Article by Gavin Stoddart – Bay City Gym Manager/Personal Trainer
Movement is essential to life, it impacts all aspects of living, and when we start to lose our ability to move, we notice the effects it has on our quality of life as well. Here are some reasons why we must move as often as possible:
Joints
Movement is essential for the lubrication and nourishment of joints. If your joints are not regularly taken through their full range of motion then they become dehydrated and seize up, the muscles around the area tighten up, and your movement gets less and less until you just can’t move properly. Most joints have a poor blood supply, so they require movement to feed nutrients to the area for growth and repair.
Energy
Have you ever noticed that when you don’t do anything you feel tired and lethargic? That’s because it takes energy to make energy- you need to move to get blood pumping around your body and to wake yourself up and improve your concentration. The body is very similar to a car in that respect, as you need to drive a car regularly to keep the battery charged just like you need to move your body to replenish the cellular energy stores.
Oxygen and Nutrients
Movement stimulates blood flow around the body, which carries oxygen and nutrients to all your cells, for growth, repair, and energy.
Stress Relief
Hard vigorous exercise can be stressful on the body, but nice gentle movements are very relaxing and therapeutic and help our nervous system to chill out. It can also be fun to play a game or just play with the kids- it’s a chance to stop being a grown up and just experience being in your own body.
Strength
Performing movement keeps your body strong and supple, allowing you to perform exercise or day-to-day chores with less effort and a much smaller chance of injury.
Flexibility
Movement helps us maintain the elastic properties of our muscles and fascia which gives us the freedom to do the things we want to do without stiffness and restriction.
Digestion
Movements such as squatting, bending and whole-body movements massage our internal organs helping to get blood to the area as well as aiding the movement of food through our digestive tract.
Weight loss
Moving your body burns calories which help burn off the large meal you had for lunch. Increasing your muscle tissue makes for a more energy hungry body that means you burn more calories all the time, even when you are asleep.
Coordination and Body awareness
Movement helps you to maintain and improve your muscle control and coordination. The more you perform an action the easier it gets and the better you get at it. Have you ever tried going back to a sport you haven’t played in years only to find you can’t even hit the ball or miss-time your shots?
Functionality
Our brain learns movements not individual muscles, so muscles trained in isolation do not necessarily carry over into functional whole-body movements. This explains why training on gym machines does not give us functional/useful strength and can lead to muscle imbalance and injury (as these movements do not train our stabilizers muscles). Our body is designed to work as a functional unit so this is the approach that a decent chunk of our training should take.
Feeling good
Exercise and movement releases endorphins, which are our own “feel-good” chemicals.
Injury Prevention
Training movement correctly will help to prevent injuries and keep you moving into old age.
Keeping your body moving can be as simple as getting up and down from the floor, sitting on the floor cross legged or kneeling; even just playing with the kids or the dog will help to keep your body free and flexible.
If you would like to free your body and learn some new tools to add to your training, please drop us an email or give us a call at Bay city Gym.