Movement is Medicine
When we think of the physical aspect of health we tend to think of ‘working out’.
“No pain, no gain, Bro!”
Whether you think of pumping iron in a weights room, running a 5k, or getting your groove on in an aerobics class, the end result is usually imagined the same way – sweating in a heap and gasping like landed fish.
Whilst this approach definitely has its place, it is nowhere near the full picture. In fact it would be just one small snippet of the movement aspect of health.
At Wild Life, we work in conjunction with the Ancestral Health approach to health and fitness. This means incorporating movement patterns and modalities that work optimally with how we are biologically designed to move day to day.
By incorporating resistance training, slow aerobic work, higher intensity sessions, natural movements, mobility routines, micro workouts and mindful movements we pretty much cover all potential bases.
Rather than focusing on particular body parts we work with fundamental human patterns:
- gait patterns – walking/running etc
- hinging
- squatting
- pushing
- pulling
- rotating and anti-rotational movements
- quadrupedal movement – crawling and rolling
- balancing
- carrying
- throwing
- jumping
The list goes on. Each pattern will have many crossovers with the others. We try to build our sessions around a number of these to give you a full body stimulus, whether you’re looking to improve mobility, gain muscle, lose fat or increase work capacity.
Our overall philosophy to movement based health is that ‘movement is medicine’.
We encourage our clients to move often and in as varied a way as they can. We think of movement in the same way as nutrition. Eating salad for 1 hour, 3 times a week is great, but it’s not going to negate the fact that we are eating cake for the rest of our waking hours. Equally working out hard for 1 hour, 3 times a week may be helping our health, but it’s clear that it is not enough to counteract the countless hours many of us spend sitting in our jobs, our cars, and our homes. Now we even have the term ‘Active Couch Potato Syndrome’, where people who exercise daily are still suffering the same ill health markers as their inactive counterparts, due to being sedentary for the rest of the day. Sitting is the new smoking.
So rather than ‘bingeing’ on movement, we advocate lots of healthy, nutritious movement ‘snacks’ throughout the day.
We use a multi-modality approach to movement health, combining resistance strength training, low level aerobic work, mobility and harder work capacity sessions to create a well-rounded, functional, anti-fragile human athlete.
Lifting heavy things will not make you bulky (if only it were that easy!), running will not ‘kill your gainz’, and mobility is not the sole domain of lycra clad yogis.
Our ancestors lifted heavy things, moved over great distances, occasionally sprinted, and had to go all out from time to time. They were constantly putting themselves through a full range of motions – squatting, crawling, climbing, jumping. Fitness and exercise wasn’t a thing, it was just called, living. And it was this constant, varied movement that made human beings such robust and adaptable creatures. To our mind, this approach is still just as vital today for making dynamic, healthy people.
“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
Socrates
