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1: Movement vs Exercise vs Sport
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Welcome to Episode 1 of the Movement Logic podcast! In this episode, Laurel and Sarah set the stage for the episodes to come. We discuss the philosophical and actual differences between movement, exercise and sport; the problems with over- and under-moving; and of course, naming your robot vacuum (it’s the law).
· What’s the difference between movement, exercise, and sport
· How does yoga fit into these categories
· What problems do we have as a society with movement, exercise, and sport
· Lack of daily movement and ADLs (Activities of Daily Living)
· How exercise without a goal becomes a chore
· Yoga as a cathartic practice that includes movement
· What is Movement Logic doing to address these topics
· Movement Logic exists to help non-clinicians improve their skill set
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Transcript
Introduction to Movement Logic 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yoga, movement, and physical therapy worlds, we believe in strong opinions loosely held, which means we're not hyping outdated movement concepts.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.
Exploring Big Questions in Movement
00:00:39
Speaker
Welcome to episode one of the Movement Logic podcast. I'm your host, Laurel Beaversdorf, and I'm joined by me, your co-host, Dr. Sarah Court. Yeah.
00:00:52
Speaker
We are going to dive right into our topic today. It's a really big one and it's kind of like a broad brushstroke conversation, but maybe more like the canvas that's going to kind of lay out what some of our more detailed conversations in future podcast episodes will kind of revolve around. So it's a question that I think is relevant to anyone with a body.
00:01:15
Speaker
but maybe more specifically to movement professionals like me and movement and rehab professionals like Dr. Sarah Court. It's a big question and hopefully it sparks some interesting and philosophical conversation between Sarah and I, but I guess we're going to have to wait and find out.
Defining Movement, Exercise, and Sport
00:01:37
Speaker
Before we get into it, we want you to know that Sarah and I, we did decide on this topic,
00:01:43
Speaker
for our conversation, but we have not had this conversation in the past. Our dialogue's not scripted. It's really just us thinking out loud. And that's kind of my favorite way to learn personally. So here's our big question. The question is, what is the difference between these three concepts? Movement, exercise, and sport.
00:02:09
Speaker
Now, those of you who practice or teach yoga, which is my guess is a good many of you who are listening. We know movement plays a really big role in the practice of yoga, but it doesn't really fit neatly into either of these or any of these three categories. It might need a category of its own. Maybe you're wondering about that. Don't worry. We are going to get into that question big time in this conversation. We have two more questions that we're going to ask around this that we've planned out as well. But more on that.
00:02:39
Speaker
as we get into this topic of the difference, the difference between movement, exercise, and sport. So Sarah, do you want to start us off?
Sports vs. Movement and Exercise
00:02:53
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think there's probably many different opinions on what these things are, what the difference is.
00:03:02
Speaker
When I was thinking about it, the sport one sort of separated itself in my mind a little more clearly from movement and exercise. Those two seemed more grouped together. Sport, to me, involves competition. It involves some sort of aim outside of the movement itself, like winning.
00:03:23
Speaker
Uh, it might involve other things like a ball or a bat, uh, which are all things that I, uh, personally really don't enjoy. I, this is a total aside, but I was at the clinic yesterday and the clinic owner who's also a practitioner was like, think fast. And she threw a ball. I was looking for this ball. She threw it at me and I literally, as she was throwing it, I went, I hate catching. Um, because
00:03:50
Speaker
Sport to me is the thing where you embarrass yourself. I guess that's my experience of sport from having more of a yoga and dance background. So to me, sport has a goal outside of the physical movement of it. And part of that difference is when I work with athletes or people who are sporty, a lot of people think people who are at a higher level of movement or sport like that
00:04:18
Speaker
that they are really incredibly excellent movers and in some ways they are. But the wild thing that I see very, very often is that because the focus is so much on this goal of, you know, be the fastest or hit the thing the farthest or whatever the sport asks for, very often they're just kind of getting there however they get there. And the strategy, the movement strategy and motor planning, all of that kind of stuff within their movement sometimes is bananas. I've seen some really crazy stuff where I'm like,
00:04:48
Speaker
I get it. You're really good at this, but you almost somehow like without actually doing it the best possible way, the most efficient way. So that's sort of where I am with sport. What do you think about sport? Well, yeah. So, so I think that sport is definitely the most specific of the three.
Personal Insights on Movement and Sport
00:05:10
Speaker
I played volleyball. That was my best sport all the way through senior year of high school.
00:05:17
Speaker
And loved lots of different sports basketball track and field. I ran the 300 meter hurdles as fairly good. It was fairly good athlete, but only in high school and, and, uh,
00:05:29
Speaker
I guess, so if I were to just give you like a couple words that I identify with each of these concepts, movement, exercise, sport, when I think of movement, I think of life or the basis of what we're studying in physics, chemistry, and biology, like movement is life. Also, you know, I think about like how movement defines space and time, right? It's just so broad that when we're talking about movement, we could be talking about any number of
00:05:59
Speaker
infinite variables having to do like with microscopic and macroscopic and like movement is in like just moving about our day. I hit the mic moving our day as humans. I moved and whammed my arm into the mic. So movements super broad exercise. When I think of exercise, I think of health, something we do for health and sport. I think of competition, just like you said,
00:06:25
Speaker
Um, I probably identify least with sport. I don't teach athletics. I'm not a competitive athlete. However, funny story. I started doing CrossFit, which has so far been something I have not been talking about a lot because I'm still trying to figure out how it fits with my identity.
