Efficiency and confidence in movement
I would say that there are few people in this world who have no room for improvement in their efficiency and confidence in movement.
Whatever your end game, be it simply living a healthy active life getting out and about with family and friends, competing in elite sport, or anywhere in between, we can all benefit from getting the fundamentals of natural movement right.
Movement vs. exercises
It is a common belief that we need to ‘exercise’ to be healthy. However, there is a nice analogy that compares MOVEMENT to food and considers EXERCISE as the vitamin supplements. So, if you are not keen on doing a gym session or a sport per say, then you can still be fully nourished with a complete daily movement diet!
What do I mean by movement? Think back to when we are born. All being well we learn to roll, sit, crawl, stand, walk, run. We push things, we pull things. We move in all directions. We sit on our haunches. We progress to lifting, climbing, hanging, going over and under obstacles.
Then in developed countries we start sitting. We move in straight lines and we keep our arms in front of us and we look down.
We buy labour saving devices to stop us having to exert ourselves. We have dishwashers, washing machines, electric mixers, power tools, electric lawnmowers. We travel in cars. We become deconditioned. Even when road running or cycling, we are still in that sagittal plane, just moving forwards and backwards.
We are starving our bodies of the nourishment they need. We then take supplements in the form of doing exercise, often in set planes of movement. However, we would all be so much healthier if we moved more often each day, in more directions and in more environments.
Put simply, our bodies are designed to move and to move efficiently. Sadly, modern day lifestyles do their best to stop this.
What do we need to move well and why do we feel stiff?
Our skeletons are made up of over 200 bones. When two bones come together, they form a joint. Each joint has a specific number of ways it can move. If you add together all the different combinations of ways all the joints could move, then the movement possibilities are mind-blowing, yet how many different movement patterns do most of us go through each day?… Many less than we could, I am sure.
None of these joints can move without skeletal muscles… of which we have over 650.
Muscles not only move us, but they fix or stabilise us so other parts can move. They are ably assisted by approximately 900 ligaments.
Muscles cannot contract without being told to do so. These messages are transported from the brain, via the nerves.
So, if we fail to move in all those hundreds of different possible ways on a regular basis, then muscles can get lazy, shortened, lengthened, go into spasm; nerves get shortened or tight; ligaments can become scarred (if previously injured); the messages stop getting sent via the nerves to tell the muscles to contract and consequently our joints can no longer move in a controlled way through their full range and we can become “stiff.”
In addition to this, we have a whole bunch of crucial organs in our trunk and abdomen. They are all surrounded by the continuous fascia (the white stringy stuff you see in meat) which also connects the muscles and bones. If your organs become stagnant and don’t keep moving, then this has a knock-on effect with the rest of your body, further limiting your mobility.
Your circulatory system (heart, arteries, and veins) needs to transport sufficient oxygen to keep all these structures functioning to the best of their abilities, and finally, there is the lymphatic system which is the filtration system for our bodies…
So, as you can see, there is a lot involved in this movement-business and a lot that we can affect to improve your mobility and agility; but even without any fancy intervention, just moving a little more and in a different way each day will help.
If, however, you wish to optimise the efficiency of your body, be it for daily life or sport, then my Rediscovering the Freedom of Movement programme will take you step by step through achievable 15-minute sessions of simple techniques in your own home to get you moving with greater confidence and ease, allowing you to Get Active Living!
