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6: How Much ‘Should’ You Exercise?
447 Plays3 years ago
Welcome to Episode 6 of the Movement Logic podcast! In this episode, Laurel and Sarah discuss the question that seems hard to answer: what is the right amount for people to exercise? We also look at ways to motivate people to want to exercise, and why a lot of yoga asana practitioners end up overdoing it.
- What are the government guidelines around exercise? Are they useful?
- How do you get people to stick with exercise long enough to reap the benefits?
- How do we know how hard to work with strength training – and does yoga count?
- Why did #yogaeverydamnday become a thing?
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:06
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic podcast with yoga teacher and strength coach Laurel Beaverstorff and physical therapist, Dr. Sarah Court. With over 30 years combined experience in the yoga, movement, and physical therapy worlds, we believe in strong opinions loosely held, which means we're not hyping outdated movement concepts. Instead, we're here with up-to-date and cutting-edge tools, evidence, and ideas to help you as a mover and a teacher.
What Counts as Exercise?
00:00:37
Speaker
Welcome to Episode 6 of the Movement Logic Podcast. I'm Dr. Sarah Court, and I am here with my co-host, Laurel Beaverstore. And today we are talking about exercise. What counts as exercise? How much are we supposed to exercise? How guilty are we supposed to feel if we don't do enough exercise? Whatever that
Cardiovascular Exercise and Guidelines
00:00:58
Speaker
means.
00:00:58
Speaker
Why has there been historically and still there is so much emphasis on cardiovascular exercise in terms of the guidelines that the government gives us, and how does an individual person's needs change based on their age, their health, their lifestyle, things like that. Laurel and I are coming at this from different perspectives. I'm a PT, Laurel is a strength coach and a movement teacher.
00:01:26
Speaker
And as always, we just want you to know that we decided on this topic for our conversation, but we haven't had this conversation before. We don't script these, we just really like to talk and learn from each other, think out loud, riff off of ideas, and that way I learn from Laurel. And on a very, very rare occasion, she went for me.
00:01:48
Speaker
That's why you're here. That's right. So our question this week is how much should and should should be in like quotation marks.
Understanding Exercise Intensity
00:01:57
Speaker
How much should you exercise? So Laurel, I have a question for you off the top of your head. Can you tell me what are the government guidelines or how much it, this is a thing. This is a real thing for how much someone should exercise every week. If I were to guess, I would say it's,
00:02:19
Speaker
probably skewed toward cardio and just based on what you said in the beginning. I have no idea. Okay, so the answer is run out of time. Yes, sorry. I'm afraid you've lost. Never in jeopardy does someone not write anything though.
00:02:37
Speaker
Sometimes they do. Sometimes it's just like... Really? Yeah, like dots, because they were like... It's not good. They need to take at least one guess. Just stab in the... Okay, so stab in the dark. What do you think? It's here. I'm going to give you a clue. Okay. How many minutes? 10,000 steps. Oh, minutes. Okay, minutes. I would say 20 minutes three times a week of cardiovascular exercise. That's what I used to think it was. That is incorrect.
00:03:07
Speaker
So they actually categorize it in sort of two, they call it moderate intensity or vigorous intensity. And you either should do 150 minutes of moderate intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity. And the way that they categorize those is moderate intensity is like a brisk walk. They say like, you can talk, but you couldn't sing.
00:03:32
Speaker
What if you just can't sing though? You can talk but you shouldn't sing.
00:03:41
Speaker
I must always be doing moderate exercise. That's right. That's right. Or 75 minutes vigorous and vigorous I would say is like running or swimming or playing a sport. You could only say a few words before you would have to stop and catch your breath. Yeah. This reminds me of when I was pregnant in my OBGYN, I was like, don't get to that vigorous intensity level of where you can't have a conversation as soon as you've gone.
00:04:07
Speaker
that far, you should reduce the intensity of your exercise, which I found to be very simple, straightforward, and easy to do, and help me feel really good about my exercise during pregnancy.
Strength Training Recommendations
00:04:20
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the descriptions are great in terms of what is moderate, what is vigorous, right? Yeah. And it's really, it's kind of an RPE, but with more, RPE being a
00:04:35
Speaker
rate of perceived exertion. I was like, what does it stand for? So RP rate of perceived exertion is what people use a lot of the time in strength training where it's like your sense of how hard you're working out of 10.
00:04:51
Speaker
And like, you know, keep it around like a seven or an eight. So you're not like completely everything out of the tank, but you're working pretty hard. Right. So, but this is not perceived. This is actual real exertion in terms of breathing. Right. So, so it kind of it categorizes it as cardiovascular because.
00:05:08
Speaker
We're going to think about that in terms of your heart rate is up. You're breathing more intensely. Your muscles are working to a level where they need more oxygen. And so your experience of it is either you can talk but you can't, or in Laurel's case, shouldn't sing. Or you can only say a few words before you have to stop and catch your breath. And I think those are very relatable guidelines in the sense that everyone understands that. Or you've had that experience in some way.
00:05:38
Speaker
Yeah, it's a really good one for cardio. Yeah. But here's what's interesting. I'm trying to think of how I did that with strength training. Yeah, I know. So there's more. They say as well, and this is, to my knowledge, this is new, and anyone who knows better than me can jump in and correct me. So it's not only that. So you have to do your 150 minutes moderate or 75 minutes vigorous, and two days or more strength training.
