Movement is a powerful component of our health and wellness. Today I talk about how you can get in more movement without putting unnecessary stress on your body.

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Show Notes:

1. Benefits of Overall Movement: Engaging in regular movement can result in improved cardiovascular health, lower blood pressure, better blood sugar management, enhanced lung function, and mental health benefits such as reduced anxiety and depression. It also helps with weight management.

2. Incorporating More Movement: Increasing everyday activities such as walking around the house or going shopping can be a good starting point. Tools like an Apple Watch or Fitbit can track daily steps and provide motivation to move more.

3. Continuous Movement: Gradually, one can progress to more continuous forms of movement. Even ten minutes a day can have significant health benefits.

4. Types of Overall Movement: Walking, biking, elliptical exercises, and swimming are all options, along with group exercise classes. The choice should be based on individual preference and what feels good for one's body.

5. Importance of Footwear: Good supportive footwear is crucial for comfort and injury prevention, especially during activities such as walking and hiking.

6. Listening to Your Body: It's crucial not to push through pain. If one type of exercise causes discomfort, there are always other options to explore.

7. Dangers of Overtraining: While exercise can be addictive, it's important to set healthy limits to avoid overtraining, which can be detrimental to health.

Key Takeaways:

• Movement is medicine: It has numerous physical and mental health benefits, and it's crucial to make it a regular part of our lives.

• It's essential to find the right balance of overall movement that suits one's individual body and lifestyle, rather than trying to fit into a one-size-fits-all exercise regimen.

• Starting small, with everyday activities, can make it easier to incorporate more movement into our lives.

• Remember not to push through pain. There's always an alternative form of movement that can suit your body better.

• Overtraining can be as detrimental as a sedentary lifestyle. It's crucial to find a balance that maintains health without leading to injury or burnout.

Transcript:

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Better Than a Pill. I'm Cari Vann, and I'm so grateful and excited to be here again to share with you today. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about overall movement. I have to say that I love the word movement. Overall movement is the term that I use for what you may want to call or somebody else may term as cardiovascular exercise or aerobic exercise. At the end of the day, what that is, is movement. We are moving in a continual fashion and that's the whole goal here is that we want to move more.

The pillars of pain-free movement that I teach are designed for that very purpose. They're the things that are going to help sustain our body so that we can move more and get in more of this overall movement that I'm referring to. Movement is medicine. Yes, you hear me saying this all the time, it can be medicine in different ways. We have the medicine that sustains our body, our pillars that we've talked about, and then we have medicine through movement, continual movement which we need, we're designed to move.

Breaking down the benefits of getting in more overall movement into our lives, we can improve our cardiovascular health, decrease our risk for heart disease, lower blood pressure, lower our blood sugars, we can increase our good cholesterol, our HDL, and again, not just lower our blood sugars, but manage them. We can assist ourselves with weight management, lose weight, improve our lung function, decrease our heart rates. We can also improve our minds, we can control the levels of anxiety and also depression. So, movement is powerful and it is a life-giving force.

Now, what are some ways we can get more overall movement into our lives? A great starting point is our ADLs, activities of daily living. We want to start just by increasing our movement throughout our homes, what we're doing or when we're going out shopping. This is a great starting point. We can be mindful of how many steps we're getting into our day, and technology makes it easy. We can use an Apple Watch or a Fitbit. It's a great level of awareness to see how many steps we're actually taking throughout our day.

At some point, we can progress into more continuous movement, which is great for our bodies and our heart health and can have many benefits. And duration wise, I have to tell you that ten minutes matters. This is a great place to start or even sustain because studies have shown that we can have benefits on our health from doing overall movement in this capacity. Ten minutes. I've lived this before and I've had to apply it myself. If it's a matter of time, get in your ten minutes. Now, you can work on increasing your duration up to 20 or 30 minutes.

