Over the summer, I worked on a certification as a Wellness Coach. It is not surprising that movement is an important aspect of wellness and one that plays well with what I already know and do. However, movement for wellness is a little different than what I usually do with my personal training and Pilates clients. I’m going to explore what wellness-directed movement looks like in my posts this week.
The basic distinction I want to make is between movement and exercise. Movement is the larger category and includes exercise, but you don’t have to do exercise to get moving. One way to think about the two is that often exercise has a particular goal—to improve strength or cardio, to get more flexible. Movement is a little more free-floating. A stroll around the block at a leisurely pace is movement, but it may or may not be exercise, depending on the level of fitness of the walker in question.
Movement is really good for us. Our bodies work better when we move them and our brains do, too. I know there are a lot of us who don’t like exercise, whether it’s because we had a terrible experience in gym class or because we think it has to involve giant weights and big sweaty guys or any of a million other reasons. But movement can be as simple as dancing around the kitchen with the kids when our song comes on, or taking the dog around the block, or challenging your partner to see which one of you can slide farther down the hall in socks.
Especially when we’ve been best friends with the couch for a long time, it’s important to realize that any movement, even a quick stand-up stretch between meetings, will help us. We may find that we want to move on to exercise eventually or we may not, but we’ll be better for the effort.
