When you move your body
you're not only moving your whole body from one place to another.
The parts that make up your body parts move, and those parts move even smaller parts, making movement
not just the single body phenomenon, but a trillion body phenomenon.
Walking for example
involves using certain muscles to move your whole body over the ground. It
Also creates movement in parts of your body near the muscles that are working.
The push-pull and expansion of a working muscle moves the cells both in that muscle and around that muscle.
Right now a huge portion of your cells are not being moved the way they need to be to stay healthy
To explain, I first need to talk about how we quantify movement.
For decades, movement scientists have been making the basic assumption that people are either
active or sedentary.
In recent years
there's been a growing awareness that even the people we call active in our culture: the bodybuilders, runners hikers,
swimmers, yogis; only spend about 4 percent of their time moving.
They are actually sedentary almost as much as those placed in the sedentary category: the couch potatoes, non-athletes,
people who don't make time for exercise, and who never take the stairs.
So a third movement category was created called actively sedentary; describing a bit of the movement problem
we have. That even our fittest people tend to be sedentary overall.
One problem with being sedentary is that you're not moving your body. But the other problem
is that the position that you're in while not moving (at work, on the couch and in your car)
tends to be the same sitting position over and over again.
Because of our time spent sitting (and because of other ways we've immobilized ourselves, casted our bodies with shoes,
constrictive clothing, and cultural expectations) our bodies have adapted by becoming stiff and
unable to move all of our parts all of the way.
This has created areas in our bodies that are cellularly sedentary even when we are moving.
For instance, we've been wearing shoes practically since birth. Shoes with a cushion sole,
limited space for the toes to move, and a heel (even if it's a short one).
And so movements of your toe bones, ankle joints, arch
supporting muscles, and even of your foot skin, don't happen in the same way had you not always worn shoes.
This means that even when your whole body is walking, not all of it is actively walking or receiving the right amount of squish your
cells need to thrive.
So we have two new ideas going on here. The first is that active and sedentary
populations move about the same amount per day,
which is not much. The other new idea is that even during a bout of movement not all of you is moving.
Which means that your movement diet is not only low in total movement
calories, the number of movement foods you eat, the variability of your movements is also low. Our
current movement diet is like a food diet that's extremely restricted in quantity and variety.
Why does this matter? For the same reason it matters what you eat.
When you eat food, the nutrients in that food communicate with your cells and cause your cells to behave in a particular way.
Movement is similar. The bending and squishing of your cells that happens when you're walking is an input
just like dietary nutrients.
Cells respond directly to mechanical input through process called mechanotransduction.
Your cells are just as affected by the
movements you do and do not feed them, as they are by the foods that you do and do not feed them. And
if you're like most people in our culture, you are - by virtue of a life spent barely moving, frequently
casted, and with cells that never get the input they need - basically starving yourself.
We're not just missing movement.
We are missing
Nutritious Movement. Movement that includes all of the right bends and squishes at the right amount for all of your parts to work optimally.
Nutritious Movement is a program that offers micronutrients or corrective exercises to help mobilize and use any
sedentary spots brought about by years of being casted by modern habitats. And
macronutrients, or larger categories of movement like walking, squatting, climbing, carrying, and even getting off of the floor with ease.
These
macronutrients nourish many parts of the body at once especially when done throughout the day.
Nutritious movement shows you how to create a more
balanced and healthy movement diet by teaching you how to figure out which micro- and macronutrients you need,
which you're currently overdosing on, and how to recognize junk food movement. We'll help you move better and
we'll also teach you why you need to by providing education on biomechanics,
kinesiology and physiology, as well as information on how to build a supportive movement community and
create a natural habitat that supports the best performance of your body. All trillion of your bodies.
Nutritious Movement. You are how you move.