We’re told to be more active; so you make sure you are.
You go for your morning walk and swim on alternate days, and you even come back to do an online Pilates class. You know you’re not supposed to sit for hours, so when you work or get on with some admin, you get up regularly and make yourself a cup of tea.
Tick. You feel like you’re doing the right things and yet you find yourself wondering if you need to do more exercise, because despite being ‘active’ as you’d describe yourself, you still feel stiff, or a little hesitant about some of the things your body used to do without you thinking about them.
But what about everything in between?
You get out of bed and walk to the bathroom. You sit on the toilet, stand up, brush your teeth, then sit down to put on your clothes. You walk downstairs and stand, facing the counter to make your breakfast and turn your body to get the milk out the fridge, then sit at the kitchen table for breakfast.
You unload the dishwasher, reaching down and bending through your spine in the same way you always do. You sit to put your shoes on and then you get in the car and sit again.
Later, you walk the dog along the same familiar route. You come home, sit down to read for a while, stand up to make dinner, then sit on the sofa to watch television.
You’ve moved from place to place all day, achieved lots of tasks.
But look a little more closely at how you’ve moved.
How often have you got low, or sat on the floor, turned through your spine, reached up high, balanced, rotated your hips? How often have you asked your joints to move through a range they don’t usually visit?
Often it’s much less than we think because our environment no longer requires it.
Being active is important. But equally so is the variety in the way you move during all the moments around your exercise – and this is the thing we’re rarely told.
It’s important because your body doesn’t just respond to how much you move. It responds to what you repeatedly ask it to do.
Your body responds to what you ask of it
Your body is constantly adapting to the demands you place on it, thankfully, as that’s what gives us the opportunity to improve our movement.
If you spend a large part of your day sitting, your body gets very familiar with sitting. If most of your walking is on level ground, at a steady pace and in a straight line, that becomes familiar too. If you always bend down in the same way, reach with the same arm or turn your whole body towards whatever you’re doing, those patterns become increasingly well practised.
Again, there’s nothing wrong with any of these movements. Your body is doing exactly what it is designed to do: becoming efficient at the things you ask of it most often.
The problem is that a body can become very good at a surprisingly small selection of movements.
And that matters because your joints, muscles and nervous system benefit from being asked to move through different ranges, directions and positions, with different parts of your body working together in different ways. That variety helps you maintain the movement possibilities your body is capable of.
Think about your hips. They don’t just need to move forwards and backwards as you walk. They also rotate, move out to the side and move across the body. Your spine can bend, but also extend and rotate, while your shoulders can reach in all sorts of directions.
You don’t need to spend one section of your day deliberately taking all your joints through a checklist of movements (unless you want to!). Sprinkling different movements throughout your day gives your body opportunities to use them in the context of your real life. But if these movements rarely feature in your life, your body has less opportunity to maintain those ranges of movement, and over time, your capability can start to lessen.
This is where variety becomes important.
Not because you need to become someone who can perform lots of different movements for the sake of it, but because the more ways your body learns to move, the more options you have available to you.
And that can make a difference to how you feel right now.
A body that is used to moving through different ranges and positions can feel less restricted when you ask it to do something that has become less familiar. You can become more comfortable changing position and more confident getting low or getting back up, rather than automatically working around what feels difficult.
What happens when you stop thinking only about what you can’t do?
Instead of being caught out by limitations when you want to do something, you have more possibilities to choose from, simply because they feel good or because you’re curious about what you can do.
A past course participant, Kathy, discovered this through what she describes as the “joy of discovery” – finding everyday movements she hadn’t thought about before and enjoying exploring what her body could do.
And that’s one of the most unexpected things about bringing more variety into your movement. It can shift your attention from what your body can’t do as easily as it once did, towards what else might be possible.
That in turn can change the way you approach life too. Instead of automatically thinking, “I don’t think I can do that,” you become more willing to give it a go and find out.
That’s what happened for another course participant Sue, when she found herself at a water park with her family. Rather than holding back because she wasn’t sure what her body could manage, she gave the slide a go and felt great for it.
And that’s a very different way to feel about your body: not constantly working around its restrictions and hearing yourself say no, but having enough confidence in what it can do to say yes when life offers you something you’d like to do.
And the good news is that creating more variety doesn’t mean adding another exercise routine to your life. It can start with the things you already do: finding different ways to move, changing position, exploring a little more range, or adding some playful movement into moments that would otherwise be spent sitting or standing in the same way.
The movements might be small, but the possibilities they create aren’t.
The possibilities might be bigger than you realised. And you don’t have to figure out how to create more movement variety on your own.
Reclaim Everyday Ease is an 8-week programme, starting on 28th September, designed to help you bring more variety into the way you move in daily life, so you can move better now and set yourself up for the future.
Early access opens this Friday. If your name is on the waiting list, you’ll get access before the doors open officially and the code you need to claim the early-bird price.
