Why movement matters, right now.

As a mobile being your body has a built-in desire to stay active. Movement is a form of expression not solely reserved for creative types like dancers and gymnasts. It’s a form of freedom, and a form of stress relief.

Subconsciously your body knows this to be true. When you remain still or seated for too long at a desk or on an airplane, notice how long it takes to get fidgety. Eventually you have to get up and walk about. You may find yourself stretching individual muscle groups as commanded by the loudest sore spot screaming for blood flow circulation.

Until we lose the right to move about in normal healthy ways, our functioning limbs don’t typically rise-up and express their opinions. But once restricted to small physical spaces for any period of time, the nervous system gets twitchy.

Chances are pretty good right now you’re self-isolating from “the virus”. I call it not by its formal names because quite frankly seeing the alpha-numeric ALL CAPS code and the lower case version (which I’ll admit I laughed at in the early days too due to its similarity to the well-known beer brand), impacts my mood poorly. One click-bait news story leads to the next, and before I know it I’m overtaken by a deep indescribable sadness about the state of humanity in this snapshot in time.

You may not have the privilege to work from home, or you may be one of our healthcare workers on the front lines, and if so, I thank you. I started working from home two weeks ago after my communications agency quickly and wisely set in place our office’s isolation procedures. In our daily online status meeting yesterday I learned a new term passed on by one of my senior creative colleagues. It comes from the field of psychology and rightly applies to anyone facing this crisis of our times: Allostatic load.

Allostatic load is defined by the International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences as, the cost of chronic exposure to elevated or fluctuating endocrine or neural responses resulting from repeated challenges that an individual experiences as stressful.

Movement is medicine.

When broken out into its many beautiful parts, the body is made up of intricate systems: muscular, skeletal, endocrine, cardiovascular, respiratory, nervous (etc.) which work together symbiotically without our having to do anything. Thing is, you can’t separate them. All these parts come wrapped-up in one incredible package: you.

Although internal struggle and suffering have always been part of the human condition, due to this global pandemic it’s safe to say that right now everyone’s reality houses some form of it. So many have already lost their jobs or businesses. Others working from home are struggling to balance child rearing, home-schooling and client calls with few boundaries left to separate work-life from home-life. With this much compounded stress occurring all at once, how do people cope?

In the name of self-preservation to soothe the intensity of Allostatic load, if the news makes you sad or angry, by all means switch it off, stop reading for a few days. When you want to binge-eat treats, binge Netflix, or feel compelled to binge anything, allow yourself some wiggle room for these comforts, but remember in the grand scheme of things this should be a temporary fix. It’s not the ideal solution to cope with stress. Over time, binging anything will create more stress on your body.

Minds: listen to your body’s. While most of us are being asked to restrict our movements outside of the home for the health and safety of all, this doesn’t mean we should restrict movement altogether. In fact, the opposite is true. Already a well-known preventative measure to fight disease and even reverse the effects of aging (when combined with a personalized nutrition plan), movement is medicine.

Think of being stuck indoors as the opportunity of a lifetime to re-prioritize fitness and make small, repeatable changes in your every day behaviour to improve your overall health and wellness, for future-you.

If you’re feeling the need to get up get out and be somewhere, welcome to your body’s inner voice! The act of moving is your mind’s way of accepting your body’s challenge to be heard.

More than ever before, we need to listen to that voice. Find ways to get active and stay active today, even if that means plank-off’s (compete with your family or room-mate!), jumping on the spot (pretend you have a rope so you don’t actually break something you can’t replace yet), or sitting against a wall in a seated position (without the chair of course). 

If your breathing is normal (meaning, you haven't been bothered by any respiratory health problems lately), you need to elevate your heart rate for 20 minutes a day, every day. Why? Times seven, that’s roughly how many minutes per week it takes to technically qualify as maintaining an active lifestyle. How do you know you're doing it? About halfway through give-or-take, you're going to sweat. (If you don't, don't sweat it. Next time push yourself a bit harder.) If you miss a day that's ok! Plan for tomorrow. Just know it will change your mental outlook, a more critical survival factor as of late.

An increased heart rate will lift your mood.

I know I make it sound easy, and some of you already found this time hard to find before isolation so are wondering, "how on earth will I find it now?" Pro Tip: you will never find the time. This is the cheapest health insurance you can get. Build the time into your day. Ask for help for those 20 minutes. Quite often our minds rebel against the idea because it sounds like more work, and it sounds like discomfort.

Friends, your body and all its systems are asking you for this one thing because at the molecular level the body knows what’s best. Right now, the fastest drug on the market to boost your mood during our global crisis is a built-in generator of serotonin, dopamine and adrenaline created naturally for you - through physical fitness. It’s a happiness cocktail. You don’t need a treadmill, stair climber or even free-weights. All you need is a stopwatch (hello mobile phone!), and a body.

I’m not going to list all the things you can try at home while stuck inside. You know how to use a search engine and you’ve probably already seen or bookmarked a few at-home fitness ideas so far on this journey of isolation.

What I will list below are my Top 3 States of Mind you can try yourself the next time your body screams at you to be active but your mind attempts to self-sabotage.

1. Stop overthinking
2. Just do it*
3. Yes, you can

Being asked to self-isolate should not be a sentence to remain seated with your seatbelts fastened at all times until the Captain turns the light off. You don’t have to love fitness, but if you understand the role of an elevated heart rate to improve the function of your brain, improve your mood, and temporarily alter your state of mind allowing you to support your loved ones and better service your workplace, you should act now.

May this time in history remind you to connect with your body too.

By Penny Greening

• Masters Figure and Fit Body athlete, WNBF Canada
• Planning committee member for National Health & Fitness Day 2020
• Account Director, If Communications Ltd.

*"Just do it" shout-out to Nike agency Wieden+Kennedy for penning this sage fitness advice.