00:06:05
Speaker
which is new. Yay. Great. It's CDC center of disease control. Yes. Centers for disease control. Centers for disease control. So these are the scientists who are interested in reducing the rates of disease in the United States. So this is where and why these recommendations have been. Exactly. And they're looking at it in terms of like, you know, heart disease is being, you know, the number one or number two
00:06:31
Speaker
Uh, you know, I think that, uh, is, is, oh God, words that our people are suffering from, right? So that's part, there's so much cardiovascular. Now, what, what they, because I was like, well, where do you put something like yoga or Pilates, which generally speaking, you're not, you're never really out of breath.
00:06:52
Speaker
And obviously with yoga, it completely depends on the type of yoga that you're doing. Same with Pilates, it can be much more gentle or it could be much more vigorous. I think probably at the highest level, it would be moderate.
00:07:06
Speaker
Yeah, maybe even like moderate and below like I don't know that that it would necessarily it's definitely not steady state That's that's the thing and when you're going for a run when you're doing like cyclical cardiovascular work like cycling like swimming like running it's And you're working in that moderate intensity level. You're probably doing steady state cardio You're not running intervals or doing tempo training, right? I
00:07:35
Speaker
And then, so I was like, okay, well, then let me look at these numbers. What would that mean on a practical level? How many things should I be doing each week? Right. How do I break up that time and schedule it into my week? Exactly. And oh, this is the other thing. It's 150 minutes moderate, 75 minutes vigorous, or some combination of the two.
00:07:57
Speaker
Basically, every two minutes of vigorous is the equivalent of one minute of moderate. I live in California. I really like going hiking. Hiking, I would consider a moderate, sometimes vigorous, depending. Yeah, uphills. Those uphills are probably vigorous. We've got some hills around here. It's like doing one hike.
00:08:20
Speaker
maybe going taking one you know maybe a vinyasa yoga class or some other sort of like moderate level you know class and then strength training twice a week and that's it that's it and maybe you know i mean to me i'm saying that's it because to me that doesn't seem like that much but i'm also someone who you know lives in the movement and exercise world and for other people that's like i don't have that much time you know yeah
00:08:44
Speaker
Yeah. And this is if you want to, like your goal is simply to stave off disease according to the CDC. This has nothing to do with performance or training for an event or training for a skill or anything like that. Yeah, because frequency would need to be increased for cardio and strength.
Personal Exercise Routines and Mental Health
00:09:10
Speaker
Can I ask you a personal question? How much do you exercise every week?
00:09:14
Speaker
Oh my gosh. So right now, a lot. Yes. Actually, I took last week almost completely off. I went to CrossFit one time, and I went on some long walks. So actually, no. I mean, when I say I take a week off of exercises. I know. That's the thing. I'm like, I can do anything last week. I did some strength training. I went on two hikes, and people are like, excuse me.
00:09:32
Speaker
It's really really skewed because it's my job and and I really rely on it so heavily for mental health that is something that I'm realizing more and more as I age that you know looking back retrospectively how much every light on exercise for my own mental health like how I've really managed my mental health with with exercise for a very long time. But I would say
00:10:01
Speaker
that on a week where I'm exercising a lot, I will probably strength train four or five times a week. So I'm training a lot. And then I don't do any cardio unless the people at CrossFit tell me to, which is not very often.
00:10:21
Speaker
And so that is actually something I see as kind of a blind spot, at least in my conditioning. I'm probably not getting enough cardiovascular stress to enhance those systems in my body. But I do do hikes, but I do them very slowly because I'm on a very, it's a very rocky, rooty trail and I'm looking out for snakes. So I'm not moving super fast across those trails. So yeah, so I would say I'm very heavily skewed toward
00:10:51
Speaker
strength training and plyometrics. I do a fair amount of plyometrics training, which can be pretty stimulating for the cardiovascular system. My experience has been like, there's plenty of strength training that for me has felt cardiovascular. I mean, you swing a kettlebell around for long enough, your heart rate goes up, you start sweating, you're breathing hard.
00:11:13
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, kettlebell training is in some ways really similar to plyometric training, except there's no impact, which is kind of the cool part about it. And yeah, definitely kettlebell swings are one of the few like, yeah, kettlebell swings could be classified as strength training, and also has the ability to increase your
00:11:35
Speaker
your body's aerobic endurance. So it depends on how much you're swinging. Right. And for how long? Exactly. So here's the thing, like you and I are coming at this from a perspective of movement and exercise are a priority. We both work in the world of it and we both value it in our own bodies. And from my perspective, at least as a PT, a lot of my job is throwing people around. I mean, I'm not throwing, but
00:12:03
Speaker
I sound like a great therapist. I people come up and say my neck hurts. I'm like, you want it to hurt? Watch this. And I throw them up. But there's a there's I have a strength requirement. Yeah. My job if I don't maintain my strength, I don't I'm not as good at I actually start to hurt myself. Yep. No, like I remember when I first started doing the amount of manual therapy that I do on people.
00:12:25
Speaker
I had like really, I don't know what it was that was going on. I think it was just a sudden volume increase with so much. I would drive home from the clinic every day with my arm on the armrest and an ice bag on my hand. Oh, that's not good. Because it was so miserable.
