I hope you enjoyed last week’s Ayurvedic interlude, and maybe even took some time to brew your very own Ginger Elixir – I sure did! It felt like instant heat during our cold-but-wonderful river walking outing on Saturday!
We’ll dip our toes into some more Ayurveda next month to explore Ayurvedic view + tools for persistent pain management.

Today’s post ventures back to our usual topics of pain management and movement logic, but with a new twist: let’s take a look at the difference between movement and exercise.

As many of the topics I write about, today’s subject has already been  privately discussed on the mat(s) during one-on-one appointments, and also in some of the classes last week (yes, fall yoga session is now officially under way!).

Usually I peg a question or a topic for a blog post whenever a theme repeats itself enough times for me to notice. This has been the case here as well, when several of my private clients, seemingly unrelatedly, voiced the need / want to exercise more.

Each one of these conversations went along the same kind of lines and sounded something like this:

“I think I need to exercise more!
My friend(s) go to the gym and love it, but every time I go with them I feel like I tweaked something, and I often hurt – for days on end…
What should I do?” 

My answer often catches folk off guard when I say:

“It is not more exercise that you need.
What you need is more, more varied, and better movement.
Ditch the idea of exercise program, and aim for a movement-oriented lifestyle instead.” 

Whoa, am I crazy?
Those of you who know me personally will likely say, “most definitely, YES!”

Bear with me for just a minute longer {I aim to make each post readable in under 2 minutes – sometimes I even succeed!}!

Picture is worth a thousand words – so, , take a look at the image at the top of this e-mail:)

Here is the hard truth (and possibly something that fitness industry doesn’t want you to know….) about movement and exercise:

The first step to radically improving your health is to let go of the notion that movement is exercise.

The reason that it is important to keep exercise and movement separate in your mind is because there are many movements we wouldn’t consider exercise that are essential for the health of tissues in the body.

Look at it this way: human body is capable and in need of a huge variety of daily movements –  like a varied, rainbow-colored movement diet.
Snapping your fingers, bicycling, squatting, pooping, swallowing, digesting, blinking, breathing, burping, breastfeeding, birthing a baby, picking apples and lifting grocery bags are all movements.

Exercise, on the other hand, most often consists of the same movement or limited number of movements, repeated over and over again – all in a relatively short period of time.

Say you ride a bike or run for cardio, or maybe lift weights for an hour each day. If you were to look at what your joints are doing for that hour, you’d find out that you are cycling through a very small set of possible joint ranges of motion over and over again.

Add to that the fact that none of us – unless specifically trained – have movement patterns that are good enough to protect our joints and help them withstand that type of repetitive motion abuse….

Think of exercise as a movement vitamin pill: while it can be great at closing some movement nutrition gaps (and improving your movement patterns – I am SOOOOO all for it!), by no means it is a replacement for a daily full movement diet.

More next week – happy Wednesday!