Do you have a movement practice?

Posted by: Michelle Newsome   Date: 19 February 2019

I first came across the term ‘movement practice’ when I was listening to Kelly Starrett’s 5- minute YouTube videos, Mobility WOD.  It struck a cord because it made so much sense.   Its not rocket science; maintaining a healthy body can be as simple as moving well and moving often.  In addition to whatever sport you play or exercise you enjoy, adopting a movement practice is essential to moving well and moving freely.

A movement practice can be anything from Feldenkrais to Tai chi to Pilates, Yoga, martial arts or body balance classes. It is a movement routine, which focuses on conscious movement that emphasises the link between your mind and your body.  It helps us to slow down and understand how our body is moving and how we can improve the way we move.

A regular movement practice can also help with managing stress and teaching us to slow down and pause from time to time.  Without knowing, many of us have an autonomic nervous system (ANS), which is significantly out of balance.  Our ANS consist of three systems; sympathetic nervous system (SNS), parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) and enteric nervous system (ENS).   These control systems work together unconsciously and regulate bodily functions such as heart rate, breathing rate, digestion, pupillary response (pupils), urination and sexual arousal and modulate our immune and endocrine functions.   Our SNS is described as our “fight or flight” response or our quick response mobilising system and works to speed things up (i.e. heart rate, breathing pattern etc.) whereas our PNS does the opposite, it slows things down.

Acute stress, which is a sudden response to a threatening situation, stimulates our SNS and releases adrenaline and norepinephrine.  These hormones dissolve quickly in the body and do not linger.  On the other hand chronic stress, stress over a long period of time, releases a third hormone called cortisol which can linger in our bodies.  High levels of cortisol can contribute to a number of physical health problems such as digestive problems, weight gain, inflammation, high blood pressure, hearth disease and diabetes.

Adopting a movement practice is an ideal way to get in touch with your body and health.  It is often gentle but can be very challenging despite your fitness level and how well you think you may move.  A movement practice specifically encourages efficient, full, controlled movement range and patterns.  Learning to move efficiently will also result in improved sporting performance and reduce the chance of injury.  If we can recognise our body’s limitations and or compensations then it will be so much easier to learn to move in a more efficient and fluid way.  Opening ourselves up to a completely new movement experience may also lead to discovering something new about ourselves.