CrossFit and Athletic Identity
00:06:43
Speaker
Like going to CrossFit classes. I am having an identity crisis in CrossFit.
00:06:49
Speaker
But here's the thing, I moved to Alabama from New York and I wanted to join a gym and I had a lot of curiosity about CrossFit and I wanted to strength train. And I knew that that was going to be a part of CrossFit like big time. I also wanted more aerobic exercise. And so, you know, CrossFit has all of that.
00:07:08
Speaker
I joined this gym and I freaking love it. I love the gym. I love the people there. I mean, I don't really know them all that well, to be honest with you, but I like the vibe. Do you know how you, when you get, you get a vibe from a place and you're like, this place is for me. It's for me.
00:07:24
Speaker
I think it really plays into like my rebel thinker personality where like, I don't like being told what to do, but I like to think really deeply about why I'm doing something. So when I choose someone to tell me what to do, I want it to be because they've thought really deeply about what they're telling me to do. So this CrossFit gym, they don't really get on me about anything. Like I can do whatever variation of whatever exercise I want. I know what I'm doing. Right. And I can also go up to them and ask them for an alternative. And they, there's no like.
00:07:52
Speaker
No, you got to like do more harder, faster, better, heavier. Like if anything, they lean more toward let's, let's, you know, start slow. Let's take it, you know, more conservatively. So I really appreciate this particular gym and I'm really digging CrossFit. But one of the things that's always sort of like giving me a twitch about CrossFit is this thick, they call everybody an athlete. And I'm like, well,
00:08:16
Speaker
I used to identify as an athlete. I don't anymore, but like really an athlete, like why do I have to be called an athlete? I'm not doing this for competition, although there is this competitive aspect to CrossFit. I mean, there were CrossFit competitions. So I was talking to somebody that I'm mentoring with, Chris Beardsley, who's an exercise scientist and he's expert in strength physiology. And I told him I was doing CrossFit.
00:08:44
Speaker
And I was like, but they call me an athlete and I don't really think I'm an athlete. He's like, well, anything done competitively is, is potentially a sport, anything done
Rehabilitation and Exercise Strategies
00:08:52
Speaker
competitively. So that's actually Chris Beardsley's definition. Well, I'm not gonna, you know, basically take his words and like set them in stone right now. But that's what was my takeaway from what he said. Anything done competitively is a sport, but then I'm like, well,
00:09:05
Speaker
I used to be competitive in the yoga classrooms that I was practicing in as a newer practitioner and like trying to like out headstand people around me as well. So was that, is that make yoga sports? I guess we could talk about like, what is competition? Yeah. There's, there's like more and less official versions of competition.
00:09:24
Speaker
I think as far as I wanted to say this idea of like what makes an athlete and is it necessarily equated with sport or competition? I think it can be. One of the things that I look at when I'm working with a patient as far as their rehab, their goals is, you know, do you want to get back to XYZ sport?
00:09:46
Speaker
And, you know, I'm not a, as we've determined already, I'm not a sporty person, but I have to know enough about the mechanics and the kinesiology and everything around a bunch of sports that are popular because I have to be able to help my patients rehab back to that sport or that activity, like golf or tennis or very, very common running is huge. And the thing I would say about, you know, calling you an athlete, I mean,
00:10:17
Speaker
I get it when when you feel like, oh, well, that's not really who I am. I'm not in this for competition. I'm not even really in competition with myself, which maybe is another way to determine, you know, calling yourself an athlete is like, oh, I'm trying to, you know, best my own PR or whatever. Right. Exactly. Yeah. But
00:10:33
Speaker
one of the, you know, in terms of when I think about the level that I have to rehab somebody to, if I have someone who, you know, and they're like, I run three or four, normally I run three or four times a week, I'll do a 10K on a weekend, no problem. In my mind, I'm thinking, okay, I'm not rehabbing this person to the level where they want to just be able to like, you know, get down to the floor and play with their grandkids or, you know, take a gentle walk and maybe ride their bike on the weekend or something. I'm rehabbing this person to be able to perform
00:11:03
Speaker
at the level of an athlete, whether or not they think of themselves as one. I have to think of them as one. So that's part of what I think of in the rehab sort of world. As far as then defining exercise and movement,
00:11:20
Speaker
I like what you said about exercise and health. I think of exercise different from movement in that exercise has a goal. The exercise itself is sometimes less, the exercise itself may not be the goal. The goal is health or fitness.
00:11:40
Speaker
I can never say the word fitness anymore without thinking about that meme with the pizza. Do you know this? It's like a cat sitting next to a pizza and the cat's like, I'm really into fitness, fitness whole pizza in my mouth. And that's so now whenever I hear the word fitness, that's all I think about.
00:11:57
Speaker
Pizza is the pizza. Um, but, but yeah, exercise has a goal, right? It's, it's, and again, in the rehab space, it's like, okay, I'm going to do this corrective exercise so that I can rehab my sprained ankle so that I can go running again or something like that. Or, um, I'm going to exercise because I.