But personally, for me, I do about 20 to 30 minutes of continual movement and that works well for my body. And you don't really necessarily need to do more, you could do more, but understand that longer is not always better. And it's important to balance out this type of movement with your pain-free pillars so that you want to again manage pain and you don't want to have pain while you're doing the movement. So oftentimes if the movement is too intense or too long, this cannot be good for inflammation. Yes, and that includes things like we talked about, like arthritis or autoimmune disorders and so forth.

So let's talk about some options here. I like to talk about options in terms of what are some good options that are protective for our joints. We'll start with walking. Walking is great for some people, it's not for everybody. But if it is an activity that feels good on your body, by all means do it. Walking, hiking, you want to make sure that you are wearing good footwear supportive tennis shoe. That's your first line of defense. And then if you need, you need to get an orthotic if you have issues with your feet, that's fine. Yes, I do personally have to wear both myself and also just throwing out there in some scenarios, walking sticks can be helpful as well, depending on your body.

It's not always good to do walking if you're going to have pain. So knee pain or foot pain and things like that, it may not be the best choice at this point for you. And I've been there, so I understand that. But we have choices and that's the good news. Other choices that are great could be depending on your body, riding a bike or doing an elliptical machine where there's less impact. You could ride a bike outside, or you could ride a bike indoors or use a machine called a new Step N Ustep, which is excellent for the knees and back.

So there are options and it's just about finding something that's going to work for your body, not throwing yourself into something because you think you have to and it doesn't feel good. And the other thing I want to mention is the water. If walking on land is not feeling good, you can take your walking to the water. It is wonderful because it's supportive and it's a great place to work on your gait and even retrain your gate, which, yes, I've even done before myself with my own body, I've had to do that.

We also have deep water running. We're suspended. Love this personally, myself, it's freeing. You have no impact. And yes, you can move. So deep water running, one of my top choices. And then we have swimming. Also, you may like to be in a group and there's nothing wrong with that. Getting in at the group exercise, as long as it feels okay on your body, could be in the form of some type of land or water aerobic-based class or Zumba, whatever it is. Just making sure that you're using your pillars and that is a good fit for your body because not necessarily is that going to be good for everybody? And again, wearing good footwear is 100% important.

So I have lots of experience with overall movement in different capacities. I've probably taught to date every type of aerobic class that there is, including spin step, water, land, and I've realized what's good for my body and what's not through this experience. And we don't ever want to push through pain. The whole point is, and I didn't mention this earlier, but let's take a step back. Even when we're doing a bicycle, we may even go to an arm or GoMeter, which is an arm bicycle, whatever it is, we can move our bodies. There's always choices.

Now, overall movement, cardiovascular aerobic movement type movement, it can be addictive. And so there are healthy limits. And so we want to be just mindful of that so that we don't over train or over exercise our bodies. Because that cannot be good for us. I've been there, I've gone through that myself and I know that it can be detrimental. So just keeping an awareness personally, like I said, 20 to 30 minutes is excellent. We don't need to push the threshold. We want to do the things that are good for our body and so on.

So yes, you can do longer movements, say occasionally the group classes or going on a longer hike, whatever that is, but in general is what I'm speaking about. We have to remember, balance is key, and while it's important to challenge our bodies, we also need to listen to them.

Anyway, just to recap, today we've broken down overall movement and with the pillars of pain-free movement allowing you to move more and move better, that's the whole goal here. We've talked about some safe options, the benefits as well as it's individualized and knowing that I gave you some general guidelines and so forth, but knowing the things that are going to be best for your body, because not everything is going to be good for everybody.

And that's really important. That's an important takeaway from today. Understanding your body's unique needs and adjusting your movement accordingly isn't just a part of a healthy lifestyle, it's a crucial part of maintaining our overall health and wellbeing.

So, I hope that you have enjoyed this episode and found it helpful. Remember, the key is to find a balance that works for you, not to push yourself to the point of pain or discomfort. Use the options we discussed today, experiment with different types of movement, and see what feels good for you. Movement should be a source of joy, not a source of pain or distress.

And remember, we do new episodes every week on Wednesday and I look forward to having you join me then.