What is movement practice?
Up until now we have been discussing peoples’ common attitudes towards movement and exercise through the use of archetypes and by clarifying some commonly used (or dare I say, misused) terms pertaining to movement practice. I’d like now to switch gears slightly to take a closer look at what I mean conceptually by movement practice, and then further along in this work, why it is important to investigate the form yours takes and your relationship with it.
Double-edged sword
We live in an interesting time in which the sharing and ingesting of information is ludicrously easy, probably to the point which it is making us less good learners (a topic for another sort of essay). With this ease of sharing of information- both of the practical and educational variety, but sometimes also the useless and intimate details of the personal lives of our distant acquaintances and what they had for #healthydinner last night- people are more health conscious than ever. In the time it takes to type in a sentence into Google, or your credit card number to Amazon Prime, you can have access to a plethora of websites, books, and other resources teaching how to be healthier. This heightened health-consciousness, however, comes with a double edge. On the one side, we have an increase in awareness of the benefits of making more time for movement and exercise in our lives. On the other side there risksbeing too much information, misinformation, and the lure to compare ourselves to the others.
As one of my favourite ballet teachers said countless times, “where your attention goes, energy flows”. For those of us who want to include more movement in our lives as part of a healthy lifestyle plan, this abundance of information makes this both an amazing, and yet confusing and challenging time in which we must choose where we want to focus our attention, and discipline ourselves to have a healthy, pragmatic relationship with the information we ingest (and this includes the words I write, too).
This idea of sifting through the rubbish, separating the wheat from the chaff, seems like as good a place as any to start to conceptualize a movement practice. Let’s bring our attention now to the mass of information that tells us what we should do, what is best for us, while remembering that “they” can’t possibly know what is best for you. I certainly don’t. “The others” don’t. It’s only you who can know, and don’t you know it already how difficult it is to interpret the information coming from your own body, let alone trust someone else to do it for you.
Movements and markets within movement
As I’ve mentioned, there is an abundance of information and a surging awareness of the world of health and fitness. Inspiration to move (or, more colloquially, “fit-spiration”, another double-edged sword, which I feel, more often than not, serves to activate our body-image based shame-triggers than provide actual inspiration) exists just a click away. New vocabularies are developing around movement culture and people are latching onto identifiers for their movement and exercise philosophies. We are seeing the advent of “movements” in peoples’ movement practices.
A movement “movement” is seen by us as a new paradigm for organizing how we perform movements and exercise. A system with its own sense of purpose, ideals, and goals. People are drawn to these movements because something about the look and feel of it seems to resonate with them. There is a perceived congruence in the underlying beliefs and goals that both the individual and the movement hold. Often, identifying with a movement (both in movement practices and in other areas of life, such as the intellectual, political, or spiritual) can bring a great sense of meaning and purpose, helping to create a sustainability effect that is necessary for a life-long, pleasurable relationship with the movement practice. If you hate it and don’t find fulfillment in your movement practice, you won’t stick with it long enough to reap its benefits, which is why “enjoyable” is one of the three tenets of a movement practice that I keep repeating (the other two being fulfilling and healthy).
Sometimes this relationship with a movement is not so healthy. Some movements can be cultish. Some movements are well-intentioned but poorly led, leading to misinformation and injury (Cross-Fit often gets flack for this). Sometimes there are movement wars and clashes, debating which one is better than the other: Marathon running vs high-intensity -interval training; powerlifting vs weightlifting (and you’ll find some nasty, useless, and time-wasting exchanges in online forums, of which I personally have no interest in engaging with). Sometimes we’re drawn to movements for the wrong reasons, like that we’re physically attracted to one of its founding leaders, and confuse this for a congruence with our goals. Latching ignorantly onto a movement is another double edged sword of the movement practice exploration.
There is also the irresistible lure to the new and shiny. Ironically, while the advent of a “new” movement can seem like a groundbreaking, sophisticated, or “high-tech” (our interpretation: better) way of interacting with our bodies, many of these movements are only building upon or repackaging something intrinsic to us that already exists, and has always existed, but just that we forgot was there and needed to create a new way of experiencing it again. Some are more or less sensible than others, more or less in line with your individual goals than others, but what all these movements within movement have in common is something atavistic. Something sacred and primal.
As I see it, this is the need to connect with our bodies, use them in the various ways made possible to us by virtue of the miracle of our skeletal structure. Its to delight in the receiving of the inputs of the world around us through the sensory and motor receptors in our joints, and the skin on the soles of our feet and hands (and other body parts should we choose to accept the challenge to get down on the ground and roll around). And of utmost importance, a movement gives us the chance to be a part of a community of similarly minded individuals with whom we feel safe and accepted by. I say this is of utmost importance because the very part of our central nervous system that allows us to have safe, enjoyable social engagement (feelings of love and belonging) is the same aspect of it that also mediates the immune system, digestion, the heart, the respiratory system, our hearing, and everything else related to our systems’ homeostasis, health, growth, and restoration (parasympathetic nervous system function).
A good example of one such movement that has become well-known to the general public in the past decade is the barefoot movement, including the advent of those goofy looking Five Finger shoes (of which I admit I had a pair back in 2013), and barefoot running (which opens up a whole can of worms in the running world, asking the question, “which running technique is best? Forefoot or heel strike?”. And the answer is, in short, it depends. But for the long answer, I implore you to read the book Even With Your Shoes On, by the running coach and fellow Anatomy in Motion practitioner, Helen Hall). But to call the barefoot movement a “new” movement is not accurate. Before we had shoes all the human race knew was barefoot living. I can only theorize that some ancient part of us recognizes the value in feeling the sensitive skin on the bottoms of our feet interacting with the grass and dirt, in allowing the bones and muscles of the foot to adapt to the naturally soft ground with variable terrain and textures. It is unfortunate that, for city dwellers like me, the only readily available option is the hard, linear concrete walkways which are not so kind for barefoot walking.
What is good about the barefoot movement is that it is a reminder of how healthy it is for us to go out into the woods and be on natural terrain: It holds the ability to connect us both with ourselves and with nature, two things crucial for our health. What is not so good is how people misinterpret “barefoot good” as “barefoot everything, even stuff I’ve never done before but will now start to do for the first time with no shoes, is the best, and running barefoot on the concrete builds character even though it really hurts, but I have to do it because some guy online wrote about how great it was.”
In both movement and the human structure, there is nothing new, just depth and breadth to explore, and the addition of scientific evidence intellectualizing of the human experience of movement, which may or may not even be necessary for us to get out of it what we need: Health, fulfillment, enjoyment, and human connection (with ourselves and others).
The commoditization movement
While there are countless examples of movements like the barefoot movement, aiming to reconnect us with something primal and intrinsic to us that we’ve forgotten was important, there is a shadow side that I do not see at all as a healthy revival of primal movement culture. This is the ever burgeoning trendy, niche, consumer fitness classes, which are primarily marketed towards women (for whom the research shows are particularly susceptible to feeling shame around their physical appearance, making them more likely to buy into such marketing).
Stay tuned…
In the next installment of this Movement Practice monster-essay I’d like to further discuss the perils of commoditizing and marketing of movement we see today, and the consumer mentality that can cause the unaware to treat movement as an item to buy and own to show off, fit in, or as a band-aid solution to deeper, unexamined problems, rather than as a gift we already possess, waiting for us to unwrap.