00:12:42
Speaker
If I want to be able to do my job well, I have to be able to train for my job. However, the average person does not have a job that is about being some amount of fitness or they may not automatically value it the way that you and I do, probably most of the people listening to this do. How do you motivate people to get interested in it?
Motivating Exercise through Goals
00:13:11
Speaker
Um, what do you, what do you, I know what I have, what I do a lot of the time. What do you do? So I find that the benefits of exercise are inherently motivating if you can get someone to stick with it long enough to see those benefits. And so one of the things that I do
00:13:32
Speaker
as a teacher is I try to talk a lot about the benefits. And when I work one on one with people and I work in live small group strength training, I also start to notice improvements that individuals are making and I make a point of noting that for them.
00:13:51
Speaker
And I write down how many reps and how much weight they lifted. And I make sure that they know that this week they lifted an extra rep, or this week their rate of perceived exertion was lower, or this week they lifted extra load. And I really strongly play up the objective, measurable, and potentially also perceived benefits that they might be experiencing. And I make sure, too, to tell them
00:14:16
Speaker
that this is what you might be experiencing or have you noticed instead of this is what you should be experiencing and this is what should be happening to you, not telling them what they're feeling, but really helping them to maybe become aware of the fact that they are performing feeling better in their life. And maybe it's connected to all this work you're doing. People also reach out to me to tell me these things and
00:14:45
Speaker
And so I know that the benefits of exercise are inherently, they're self-reinforcing. Why do people not exercise then? I think it's probably because there's no immediate gratification. It feels
00:15:10
Speaker
like a form of punishment for some reason because of the stories they've been told or the stories they're telling themselves about it. It's very complex, but then when they're put in front of the opportunity to exercise, there's no immediate gratification. Things that I consider to be immediate gratification are human relationship, human interaction.
00:15:33
Speaker
an inspiring environment to exercise in. I really look forward to going. So for example, I go to this CrossFit gym really to get out of the house. It's more mental health than anything else. The gym is this huge warehouse. It's a really exciting place to lift weights. And they play like kind of hardcore music, most of which I don't really like, but the vibe is kind of like, yeah, you know, I'm like, I'm into it, you know? And I'm like, what are the like,
00:15:58
Speaker
like lowest on the like levels of like fitness there. Like it's amazing to me. And that's also inspiring to me is like, wow, I thought it was fit. Turns out in this population, I'm really not. And so I think there's also things like playlists, which can be really super important.
00:16:18
Speaker
Things like, is this something that you can actually work toward improvement in? Like, can you see results? Can you see higher levels of mastery over time? Sometimes that requires an external eye going, wow, you know, your downward facing dog or your handstand or your, you know, kettlebell swing.
00:16:43
Speaker
is really coming along and sometimes it's just a matter of that person having a goal and seeing that they are making
00:16:53
Speaker
improvements and making progress toward that goal. I think these are all gratifications that can really keep people coming back. And then there's all the intrinsic benefits of like I had my private clients. I teach a couple of two women and they are on vacation now and they had to schlep a whole bunch of stuff to Fire Island for their vacation. And they were like, oh, we can only do this because of Laurel. I'm like, no, you can only do this because you are putting in the work to strength train
00:17:23
Speaker
once or twice a week and they're brand new beginners and they're so excited about like all the things that don't hurt anymore, you know? So, you know, letting people, having people share those things with you and being open to, you know, holding space for that but also as a teacher if you are a teacher.
00:17:41
Speaker
really play up the benefits. And there's a lot, I think a lot of evidence to suggest that that is an evidence-based way to improve compliance, right? Could you give me an example? Like, because you were talking, you've been talking about this about playing up the benefits and you've talked about things that people have reported back to you. Are there things that you talk about in a less specific to each client or student and more sort of generally like, this is going to help you
00:18:09
Speaker
carry the groceries in from the house? Are you peppering that into when you're teaching? I definitely am. I'm doing it in various ways. I'm sharing my own stories and I'm also sharing stories from other students while keeping them anonymous. Basically, it comes down to the way that I think about it is our comfort zone. How comfortable do we want to feel
00:18:32
Speaker
in our lives and in order to feel comfortable in our lives meaning pain reduced pain free and capable of participating in the activities are of our lives that are meaningful so for perhaps a grandparent that means being able to play
00:18:50
Speaker
You know, rough and tumble on the ground with their grandkids or go play catch or, you know, maybe if you have a dog, it's like being able to keep up with your puppy. And if you have, you know, a spouse who really likes hiking, being able to, you know, go on those hikes with your spouse.
00:19:06
Speaker
being able to sleep on the ground in a tent. All these things that are physically demanding, that are cushy lives and are outsourced lives, we outsource everything in the name of convenience that don't require us to have to endure, but then we have this opportunity to really live. We want to live, and we want to be comfortable in those higher demand moments of our everyday life.
