There’s a nurse I met for the first time last week who, while drawing my blood, asked what I do. When I told her I’m an ‘everyday movement coach’, helping people move well now and as they age, she lit up and started telling me about her dad, Brian. Brian is 94. In a few days they’re flying to Spain, as they do twice a year, and one of the daily habits he won’t be leaving at home is getting down on the floor to move his hips.
He’s done it for decades. When he left the military he made a decision that his body was his own responsibility, daily, and he’s never let go of it – even while he’s on holiday! She said that if the hotel floor is hard, he uses the bed, or he finds a patch of grass. His daughter has made gentle suggestions before: ‘you’re on holiday, Dad, why don’t you give it a rest for a week’. And Brian says the same thing every time. Daily habits are daily habits for a reason.
He’s right and his body agrees. At 94 he gets up and down off the floor without a second thought, walks most days, and has never had a joint operation. He guards his independence fiercely, and he’s earned it.
Your body is always adapting to what you ask of it
What Brian clearly embodies to his core, is that the body adapts to what it’s asked to do. Ask it to get to the floor, feel comfortable there and move there, and it will maintain those skills. That’s not luck or ‘good’ genetics, it’s the same principle that governs every body, including yours and mine – adaptation.
The catch is that adaptation runs both ways. The body is just as willing to adapt away from a movement as toward it. Stop asking your body to lower you to the ground, or your hips to allow you to be there comfortably, and over months and years your body can gradually conclude you don’t need that range any more, and let it go. Sometimes there’s a clear reason, an injury, an illness, a stretch of life where moving was the last thing you had room for. Sometimes there’s no reason you could name at all. Either way the drift is the same: one day getting down to the floor feels like more than it used to, and getting back up feels like a small project rather than a thing you just do. It’s one of the movements we lose without noticing, and the losing doesn’t always announce itself loudly, but instead quietly in the background without us noticing.
This is what I mean when I say your body is telling its story. The stiffness, the hesitation, the way the floor has started to feel further away, none of that is a verdict on your age, and it isn’t a failing. It’s information, and the useful kind. It tells you which way your body has been drifting lately, which means it also tells you exactly where to begin.
The floor is a habit before it’s an ability
I want to be careful here, because it’s easy to read all this as bad news, and it isn’t. If adaptation runs both ways, then the door is open in both directions too. The body that adapted away from the floor will adapt back toward it, given a reason and a bit of consistency. It’s never too late to start sending the signal again.
Take Kathy. She’d watched my videos for years, agreeing with all of it, never quite starting. Then she was given the chance to spend more time with her granddaughter after school, and Kathy didn’t just want to supervise from a chair. She wanted to be down on the floor with her, at her level, being playful and feeling part of her world. That was the reason. She decided to sign up to Reclaim Everyday Ease which begins with ground time, and the habit took. In her words: “Now I do find more opportunities to be on the floor, whether it’s when I have my tea in the afternoon with girlfriends, when I meditate, or in the morning when I have those stiff aches getting up from bed.”
For Kathy, the grandchild was the way in, but the floor hasn’t stayed confined to playtime. Once her body remembered the ground, it started finding the ground everywhere: the afternoon cup of tea with friends, the morning stretch, the moment of stillness. The habit outgrew the reason that started it.
That’s the version of this most people actually want. Not to pass a test, not to perform anything, just to stay the kind of person who gets down to the floor and back up again without it becoming an occasion. To get on the floor with a grandchild and have neither of you give it a second thought. To still be choosing it at 80, at 90, because your body never lost the thread.
It’s worth saying that the ground itself hasn’t changed; our relationship with it has. We’ve built lives that rarely ask us down there, and the body took the hint. The good news is that it takes a new hint just as readily.
Where to begin
If reconnecting with the ground is something you’d like to do, in a way that builds gradually and fits into an ordinary day rather than asking you to overhaul it, Reclaim the Ground is where to start. It’s a focused mini course, £49, that takes you through getting comfortable on the floor and moving there, step by step, at your own pace. It’s the first 2 weeks of the bigger method, and a complete, doable beginning in its own right. You can start here: Reclaim the Ground.
Brian never had to reclaim the ground, because he never let it go. Most of us aren’t Brian, and that’s all right. The ground is more patient than we give it credit for. It’s been waiting the whole time, and your body remembers the way back better than you’d think.
