In previous posts I described why alignment is important and how it can be taught within an exercise class setting. You can find those here: 

Part 1

Part 2

This time I’d like to discuss my particular purpose for teaching alignment and movement skills instead of leading an exercise routine whose purpose is to get you sweaty and sore. 

I’d like to be part of the movement to change the paradigm of our purpose for going to classes. 

Many in the fitness profession have the business model of giving people a workout which exerts your muscles to the point of fatigue and leaves you in a puddle of sweat. This is giving people the “exercise feels” which is the feeling of having “achieved” something through your body signaling that it is exhausted. Don’t get me wrong: these workouts can be fun and they have their place if you have certain performance goals and if you can respect your body’s limits. The business model works because it delivers an immediate sensation and satisfies our culture’s belief that anything worth doing must be hard and exhausting (This is where “no pain no gain” came from. Thankfully now, that slogan is out of favor due to how it encourages people to push past their limits and risk injury).

So, what’s wrong or missing from this model? People need to workout to be healthy, right? Also, people only have a limited time to get their workout in when balancing work, family and other life commitments, so why not get the biggest “bang for your buck” in the allotted time at the gym/class? 

Let’s start with this premise which I have often heard from my teacher Katy Bowman: 

“The body doesn’t adapt to our best intentions, but rather to what we do most often.” 

Although the 1 hour or so of a hard workout will indeed have an effect on your muscles, the movements and shapes you put your body through (or don’t put your body through) for the other 16-23  hours of the day has a much greater effect on our functionality and health. 

Back to the “exercise feels”: 

When we exercise, we get the endorphin rush, we feel the burn in our muscles and the soreness after that lets us know we’ve done the work. These are the  sensations and body feedback that, in the short term, satisfies our craving for movement in a mostly sedentary lifestyle. It’s also something we have been conditioned to think we need to feel to offset our sedentarism and comfort-focused lifestyle. Even if we’re someone who dreads the feeling of “working out”- becoming sore and tired- it’s the chore we think our body needs to endure in order to stay healthy… 

But is this true? 

What if all that tiredness and soreness is just a sign that we’ve pushed ourselves too far beyond our present capabilities? 

Sure, the body has received the signal that it’s required to do more than it’s used to and therefore will try to repair and grow the muscles to be stronger, but if we then spend the rest of the day NOT moving in the ways we did in our workout the body then receives the signals that all those movements are not really needed. 

The body is listening to what we require it to do ALL the time and adjusting to have the most efficient body for those requirements. 

Said again: 1 hour of working really hard and the body says “oh no! I’m not conditioned for that, I better build a body for those things.” Then 16-23 hours of being relatively sedentary and the body gets the message: “oh nevermind, that was a false alarm. I should adapt for this non-moving way of life.” 

What if conditioning could come from a more consistent message given to all parts of the body. That would require setting up your lifestyle and habits to move more and to move more of you throughout the whole day.

Learning these principles and habits takes time, and it may be a slower progression with less immediate reward. Those running a business in the old model may know the principles but object to taking the time necessary to teach these skills because it won’t give the clients the “exercise feels” in the same way and that might risk losing clients if they don’t understand or feel the immediate benefits. 

So, I understand the desire for the “exercise feels”. BUT, I believe the feeling of your body working well ALL the time is much better. And in the end, it really is a much better “bang for your buck.”

If you spend the time in classes or get coaching to build awareness and knowledge of principles and skills of alignment and better movement, then you can take that knowledge and those skills into your whole day, building better habits, which in turn results in you moving better, and therefore FEELING better for your whole life. 

Taking the long term perspective (skills vs. immediate feeling) I believe is so empowering. Once you feel better in your body, you’ll move more, and more movement will continue to help you feel better - it’s a positive cycle. 

I’ve said the same thing in a few ways now… but this is the message I’d like to convey: 

By building habits and skills for movement, how you move your body all day long is coaxing the body toward health. It doesn’t require high intensity working out all the time, but instead more frequency and consistency of movement. 

That’s why I teach alignment principles with Restorative Exercise and movement skills with Mov Nat. We use the class as our laboratory to learn the sklls of how to move better and then we continue that movement out in the world: from the most quotidian of movements such as walking, standing, and sitting, to more environmental and situational challenges such as jumping, climbing, running, lifting, and carrying.

Move More. Move more of you. Feel better in your body. Feel free to live your life.