00:19:32
Speaker
So we take a little bit of time, not much as it turns out, out of our week to actually get even more uncomfortable than that. To stress our bodies in the laboratory of exercise, to stress our cardiovascular systems to the point where it is uncomfortable to stress our muscles and strength training to the point where we're feeling the burn or we're feeling the fatigue or we're feeling this is a heavy weight so that
00:20:00
Speaker
right? We make ourselves uncomfortable in those small moments so that we expand the comfort zone of our life and so that you can relate to any type of meaningful activity that you find potentially challenging or that you have found painful in the past like riding in the car for two hours if you've got an hour commute there and back like how those activities are necessary meaningful required and how if we
00:20:30
Speaker
take time to prepare for those. They won't be uncomfortable. They won't cause pain. And then we have so much more attention mentally, cognitively, energetically to devote in those moments to being present
00:20:48
Speaker
And to finding even deeper meaning beyond the distraction potentially of our body going, I don't know if I can do this. This hurts. This is scary, right?
00:21:02
Speaker
That's kind of the meta of what I talk about, but obviously in little anecdotes and stories. My daughter's 35 pounds. She's well on her way to being 35 pounds. I was about to say my daughter's 35. We feed her a lot of spinach.
00:21:19
Speaker
she is benjamin button and high quality protein and calcium and she's growing no she's thirty she's thirty five she's thirty five pounds but she's three and so she wants to be carried and picked up and like how old and and like i'm savoring this phase cuz i know it's not gonna last forever and so the ability to bend over she's lying on her back pick her all the way up and carry her up the stairs while i'm holding on to something else
00:21:47
Speaker
Right. Like, yeah, I'm glad I can do that. And it's not a burden. Exactly. Because I strength train. I had a whole bunch of ideas come up. That's just things that when you were talking kind of came into my came into my head. I, you know, in the PT world, I use this kind of goals based
00:22:03
Speaker
work the same way, a slightly different take on it. What I say to patients a lot of the time is when they're coming in, is there something that you are not doing right now because of your injury? Is there a sport you're not playing? Is there something you'd like to get back to that you have thought was just long gone and whatever?
00:22:26
Speaker
not only do we have that as a tangible goal where it's like, oh yeah, you wanted to get back to running and here we are four weeks later and you're starting to run again or something like that.
00:22:36
Speaker
but it also works to guide what I'm doing with the person in that session because it gives the exercise more meaning because it's always aimed at a goal. So it's not like, well, today I felt like you need to do abs or something like that. It's very, very like, see this shape we're making here? This is the same shape that you make when you're running. We're making you do it in a harder situation so that when you go to run, it's actually easy or whatever the example might be.
00:23:07
Speaker
For people who don't have that sort of natural motivation, maybe, constantly reminding them of what their goal is and how this, to your point, uncomfortable thing we're doing now is going to make the thing that they want to do more comfortable. It's huge. It's so big. Yeah. I think in the beginning as well,
00:23:28
Speaker
And this is something that it took me a while to kind of feel like I could say legitimately. It took me working with a lot of different patients and seeing a lot of people, you know, heal their
00:23:43
Speaker
issue or get stronger or get out of pain, we're in the beginning for people, especially if they are coming in with pain. But even if they're like, you know what, I'm 55, I've never done any weight training, I'm suddenly worried about my bone density, I have no idea what to do, I don't like exercise, it always felt like punishment, stuff like that. I find that in the very, very beginning, if I hold the confidence of the outcome,
00:24:11
Speaker
And I don't make it something that they have to blindly believe in or hope that will come out. And so by that, I mean like, you know, if they say, do you really think I could go back to, you know, going for a walk every day? And I don't lie, like, like, no, I'm,
00:24:30
Speaker
or I talk about it in a sort of like stepwise procedure, but I also say something like, based on what I've seen of other people that are similar to this person or just how I'm getting the sense of them as a person, all of those sorts of things, I'm usually just like, yes, absolutely. And I hold the confidence of that because I've seen the example of it over and over. And that's just sort of the gift of having worked for a while and having enough of your own
00:24:58
Speaker
um, evidence that you can draw from. I had, I mean, I remember this person that I had recently who had, um, uh, low back pain, disc herniation and all this kind of stuff was, you know, that kind of pain, a lot of the time is, is debilitating. And especially if it's been going on for a long time, it just ruins people's belief that it could ever go away or be better.
00:25:23
Speaker
And I remember they were like, you know, do you really think you can help me get out of this pain? And I was like, yes, because I've seen it, variations of it a lot. And I was extremely, and he was like, really? Okay. And I know that my, my confidence in what I can do
00:25:40
Speaker
my skill set allows me to hold that space for people when they're not sure. And then as they see results, they take over the confidence part, right? And then you don't have to do that so much. And that's also that thing when people say, like when people say to you, oh, you know, I, they'll come in and be like, I went swimming, it didn't hurt my shoulder. It's all thanks to you. And I do that same thing where I'm like, no, no, no, I just suggested some stuff, right? You decided to do it, you know, just because I told you to do a squat, you're still in, you could have walked out of the room if you wanted to.
00:26:10
Speaker
So, making the person recognize that it's their work that they've put in that has made the difference, not that I did it for them, so that they get that autonomy over how their body feels and their strength.
Stress, Strain, and Realistic Goals
00:26:23
Speaker
And the last thing that I was thinking about when you were talking about stressing the system, that idea, you know, which is sort of anytime you're learning something new, you want to be in the sort of what they call the stress
00:26:34
Speaker
area, but not the strain physically or mentally. R in the stress area where
00:26:43
Speaker
but it's not breaking anything like physically or mentally, right? This is not so impossible. I'm not going from zero working out to thinking I'm gonna work out every single day. That's too much versus that when you get into that strain period where it's like you're overloaded, you're emotionally exhausted, you're trying to cram more workouts into your day than you have time for, all of that kind of stuff. So some of it is,
00:27:11
Speaker
bringing it into your world or helping people bring it into their lives in a way that's doable and setting realistic guidelines for themselves or goals for themselves. Can I share some good news? Sure. I mean, at least from strength training, which is more my wheelhouse, is that beginners can make the most improvement to their strength in terms of percentage wise than any other training age. Nice.
