Moving Well
A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world.
– Dr. Paul Dudley White
When did physical fitness and exercise become so uncommon in our everyday lives? Humans are the only species on earth that has changed our exercise & energy expenditure away from what we as humans genetically require.
Exercise is a required nutrient (like water) for homeostasis (balance) and our genes are programmed to need it in order to create healthy function throughout our lives. In our industrialized societies today we are deathly deficient in it! The reality is that you have enough time to get your daily exercise, most of us are just so out of shape that we are too tried to exercise. The irony is that you are too tried because you don’t exercise!
Just a few of the proven positive effects of exercise:
- Prevent up to 91% of type 2 diabetes and obesity which cost 519 Million Dollars per DAY in the US!
- Prevent up to 50% of all cases of heart disease which kills 950,000 people per year and costs 501 Million Dollars per DAY in the US!
- Reduces breast cancer by up to 60%
- Reduces lung cancer in smokers by up to 72%
- Reduces the risk of and improves rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis
- Increases new bone formation
- Increases strength, flexibility, and balance
- Improves digestion and decreases indigestion
It is not just our activity levels, energy expenditures, and fitness levels that have been dramatically reduced. We are also exposed to an extreme amount of toxic activity and inactivity habits. We sit with very poor posture for most of our lives. Similar to the effects of sugar and diet are on your teeth, our chronic sitting and inactivity cause decay of our spines. This creates toxic nociceptive patterns as well as deficient healthy proprioceptive input required for homeostasis and health.
The lack of motion and increased tension also results in the structural decay associated with subluxation of the spine, and osteoarthritis as well as osteoporosis. Regular spinal hygiene in the form of chiropractic adjustments and spinal hygiene exercises to counteract the effects of modern inactivity patterns is now as critical for spinal health and the health of your whole nervous system, as dental hygiene is for counteracting the effects of the modern diet on the health of your teeth.
Our ancestors had the bone density, muscle mass, body composition, aerobic fitness, anaerobic fitness, strength, agility, core strength, and attractiveness of today’s elite cross-training athletes (decathletes). What we now call elite is really just normal. What we call normal is unfit and unhealthy.
“There is now unequivocal evidence in the literature supporting the notion that all environmental factors combined, including physical inactivity (defined here as the activity equivalent of ‹30 min of brisk walking/day), account for the majority of chronic health conditions. These conditions are characterized as chronic because they are slow in progression and long in continuance.”
- Booth et al. Waging war on physical inactivity,J Appl Physiol 93: 3-30, 2002
The two most important movement questions are:
- How do we avoid all the illness and suffering that results from not moving congruently with our human genetic requirements?
- How do we ensure we are moving and expending the amount of energy needed to be congruent with our genetic requirements?
Subscribe to the Get Well For Life blog and stay up to date with helpful tips, research and much more about moving well to get healthy and stay healthy.
