparing for a performance. Rather, it’s about improving mental clarity and cognitive processing.
The etymology of the word healing is to make one whole and drumboxing seeks to help participants heal processing deficiencies and maximize their focus by empowering them to beat their drums in sync with varying patterns and combinations. As one learns to keep up with the ever-changing beat of music, his brain’s ability to process thoughts and focus improves markedly, Wakefield noted.
The variability of the beat patterns and participants hitting the drums from varying distances sets the drumboxingregime apart from other workouts, Wakefield and Hinds emphasize, positing that presenting ever vacillating sound patterns is what assists synaptic functioning, making drum boxing one of the most effective cognitive workouts for the brain.
Participants thoroughly enjoyed the process of changing their drum beats and foot patterns repeatedly, with Wakefield calling out various patterns for them to emulate.
Although the exact basis of drumboxing’s effectiveness is somewhat novel, when carefully analyzed, the concept derives from ancient cultures that have used rhythmic music for many varied purposes — to calm a baby, to get the attention of a gathering group, to help members define their community — all have been achieved over time utilizing musical beats and rhythms.
The concept that drumboxing is based on is also grounded in science. On Dec. 4, 2019, Brain and Behavior published a scholarly academic article explaining the results of a study concluding that people who play drums regularly for years differ from unmusical people in their brain structure and function.
Friedrich’s team collected data that provided new insights into the organization of complex motor processes in the brain by identifying the changes in the brain caused by drumming.
“It has long been understood that playing a musical instrument can change the brain via neuroplastic processes,” said Sarah Friedrich, a scientist who wrote her academic thesis on the subject. “But no one had previously looked specifically at drummers.”
Hinds and Wakefield now have done so by creating a technique that offers a healing modality integrating varying musical beats and the integral, inherent rhythm innate to everyone.
It was on one of those inspiring, crisp Malibu mornings, with the sun shining through the trees and a new drum boxing experience that made participants feel confident in the healing power of connecting to their inner psyche through drum beats, thereby achieving clarity of thought and inner harmony.
The drumboxing training seeks to help participants heal processing deficiencies and maximize their focus by empowering them to beat their drums in sync with varying patterns and combinations.