00:27:40
Speaker
Beginners will improve more rapidly than intermediate or advanced lifters in their strength and their muscle mass. So in the beginning, basically everything works and you don't need to do very much. In fact, there are studies showing that single set training once a week, what single set? That's what a set of like 12 reps.
00:28:04
Speaker
that are challenging, you have to be going to that really uncomfortable place. Once a week can be enough to cause increases in strength, to yield increases in strength. Now, you will quickly plateau. That will quickly become not enough, right? And then you've got to bump up the frequency. But two times a week for a beginner, one to two times a week, and a beginner in strength training is anyone who's been lifting weights for less than two months,
00:28:32
Speaker
So, you know, you have those first two months to make a ton of progress and not have to input very much time and energy. But the energy you do input needs to be pretty, again, because it has to be a stimulus. We talked about like a stimulus is a stressor that makes a change, not just any stressor, but one that actually causes the changes you're targeting for strength. The stimulus has to be, you know,
00:28:59
Speaker
75, 80% of a 1RM. And you're doing no more than 12 reps before. It's really quite challenging. So it's a 1RM. Could you do that? A 1RM, yeah. Thank you. It's a theoretical amount of weight that you could lift one time and one time only. It's very hard to test for 1RM because you've got to warm up
00:29:18
Speaker
And then by that time, you're maybe fatigued. And then every day is different, depending on how much sleep or what you ate the day before. So it's also a moving target. It's going to change. But you can be pretty accurate in terms of what your 1RM is with something like a 10RM and lower test. So if you did like picked up a weight and tried to lift it 10 times and you got to pretty close to failure on that 10th rep, you could
00:29:45
Speaker
fairly accurately extrapolate what you would be able to lift one time using 1RM charts, which you can just Google 1RM charts. You get more accurate results. The higher the load, the closer to your 1RM you are. If you're lifting, say, for five reps or four reps, this is probably something in the realms of an 85% to 90% 1RM.
00:30:06
Speaker
and that's going to give you a much more accurate 1RM estimate but basically if you're targeting strength you have to be working within a percentage of your 1RM
00:30:17
Speaker
And a lot of times, we're not. We're working on strength endurance, which is also a really important capacity to develop and should be developed alongside strength. And yoga, by the way, is wonderful for strength endurance in many cases, not for all muscles, but for many of the major muscles of the body. But yeah, what was the original question?
00:30:40
Speaker
We're talking about how often you need to work out. Yeah. So if you want to, if you want to improve your strength, the good news is like once or twice a week in the first eight weeks consistently of training, you know, two sets, not even more than like a couple of sets. Um, you know, and I think a good, a good percentage to start with is like a eight to 12 rep max. So that would be a 75 to I guess, 80, 85, 75 to 80% one RM.
00:31:11
Speaker
or 70 to 80% 1RM, it doesn't have to be a super heavy load. That's going to result in you actually becoming aware of your increased strength in your daily life. You're going to notice if you stick with strength training for eight weeks in that dosage,
00:31:34
Speaker
And it's recommended that you don't go above that because that's where we start to enter into that realm of strain as you call it. You will notice that you have objectively improved your ability to do certain things in your daily life as long as you haven't overdone it.
Yoga, Frequency, and Societal Pressures
00:31:52
Speaker
This is going to be a panacea for everyone to follow this protocol. You do need to have solid technique. You probably benefit from working with somebody who's an outside eye who can help you if you're feeling like you really do need that or want that. You will notice and it's not that much. You could do two 30 to 45 minute sessions a week and make a big change.
00:32:19
Speaker
So I want to sort of turn back around to yoga for a minute because I want to talk about why or how we sort of got this idea of like hashtag yoga every day or how it sort of became just sort of a widely held belief that
00:32:41
Speaker
In the yoga community at least this is my experience I mean yours yours may be different but that you were supposed to do yoga every single day, every damn day, every damn day, and and why, why might that actually not be appropriate for people might my feeling is
00:32:56
Speaker
the people that I see who come into the clinic and have yoga-based injuries are generally the people who are doing yoga every day. Not because it's automatically a bad idea to do some yoga every single day, but the mentality of it is such that
00:33:16
Speaker
the yoga is usually their only physical exercise. They are not practicing like a sort of gentle or restorative yoga every damn day. It is taking yoga and turning it into, you know, like a workout or a gymnastics challenge or a, you know, it's the people who are doing like the vinyasa two, three,
00:33:39
Speaker
We're talking about Asana really then, right? Yes. I'm sorry. Let me be clear. I'm talking specifically about Asana, but people who take the yoga Asana practice as an extreme sport, essentially. What I see with a lot of those people, when I talk to them about, let's broaden your movement diet and apart from yoga, what else are you doing?
