CHANGING LIVES THROUGH INTELLIGENT MOVEMENT
Do you want to feel more energy and ease in your life?
Do you want to live to a healthy age – and still be able to enjoy life?
I’m just back from a 4 day Pilates workshop on the importance of movement for a long AND fulfilling life. The course challenged us to encourage healthier habits for ourselves and our clients. Some interesting tidbits of information and research included:
- People who live in areas that rely on public transportation live longer. This includes London and New York. It is hypothesized that the extra walking to/from public transport improves health whereas the suburban lifestyle of driving and parking within close proximity is detrimental to long term health
- You can not “out run” a sedentary lifestyle. A daily movement practice will help, but nothing beats regular movement throughout the day
- Pilates exercises are designed to give clients experience and access to new and more efficient movement. Returning straight to the car and sitting may impact the chance to fully integrate these new movements into the nervous system
The purpose of our Pilates classes is to allow people to experience more movement – so they can keep doing what they love. But maybe to truly achieve this goal we need to go one step further and challenge our members to find more movement in other aspects of their lives as well. One of the methods we were taught on the weekend was to re frame our language and mindset. When we see “restrictions of movement” in our clients, we were taught to re frame it as “opportunities to gain movement”.
This re framing works great outside of the Pilates session as well.
- What opportunities for movement are you missing?
- Is school pickup another task to be squeezed in, or an opportunity for movement?
- Is the walk from the carpark an inconvenience or an opportunity to add a few hundred extra steps to your day?
- Is the lift that takes too long to come wasting your time, or an opportunity to use the stairs?
I challenge you this week to find those extra moments of movement and re frame them as a positive – because we all know that to keep doing what you love, you have to keep moving.
