Exercise Does Not Equal Movement

The modern term exercise is likely derived from the 14th century use of the Latin word exercitium, meaning training or keeping busy with forward movement. These days we use exercise to describe a period of time over which we purposefully move with the desire to reap the benefits of moving. Desired benefits of exercise could include weight loss, improved athletic performance, a stronger heart, beefier biceps, and stress reduction.

To be evaluated scientifically, exercise must be defined further and broken down to the following components: mode, duration, frequency, and intensity.

• The mode of an exercise is simply the kind of physical activity being evaluated. Running, cycling, a Zumba dance class, a CrossFit session, jumping on a trampoline, or weight lifting are all examples of modes of exercise.
• Duration is a fancy word for how long the activity was done and frequency is how many times one exercised over some period of time – usually a week.
• Intensity is how hard your body worked while exercising. Most people are familiar with the use of heart rate (or percentage of maximal heart rate) as an indicator of intensity.

Putting these pieces together, your intention, choosing beforehand how you will use your body (a e.g. a pool, a bike, a class, etc.), and how long and how hard you are going to work – is what makes movement “exercise.”

Movement, on the other hand, refers to any motion made by body. Your jaws chewing. Your diaphragm and intercostals contractingwhile breathing. The way your muscles respond to your sleeping surface. Movement, as a category, is much (much) broader than exercise. But, for practical purposes, it helps to think of movement in this way: if the goal of exercise is to reap the physical benefits of movement, the goal of movement is to reap the non-movement benefits of the activity.

Going for a mile-walk to strengthen your legs, burn some calories, and stretch your muscles is an example of exercise. Walking a mileto the store because you need to pick up something for dinner is an example of movement. Both may use the body in the same way, but there is a difference in the bigger picture regarding how we think about and schedule the needs of our body.

Exercise Is Movement, but Movement Is Not Always Exercise

Movement, in a natural setting, is incidental to meeting other biological needs. This arrangement between nature and your physiology creates a dynamic and sustainable relationship that is self-regulating. Natural movement occurs (or at least would, were movement still required for survival) at the most natural frequencies, intensities, and ranges of motion for the human body.

“The pattern of disease or injury that affects any group of people is never a matter of chance; it is invariably a response to the combined elements of their environment.”

Calvin Wells, “Bones, Bodies and Disease“

Disease patterns are not uniform about the globe. Certain ailments arise in populations that have a particular lifestyle, and by studying disease patterns we are able to understand better the suitability of one’s body for that environment. A prominent feature of our environment (which I assume we share, if you’re reading this on the Internet) is sedentarism.

While “being sedentary” is often assumed to mean the opposite of “being an exerciser,” sedentarism is determined by your most frequent behavior – not by brief periods of your most intense.

Examples of sedentary activities, as listed in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, include sitting, lying down, watching TV, using the computer, reading, and sleeping. Even those with excellent exercise habits spend most of their non-exercise time not moving. When we’ve checked the exercise box, we perceive ourselves as active, but it is the almost-all-day stillness that is the problem.

While almost every disease lists “exercise” as either a preventive or therapeutic treatment, let us not forget the reason we need exercise in the first place is because movement is no longer provided forby our environment.

An animal in the zoo needs to be given an exercise program because their habitat limits their biological reflexes. Diseases of captivity are well documented in animals kept outside of their natural habitat. We are too close to our own culture to see ourselves in this same light.

People have not exercised throughout history. Exercise is the modern man’s equivalent to nutritional supplements. In the same way supplements should not be bulk of your diet, exercise should not be the bulk of your movement profile.

If I plotted 24 hours worth of joint configurations of a Regular Exerciser next to those of a Couch Potato (something I do as a professional biomechanist), you would see that the greatest difference in habit boils down to approximately sixty minutes a day. If you exercise an hour a day, seven days a week, your total movement time equals a whopping 420 minutes out of a possible 10,080, or about 4% of all time spent.

The rest of the time, the 96% of your weekly minutes, exercisers and non-exercisers alike sit in the same office chair, use the same home furniture, stare at the computer screen with arms andneck frozen, and slap on the same geometry-altering footwear. In short, while the exerciser tends to look better in person, they don’t look that different on paper, especially when compared to humans who move (but not exercise) more than we do.

