What Really Is Movement?
The world of health and fitness has been filled with buzz words since the dawn of time. No wonder it becomes so hard for people to sort through the nonsense to find the path to be healthy. I was a victim of my environment. I judged what was right or wrong based on my ego and what I was taught by others who were taught by others, etc. Truth be told, no one can ever know what is truly the right path, because it all works to some degree. That brings us to one of the latest buzz words...Movement. There are Movement specialists and certifications based around “natural” or “functional” movement. That’s all well and good, so what is it? The definition of movement is: an act of changing physical location or position or of having this changed. Pretty vague I know, but that’s the point I am trying to make. Movement means that we move. We are now a society based around sitting with fancy expensive devices. Couches, cars, and desks become the daily coffins for our body. We are designed to move, and we fight tooth and nail to avoid it. Then we make a goal to get “fit and healthy”, and think we have to start running and lifting and doing group programs and everything else under the sun! It’s an unbroken run on sentence in our head causing nothing but confusion. Look, all of those things and more are great, but if you find that you live this life of sitting and laying and sitting some more, you can start by just moving! Take the stairs, stand up and bend forward, back, twist, side to side, or just take a little walk. For lack of a better word… just move. It doesn’t have to start so complicated. Just moving, you may discover that you start feeling better. Now, you can start to experiment, and seek out the more advanced concepts in developing the version of “healthy” that you want to become. Want to be stronger and more muscular? Find a professional to teach you the safe way to lift weights. You want to run a marathon? Find someone to help you design a phasic running program and help your form. And if you want to become a “functional” mover, there are people to teach you that too ;-) I just want to help you understand that the first step to feeling better is literally to just get up and move around… even if you just want to jump around your office like a crazed animal… we all started from that, it can’t be that bad to go back to it from time to time. Just start moving, then you’ll find the kind of movement that you truly love to do!
Ryan Golec, LMT, BA, ACSM, CHEK P2
Director of Movement and Education at Performance EDU