Many of you make an investment into your financial future. Why do you take the time and planning to do this? The obvious answer is to have enough financial resources to live a lifestyle you are accustomed to upon retirement. My next question is one that many do not think about proactively:

What kind of investment are you making towards your movement future?

Before you answer this I want to define what I mean by movement. For many the idea of movement is about having the ability to physically move your body from point A to B. Moving from point A to B has many variations. Most of us tend to move using a limited number of variations. Most will use walking as their form of movement. It is a well known fact that our modern world of convenience has encouraged us to move less. Movement is a very important resource to the maintenance of our health and longevity. In fact, 50% of the nerve cells in your brain require stimulation from movement related activities. The type of movement activity does matter when it comes to effective activation of the brain. The human brain thrives when it is stimulated with complex movements. Complex movements are movements that move the body in multiple directions. These movements are observed in martial arts, dance, gymnastics, etc. Depending on what your goals are for your physical health will determine where to start with your movement practice.

A movement practice unlike exercising will transfer well into your activities of daily living. Many people will go to a gym and workout to get their exercise versus learning movement patterns that will transfer well into the activities that cycle throughout their day. Examples of these activities are bending, reaching, lifting, pushing, pulling, twisting, etc. This leads me to a second question:

How has your current exercise program improve your ability to move well during daily and occupational activities?

• Does sitting down in a chair look like your squats in the gym?

• Does bending over to takeout your trash look like your dead lifts?

• Does pushing your stuck car out of the snow look like your bench press?

The point I’m making with this is think about what you want your body to physically be able to handle on a daily basis. If you are currently exercising on a regular basis and are still confronted with some form of painful musculoskeletal condition, (i.e. back pain, neck pain, knee pain, shoulder pain, etc.) you may need to re-think how you are exercising. Start with defining your purpose for exercising.

Once you have defined your purpose for exercising you are ready to build a conditioning program that will help you condition your body to respond effectively to your daily physical demands and age gracefully. If you are not quite sure what your physical movement goals are you can start with our SITTING DYNAMICALLY course. This course addresses how to sit, stand, and move in between these positions. My motivation for creating this course is that many of us could do a better job of executing these activities.

Many of us are spending anywhere form 50% to 70% of our waking hours executing these daily movements. It is these activities that many of our movement habits, good and bad, evolve from. Imagine making these activities part of your daily movement practice in an effort to making them sustainably better. It may not be the most glamorous approach but makes tremendous sense to focus our attention on the activities we execute countless times a day. The learning process that evolves from this type of practice will carry over into more physically challenging activities that may surface through your day.

Start learning to master the more common, simple daily movements first and then to add relatively more challenging movements. You could think of this process as learning the “movement” alphabet. The SITTING DYNAMICALLY course is the equivalent to your movement ABC’s.

It’s time to build a sustainable and practical movement vocabulary.