There is a need for humans and professionals to clarify that saying a disease stems from sedentarism is not the same thing as saying a disease is the result of not exercising. Exercise is certainly a step toward reducing our sedentarism, but it’s a very small one. How about instead of resolving to exercise daily (which is a great goal, don’t get me wrong) we go deeper – collectively – and resolve not to need exercise in the first place. Exercise because you love it. Move as much as you can per day because you need to.

Time often limits how much movement we get in a day, but again, I’ll say this is due to the fact that we’ve set movement equal to exercise in our mind. Many of the ways you can increase muscular loading, joint positions, and local circulation (i.e. what movement delivers) take no extra time at all – they only require a change in habit.

Here are a few simple ways to incorporate more movement into your life:

• Wear minimal shoes. You’re going to put a shoe on anyway! How about picking ones that allow more of your body to participate in the day’s activities?
• Build a standing (or sitting-differently) workstation. It does not take extra time to sometimes stand in front of your computer, loading your bones and muscles. How about sitting on the floor with your laptop or getting a chair that allows you to sit in alternative positions.
• Go furniture free(ish). Why do you need to go to yoga class to assume different positions for an hour? You can do it at home, on your floor, all evening long! Want to know what a furniture-free house looks like (no, it’s not freaky)? Here is a tour of my home.
• Walk short distances instead of driveAnd then wh. ile you’re at it, why not walk a long one every now and then?
• Get a Squatty Potty. I mean, you were already sitting there anyway, right? Why not get a little more bang for your buck?
• Carry your kids or groceries. And not always in a backpack. You’ve got an entire shoulder girdle aching to be used.

“Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it.”

Plato

Since Plato, individuals have been trying to exercise their way out of the diseases of civilized living. And to be fair, “exercise more” is a fine goal to begin with. But, as Plato and modern scientists recognize, the goal to “move more when I’m not exercising” is foundational.

This significant movement recommendation is often lost when we focus on exercise as a means to a ripped body or high-octane performance, and we forget that moving is as essential as eating. Before we go big, we must go basic. Back to the essential human movements and frequency of movements that provide the context for a human to flourish.

I do believe that “get strong enough for living” makes a noble goal, don’t you?

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post This Year, Exercise Less appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

I brought this question to Katy Bowman, a biomechanics expert specializing on natural human movement and development. In addition to her textbook smarts, she also has two little ones under two who have hanging skills that would impress any monkey:

Katy encourages parents to get kids started with these movements that prime upper body strength from a young age (whether they go commando is up to you). “Babies have the reflexes to become strong very quickly. But it is up to us as the guiders of the wee ones, to cultivate what nature has presented – just like every other animal.” So what’s the big deal about this particular movement? What do hanging and swinging do for upper body strength, not to mention the rest of the body? According to Katy, they do a lot more than we might think:

Hanging and the much more challenging action of swinging from object to object, use upper body strength in a general sense. Swinging requires the full participation of every bit of tissue from the fingers to the lower body. The largest contributing muscle force-wise, is the latissimus, which connects the arm bone to the pelvis. When we work our lats as adults, we’re used to fixing the pelvis and pulling the arms toward the ground. This way of training creates an entirely different load (and motor program) than when you pull the pelvis toward the arm as you do during brachiation. The resulting tone of a muscle regularly used in this whole-body fashion can aid in shoulder and sacral stabilization, which in turn are essential for the mechanics of breathing and pelvic floor function. We don’t typically associate ‘monkeying around’ with lung inflation and bladder support, but mechanically speaking they are directly linked.

As a parent, this is fascinating stuff, but what’s even more amazing is that the strength required for swinging all starts way before kids find their way to the monkey bars. If you’ve ever held a newborn you’ve probably experienced that primordial response known as the grasping reflex. In addition to the stepping reflex (more on that here) reflexive gripping is one of the infant reflexes that drives human development. As Katy notes, “For the last hundred years, infant reflexes have been presented as vestigial; artifacts of our ancestral past. Many a scholar has written a paper on how these relics disappeared after a few months because they are unnecessary. Real development comes later, according to these papers, after the modern brain (implied as superior to our ancestral counterpart) was ready to be developed.” Which begs the question: Are infantile reflexes simply the leftover residue from our inferior ancestors, or are they something to be cultivated?