00:12:18
Speaker
have goals around my weight or goals around my cardiovascular health or goals around some sort of muscular, hypertrophy, bodybuilding thing or bone density or any number of other things. I always think of it like exercise is sort of like the thing that you're doing to get to the other thing that you want.
00:12:39
Speaker
And yeah, movement, I think it seems to me that in the world of yoga and pilates and, you know,
00:12:50
Speaker
I think we've sort of all adapted the term, or not adapted, excuse me, adopted the term movement because it's hard to, you know, and we, you and I were talking about this earlier, it's hard for me to describe what I do when I teach classes. And I think movement just allows us so much freedom to include whatever we want, that it's much easier than, if I call my class a yoga class, how much of it needs to be what people think of as yoga asana,
00:13:19
Speaker
right and how much of it needs to or can be other things and right at this point it's it's such a mishmash you know but if i call it movement then then the expectations are well it could be anything and i could put whatever i want into it so i think movement gives us a degree of freedom as teachers to include whatever we want to conclude include in our classes
00:13:39
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Yoga is a combination of physical movement, spiritual practices, meditative, breath-based practices that originated in India. And so it has this like spiritual cultural component to it that I do think, you know, it makes us that it doesn't really fit very neatly into the categories of movement or exercise. I don't think it really
00:14:06
Speaker
belongs in sport at all. But movement is something that we do in a yoga practice because everything is movement. But some forms of yoga are treated, I think, a bit more like exercise, right? So we're doing the asanas in order to actually put some stress on our body to facilitate changes, adaptations toward different capacities.
00:14:34
Speaker
Um, the yoga practice is, uh, also potentially used for like decreasing or, uh, basically recovery, a form of recovery practice. Uh, so if you do, for example, higher intensity exercise.
00:14:52
Speaker
strength training, things like that. On your off days, you might do a practice like yoga for the very purpose of kind of like removing the stressor and recovering and then having all of those maybe positive effects on the nervous system and on the brain that we know are associated with things like meditation and mindfulness. So
00:15:12
Speaker
Yeah, I guess my, my next question is, so when we're talking about movement, we can be talking about any number of things there, there are certain activities that don't fit very neatly into either category fully. Let me just give you one example, like gardening, some people called gardening exercise. They do gardening for exercise, but gardening is also kind of like one of those daily life tasks that you do to like, get your plants to grow and have vegetables and things like that. Same thing with, um, you know, housework could also sort of be exercise in that, like it gets you moving. There might be some physical.
00:15:42
Speaker
Um, labor involved with it that, you know, could facilitate adaptations. I mean, honestly, like.
00:15:50
Speaker
any type of movement could be taking us away from a deconditioned state. But I think the, what sets exercise apart is potentially that when we do exercise, we're seeking to make some kind of change to our body. Now that exercise that we do, the exercise that we do could be like on a spectrum of intensities though. So like we could be doing restorative yoga as a recovery practice that actually doesn't really put very much stress at all on our bodies.
00:16:15
Speaker
but does create change, say, in our energetic state, right? So it's still creating change. The types of exercises that you might do
00:16:25
Speaker
with somebody who is just out of surgery, like rehabilitation exercises are going to be very low effort, low intensity exercises, potentially for the average person. But for that, that person just out of surgery, they're going to be pretty significant. So that's another thing about, you know, exercise, like the difficulty factor really depends on the person we're working with and like where they are. Um,
00:16:47
Speaker
you know, but I was going to say exercise is so broad, right? And so I think what we get a little bit confused when we're talking about exercise as movement teachers is like, what are we trying to change? What types of changes are we trying to facilitate in someone's life and maybe more narrowly in their body, right?
00:17:12
Speaker
Because when we talk about body, sometimes we get kind of hung up on like the muscles and the bones and the flexibility and the strength and all that stuff. But like, honestly, the bigger changes that I think people want from exercise have more to do with their life, like how they feel in their life and how they feel as a person in their life. I think really it's the feeling they're left with.
00:17:40
Speaker
Uh, so yeah, that's what I have to say about movement exercise yoga.
Societal Challenges in Movement and Exercise
00:17:46
Speaker
Um, I wonder if maybe we could ask our next question. Sure. Okay. Next question is what problems do we have as a society? We're, you know, we're in the United States, but you know, anywhere in your society, what problems might your society, your culture have with
00:18:08
Speaker
with movement, what problems might your society or culture have with exercise and what problems might it have with sport? I'm happy to, to, to start us off with this one. So it's real quick, like movement, maybe we don't move enough. We've outsourced movement and we call it convenience, right? We're no longer having to do like.
00:18:30
Speaker
The movement that we had to do before there was delivery, internet, cars, vacuum cleaner, right? Vacuum cleaner, right. Exercise. I think that we, we struggle with the problem of never enough.
00:18:44
Speaker
Um, or also maybe not enough, like, because maybe the daily movements of our lives aren't stressing our bodies enough to leave us with the resilience and robustness that we need to be pain-free and to feel good. But exercise also has this, like the pendulum swings pretty widely and we have a problem with exercise.
00:19:04
Speaker
where it's just never enough. So in yoga, you're never aligned enough. You're never doing fancy enough poses, strength training. It's never heavy enough, aerobic exercise. You're never fast enough or running long enough. Right. Um, and then with sport, similar to exercise, we have an issue maybe with over training, right? And, and a lack of variability where we're only training for our sport. And then we end up with, you know, pain as a result of that variability.
