To improve movement, don't go to your limit
I know, weird advice, right? You'd think so, but let me explain how this helps. I was talking to a client today about pushing through the foot to lift the hip. "Make a small movement," I said, "smaller than that!" I said this because if we go to our limit all the time, we will never know if we can go further. We just bump into the limit of the joint or the muscle or the mechanics or the emotion or the pain and we stop.
Moshe always taught to stop before you reach the end of your range. That way, by making many, many repetitions and exploring the variables within an EASY scope, the brain learns, "Hey, I can always do a little more, I just choose not to." Then, bit by bit, the outer border of the "limit" expands. Your easy range becomes more expansive.
If you are always teaching yourself that you have limits, you'll never move past them.
There is a story of Moshe teaching himself to lift weights. I don't remember the exact details, but I know he started with something around the house that was ridiculously light. He would then only add something to the weight if it felt equally light. Soon, over weeks of practice, he was lifting things that were objectively quite heavy, but his brain told him they were equally light becasue he never, ever went beyond his capacity to sense lightness and ease, even though the weight kept increasing.
I cannot stress enough how important it is to stay within the range of ease.
As I tell all my students, however, don't listen to me. Test it for yourself: Do a lesson and push to your limit. Strain, stretch, heave, lift, do whatever you have to do to hit the roadblock at the end of your range. Notice if the quality, distance, or ease of the movement improved, or did you just wreck your day with effort? As Moshe says, "Can you feel how tiring it is to constantly do something you cannot do?"
It's like with dog training where you set the dog up for success. Too many failures and the dog gets frustrated, snaps, gets tired, or some other negative displacement behavior happens. (Not unlike humans.) If the pup doesn't consistently get four out of five reps, go back a step. In other words, make it easy, doable, and accessible.
Then, do the same lesson with the greatest delicacy, awareness, and comfort. Notice now what happen to the quality, ease, and range of your movement. If you run the comparison and test your results, even with one movement variable, you will see what I mean. In this way, the "limit" shifts the borders, like after World War I when all the boundaries were redrawn in the Middle East.
What is the limit of human improvement? I have no idea. If we keep employing this strategy, over and over, like Moshe did lifting weights, who knows what we can do.