Home Body

How do you think about movement when you’re back at home and in full relaxation mode? That might not seem like a reasonable question to someone swirled up in a duvet or sprawled out on a couch. So, I want to be clear: I’m not saying that you should disrupt your vibes in these moments, so much as be open to adding to your recovery. Here, you relax more effectively by giving your body a break from repetitive stimuli and through a bit of curiosity and creativity. Let’s get into some examples:

In bed

There is a classic catch-22, where an injury messes with your sleep and your sleep messes with your recovery. Some of the simplest fixes are positioning your pillows. Snug under the arm for shoulder issues. Between the knees for the ole lower-back. In fact, I started thinking about this email when I recently found myself wanting to traction my lower back, which I achieved by finding a semi-fetal position on my side and draping my top leg behind me. I’m not saying that you should do this — just that there might be some positions that are worth exploring. For the record, I woke up feeling terrific. Some less weird examples from the Mayo Clinic below:

Lazy yoga

If you’re laying around watching Netflix, reading, scrolling, or whatever it is that humans do in the 21st century, you can experiment with creating slightly more demanding positions. A whisper. A scintilla. Slightly less lazy. Perhaps it’s opening up your hips a bit more. Or finding a position that requires a tiny bit more stability. Lazy, here, means that your conscious involvement is not required.
 

The advantage of this approach is that it exposes you to a more diverse range of positions and allows some tissues to rest a little more while loading is transferred elsewhere.

Micro-workouts

These babies were a saviour during the pandemic. Micro-workouts are about doing the same things you were going to do anyway — unload the dishwasher, climb the stairs, etc — and then playing around with ways to make these quotidian tasks more energetic, more creative, and more challenging. The micro-workout strategy channels the Blue Zones approach of more demanding everyday physical environments without having to go to the trouble of moving to a Sardinian mountainside or Arctic lake (see below) to get them.

Celebrate movement

One of the white whales of metabolic research is non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT). This is all the moving around that happens outside of exercise. We know a few interesting things about NEAT:

• 1. NEAT will adjust to counterbalance big changes in nutritional intake. So, a sudden reduction in calories will sometimes lead to unconsciously-mediated drops in spontaneous physical activity. This is why gentler changes are often best practice when the goal is to create a net caloric deficit.
• 2. NEAT can vary wildly. To the tune of 2,000 Cal/day. This is thought to be mostly genetic variation.
• 3. As much as researchers have looked for ways to increase NEAT via medication, etc, nothing has passed muster in terms of evidence. You might have heard some things about (highly metabolic) brown fat via influencer-flavoured science but unless you’re living in extremely cold conditions for 16 hours a day, this is not a thing.

HOWEVER…

There is something that I believe to be quite important in that I want to share with you: You can apply skills and emotions to increasing movement.

Skills

Learn to work with pain in a functional and optimistic way. We can help with that, of course.

Emotions

Here’s the big one: celebrate any and all movement that feels good. It’s a joy — even if we forget that sometimes. When you are grateful for any opportunity to move, and find the enjoyment in doing so, you begin to seek out extra movement opportunities organically. Emotions create habits. That’s not an opinion; that’s the science of the whole thing, which is — and I hope you will forgive me for ending things in this way — pretty NEAT.