00:19:30
Speaker
Um, is really important, you know, for, for keeping us feeling good, but with, with, with sport in terms of our culture and society, I actually feel like there's just such an outside emphasis on sport.
00:19:43
Speaker
that it drives the financing of so much research that who's being researched are like college athletes or like elite athletes a lot of the time. Well, actually it's either, it's like, it seems like it's either swinging between like absolute beginners who've, who are completely untrained. Say for example, if it's like a research about strength or we're, we're conducting this, this study in order to get an answer to a question that would be relevant to athletics or sport. Yeah.
00:20:10
Speaker
And unfortunately, I feel like that leaves so many people out from the evidence being able to help potentially steer movement education for the average 55-year-old woman, for example.
00:20:27
Speaker
There's not a whole lot of studies on like strength for 55 year old women. No, I find it from my perspective, which is limited. If I read another study that starts, that is like methods, 18 college level athletes, I'm always just like, okay, great. So that's where the money is. 18 to 25 year olds. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I think, um,
00:20:50
Speaker
You know, to go back, as you were talking, I had so many things just sort of pinging in my head. I think absolutely one of the biggest issues that we have in this country is with people just not moving enough generally. I can't tell you the number of patients who come in and they're like, I sit at my computer 10 hours a day. And I'm like, when do you get up? And they're like, once. You know, and so we see these repetitive,
00:21:15
Speaker
stressors on the body from posture, not that there is a necessarily perfect posture to be in, but lack of, to your point, variability in posture, lack of movement in, I'm gonna give you a term, ADLs. ADLs are activities of daily living. It's one of my fancy physical therapy, note writing, shorthand, and that means that is cleaning the house and going to the store and all that kind of stuff. It's a type of movement.
00:21:43
Speaker
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And, you know, I could push the vacuum cleaner around or I could press the button on my little robot and my robot could run around the house and vacuum the floor instead, right? I could. I want a room that's so bad. Oh, I mean. They're like $800 though, aren't they? No, no, no, no. They're like $200. Yeah. I mean, if you get the, you don't have to get that much cheaper. Well, it's the best. I do love it. You have to name it. Oh, you have a Roomba?
00:22:09
Speaker
I have a, it's a, not a Roomba, but it's like a off brand or whatever. His name's Kevin. Uh, so yeah, you have to name them because that's just a rule. That's a rule of the robot vacuum. Um, we have an owl outside our house. We named it Steve. Nice naming things. I have an imaginary raccoon, not a real one in my basement and his name's Richard.
00:22:34
Speaker
I just promise it's true. I'm afraid he's going to come up through the vents with his little hands and just wrap them around the vents and be like, hello. Anyway, but yeah, we, we drive to the store because we can load up the car instead of walking, you know, where I live at least instead of walking. Well, I live where I live now in Alabama. It's like life changing. It's amazing. I love it. I would never, I never want to go back to schlepping my groceries again. Cause I used to live in New York city where
00:23:04
Speaker
grocery shopping before the pandemic when everything became like delivered to your door, but grocery shopping was like a sport. It was more like a sport. I remember when I lived there walking up my three flights of stairs with bags of groceries and just being like, okay, well, here's my workout for the day. So yeah, we've outsourced a lot of it. And even, I mean, you can get very
00:23:25
Speaker
sort of uh micro with this as well and talk about things like the amount of foods that we that are available that are pre-chopped so people aren't chopping vegetables right that your jaw strength is different because you're not biting into an apple you're eating apple slices you know things like that but you know so from a sort of micro to macro level we have really
00:23:47
Speaker
removed a lot of the kind of daily exercise that previously was helping with overall fitness, with bone density, with fatigue, with sleeping better, all of these other things.
Foot and Ankle Tutorial Promotion
00:24:04
Speaker
This episode is brought to you by the Movement Logic foot and ankle tutorial. Our feet and ankles are a pretty complicated bunch of joints that we tend to pay little attention to until they hurt. But with the proper care, we can recover from injury or prevent future injuries from taking place. If you or your students have foot pain, or you simply want more ideas for functional and progressive movements to maintain healthy ankle, foot and toe mobility and strength, the Movement Logic foot and ankle tutorial is for you.
00:24:33
Speaker
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00:24:56
Speaker
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00:25:21
Speaker
And I think what has happened now is we sort of have turned exercise into punishment for a lot of people because it's like, oh, well, because of my lifestyle now, I have to do these, you know, six exercises today that Sarah gave me as homework, but I don't enjoy it. And it's like, oh, I got to find time to put this in. And it becomes like a whole thing for a lot of people. Right.
00:25:48
Speaker
you know, the number of people that I see when I'll be like, okay, how's it going with the stuff we're giving you at home? And they're like, I kind of did it once, you know, because it because it becomes like another chore, right? So we started to think of exercise as a chore, as opposed to, you know, in and of itself, something something to enjoy.
00:26:07
Speaker
And I'll say that I think that's where sport is really helpful because I feel like people who are training. So exercise becomes training when you're an athlete, right? So even the change in term tells you that I am doing this exercise in a very specific reason.