00:33:59
Speaker
you know i'm like okay maybe you should you know also on a day go for a hike or maybe a long walk or you know maybe do some some weight training and and what i what i see is a lot of reluctance to do that very often i see people who you know i suggest that to them and i and they're just kind of like or you know i found like well
00:34:19
Speaker
you know your hip hurts because you have been doing lotus pose not that there's anything wrong with it necessarily but let's say in this instance every single day for 15 minutes uh and your particular anatomy does not like it that much and that's why like your knee is now giving you a problem and your hip yeah
00:34:37
Speaker
and the idea of so what I want you to do is like let's leave that pose out of your practice and also maybe just take a couple days and don't do any yoga and it's like I took a knife and stabbed them in the eye when I said that you know but I remember I was that person I know I remember it when I first started to have problems with my hip was when I was about 27
00:34:59
Speaker
And for everybody who probably doesn't know because this is, why would anyone know this? I had hip dysplasia, which is, yes, it's something that happens to large dogs, but it also happens to, well, especially women. You say that like I knew it happened to large dogs. No, a lot of people- Yeah, people know. Large dogs. They have dysplasia and people are like, oh, like in Newfoundland? No, because it does. Anyway.
00:35:27
Speaker
I am a large dog, apparently. And it's a very casual phrase, but essentially what it means is that there's something about the way that your acetabulum and the head of the femur, your hip socket fit together that is over time problematic, causing injury, causing arthritis, all these things. And it's genetic, right? Yes. And it's usually- Highly genetic. And it usually co-morbidities with- What is co-morbidity?
00:35:54
Speaker
Oh, my God. It's just comorbidity. I know. First of all, comorbidity is a term. Comorbidity. It's like, here's something that's also going to kill you. It's what it sounds like. Here's the, here's the colleague of morbidity. Yes. Comorbidity. They work together. These two things are going to be in charge of your death.
00:36:11
Speaker
um no but um it just means let's say you're working with somebody and they have asthma and they also have diabetes so it would be like well they have asthma and their comorbidities it's just whatever like other things are going on with your body but so this is i've gotten well off topic but hip dysplasia and scoliosis often show up together just as a general fyi for people
00:36:32
Speaker
By the way, I want to say, I think one of the reasons I like listening to podcasts is because the nature of conversation is to trail off in different related directions. I think that's the way we learn. Definitely. As long as we don't trail off for too long and get lost. But I'm enjoying this hip dysplasia. This story of my life. Lesson, within the lesson, and dogs.
00:36:58
Speaker
Um, so, so I went to, I was 27. I was practicing yoga every damn day. I went to my first physical therapist ever. And they told me that I had to stop doing yoga and it was crushing. Uh, and, but I was like, okay, I guess. And I did for a while and I didn't feel any better because they didn't give me anything else to do separately. Like in place of it, they were just like, just don't do, don't do yoga anymore. And then eventually I just went back to yoga because I was like, well,
00:37:29
Speaker
in the words of Cartman, screw you guys. I didn't see it affect any change in my body, but why do you think in particular in the United States, in the yoga community, we see so much of this emphasis on you have to do yoga every day. Do you think it's an idea around mastery of yoga? I think that we've got a
00:37:58
Speaker
a tendency toward excess in many ways and directions and fields and indulgences in this country. And I think yoga is a victim to capitalism, honestly. I think it comes from the ideals espoused in capitalistic thinking, which is that more is better. And it permeates
00:38:27
Speaker
all aspects of our lives. And it's one of those when we talk about the psychosocial model, when we're dealing with the social influences of pain or the social influences of racism or poverty. Capitalism is the CEO of, it underpins a lot of what we're talking about. And it's difficult to talk about because it's such a big thing, right? And it's so all-encompassing.
00:38:56
Speaker
We are living inside of it and therefore we cannot always see it, right? So I think that yoga as a traditional spiritual practice that originated in India is something we could potentially do every day and maybe the world would be better. But Asana has become the poster child of yoga and because it is so easy to put on a poster,
00:39:27
Speaker
And big ranges of motion are impressive and sometimes beautiful. And the people practicing and being put on posters are increasingly thin and white and beautiful. And so this is capitalism, right? This is how we sell yoga. This is how we commodify it and how people profit off of it. And I think that whether or not people know that they've bought into these ideals of thin white beauty,
00:39:56
Speaker
and or the ideals that tag along with yoga that are very much wrapped up in alternative medicine and health and a lot of unsubstantiated claims about detoxifying the body and juice cleanses and all these other ways that people are, I think, at the bottom of it just starving themselves at the end of the day and trying to lose weight because, again, the thin ideal.
00:40:23
Speaker
I think that this is what is undergirding this drive to want to do yoga every day. But the story people are telling, which makes it extra insidious, is that this is my spiritual practice. That I'm doing this to transcend this earthly body and these earthly concerns and this earthly suffering. And in a way, dissociating from it,
00:40:50
Speaker
and bypassing it, right? Spiritual bypassing dissociation, which I can tell you a lot about because I was really, really good at it. Spiritual bypassing, I was raised up in it with my conservative evangelical Christian upbringing, which is largely about spiritual bypassing.
00:41:09
Speaker
From my perspective, you know, it's a it's that really I think and and when when but but then you know and I think we can both relate to this like then when we hear don't do yoga at all that kind of negates the fact that yoga asana.
