Movement is Medicine for our bodies. This article will teach you why moving is vital for us to be healthy. The first principle is that there are three kinds of movement you need in your life. Without regularly engaging in all three kinds of movement, you will miss out on many benefits and limit how healthy you can be. If you master the basics of caring for yourself, it clears up many other issues or pains you may be dealing with.
Movement is Medicine
Our brains have a lot of space dedicated to contracting muscles and sensing how we move. When we move, we build a holographic map of where we are, and this helps our brain ‘see’ where our body is in space. This enhances our cognitive ability and is further supported by increases in blood and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) flow. Essentially, moving more makes you smarter and helps prevent age related declines in your thinking and intellectual abilities.
Movement is a non-negotiable maintenance requirement of our bodies.
Hopefully those benefits alone are enough to interest you in moving more. If that isn’t enough, movement will also do the following for you:
- Make you feel great
- Support healthy hormone levels
- Make you look and feel younger
- Enhance your natural intelligence
- Maximize your natural beauty
- Improve the appearance of your skin, hair and nails
- Make all of your organs more disease resistant
- Improve your resilience
- Make everyday life easier as you get stronger, fitter and more flexible
- Prevent injuries
- Help you heal faster
- Assist with healing many chronic conditions and chronic pains
- Improve your mood and make you feel happier
- Improve your relationship with yourself, which will improve your relationships with others
- Reduce and prevent many kinds of musculoskeletal pain
- Improve your confidence and feelings of independence
Movement will add years to your life and life to your years
It is a challenge to move enough in our modern world. So many people in our society have desk jobs and sit for the whole work week. Standing desks and other ergonomic workstations are becoming more common, but that is not enough. Furthermore, when not working, many people sit in cars, sit on weeknights, and sit on weekends when they are not working. It has become such a habit for many, that it is not their fault that they do not notice or think about how much they sit. Children sit a lot in classrooms, so this conditioning starts early.
“Many people are unconsciously choosing to practice poor posture for the majority of their life”
Sitting has become the new default state and neurologically, the more you repeat something, the more the body will adapt to that. Nerves that fire together wire together, which means the more we use certain pathways between the brain and the body, the more our nervous system will build more connections (synapses) along those pathways to increase signaling efficiency.
The more we repeat any behavior, the stronger the connections will get. We can see that whatever behaviors we repeat, we reinforce. How I like to describe this in my office is that many people are unconsciously choosing to practice poor posture for the majority of their life. Often, they ask me how to fix their posture, and the simple answer is to change these behaviors and replace them with ones that support your goals.
Many people I work on are neurologically stuck in a seated posture, even when they are walking, exercising, or sleeping.
Your muscles get used to whatever length they usually are. If you sit a lot, the hip flexors get used to the shorten length they are when you are sitting. This can lead to feelings of low back stiffness/pain and hip stiffness/pain. Also, people keep their head forward of it’s ideal position when sitting. Again, the repetition of this posture reinforces it, and people typically experience neck and upper back stiffness and pain. Commonly, people round the shoulders forward and get a tight chest. This is just the tip of the iceberg. The human body developed with movement in mind, and this is not a natural state for us to be in.
By not moving enough, we are not following the instruction manual that is encoded within our genes.
This article aims to teach you why moving is important and to help you get started. After working with thousands of people, I have heard many common objections to moving more. Commonly, people don’t know where to start or find the time. Many people have pain and are afraid the movement will hurt them more. Others have old injuries or chronic pains that haven’t healed yet. Others may have painful ranges of motion or feel like there is hard blockage to their movement that wasn’t always there. Those can be signs you would benefit from chiropractic care.
These limitations can be overcome, but sometimes you need help. With a professional on your team, you can feel confident that you can start moving again without fear of hurting yourself. There are many movement specialists, personal trainers, and videos on the internet that can teach you how to get started and what to do.
The sooner you start, the longer you can enjoy the benefits. How long have you already waited for things to become more convenient? I help people move better with less pain. Come and get assessed and take a step in becoming a happier and healthier version of yourself.
TLDR: Move more. If it hurts, seek help. I help people move with less pain.
Get Healthy and Experience Wellness,
Dr. Josh
