We all know that eating well, getting plenty of sleep, and getting regular exercise are the basic building blocks to being healthy. However, what if I told you that exercise isn’t all that it’s hyped up to be? This might sound really strange coming from a fitness gym but we have a slightly different take on the concept of exercise that more and more experts are beginning to adopt. Are you for a paradigm shift? Read on with an open mind and you might find that you’ll never look at your life the same way! Take the red pill and never look back. (Or, ditch the pills and start living a healthy life without them!)
First of all, let’s take a look at basic nutrition. There are a lot of different ideas about nutrition but one thing everyone seems to agree on is that we need to eat plenty of vegetables and get a variety of important nutrients. Imagine that you live in a different world and there is nothing in the grocery stores but meat and bread. That is all we have to eat. You might say that there are important nutrients that you’re getting such as protein, but you wouldn’t have a very balanced diet. To offset this imbalance, we are told that we all must take multi-vitamin capsules to keep us alive. That makes perfect sense so we all make sure we take a capsule once per day and we certainly feel the difference when we don’t do it. Now imagine that the world changed and a wide variety of fruits and vegetables were now available. We might assume that the general health and wellbeing of the entire population would become better. We might still use multi-vitamins (as we currently do) but they would no longer be a replacement for our daily nutrition. Instead they would be a supplement, or additional support to the nutrients we’re already getting. If we eat well enough, then we don’t need any kind of daily supplement to keep us healthy.
Now, let’s take a look at exercise. Biomechanist and award winning author, Katy Bowman compares exercise to supplements. She suggests that movement (not exercise) is very much like nutrients that we take into our bodies. We are meant to move, but unfortunately, we live in a very sedentary society. We tend to sit in the same positions with very little variation, hour after hour, day after day. We use comfortable chairs that support our weight and even hold our bodies upright. We don’t have to do anything to stay upright! If you think of movement like nutrition, it seems that we have a tendency to starve ourselves of good meals throughout the day, then binge on supplements every now and then in the form of exercise. As a result, many people begin to loose their range of mobility and that means even less movement nutrients. To make up for it, we think we need more intense exercise. The combination of poor mobility and intense, repetitive exercise can result in injury. This is a very big problem.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that we should all stop exercising. But what I do suggest is that exercise isn’t as good as what it could be since we don’t move often enough, and with enough variety. Just like nutrition, balance and variety are both essential! This is our philosophy at Origins Family Fitness. Every single program at our gym teaches a wide variety of useful movements. We are essentially introducing nutrients back into your movement diet by teaching people how to move proficiently. Do you get a good workout at our gym? YES!!! But more importantly, you learn how to move better. The icing on the very nutrient dense cake is that while you get all these things, you get to have a ton of fun doing it! If you want to introduce movement nutrients that you’ve been lacking, come try a class and begin to see the benefits of movement nutrients today!