It’s not (just) the chair – how Jemimah Hiscox of Moved Armidale keeps moving
Movement has always made me feel good. So I move! I’ve found various ways to satisfy this desire to move throughout my life, including dancing, swimming, boxing, mountain biking, yoga, Pilates, functional weight training and teaching a variety of gym classes. Then there was the birth of my third child and I felt stuck…
In my care was a 5 year old, a toddler and a newborn. I found myself wondering how I would ever even leave the house again, let alone make time for an exercise program. To add to this, my body didn’t feel the same - it felt weak, less robust, and the exercises that once satisfied, no longer had the same beneficial effect. I needed to find another way to move - my physical and mental health depended on it. So I began to research…
I’m about to tell you what I’ve learnt on my journey to moving more and moving better. Let me disclose straight up: none of the ideas you will read here are new or ground-breaking. Yet, I believe that the underlying message has not been well understood or widely explored in our sectionalised, convenience loving culture.
As we know, and research confirms, the prevalence of lifestyle diseases, such as diabetes, asthma, heart disease and osteoporosis is increasing. As a society we are not meeting our body’s requirements for optimal health. Conditions viewed as less life limiting, such as IBS, migraines, sciatica and pelvic floor disorders, significantly diminish our health, wellbeing and quality of life. It’s time to take a good look at how our modern-day lifestyles rob us of the movement we need for a better quality of life.
Most of us would have come across health-directed messages comparing sitting on chairs to smoking. This message has led many in workplaces to ditch their chair for a standing work desk in the hope of avoiding the detrimental affects of ‘the chair’. What they’ve failed to see is that it’s not just the chair that is causing our health problems, it’s what the chair represents – a lack of movement overall. Replacing one way of being still with another way of being still is to miss the point entirely.
It’s getting harder and harder for us (sitting on our couches with smartphones in hand), to comprehend how much movement was once required just to survive. It wasn’t all that long ago (relatively speaking) that everyone ‘moved for a living’. In a pre-industrialised world just about everyone moved for their shelter, food, clothing and other basic necessities of life. Though life was physically demanding and laboursome, bodies were receiving something back: improved health. This occurred through the nourishment of tissues, joints and bones, right down to the cellular level through movement.
I’m not suggesting that we revert back to a life of back-breaking work. What I am suggesting is that our bodies are, by and large, deficient in the amount and type of movement they need to thrive. Once we start to see how ‘movement-starved’ we really are (a term popularised by biomechanist, Katy Bowman), we can understand why, as a society, we’re not thriving physically.
As I’ve said and research substantiates, daily living, working, just surviving has changed drastically in the past few hundred years. Our body’s movement requirements have not! What our bodies once received organically through everyday living we now need to consciously cultivate to be healthy. This brings me to the concept of ‘exercise’. Exercise is a valuable thing. If it wasn’t for exercise, we would be even less healthy than we are today. However, in creating this ‘space’ for movement, we’ve ended up compartmentalising exercise so that it has been squashed into a one-hour-a-day window (if we’re lucky). While many of us make the time to move within that window, for the other 23 hours we are relatively sedentary.
Now research shows that the jury’s still out as to whether continuous or accumulated exercise is best. But, if we look back to a time before the rise in ‘lifestyle’ diseases, we see that a variety of movements were woven into people’s daily patterns and habits in a fairly constant way. Maybe there’s something in that?
Am I suggesting that we scrap our exercise regime and just simply move? Not at all. But we need every opportunity to move and I am suggesting that we start to think about other ways to infuse movement into our day to day lives, regardless of our designated exercise time – seeing movement as something that can and should happen outside the ‘exercise bubble’. This will help us to start thinking outside the box in terms of how we can move more every day.
This one idea helped me immensely when I was feeling stuck as a mother of three small children. The change in the way I viewed movement freed me up to see that I did not have to wait until I got the opportunity to exercise to move. I started to make the most of every opportunity I had, even if it was a calf stretch while I was preparing dinner, or getting down onto the floor to fold the clothes. The types of movement I was weaving into my life were incredibly basic and took next to no extra time out of my day, they just required conscious thought.
Before you go thinking ‘this article’s not for me – I move all the time’, perhaps think again. You probably are very active! However, elements of modern living (such as conventional footwear, being in the same position for long periods and peering at screens for hours), can very quickly lead to movement restrictions, causing us to subconsciously bypass areas of our bodies. This limits the benefits of the movement we are doing and increases wear-and-tear. Less-than-optimal alignment (i.e. the dodgy way we carry ourselves), is a biggie here. It might also be that your knees don’t work well due to a workplace injury, or that you have a misaligned hip because of the way you were delivered at birth. These aren’t character flaws, they’re just something to pay attention to.
After the birth of my third child, my physical problems were suddenly magnified. My less-than-optimal alignment and movement habits and patterns had finally caught up with me. I had aches and pains, my sciatica was worsening, and I had a Diastasis Recti that didn’t seem to be improving. This is where a little bit of knowledge and a lot of curiosity went a long way. I researched; I looked into what might be causing my ailments, studied some anatomy, experimented with bodywork techniques, delved into breathing biomechanics and learnt about alignment. This growing knowledge of alignment began to help me to move in a more deliberate, targeted way, allowing me to nourish the ‘stagnant’ areas of my body, while giving my overloaded parts a break. I started to get stronger, more mobile, feel less pain and discomfort and my problem areas began to heal.
What I learnt is that alignment is an extremely helpful way to see whether we are moving the parts we intend to. If we pay attention to our physical state, we can start to work out which of our parts aren’t faring so well. Then, if we have some idea of what optimal alignment looks like, we can piece together a ‘roadmap’ for how to move and position ourselves for better physical health in the future. Knowing what you need to do to improve your health is a valuable thing. Remember, the earlier we address our physical issues, the better – ‘prehab is better than rehab’! There are many clever health professionals around who can help us learn more about our bodies and show us new and nourishing ways to move. It’s worthwhile finding out who’s out there and what they offer, for the sake of your health.
This takes me to the last and most important discovery on my movement journey: my health is my responsibility. I know my body better than anyone else, I know my pain points, I know what makes me feel better physically and what causes discomfort. With some conscious thought, a little bit of knowledge and a lot of curiosity, I was able to start my own journey towards moving more and moving better. You can too!
Movement is a powerful way to improve our health, it changes bodies down to the cellular level, preventing disease and injury and improving quality of life. You don’t need to wait for an opportunity to exercise to use this free tool. You don’t need a big chunk of time and you don’t need fancy equipment. Actually, if you feel stuck and need an idea to help you start your own movement journey, there is this one piece of equipment that is surprisingly versatile… with a bit of imagination, a person could create a whole repertoire of moves based on this thing, and we all have one – a chair.
Need to get moving?
What Jemimah learnt on her movement journey made such a difference to her that she ended up learning a whole lot more and now has her own local movement business, where she helps others to move more and move better.
82 Rusden Street, Armidale
movedarmidale.com.au
@movedarmidale