Still Life with Hypertension
MOTION IS THE LOTION
Note: This is a revision and (heavy) rewrite of a 2013 Leftfield 101 essay.
The science of circadian rhythms and our evolutionary mismatch detailed last week may feel abstract, but the implications hit close to home. That we’ve traded survival for convenience is hardly a bad thing, it has to be said, until we make it so.
When we’re out of sync with the natural rhythms that once sustained us, certainly, nothing else comes close to exercise for the mental and physical advantages it offers either in combatting this specifically or more generally but with the exercise box ticked it’s also about where our efforts end.
And look, I’m all too aware few of us get even this far. So it’s with some trepidation — after 14 years of doing so, I’m still no closer to knowing just how, or more specifically when— I broach the next little chestnut because it’s rarely well received.
I do know like everything else it comes after we get exercise, in some form, up and running in your life. Exercise has a positive—normalising— influence and will often improve sleep quality, dietary intake, mood, energy etc across the board, all by itself, nevertheless — I’m just going to say it— it is not enough.
Worse still, even should you transcend ‘exercise’, even allowing for the far greater efficiencies and efficacy of training it’s still not enough. And, at least part of the reason why so few persist with and ever develop anything close to an ongoing fitness practice, is because we ask and expect too much.
That a mere 3 hours a week will somehow turn the tide.
But once you’ve acknowledged the need for exercise and begun the considerable and never-ending work of a fitness practice this makes many want to throw their hands in the air and say what else do you want from me? And some do.
Only, as ever, I don’t want anything from you—I am but pointing back to your body and the fact it’s telling you what it needs all the time.
Waking to an alarm every day. The bleary morning that somehow segues straight into the afternoon slump and after-work crash. Poor gut health. Pain, tension, irritability, a general and total malaise. Disrupted sleep patterns, endless —always eating or thinking about—eating and consuming poor quality foodstuffs when you do and surfing coffee to Redbull to wineglass is standard.
And it’s true, you can’t just go and live in a forest. But that is only to neatly sidestep what you can do.
If you can’t get early morning exposure to sunlight, to rise and set with the sun, can you regulate wake and sleep times?
If you can’t fast for part of the day can you stick to meal times? And eat mostly food when you do eat.
Can you enjoy a morning coffee or two and then drink water, saving alcohol for special occasions or even just a couple of nights a week?
If you don’t want to do ice baths or sauna could you end your showers with the cold tap for 10, 20 or 30 seconds? Could you use aircon only to smooth out temperature extremes?
Every time you hit snooze or snack on the go is not only further reinforcement of that behaviour but responding to an environment your biology doesn’t recognise. To move in the other direction is never black and white but a spectrum, do what you can. You decide. But make your decision an informed one. Do what is required to move the needle, to see and feel the difference, and then decide.
As I said, not to make your life difficult. If it doesn't fall into the 'I can’t believe how great this is, I wish I'd always done this’ column don’t do it, but further note that reporting— it didn’t work for me— only points to a failure of consistency or adherence. Or something else is wrong.
You are not the sole exception to the gravitational pull of any hard-wired zeitgebers and while you may choose otherwise, they always work.
Structured training, is vital—but fitness —is equally a product of the small, intentional acts that punctuate your day and keep your body in conversation with its surroundings, even in light of which we are yet to address the biggest problem by far: not moving.
Whether they do anything about it or not, those who don’t exercise rarely need to be disabused of the notion they better do something about it. By contrast, plenty of regular exercisers believe that’s their movement taken care of, full stop.
And stop they do. Or more to the point, stop they can. Because in our disembodied world — just like exercise— movement must now be contrived. A further sign of just how wrong we’ve gone.
In response to his observations of the physical, moral, and practical shortcomings of physical education and fitness practices in early 20th-century France, Georges Hébert’s Méthode naturelle sought to bring the rigours— and results— of military training to broader society. In 1960, in an essay titled The Soft American published in Sports Illustrated, JFK wrote:
the physical well-being of the American people is declining and that their strength and stamina are not what they ought to be... This alarming decline is not confined to children or adolescents. It is a problem which runs through all age groups of the population, and its roots are deep in the way we live. Overeating, overdrinking, too little exercise and too much comfort are all factors.
A year later, in his address to The President’s Council on Physical Fitness adding:
A physical system of automatic conveniences and sedentary comforts has left too many Americans physically unprepared for the challenges they must face, whether on the battlefield or in their daily lives.
Recognising the physical deterioration brought about by technological advancement the La Sierra System was modelled in high schools nationwide producing a level of fitness unthinkable by today’s standards.
Unthinkable, because today’s standards are non-existent. But these fitness programs instituted in schools and adopted by society more broadly have long fallen by the wayside
While optimistically named even then the ‘Phys. Ed’ I got as a kid amounted to a game of Bullrush a couple of times a week so it was hardly a physical education, nonetheless, we would have given any 60’s American kid a right shakeup La Sierra system and all. Nowadays fitness comes a long last behind more ‘important’ academic pursuits and here we are.
