Healthy Life Tip: Reclaim Your Movement Diversity

Inspired by Daniel Tsukayama

Reclaim your movement potential by varying your movements throughout the day. Add in unfamiliar patterns – crawl, stretch, balance, reach. Choose stairs. Walk different paths. Explore changes of bodyweight or new movement practices that challenge your coordination, strength, and awareness.

Most of us are unwilling to pass on the modern conveniences. However, we can participate in our tech-savvy worlds with devotional awareness to our sensational and somatic experience. If we supplement with a daily exercise practice that prioritizes diversity, rigor and nuance, I do think that we can avoid many of the diseases that plague the modern world.

We can still reconnect to our physical design through curiosity, variety, and felt-sense presence in every move we make.

Modern life has brought us many conveniences – but at a cost. We human beings have dramatically reduced the wide range of physical movement our bodies evolved to perform. Our modern diet lacks the nutritional diversity that our ancestors once had. Similarly, our movement diversity for most of the population is only a tiny fraction of what the many millions-year-old biomechanical masterpiece called the human body is designed to perform.

Here, convenience is the culprit. Entire vocabularies of lifestyle functions that were once demanded of our ancestors have become obsolete or have been replaced by mechanization. The average city-dweller’s repertoire of motions are often repetitive and simplistic, lacking sophistication, nuance and rigor, and often lead to repetitive strain injuries!

I believe our felt-sense nuance is a foundational component of our musculoskeletal health. Seize the opportunity for creative exploration of movement, sensing all its subtle variations!