When a doctor prescribes an iron supplement for an anaemic patient, the understanding is that the lack of iron is affecting the body’s ability to perform certain essential functions.  Thus when our body has a deficiency, we understand that we need to fill in the missing pieces to help restore the body’s equilibrium and get it working optimally. Our body’s health is maintained by supplying it with the nourishment (physical, emotional, environmental) that it needs.

So how does this analogy apply to our movement? 

The human body is a complex organism that is principally designed to interact with our physical environment on a constant, highly variable way. For better or for worse, the body adapts to the positions that it’s in for most of the day.  What if we sit most of the day, get very little variation of movement (same position for a long period of time), under the same repeating circumstances (odd shoes, flat hard surfaces, cramped quarters etc)?  Unfortunately, the result is often that the body becomes ‘deficient’ in getting exposed to changing, moving, supporting, balancing, feeling, and adapting to much other than these limited situations. This often makes us very susceptible to injuries when trying to do anything different.  In order to avoid this situation, it’s so important to look at addressing the deficiency with what Katy Bowman, author of Move Your DNA, calls ‘ movement nutrition’ as often as possible!  We see the harmful physical effects on animals kept in captivity, and we are often doing the same thing to ourselves.

The human body is a complex organism that is principally designed to interact with our physical environment on a constant, highly variable way.

At our clinic, the root of many imbalances that we see from the head all the way to the toes stem from this lack of range of motion and infrequent use of full ranges.  Even for those that are doing a single discipline activity like running or walking, the low variance in different movement patterns is not enough to override the negative effects of a primarily sedentary lifestyle.  As such we wanted to provide a recommendation for implementing a ‘daily nutritious movement practice’. It’s simple to do everyday and it takes the body through every joint to feed it what it wants – valuable variable movement!  This can be complimented by or adjunct to yoga practice, dynamic exercises or other home maintenance work (like our recently reviewed ROMWOD article). 

We challenge you to try it for seven days in a row and see how you feel! 

As always, we’d love to hear back from you if you have any questions and/or feedback.  Be sure to sign up for our newsletter for upcoming events, sales, and blog articles!

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