As we’ve become increasingly sedentary, we’ve seen the rise of first-world diseases of affluence — obesity, diabetes and heart disease. ‘Lifestyle’ diseases as they are now called, sickeningly.
And that soft American would have us for breakfast. We merely look like we ate him.
But the very idea of progress has been antithetical to movement, and, correspondingly health, for a long time now. A remote control — invented in the 1950s — that, arguably, made some sense in a time of physical work and other daily manual labour, is now but one less reason for even more critical movement, much less more modern sources of stagnation and stupefaction.
Excepting very few jobs, even maintaining fitness through our work or daily life is a relic of an earlier time. You likely work from home, and much of your life can be conducted from a chair. Again, confusion between technological advancement and progress. But somewhere between handwashing your laundry and pushing a button for everything, there’s got to be a better Goldilocks sweet spot than the one we’re in.
Mark Twain once observed that the ‘man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot’ and we are fast becoming physically illiterate by choice. Our unbounded technological advancement has long outstripped the limits of the flesh with not even the pretence of prodding it along.
So it only gets more difficult. You rarely have to move to do anything so our inertia is increasingly upset only by the contrived. Some tech colostomy bag can’t be far off and then we’ll be free to go nowhere, to get back to our roots, you might say.
MOVEMENT IS (INTELLIGENT) LIFE
And nothing less than the raison d’etre of your entire nervous system. Your brain’s original purpose had nothing to do with quadratic equations, poetry, love, or music. Not even basic unadorned thought.
As determined by neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás, the brain evolved not to think or feel but to control movement. In his 2002 book I of the Vortex, he traces the early evolution of the mind through the organism Urochordata, known as the sea squirt, which in its mobile, larvae stage will swim to a rock — or other stationary object — and thereby affix itself. Forever.
With movement no longer required, the brain and nervous systems are redundant and metabolically expensive so with the beautiful efficiency of nature, it solves for both by consuming them.
Our nervous system comes courtesy of similar Chordata (spinal cord/vertebrate) ancestors who, eventually, got sick of waiting for food to come to them and figured they might like to eat out occasionally. If that’s not kicker enough for the primacy of movement, Llinas goes one better in positing that:
The central generation of movement and the generation of mindness are deeply related; they are in fact different parts of the same process. In my view, from its very evolutionary inception mindness is the internalization of movement.
It is hardly surprising that everything goes sideways in its absence when our minds only mirror the stagnation of our bodies.
Movement and mental health are deeply intertwined. This is a two-way street and the same as our posture or movement sends signals to others, indicating our emotions and intentions, the body readily transmits the same - boredom, laziness, or enthusiasm to itself.
Since, even where, in your opinion, there is least use of the body—in thinking—who does not know that, even here, many greatly falter because their body is not healthy? And forgetfulness, dispiritedness, peevishness, and madness frequently attack the thought of many due to the bad condition of their body, so as to drive out even the sciences.
Socrates
Revealed in language like sprightly, moping and wallowing, movement—or its absence—is faithfully transcribed to your state of mind. Somatic practices and neurobiological evidence reinforce this bidirectional relationship with brain disorders including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and depression now also linked to being sedentary. It won’t be long before we see them added to the ‘lifestyle’ collection also.
If there’s a bright side here it’s that when now at a point where we all have a lifestyle disease to look forward to, ‘better’ is a very low bar.
So what to do then?
Unwind the present— take the stairs, leave the car at home or park further away, take movement ‘snacks’ regularly throughout the day, and leave the remote beside the TV. Get a Lab X Kelpie. That’ll take care of it, guaranteed. But also understand that more movement isn’t necessarily better.
FLUID, EFFICIENT MOVEMENT IS THE BASELINE
For those of us who don’t have a game on Saturday night or a time trial on Monday morning, the greatest benefit we can derive from training is in improving the quality of our movement. The exact opposite of the Olympic ideal, your initial focus is on slower, lower and weaker. Help the brain to accurately map your movement patterns, to detect inefficiencies.
But this extends to movement more generally and the decline in our quantity of movement means there has been a corresponding decline in the quality of it.
A martial art or a dance class is ideal for developing coordinated fluid movement but, as a general rule, slow down. Be the tortoise. Make it look good and only then then speed it up. Whatever our aspirations in fitness (or sports), rather than a detour, this only serves to accelerate our ultimate goals. All too often people push into more and more movement while never feeling better, stronger or in less pain. Sooner or later, we all experience some form of limitation or restriction but when you further recognise this is only echoed in the mind a focus on quality— and rehab— is paramount.
You are a highly complex anatomical structure evolved to perform a series of movements — crawl, walk, run, climb, jump, swim and fight. You are capable of lifting, throwing, jumping and dancing. You have a brain and central nervous system solely for that reason. By focusing on quality of movement and developing a heightened sense of body awareness, you enrich and refine your body's language, moving from gibberish to poetry, from noise to music.
Your body is the instrument and medium through which you engage in life.
Tune it.
Enjoy your weekend.
- OLI