Week 4: Functional movement and exercise

Welcome to Week 4. Let’s get moving.

Our next two weeks are going to be EYE OPENING! If you didn’t already know, our bodies are so incredibly cool. To almost criminally oversimplify human movement science: your body works nonstop around-the-clock to make you the best at what you do often. Our bodies are great listeners, and loud voices. It’s a blessing… and a curse.

Confused? Here’s what I mean: in relation to movement, your body operates on a principle of adaptation—or rather, specific adaptation of imposed demand (SAID).

The SAID principle essentially states that the body will modify to handle the specific actions you’re asking of it. The SAID principle is part of the reason we get stronger when we lift, can run faster when we train sprints, … and also part of why we feel really great taking a seat.

Generally speaking, we sit A LOT. I invite you to take a moment to become aware of your surroundings—where are you reading this? If you’re like me, you’re probably on your phone or at your computer, on the couch or at a desk. Sitting.  

If we tell our bodies that we’re going to be sitting 90% of the time, our bodies are going to adapt to become Olympic sitters. Our musculature adapts to make sitting comfortable and easy for us; muscles that function best elongated may shorten and become tight, some muscles might become a little sleepy because we don’t call on them often in a seated position… the list goes on.

So, what happens when we get up to walk to the kitchen for a snack? What about when we want to bend over and pick up our pets for a quick squeeze? Or carry those groceries into the house in just one trip?

Back pain, knee pain, feeling off-balance, feeling winded. Your body’s like, “Hey! This isn’t how we sit… I just made all these adjustments for you and now you have the nerve to bend over and pick that dirty laundry up off the floor?”

Long story short: Movement and how we exercise should feed into our functional movement patterns. Yes, we sit a lot, but as humans, we shouldn’t be training to stay sedentary—we should be training to keep our bodies happy, safe, and strong when we push, pull, squat, bend over, twist, and walk; all of the functional movement patterns we move through daily (when we aren’t taking a seat).

But when we want to start training, we do the most. Thanks, wellness industry *eyeroll* … 

Oh, how I’ve been there. I was in the camp of one extreme to the next: when I was ready to start an “exercise program,” I went from nothing to daily high-intensity cardio training. I felt like I was draining my body of my youth during every workout—I was exhausted, rapidly losing weight, not fueling properly against the calories I burned… but I thought that was just the nature of exercise: “If you feel like you’re dying, you’re doing it right!” Wrong.

And at the end of the day, I still had my back pain, my knee pain… maybe I was a little less winded, but after all, I was training cardio. See: SAID principle.

Of course, there’s a time and a place for especially challenging workouts, but it’s most definitely not part of your everyday routine.

The wellness industry—and to be blunt: most Instagram wellness influencers—seriously overcomplicates exercise. There are only a few, highly individualized, elements that you need for an effective exercise routine: consistency, enjoyment, and progressive overload.

Breaking down the elements of an effective exercise routine:

Consistency

If you struggle with consistency, you may have a short-term mindset when it comes to exercise. Hear me out: people often begin an exercise routine with the goal of weight loss—hardly ever performance, or optimizing daily movement patterns. If your goal is weight loss, it’s likely you’ll opt-in to a difficult workout routine that emphasizes daily, intense workouts pushing a “No days off!” mentality. After one week of these workouts, you’re absolutely drained. You’re not seeing results, you’re just tired.

Or maybe you are seeing results! But then something happens, and you plateau (hint: your body did its job and got efficient with that workout routine). Now you’re not seeing the same results, and you’re discouraged, and you can’t imagine a world where you do MORE exercise, so you quit.

Consistency is key, and the key to consistency is being realistic: start SMALL. Often, 1-2 days a week is an excellent starting point for introducing (or re-introducing) exercise. And if you’ve already been consistently training, sometimes stepping back is the key to seeing results.

Enjoyment

If you hate what you’re doing for exercise, stop doing it. There are endless ways you can move your body and practice functional movement patterns—and if there’s something you don’t enjoy doing, there’s almost always an alternative.

If you despise running, go for a walk. If you’re uncomfortable with the thought of heavy weight training, give suspension bands a try.

You’ll never stay consistent—or reap the many, many benefits of exercise—if you don’t enjoy the process. Prioritize moving in ways that make you feel good. The rest will come naturally with it.

Progressive overload

Hitting a progress plateau can be super discouraging—let’s flip this narrative.

A plateau is not a bad thing, it’s a signal. Remember how I said our bodies are great listeners, and also loud voices? A plateau is your body telling you: “Hey, we’re good at this now!” You accomplished the goal: adapt to this challenge. Big win!

To keep seeing results, you have to strategically phase through new programming that’s appropriately challenging. There are many, many ways to progressively overload an exercise routine: adding more weight, increasing the volume of exercise, changing your programming completely… the list goes on, and on, and on.

What I want you to bear in mind here is that overcoming a plateau typically doesn’t take any drastic changes. Adam Schafer says it best: “The goal is to elicit the most amount of change with the least amount of work.” Making incremental changes can help you overcome—or avoid—plateaus.

Now, get up and move!

Consistency, enjoyment, and progressive overload are all that you need to craft an exercise routine that works for you. This week, explore movement that checks these boxes; look for inspiration, but at the end of the day, get up and move in a way that feels good for you and your body.

And if you ever feel like you need a little extra guidance, just reply back to this email. I’m here to help.