00:26:24
Speaker
And for for in pursuit of mastery which is incredibly fulfilling, we can, we can we can be working on getting better at something that we that we really enjoy and care about. So anyway, absolutely. Yeah, and and that's also something we sort of stress a lot in the rehab world which is
Connecting Exercises to Personal Goals
00:26:40
Speaker
If I don't give you a reason to do this exercise at home, you're just going to be like, ugh, I'm not enjoying this. But if I give you a reason, if I connect it to the thing that you want to get back to, right? So you want to increase your range of motion in your shoulder so you can do your tennis swing again post, I don't know, labral repair, let's say something like that.
00:27:00
Speaker
every then piece of homework that I'm giving you to do or even calling it homework, right? I need a better term for it, but every piece of exercise that I give you to do, if I can connect it for you to that goal, you're so much more likely to want to do it and then to actually do it because it's not just this sort of standalone, like, oh, I'm flossing my teeth again, you know, kind of a thing. So I think that's a big piece of it. And, you know, ultimately,
00:27:28
Speaker
I think a lot of adults at least start to think about sport as something they did when they were younger and it is no longer for them a lot of the time. You know, or it's, oh, I tried to get back into soccer and I injured my ankle because I haven't played soccer in 20 years, but I played it in school, you know, and then
00:27:51
Speaker
Things like that. So, so figuring out a word in between exercise and sport, maybe where there's something like, like, I really enjoy hiking. There's tons of beautiful hiking trails in and around Los Angeles, which you will come and see. Uh, but you know, my friend Alex and I will go on like a six mile hike. That's exhausting. Is that exercise? Is that sport? Is that movement? It's kind of all three because
00:28:16
Speaker
I, I'm not in competition with somebody about it, but I'm a little bit in competition with myself and with each other. We time it every time and we try to see like, how long did it take? You know, it's like, Oh, wow. We shave 10 minutes off of that hike, you know? So, you know, I think, I think the ideal scenario is some sort of.
00:28:35
Speaker
uh, Venn diagram where the middle of like movement exercise and sport where the middle is like where you want to hang out. And so what are the things that motivate you? What do you get excited about? You know, and, and how does your movement and exercise lead you towards that activity? Well, can I say something? I'm, I'm training for a muscle up right now. So in addition to doing crossfit,
00:28:58
Speaker
where like there's lots of muscle ups in CrossFit and I can't do them. So I hired a personal trainer who is really smart and he's doing remote personal training with me. And so this idea of like, what is the, what is the in-between between exercise and sport? I feel like my muscle up training is that CrossFit exercise. It's very general, but this muscle up training is much more specific. And so all of the.
00:29:24
Speaker
programming that he's doing for me is really taking me very specifically in the direction of being able to do a muscle up. And so we're training specific exercises with specific training parameters for that purpose. And so yes, it's exercise. I consider my training, I call it training, right? As exercise, but it is progressive and targeted.
00:29:49
Speaker
to take me toward this goal that is not a sport. I'm not in competition, but I am writing down my numbers every day, tracking my parameters. And I definitely have an eye on improvement. I definitely have an eye on progress. And I feel like that might be what is missing from
00:30:11
Speaker
people who, for example, go from sitting at their desk all day and then decide they wanna take up basketball, right? That might be that type of progressive overload and specific loading might be the answer to that problem. But that's a form of exercise, but it's a more specific approach to exercise, which is what I actually love so much about strength training.
00:30:40
Speaker
is the goal orientation of it that you can have. You don't have to have CrossFit, like I said, is much more general. It's a much more general resistance type of resistance training and strength training.
00:30:55
Speaker
But the type of work you could be doing to prepare yourself or prepare your student or prepare your patient for this more specific type of demand, you know, strength training kind of is able to do that in a way that I have not really
00:31:17
Speaker
I haven't really understood other other modalities is capable of doing, except, um, I guess like we could kind of take a little bit of a tangent here and talk about dance, right? We could talk about another type of performance, which is art artistic performance. You and I both have an artistic background.
00:31:31
Speaker
Uh, I was an actor, but I had some, some movement, uh, proclivities in, in my acting. I was much more of a movement based actor. I keep hitting the mic. Sorry. I was much more of a movement based actor. Um, and you were a former, you're a former dancer, uh, swimmer.
00:31:47
Speaker
Right? Yeah. Well, not in any sort of professional capacity, but I did it a lot. And I also did some of my own acting, although it was all really in commercials. So I could act at quotation marks around acting because a lot of just, you know, hold the product smile and say something dumb. So yeah, for whatever reason, I was the exact level of corny. Yeah. To be able to do that with a straight face. Yeah. But yeah, yeah.
00:32:14
Speaker
So I think that what's interesting to me about artistic forms of movement that honestly I think is missing really from our conversation so far is the cathartic aspect of moving for the purpose of self-expression or movement for the purpose of expression. So
00:32:39
Speaker
And this is where I want to bring back yoga, where I think that yoga is just walking this really interesting line as a modality because it can kind of hold space for movement, exercise. I don't really associate it that much with sport, but it definitely could be a nice compliment to sport, right? But movement and exercise, but then there's also this like self expressive aspect of yoga where the focus is less on
00:33:07
Speaker
performance and more it can be less on performance or even the doing and more on the feeling and the attunement and then from there taking that that level of self-awareness that level of of interoception the ability to like pay attention to what we're feeling on the inside and turn that into an expression of movement an expression of movement for the sake of expressing movement
00:33:35
Speaker
And, and this is where yoga, I think is so unique because it really can be done. Of course, everyone's doing yoga for their own reason, but yoga can be done just for the sake of it, right? Like I'm really not trying to do anything. I'm trying to
00:33:53
Speaker
be with myself right now. Yeah. Yoga is, you know, it's different. As you said, it's different things in different people. It's taught and practiced in so many different ways now that I think it can be hard to find a single kind of definition of it. But I do think I agree with you at its core. It is a practice of being with yourself in yourself and not
00:34:22
Speaker
doom scrolling or distracting ourselves from the present moment. It's so much about being in your body in the moment and being okay with whatever comes up.
