Today is part 3 of 5 of the Minimum Viable Practice series. The goal of this series is to establish a baseline practice for those who want to get serious about their health and longevity.
Part one can be found here: MVP Part I: Dumb Ways to Die
Part two can be found here: MVP Part II: Optimizing Intake
TL;DR: Move (at least) every hour. Get your heart rate up or lift something heavy. Engage daily in active and passive stretching.
Not long after my twelfth birthday, I was in a serious ATV accident. I hit a drainage ditch at 50 mph and flew head over heels. The 500 lb machine came crashing down on my body, crushing my left femur. I was wearing no helmet and no protective body gear. In retrospect, I was lucky to be alive, but at the time I didn’t feel lucky. After surgery, I was incapacitated for about a year. Even after the stitches healed, I couldn’t roughhouse with my friends or walk without a limp. I remember watching my friends’ sports games, thinking I would give anything for my leg to healed and my movement restored.
With the help of grueling physical therapy, it wasn't long before I was running and playing again. But for 61 million Americans living with a disability (13.7% with a mobility disability), their condition is something they face every day. What people don’t realize is the leading cause of disability is a disease we all have. Aging. Your odds of becoming disabled before you retire are about 1 in 3. The majority of causes driving that number are neuropsychiatric disorders, heart disease, and cancer, but another large driver is the loss of strength and mobility as we age. This can lead to musculoskeletal disorders and worse outcomes for those with chronic disease.
We take our ability to move freely and pain-free for granted. Until it’s too late.
The CDCs latest guidelines for physical activity recommend adults get at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity each week. The guidelines also advocate for the incorporation of muscle-strengthening activities 2 or more days per week. On paper, this seems like a relatively low bar, but Americans are still coming up short. Less than a quarter are meeting these minimums. With the strong inverse association between intense exercise and musculoskeletal disorders, heart disease, cancer, and early mortality, our lack of adherence to these guidelines is spelling disaster for our health. But for even those that exercise 2-3 times per week, most people are making one (if not all) of the following mistakes:
Lack of awareness of ergonomics and the importance of habitual movement
Failing to incorporate any stretching or mobility work into their daily routine
Lack of a strength or HIIT routine that progressively overloads the body.
Today we are going to walk through each of these “pillars of movement” and see how easy it can be to make vast improvements in these categories. Let’s start by taking a look at a day in the life of you.
Habitual movement and ergonomics
The picture above illustrates the day of someone who works out 5x a week. A sedentary day, punctuated by a burst of activity in a one hour window. If this is you don’t feel bad, you are already doing better than 80% of America. Furthermore, by my estimation, this activity profile has made up the bulk of my own workout days. It’s how we have been conditioned to move.
Humans haven’t evolved to live this way. We have muscles that atrophy, bones that lose density, and arteries that calcify. We have evolved to run, hike, jump and climb. Ancient humans spent their days foraging for nuts, hunting animals, exploring their environment, and lounging around the fire (not usually in office chairs). As children, we run around all day and not get sore, squat down easily, and suck on our toes when we need a pacifier. We are trained out of these patterns by a world designed to promote your comfort and productivity, not your health and wellbeing. By incorporating simple, low-intensity movement into our days we can begin to restore the movement patterns we had before cubicles became our homes.
This may look complex but it’s really the incorporation of 5 simple habits:
Short stretch routine every morning (more on this later)
Bike/Walk to work (yes, I know this increases your accident risk)
3-5 min stretch/walk breaks every hour of work
Formation of HIIT/Strength training plan (more on this later)
Establishing a daily family/friends activity time
Remember this isn’t a prescription, these habits might not work for you and that’s ok. What you can do is start to get creative about how you can incorporate movement into your day. Try this: Get out a sheet of paper and outline what you usually do every hour of your 16 hour day (similar to above). For each hour, ask yourself, "How can I incorporate movement into this hour?”
Maybe it's doing lunges down the airport terminal or quad stretches in the subway. Small changes can have a profound impact on how you feel throughout the day and how prepared you are for higher intensity training.
