Move better, move to heal

Hey, when’s the last time you thought of movement being as important as nutrition?

My mentor Katy Bowman believes that so strongly that she even renamed her own method from Restorative Exercise to Nutritious Movement, and rebranded a whole organization to reflect that powerful message – how we move, how often we move, how we distribute movement and what the variety of that movement is will, to a large degree, determine the mechanical health of our bodies and tissues, down to our cellular DNA.

It might sound crazy when you first hear it, but you not only have a bony skeleton, you also have a cellular skeleton, and each wee little cell is supposed to get some movement.

Mechanical loads are then translated into biochemical and electrical loads, and voila – we have a part of the information that cells need to be healthy, downloaded through movement!

Cells make tissues and tissues, in turn, make systems and organs!

Our systems and organs are under-moved, which often happens in a sedentary society, and in a culture of convenience. When was the last time you lugged your water from the well and wood from the forest? Many of us suffer aches, pains, and various diseases of civilization – like high blood pressure, metabolic illness, or osteoarthritis…not to mention the epidemic of myopia.

So ponder this: for decades we’ve been trying to replace movement, the natural all day distribution of natural changes in our physical body, with exercise.

Alas, it hasn’t been enough.

To see a visual of that attempt and how it compares to nutrition, here is a handy video that explains in detail the philosophy behind the ‘movement movement.’

Roland and I believe so strongly that movement is incredibly important, that we created a movement-friendly home, moved near the Rockies so we can have more access to open nature and clean air, and even wrote a book about the way we organized our life and work with movement in mind.

If you too have realized that movement is super important, you may also have realized that lack of movement has limited you in certain ways that exercise hasn’t been able to remedy.

Where do you think your body could move better?

Which of your day to day challenges do you think movement can help?

Perhaps your hips ache when you go upstairs, or you have a bum knee, or your belly bloats after meals, or like many of our clients, you just feel sluggish and tired and don’t have the mojo you once used to have. Instead of going for a bike ride after work, you might be curling on the couch and blaming it on work, while, frankly, maybe your body just doesn’t feel great doing what you used to love…

A part of what I do here in our small part of the Internet is help people move better through creating targeted solutions, so you can do what you love without having to think like a personal trainer or movement coach.

And in my work, I have always tried to answer these three questions

What current challenges in your body can be overcome through targeted, specific and gentle movement?
How can I teach movement and also deliver education about how the body functions?
How can I deliver the movement solutions in a way that is playful and beneficial while simultaneously making it affordable…

Let’s be brutally honest, investing in 1-1 movement coaching is incredible and sometimes very needed, but many people juggle responsibilities and daily costs that leave little space to spend several thousand dollars in individual coaching.

This leaves specialized help out of the reach of so many, and Roland and I have devoted our work in recent years to make movement accessible to everyone. That’s why we released Healing Movement.

We wanted everyone who wants to learn how movement can help with various aches and pains, as well as chronic challenges, like this month’s Digestion Sessions, to be able to enroll and practice out of the comfort of their home.

And we wanted the content to be super specific – to get to these hardly ever moved areas of the body that typical exercise programs just don’t reach.

But here is the thing with ideas – we didn’t yet know if students would love this format – learning in 30-minute increments via recorded content, on a computer, phone or tablet…and it turned out that we had felt the pulse of our readers and students because many people totally loved the offerings we made in the first few months.

Healing movement has become our most popular offering. We could not be more thrilled that many of you have been learning with this easy format!

People are reporting feeling great, loving the learning, and kissing old aches and pains goodbye. Now, that’s something that our 1-1 clients experience all the time, but seeing it done in this way, just makes us so happy and proud.

How can you kiss your own aches and pains goodbye?

You have two ways to do it: grab an individual Healing movement series – like this month’s Digestion Sessions, or go all in and become a 365 member.

Once you’re in the 365 Community, you’ll have access to all Healing Movement classes as a bonus, and that’s hundreds of dollars in savings through the year.