00:34:41
Speaker
which is different to me than the idea of exercise, right? It doesn't, to your point, it doesn't have a goal outside of itself necessarily. It exists as its own goal. The practice is the goal. So that sort of categorizes it differently than doing exercise or sport. But sometimes the practice of yoga does not involve that much movement, right? Sometimes it's about a non-moving, right? It's the practice of meditation, the practice of sitting, the practice of quietude.
00:35:11
Speaker
And it's such a phenomenal gift. And I love it. My own yoga practice has changed so much over the years, and I'm sure yours has as well. In the beginning, I was much younger and so very much into the like, oh, look at how well I do this pose in the middle of the room. And everyone's like, oh, good job.
00:35:40
Speaker
Now it probably looks, if the 25-year-old me practicing yoga saw what I was doing now, I would probably be like, what is this feeble old lady yoga that you're doing with the 15 headstands and the crazy balance poses and all the things that actually I over-practiced and ended up injuring myself from. But I think with some age comes hopefully a little bit of wisdom and some understanding that
00:36:09
Speaker
you know, you can look back and say, okay, well, what was I using the practice for at that point? And were my goals different? I don't necessarily want to say better or worse, but how have my goals for my practice of yoga changed? And how has my practice of yoga changed to reflect those goals?
Evolving Exercise Approaches
00:36:30
Speaker
Well, yeah. And you're making me think of one of the problems that I feel like arises for me when I consider the concept of exercise is this never enough mentality that I feel was much more prevalent in me as a younger practitioner where at first it was never fancy enough. Like what's the hardest pose I can do. And then it was never aligned enough.
00:36:56
Speaker
And then I started to have pain associated at least in part from my practice, but it might've just been because that was the only practice that I had. I wasn't doing other forms of exercise. I wasn't doing other types of movement for the purpose of health, right? I was just doing yoga for all of my health and I started to have pain.
00:37:14
Speaker
And I started to recognize that actually maybe I needed to do some different type of exercise. I started strength training and because the effort and intensity of strength training is much, much higher than yoga, I had underwent kind of an identity crisis of sorts where I was like, Oh, I'm working so hard. I am not used to working this hard. And in fact, in the yoga practice, the, the.
00:37:39
Speaker
sort of direction, the trajectory that I thought I was on was to make everything feel easier and effortless, right? Like the path toward effortlessness, right? And so strength training was this very interesting challenge to my identity of like what I thought I was trying to do with my body, but then also
00:37:57
Speaker
of just spoke for itself in terms of how much better I felt after I started doing it that I was like, well, there's something to this. I'm going to keep doing it. Um, and so the never enough though, of strength training, I think is, is often to just try to like get stronger and stronger and stronger. And, and maybe as a result, over load in the sense of like, you know, injuring ourselves or
00:38:23
Speaker
I'm maybe not having enough recovery built into our training as a 41 year old woman. I don't notice myself suffering from that. Never enough mentality as much as I did when I was 25. Absolutely. The other thing that I would, I would run as well as a 25 year old for the purpose of losing weight and looking a certain way, which I think is another never enough problem with exercise, which is that I don't think enough people are exercising to feel good. I think they're exercising to change the way they look. Yeah.
00:38:53
Speaker
Which is, is not helping them feel better actually. It's like sort of at least I'll speak from my perspective as a 25 year old trying to become thinner and thinner and thinner that definitely running for the purpose of losing weight, that, that reasoning for my running wasn't helping me feel better. However, the running in and of itself, the endorphins, the aerobic capacity I was building from it was certainly having.
00:39:18
Speaker
positive influence, but it could have easily become something that was unhealthy.
Balancing Exercise and Movement in Society
00:39:24
Speaker
And so when we're doing exercise for health, we have to be careful that our approach isn't actually creating the opposite effect of it becoming unhealthy. And I think that that's true for sport as well. Yeah, I think you can, I mean, and there's plenty of people that I don't see it as much anymore, but I still do see sometimes where they've injured themselves during their yoga practice. And I say, well, how many times a week are you practicing yoga every day?
00:39:48
Speaker
Is there any day where you're not doing that? No. Is there any day where you're doing something different? No. So, you know, anything can become a problem if it's done for the wrong reasons, or if it's done in an unhealthy manner, we can addict ourselves to anything, right? We can addict ourselves to the feeling of being the person who does yoga every day, right? So there's so many ways, but I think ultimately,
00:40:18
Speaker
sort of big picture for us culturally is that
00:40:24
Speaker
We need to land somewhere in the middle. We need to figure out how to stop some parts of the population who are overusing, abusing, overdoing whatever, sport or activity or exercise. And we have to talk to the parts of the population that are doing not enough or nothing for no reason other than they're out of the habit of it. It was never encouraged. It was never emphasized.