Katy says research shows strong evidence for the latter. “Early cultivation of these reflexes is essential to the health, strength and survival of children – even today. With skyrocketing bouts of children’s asthma and allergies, low muscular tone, abdominal herniations, diastasis recti, and just general malaise, a child’s development requires much greater attention than we are currently giving it.” In fact, when we look at the example of Katy’s kids (fourteen-month old Finn, in the video) it’s easy to call him a super baby, and move on. But what appears as super-strength is really quite average when you look at data collected from modern Hunter-Gathering populations. Did I mention Katy knows a lot about that too?

Data shows that modern H-G tribes like the !X un and Ju/‘hoan work specific exercises, multiple times a day, with their children in the first few months of their life. These children walk much more quickly (seven to nine months) and can hold their entire body early on. A deeper literature review reveals earlier research into the gripping reflex (1930s) and their conclusions that it was indeed a lack of practice early on that reduced the appearance of the reflex. They raised the question ‘What result would the practice of this function have on its retention?’ They found with cultivation, four-day old babies could hold their weight for a periods of time ranging from seconds to a full minute.

In my experience as a personal trainer, these are stats that put many adults to shame!

The next question is, “How safe is this?” Katy’s answer: it depends on the child’s mass and previous habits:. “A two- or three-year-old who’s never hung from his own arms doesn’t have the muscle to support his body weight,” says Bowman. “This load is then transferred this to the ligaments, which are not designed to withstand it, and can cause dislocation. This is where injuries like nursemaid’s elbow come from. When you progress appropriately – that is low and gentle tensile loads applied multiple times throughout a day for a few seconds each time – and you do it as they grow from eight to thirty pounds, watch out! Your kids will quickly become little circus performers.”

So if you’re a new parent sitting and staring at your infant in her swing, bummed that you missed your window to be able to ‘do’ something with her, there’s good news. There is a lot you can do with that baby to cultivate her reflexes and develop healthy movement habits, even now.

Start at the beginning, by loading your wee one the same way you would have if they were a newborn. Here is a video of a much younger baby Finn (wearing a diaper this time) cultivating his strength-to-weight ratio and pulling his own weight at just three months old. (No wonder he’s so good at those rings!):

These tips from Katy are a must-read before you get started:

1. Start cultivating the grasping reflex as early as you can. “Place a finger in their palms, letting them hold you. Then gently and slowly, begin pulling your hand away, giving them a chance to engage their muscles. Never yank, and, at a certain point, hold your position still and let them do some isometric work. They’ll stop when they are tired.”

2. Let baby pull up- don’t yank on your baby. “There’s a difference between you pulling on your kid and your kid pulling against something fixed. When you pull up on a child, you generate the load, which isn’t good because you have no idea of your force generation and how it relates to their current abilities.”

3. Pay attention to your baby’s signals. “You don’t know how fatigued they are – only they do. ‘Sessions’ with my kids (and in H-G tribes) are done just after a feeding and lasted maybe a few minutes tops. Teaching a few baby signs like ‘More’ and ‘All Done’ also help a ton with communication. You don’t want to be into it more than they are.”

4. Take it slow with latecomers: “For latecomers (kids who are already heavier than their muscles can adapt to quickly), start by ‘hanging,’ keeping the feet on the ground. Smaller progressions are more sound when it comes to injury prevention and optimizing your program. That goes for the adults too!”

Stay tuned for the final installment of this series: what Katy has to say about slings, cribs, car seats, and carrying your baby. If you missed it, make sure to read the first part of the series: Barefoot Babies.

As you can probably tell, Katy could write a book about this stuff- in fact, she is! Look for Katy’s book on natural human movement and how to find your reflex-driven body (or how to fix it if you missed out!), to be released in Spring 2014. Follow her Facebook at Alignedandwell for updates.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Katy Bowman and the Biomechanics of Human Growth: The Necessity of Monkey Business appeared first on Breaking Muscle.