By in Sports Physiotherapy, Yoga & Pilates

Movement is Organic, Not Robotic

After 9 years of working within and alongside the fitness industry, I can say that I do have a problem with some of the concepts and customs of how fitness and exercise are commonly taught and practised. That is why I do not often use those the words “fitness” and “exercise” and tend to opt for words like “movement health” and “movement practice” instead.

My issue is not with the ambition to be strong or to challenge our body. On the contrary, I visit the gym 2 to 3 times a week besides my regular pilates and body weight /mat-based practice. I am eagerly thriving to perfect my push-ups and towards being able to do handstands and pull-ups.

And of course, not everyone involved in fitness and exercise contributes to the dysfunctional way the industry is promoted. In fact, I have similar criticism for the pilates industry, that I am part of. -But that is another article…

My issue is with the common way fitness and exercise are perceived, understood and practised, which is so limiting to what we can actually achieve when engaging with our body physically.

First of all: Our muscles are not the only thing that gives us strength.

In the world of fitness, everything tends to be about muscle. It appears as though muscles either need strengthening or stretching. In reality, muscles are only one element in what makes us feel strong and capable. Our fascial network plays a huge role in how we access our strength and the general balance and distribution of forces through our body also plays a key role. Likewise, our nervous system, from our mindset about what we believe we are or are not capable off, to the way our nerve endings are “wired” to our muscular system has a huge impact on our physical abilities.

In the gym, the traditional machines give us the idea that we can strengthen individual muscle groups to get stronger. It simply is not as straight forward as this. The body is not made up of individual muscles that hold individual strength. Each muscle has a role to play in a complex orchestra of movement and capability that is dependent on many many things

Secondly: Our body does not work like a machine.

With the language that is commonly used in the fitness industry, it is easy to get the idea that the body works in a robotic sort of way. We “switch on” or “contract” muscles to do certain movements and that’s how we are told we move safely. It is difficult to understand how this way of thinking about movement even came from. After all, that is not how we started to learn moving when we were toddlers. And just what amazing movers are little children?

First of all, it is rather doubtful that switching on individual muscles is actually possible in the way we imagine, after all, every individual muscle is tightly webbed together with other muscles. It also is a very inefficient and unhealthy way of going about moving. It is as though we switch off all our instincts about how we have evolved our movement patterns since we developed in the womb and override it all with cognitive thinking. If you have been told to engage this or that muscle and breath at certain points you may have wondered how you are to replicate this when you are outside the gym. Well, the truth is that you probably won’t, because your brain will be busy doing other things and instinct takes over. What would be more useful is to reawaken and stimulate your instinctive movement patterns by engaging somatically with gravity, space and breath and to allow the whole of your body to engage with the challenge.

Thirdly: You do not have to assume you are rubbish, unfit, not doing it right etc.

What I have noticed over the years is that we as a people seem to have completely shattered our confidence about our physical abilities at some point. People keep telling me over and over how unfit they are and how terrible they are at whatever movement, sport, exercise they are attempting. The fitness industry, rightly, inspires us to what amazing things the human body is capable of if we choose to take care of it and engage with it intensively. The downside to this, however, is that many of us feel intimidated and left behind by the trend. It is easy to feel ashamed of our not so perfect bodies in comparison to what we see on Instagram, especially when there is a lack of explanation about the actual values of what we are doing. And it is easy to feel left behind when we are of an older age group or dealing with health conditions or injuries that mean we can not work out in the same straight forward way others can.

The truth is that if you are kind to your body and engaging with it in a way that feels safe and good, that will be tremendously valuable for you. You do not need to compare yourself to anyone. It is not about achieving whatever they are doing. It is just about you and what feels right and good to you. They know nothing about what it is like to be you and you do not know what hidden pains and issues they have while they show you their 50 perfect push-ups.

Fourthly: Why work out hard if you can work out smart?

Last but not least a real problem I see in the fitness industry is this idea that whatever the exercise is, it has to be challenging in the sense that you feel your muscles burn to fatigue. The thing is, that if that is my goal, I can make that happen really easily. In fact, many of us who spend enough time in the fitness industry learn to move inefficiently, so that our muscles fatigue faster than they should. It makes us feel like we are really working hard, which equals building stronger muscles faster. I understand the idea of building muscular strength as one element of what might make us more capable, but again, muscle strength is by far not the only thing that helps us be more physically capable. In fact, if we rely on this tactic for too long we are on the best way to creating wear and tear and exhaustion in our body. My leg muscles, for instance, might be perfectly capable to get me up the stairs in terms of strength. But I will have learned to walk up the stairs in a way that really makes my muscles work hard, fatiguing them and leaving me with tight hip flexors, knee pain or back pain. Instead, it would be more clever to seek effortlessness and efficiency in the physical activity of stair climbing. Rather than just making our muscles stronger it would be useful to consider our whole body and the subtle strategies that allow our body to feel connected, light and springy as we move. The muscles will obtain their strength as we then are able to climb stairs for longer.

Let’s remember that we are all capable of movement. Moving comes as natural to us as talking, seeing and hearing. We all have many years of experience in moving around. We have started learning it from an early age and we were our own first teacher. We learned to roll over, how to crawl, sit up, stand, walk and run without a professional showing us how. We did brilliantly for many years before we decided somehow that we are bad at it.

Sure sometimes adult modern life can deprive us of sufficient movement experience and we feel our abilities decline. There is nothing wrong with seeking help and support and dedicating time to regain our “fitness”. But let’s do it in an organic way. Let’s let our whole body take part in it. Let’s reconnect to our original instincts of how to do it well. And let’s be kind while ambitions and feel good about ourselves!

If you would like to explore such a way of improving your fitness explore Kristin’s studio club classes or her mat-based functional fun class. For more info on those classes contact Kristin at The Body Matters on 01702 714968.

Kristin Loeer
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