00:40:51
Speaker
And now they're finding themselves in pain or having problems because of that. And honestly, I do a lot of education in the clinic around, yes, we can make your back feel better if you do some movement and how much people have become scared of movement because now things hurt, right?
00:41:07
Speaker
And I think we need to take sort of both ends of the spectrum and kind of try to point them more into the middle, where you live in a space of practicing whatever your sport is for fun, understanding your exercise or training as a way to help you do the thing that you like, the joy of just being in a body and the ability to move a body and the privilege of having a body that functions relatively well, right?
00:41:37
Speaker
you know, enjoy it a little more. I think with a lot of these things, in American culture in particular, I think we're very good at turning everything into work. So suddenly the sport becomes a work, the exercise becomes work. You're like, well, from eight to nine is when I achieve enlightenment and then at nine I have a Zoom meeting and it's
00:42:00
Speaker
And I've got to turn my yoga practice into a reel for Instagram. Right. Exactly. You know, so, um, did it even, Hey, if nobody ever saw it, if you can record it, did it even happen? Right. And the, and the yoga practice took 30 minutes and making the real took five hours.
00:42:16
Speaker
And the making of the real undid any benefit of the yoga practice because after hour five, you're ready to throw your phone across the room. A thousand times over. So I think we need to come to sort of this middle ground of understanding that we all need to be probably moving more than we are on a daily basis, not turning it into punishment, not turning it into overuse, not turning towards medication as the automatic fix.
00:42:41
Speaker
or surgery, which I see a lot of, and understanding that a lot of the research now actually is saying, the surgery is not going to fix the problem that you have. I've had plenty of surgery, so I'm not anti-surgery, but in a lot of cases, like low back pain, for example, there's a lot of studies where it's like, you can go ahead and have that low back surgery and you're still going to have your pain. A lot of education around both ends of the spectrum, I think.
00:43:09
Speaker
I think the question is usually where's the money at right. That's why the money's in the drugs, the money's in the drugs, the money's in the surgery, the money's in the drugs, but then the money for, for example, this topic of, of sport being sort of the problem in our culture and society with sport is that there's such a hyper focus. It's such a priority.
00:43:29
Speaker
in terms of like the collection of knowledge, like epistemologically, like we want to know as much as possible about performance in sport, but why don't we also want to know as much as possible about perimenopausal women? And why don't we also want to know as much as possible about postnatal recovery, pelvic floor health? Why don't we want to know as much as possible about, you know,
00:43:55
Speaker
these other topics for the majority of the population who are not elite athletes, I'm getting worked up about
Addressing Gender Bias in Sports Research
00:44:01
Speaker
it. You are. And Laurel, the answer is, you know, why not? Because the patriarchy, right? Because all of those topics are about women, for the most part pelvic floor health is for both. Yeah. But you know, mostly people who come in are women and male and male and male and all the money in sports is with the, you know, male, male athletes.
00:44:21
Speaker
Our final question around the original question is what are we doing, you and I, what is movement logic doing? And what's our aim? What's our mission as it relates to the topics of movement, exercise, and sport? Yeah. You want to go first? Or you want me to go first? What's
Mission of Movement Logic
00:44:47
Speaker
our mission? Well, you know, movement logic is
00:44:51
Speaker
for everybody, but it is also sort of more aimed at teachers. So any teacher of movement, Pilates, yoga, you know, strength coaches, personal trainers, physical therapists, you know, and as such, it tries to, what we're trying to do is create content that
00:45:12
Speaker
takes the knowledge that you have and just levels it up and gives you more background to what you might have learned in your sort of initial trainings or over the years of your work. And we mostly try to do that with a lot of exercises, for want of a better word, movements.
00:45:34
Speaker
Now that we've had this conversation, I'm like, I don't know, is it movement or is it exercise? I don't know. Examples of ways that you can start to create novel movement variability for the yoga population in particular, including strength into the work that you're doing, because that is a piece, yes, there is strengthening components to yoga, but that sent that external load is missing unless you're doing yoga with weights.
00:46:02
Speaker
Right. Which then sort of gets into that weird hybrid world. But anyway, you know, to me that's the goal is, it's the sort of, you know, teach a person to fish rather than just like handing out fish. So I love getting to work in my role as a teacher separately from my role as a clinician because
00:46:24
Speaker
clinician, it's sort of one to one. And teacher, I feel like, well, if I just taught 15 different people something about this, they then go out and work with how many other of their, you know, students and clients. So really, I mean, just just just a lot of movement education, which that's to me, that's the goal. What about you? What do you think? Well, I'm gonna talk about what my mission is, is a
00:46:53
Speaker
yoga teacher, strength coach, or just movement educator, which is, well, I'm doing it right now, right? Starting conversations to get us thinking a little bit deeper about what it is that we're doing and why we're doing it. But in the realms of like my actual movement teaching, I think I'm always trying to think about how I want students
00:47:15
Speaker
what I want them to leave with beyond just the feeling and maybe the outcome of having done the yoga class or the strength program or the kettlebell class with me, I'm thinking about how I want them to see themselves. And so this means that I'm trying to create opportunities for people through movement to have a fresh perspective
00:47:45
Speaker
on themselves and to start to imagine potentially what else could be possible in their life because of how they feel now. So I guess I'm dealing in feelings, right? I'm dealing in like these more positive, hopefully feelings of greater capacity, better breathing, more strength.