00:41:26
Speaker
And the spiritual practices that sometimes skillfully accompany it and sometimes don't, right, depending on where you're doing your yoga, has so many benefits that it can give us. I have benefited probably of all the modalities I've engaged with that you could term exercise or movement. Yoga has been the most profound and most life shifting. And if you take that away from people,
00:41:53
Speaker
That's not good, but if you train people to believe that they need to do it every day, especially the asana side of yoga, that's also potentially gonna cause problems for a number of reasons. One is, do you have any time now to do your strength training in cardio because yoga's not giving you that?
00:42:13
Speaker
And are you cranking on some joints that are not prepared to be cranked on the way you're cranking on them, i.e. the knee and lotus pose? So those are my thoughts.
Movement Logic Promotions
00:42:29
Speaker
This episode is brought to you by Movement Logic, a library of evidence-based movement therapy tutorials to help your students who are in pain and looking to you for help. What most movement teachers need are critical thinking skills to be able to respond to their students' needs in the moment. But let's face it, whether it's a private client or a student after class, questions about what to do about pain and discomfort can be challenging to address for a movement teacher. However, it's possible
00:42:56
Speaker
to be able to address students' needs skillfully using evidence-based reasoning and tools, all while staying within scope of practice. This happens by becoming anatomically and biomechanically informed, gaining a deeper understanding around pain science, and acquiring a diverse set of teaching tools that you can apply immediately. With movement logic, you will do just that, all while building a foundation of critical thinking skills to reach a broader clientele.
00:43:24
Speaker
Want a free peek of what you'll learn in our tutorials? Right now on our website homepage at www.movementlogictutorials.com. You can sign up for our email list to receive updates on course sales and discounts. When you do, you'll also receive four free pelvic floor videos that take a movement-based approach to working with clients with an array of pelvic floor concerns.
00:43:48
Speaker
Within these videos, we help you understand specifically how the movement or breathing exercise can influence awareness of and connection to the pelvic floor specifically, as well as many other structures it directly influences. Go to movementlogictutorials.com, enter your first name and email address, and get four free pelvic floor videos. And now, back to our episode. Ultimately, I think there's an interesting similarity between
00:44:19
Speaker
Using it because we see I mean, you know, I I'm I brought up the the yoga world because that's my personal experience but I am a hundred percent positive that it exists in the same way in the strength training world in the CrossFit world where people are just like more is better heavier is better, you know, that kind of stuff not that they're necessarily Encouraged that that's the right thing to do. But yeah, like my my my old clients dad who is
00:44:46
Speaker
his late 70s and was having neck pain and went to PT and they gave him, they said, do 10 shoulder shrugs. I don't know why. And so he went home and he was like, well, they told him to do 10. So if 10 is good, surely a hundred is better. So he started doing a hundred, I'm not even kidding, shoulder shrugs every day. And then he went back and he was like, my neck feels worse. And they were like, well, yeah. So I think
00:45:11
Speaker
his tendency towards the sort of overdoing it. I know, I love that story. But not just humans. I had a dachshund once who ate an entire pizza. So, I mean, dogs are, you know, around the top of a dog. Dogs are known for not possessing a lot of self-control, especially around food. They're not really, you know, thinking about the future basically ever.
00:45:33
Speaker
Is that what it is? Sometimes that's what excess is about too, is you're not thinking about the consequences. Yeah, exactly. That's actually happening to me. But I think there's sort of a similarity in what we're talking about in terms of using the full yoga practice, not just asana, with a goal that is not external, and using exercise also with a goal that is not external in terms of an appearance.
00:46:00
Speaker
that that training to be and and as a way that that ultimately is much more empowering for people who who maybe are new to to working to exercising and much less judgmental you know then then a lot of people a lot of people aren't exercising because
00:46:18
Speaker
It's a world they've never been in and going into a gym is terrifying because they feel overwhelmed and there's all these people in there who look super fit and they, you know, they don't know what the machines are and it's just a horrible scenario. There's a lot of negativity that a lot of people have associated with exercise based on their past experience, you know, being left out of gym class in high school and all that kind of stuff, right? Rightfully so. Rightfully so. Absolutely. So this idea of using exercise not as a
00:46:47
Speaker
you know, what you should do, right? A sort of shaming idea or even as a you should do it because you should be thinner because society is telling us that thinner is better, not versus like, well, if you do it, when you go to the pet store and you just apparently this whole episode about dogs, when you go to the store and you're buying because this is what I used to have to do when you're buying a 35 pound bag of dog food, you have the ability to pick it up from the ground
00:47:12
Speaker
hold it on your shoulder and walk out to the parking lot and put it in your car. And when they say, do you need help? You can say no, right? So that's, to me, those are the kind of goals that are so much more personally empowering for people and ultimately more valuable. And it's sort of a similarity in the way that yoga in its wholeness can be practiced as a way not to change anything externally, but to change something internally. Yeah.
00:47:37
Speaker
And yoga can change things externally as well.
Yoga's Unique Impact
00:47:40
Speaker
And I do think that many, many folks benefit from the mobility benefits of yoga. I meant like not your goal is not the, you know, be the poet, like do the forum stand with the sunset behind you. Right? Because I'll say in a bikini, I'll say this, that I still have not found a modality like yoga that is able to shift my feeling
00:48:03
Speaker
And I mean like my sense of interoception, which is my ability to pay attention and notice the details of my inwardly felt experiences, to shift my mind, my train of thought, to shift my like overall baseline level that I feel of relaxation versus kind of.