HIIT and Strength Training
High-intensity interval training is simply short periods of intense aerobic exercise with short recovery periods in-between. A HIIT workout usually consists of a beginning warm-up and tissue preparation session, followed by intervals until exhaustion, and capped off with a cool-down period. Popular branded exercise regimens like CrossFit, Orangetheory Fitness, and 9Round incorporate HIIT into their specific routines, and for good reason. HIIT improves cardiovascular fitness, increases fat oxidation, and enhances glucose metabolism. Furthermore, HIIT training requires as little as one minute to complete (although usually 20-60 minutes) giving it a high benefit-cost ratio. Regimens such as CrossFit attempt to combine both HIIT and barbell strength training and then on top of that have the participant compete for time. This may work for some individuals, but for me, it’s a recipe for improper biomechanics and injury. Many barbell movements take months perfectly. The journey from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence is a slow and arduous process the should be carried out in a supervised, non-competitive environment. For this reason, I keep my HIIT and heavyweight strength training separate.
Strength training is simply applying force by means of muscle contraction to external resistance. Strength training can be done by almost anyone, regardless of gender, age, or starting level of fitness. Engaging in strength training leads to improved muscle, tendon, and ligament strength, improved cardiovascular fitness, and increased bone density. Strength training helps counteract the decrease in muscle mass as we age. Greater muscle mass decreases our risk of succumbing to a variety of chronic diseases and unintentional injuries (1-in-4 Americans age 65+ fall each year). Being able to perform hip hinge movements into old age is what allows us to squat down to see our grandkids or pick them up when they need help. Compound, multi-joint movements train our body to interact with our world in a healthy way. I would argue the most effective form of strength training is found in basic barbell lifts where progressively overloading the body leads to adaptation. World-renowned strength training coach Mark Rippetoe has been an advocate of barbell strength training since 1978. “Properly performed, full-range-of-motion barbell exercises are essentially the functional expression of human skeletal and muscular anatomy under a load.” Machines, kettlebells, ropes, bags, balls, and sleds are nice for adding variability but aren’t necessary. A rack, a barbell, and a set of bumper plates are all you need to start building your foundation. The key to any barbell program is proper form, consistency, and continued progression. I would recommend finding an old-school weightlifting gym in your area (in a perfect world, a Starting Strength affiliate) and pay for a program to get you started with the basic lifts. You will likely start by learning the squat, deadlift, press, and bench press. After which you will expand into power cleans and supplementary exercises. If you don’t have a gym with a coach in your area or cost is an issue, consider purchasing Mark’s book, Starting Strength. With over 500,000 copies sold, Starting Strength is widely considered to be the bible of barbell training. Take your time reading this one, it’s very dense and technical, but every line is important. Supplement your reading with YouTube videos in order to cement visual cues and record yourself performing the lifts for later analysis. Becoming a student of your training will increase your interest in your workouts and pay dividends as you progress into your golden years.
Mobility
There is a lot of disagreement about the relationship between mobility and flexibility. Some say flexibility is defined as "the absolute range of movement in a joint or series of joints that is attainable in a momentary effort” While mobility is the “ability of a joint to move actively through a range of motion”. Therefore one is passive and one is active. But when taking into account dynamic and static flexibility, these limited definitions don’t hold true. I think of things simply: joints are mobile, muscles flex. Your joint mobility and range of motion will increase as you build strength and increase flexibility. The best way to do this is through a short, daily routine that incorporates both isometric and dynamic stretches. An in-depth explanation of a sufficient stretching routine is a topic for another time, but a good place to start is Starting to Stretch—a beginner’s full-body flexibility program formulated by the r/flexibility subreddit. This basic routine will take about 30 minutes. If you don’t have a 30-minute time slot available in your day feel free to modify it as necessary, 10 minutes daily is better than 30 minutes weekly. Your improvements in range of motion will lead to better biomechanics in your strength exercises. Better biomechanics means greater progression with less injury risk. Lower injury risk means a greater likelihood of maintaining pain-free movement into old age.
Even small changes in our daily movement patterns can have cascading effects on our health and consequent happiness. Tomorrow doesn’t have to be day one of your stretching routine, strength training routine, and hourly runs around the block. Start with just one, small change. Starting slow and building habits slowly will keep you from becoming overwhelmed.
For those of you that have your mobility, take a moment feel gratitude for the freedom of movement. Your body is amazing. It is the vessel in which you explore your environment, experience the world, and connect with others. Take the time today to move. Take a walk with your dog, go on a run with a friend or wrestle with your kids in the backyard. Recognize there exists a path to pain-free functional movement as you age, but it’s up to you to enact the habits that lead you there.