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I am very excited to announce the arrival of my newest book, My Perfect Movement Plan: The Move Your DNA All Day Workbook.
A movement diet is the total movement that makes up your day or week or month. Not just what you do for exercise, but the shapes and loads you create all day long. Movement nutrients need to balance like dietary nutrients do—balance over our bodies but also be in balance with our personal preferences, i.e. what we find meaningful and functional for our individual lives.
This practical workbook is a tool that anyone can use to track how you are moving, how you aren’t moving, and—perhaps most importantly—how to fit the movements you will discover you need into your everyday life.
I’ll provide plenty of guidance, but you’ll “put the 'work' in the workbook,” journaling answers to questions about your movement history, your current relationship to movement, and what it means to you. You’ll fill in tables showing the movement activities that make up your weeks, and which nutrients—large and small—those activities are giving you. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to create your own personalized movement plan, and keep adapting it as your Movement Why changes.
Here’s a bit from the introduction.
Movement is an essential input for the body, and across the board there’s agreement that we must move our bodies for health and longevity. But there are some issues in this simplicity. Laborers move their body all day long, yet many leave their work due to injury and pain—or worse, must keep working despite the aches. All that movement isn’t making their body feel good. Athletes can train hard and be fantastically fit while they’re performing but end up not being able to move well later in life. Shouldn’t moving now help us move better in the future? And what about those who desire to move more but can’t because it hurts when they move? The simplistic directive to “Just move more!” doesn’t work for many people—it often requires elaboration.
I began using a “movement nutrient” framework fifteen years ago when looking for an efficient way to explain movement in the above variety of experiences and more. I even named my movement company Nutritious Movement because the calorie/macronutrient/micronutrient framework helps people understand the breadth of movement our bodies really need. It helps us understand which movements we aren’t getting enough of and which we might be getting too much of. I’ll reference this framework throughout this book, and I hope that by the end you will see movement in an entirely different light.
In the most general sense, there are three broad classifications of food diets: those balanced in terms of calories and nutrients (the right amount of food containing the correct quantities of macro and micronutrients); those high in calories but low in nutrients (you’re getting enough energy from the calories, but you’re still missing essential nutrients); and those too low in both calories and necessary nutrients. “Movement diets” work in the same way. If “movement calories” are the total units (minutes) of movement you’re getting and “movement nutrients” are the different shapes your body flows through to create that movement, which below sounds the closest to your movement diet?
High-volume, nutrient-dense movement/a well-balanced movement diet:
You move your body a large portion of the day in a way that nourishes all the different body parts and tissue-types, and also develops (or maintains) the movement skills necessary to live your life in a way you find meaningful.
High-volume, low-diversity movement/high-calorie, low-nutrient movement:
You move a lot every day—maybe your work or lifestyle involves lots of physical labor. You might be on your feet all day and almost never sit down for hours at a time. But the way you move is repetitive and uses the same body parts or patterns over and over again, leaving some of your parts strong and other parts lacking. This might describe anyone from a nurse or mail carrier to a competitive cyclist or runner who practices a lot but doesn’t do much cross-training.
Low-volume, low-diversity movement/ low-calorie, nutrient-poor movement:
Most of your time is spent sitting—at home, work, and most places in between. Even if you do get up to exercise every day for an hour, the rest of the time you’re back in the chair or couch. Because you don’t move your whole body much, most of your parts are also not regularly involved in movement. This describes many office workers and people who drive for a living, like bus drivers.
In the following pages, I’m going to walk you through figuring out which movement diet you currently have and then guide you to approaching movement in a brand new way—a way that changes not only how you move, but also how you think about movement and where it “fits” into your life.
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Find your movement “why”
The concept of dietary nutrients arose after people realized that what they ate could affect how their body functioned. But the fact that food affects one’s physiology doesn’t mean that nutrients are the only thing people get from food. Food can also be a source of joy, celebration, and tradition.
Similarly, movement is good for the body, keeps us healthy, and is key to fixing or decreasing symptoms of a wide variety of issues—but those are not the only reasons to move. Movement is the medium that connects us with the experiences and people we love. Most people want to feel better on a daily basis and are interested in living a relatively rich life, but most people also struggle with moving enough. One of the keys to moving consistently is figuring out the deeper reason behind your interest, for your general health and beyond.
Use the questions below to help you identify exactly why you are seeking out movement. As you write out the answers, keep asking yourself if you can go deeper. Answer the questions, then question your answers. Whatever you write, think to yourself, “Well, why?” to drill down to the deepest values you hold. This deepened understanding of your values and motivations makes it much easier to adapt the practice of regular movement to your life.