00:48:21
Speaker
stimulation and also confer these, I guess, more neuromuscular benefits of strength endurance or the soft tissue benefits potentially of improved joint flexibility and mobility. I know, for example, I've done Feldenkrais, which has brought me even to a more relaxed state mentally, but I don't feel that Feldenkrais is stressing my body.
00:48:50
Speaker
in is sufficient enough a way to make the changes that I'm able to make which seem much more significant with yoga although I know it's working on a different thing too. It's not working necessarily on mobility, it's working on coordination and patterning and timing of movement. I will say though that for me personally yoga holds my attention a little bit more
00:49:14
Speaker
uh effectively and because i'm the kind of person who really wants to feel things in my body and then it's it's um it's also you know it's it's got these uh cultural aspects to it that i find very that that give yoga so much more meaning
00:49:34
Speaker
outside of just the physical realm. I really appreciate the history and culture behind yoga. I appreciate Sanskrit being incorporated into classes. I appreciate that sometimes we're chanting and doing mantra practice or doing pranayama practice or
00:49:52
Speaker
or meditative practices, yoga is so diverse of a physical practice, not just a mind practice. It's a diverse physical practice of so many different actually separate modalities that are included in the wider system. And I'm sorry, I cannot think of another system like that that is able to produce this significant amount of
00:50:18
Speaker
mental shift and change. It's really that. It's like you said, the changes that are happening internally are really profound with yoga, I find. I agree. Much more so than CrossFit.
00:50:33
Speaker
Well, and I think someone, I mean, you know, we're sort of on a tangential conversation, but I think it is what holds your attention.
Exercise as Emotional Outlets
00:50:41
Speaker
Yes. That's what helps. And so for different people, different levels of exertion hold their attention and not just different people, but there's days when, like if something happens and I get real mad about it, if I don't do something that is like, I'm like, I got to go swing a kettlebell around or I have to like,
00:51:00
Speaker
get on this reformer because I'm at work and I have an hour break and do a punishing level amount of work. Sometimes that is the only thing that stops my rumination in my brain. But that's an extreme example of when I am in a heightened emotional state.
00:51:21
Speaker
I need to go do something extremely physical that that is going to exhaust me so that I can't, you know, I run out of the mental energy to keep this, you know, emotionally. I'm the same way. I'm the same way. I think there's different tones to my felt levels of psychological stress that require different interventions. Yes, absolutely.
00:51:42
Speaker
And there's times when I, when I hope to be meditating and I sit down to do it and I'm like, I am, I, this is, I need to go for, I need to do this while moving. I need to try to be walking and like, I can't be still physically.
00:51:55
Speaker
And then there are days where the day prior, I did a lot of strength training, a lot of plyometrics. And so the following day when I need that input, I'm definitely not going to be doing that the next day, right? I'm going to need to do something that's more active recovery, like walk in the woods or yoga.
00:52:16
Speaker
Cool. All right. Well, I feel like this has been a very interesting conversation.
Making and Learning from the Podcast
00:52:21
Speaker
Yes. I enjoy all of our conversations. This is too. In a lot of ways, starting this podcast was an extremely selfish act for me because I was like, I just want to talk to Laurel. The same way. I feel the same way. I love the amount of learning that I'm undergoing in doing this too.
00:52:43
Speaker
I assumed that was about me when maybe you're like, I'm just researching a lot of things. No, I'm learning. Well, no, see, it's all connected. It's like, yes, I am researching things, but then I have to tell you about it, and it needs to make sense to you. That's another level of understanding that I have to acquire. All right. Well, a note to our listeners, you can check out our show notes, and I'm going to include any sort of link to a runway.
Episode Resources and Gratitude
00:53:09
Speaker
What?
00:53:11
Speaker
oh one wet max a one wet max one wet max that's when you jump in oh boy dry yes you just go into the pool you're totally dry you're dry you jump into the pool and you're just tan and ball it to the max you got a one wet max
00:53:33
Speaker
Just a note to our listeners, you can check out our show notes for links to the references we mentioned in this podcast. I'm going to link to the CDC guidelines and also where you can find that information about a one rep max that I had to really enunciate that Laura was talking about.
00:53:49
Speaker
You can also visit the MovementLogic website. You can get on our mailing list to be in the know about different sales on our tutorials. If you like watching videos, you can watch the video version of this episode on our website at movementlogictutorials.com forward slash podcast if you want to see what my quote unquote recording studio looks like. And to be clear, it is a closet. It's a nice looking one. Plants grow great there. I don't know how you do it.
00:54:15
Speaker
They're really thriving on absolutely no natural light. It's incredible. I just must have the greenest thumb anyone's ever seen. All right. Thank you so much for joining us. If you liked this episode, it really, really helps us if you subscribe.
00:54:33
Speaker
and also rate and review on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We would be super, super appreciative of that. And please join us again next week for more movement logic and more of our loosely held opinions and pretty strong muscles. Wasn't it strong opinions, loosely held? Yeah. All right. We're holding them loosely. And we're strong. Strong muscles. And loose.
00:54:59
Speaker
that I could shake loosely. That is a dangerous woman. That's right. Strong muscles. Loose morals. Watch out. Bye. Bye, everybody.