00:48:10
Speaker
maybe more flexibility, maybe the ability to do something they had not been able to do before, whether it's a yoga pose or a pull-up or a kettlebell flow. But underneath that, I guess I want people to ask and to believe, right? What else is possible? There's more possible for me in my life. I'm capable of more, not in terms of more work or better performance or this or that, but like maybe I'm capable of
00:48:39
Speaker
feeling more present in my life, better in my body, more capable to take on the challenges that are inherent to being in a body and to living in this world. I have a follow-up question for you. Do you think differently in terms of, because I know that I do in my head, I sort of think about what I call lovingly, gen-pop, which is anyone who's not a teacher, and then the teacher community, which is anyone who teaches anything. Do you
00:49:08
Speaker
think differently in terms of who you're creating content for. Do you have different goals when you're teaching like a public workshop that's for regular folks versus I'm teaching in part of a teacher training or something like that? I think what I've noticed about myself is that in order for me to be an effective teacher, I can really only be teaching what I'm truly invested in and interested in and believe in.
00:49:34
Speaker
And what tends to be the outcome of that is that I do attract a lot of teachers because I think that my perspective is usually coming from this more like, Hmm.
00:49:46
Speaker
this level of understanding that's a little bit maybe deeper and therefore not as relevant to the general population. However, I do have people who are non-teachers who take classes with me or members of my virtual studio. And I think what sets them apart is that they're really curious to understand these finer details and sort of the connections between things. My multidisciplinary approach is
00:50:16
Speaker
because I teach strength, I teach yoga, I teach very down regulating and very up regulating practices together as a part of my work.
00:50:24
Speaker
My reasoning behind that is that I do think if we think of movement as a kind of nutrition for our bodies, that we need all the different food groups. We need all the different movement groups for balance. And I feel like that's my way of kind of taking that middle road of like, let's find balance here. And for me, balance means a lot of times it means variety. Of course, we could go to the extreme with that as well.
00:50:49
Speaker
like too much variety actually starts to kind of work against you, I think, because we can't really then make progress in any particular direction. We dig a lot of shallow holes and we fail to dig any deep ones. So I don't think that the answer is to be doing something different every day, but I do think that variety might, this, um,
00:51:11
Speaker
attempt to bring more variety to our movement diet movement practice. Katie Bowman was the first, first person who used that, that phrase that is just like, so such an adequate analogy. I think it's such a good analogy, but our movement diet, I think we can bring start start bringing more balance to it when we seek very different avenues of movement along a wide spectrum from effort, low effort to high effort from low intensity to high intensity. And we have some of
00:51:40
Speaker
some variety within that spectrum spectrum. Um, so, so my goal really is to help people ask the question, what else is possible in their life? Like that's the big one. And I do it through movement and I do it by helping people take a more reasonable balanced approach to their movement, to open their mind to the possibility that, uh, they can feel very differently. And all of those ways of feeling can be good simply by exposing themselves to different ways of
00:52:12
Speaker
different ways of hitting the microphone and moving. You need to gesture less with your arms when you're talking. You need variability in where you're putting your hands when you're talking.
00:52:31
Speaker
No, I think that's I think that's really great. And I think that ultimately, like, that's a great goal for all of us as as teachers, right, is to help people understand where they might have self limited or where they might, you know, and
00:52:50
Speaker
It can happen in a, in a teacher, you know, teacher to teacher, it can happen, you know, teacher to client, student, patient. I mean, I see a lot of people where, where they'll come in and they're like, Oh, you know, I say, okay, what is there something you'd like? I usually ask people, is there something you'd like to be doing that you're not doing right now because of how your body feels. And some people are very clear. They're like, I'm going to get back to my thing.
00:53:12
Speaker
And other people are like, Oh, well, you know, I used to love da da da, but I haven't done it in years. And I don't think I could ever do it again. And I just, I'm always like, just super positive about it. I'm like, well, let's, let's see. I think maybe you could, or maybe a version of it, you know, maybe a variation on it, something, but
00:53:31
Speaker
And I think that's the sort of concept of taking your embodiment and your movement and your exercise in your sport out of the realm of it's a chore, it's not fun, it's something I used to do. It's become stagnant. I only ever do the same things anymore. And instead, kind of just throwing a bath bomb of inspiration in so that somebody starts to think
00:53:55
Speaker
Oh, and this is also, I mean, it's a totally separate topic, but it's also like really important for like nociception and interoception and. What's nociception, Sarah? Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, pardon me. Nociception is your body's sense of like noxious negative things. It is the precursor to what we consider the experience of pain. So that, um,
00:54:19
Speaker
you know, having negative thoughts around your own capabilities, around what movement's going to feel like, uh, has been shown in research to actually decrease your ability to, for like motor output, strength, things like that, and, and increase your sense of pain. Right. But if we start to flip it, if we start to, um, put ideas back into people's heads around what they can do with their body, um, then, you know, any, anything's possible, anything's possible.
00:54:47
Speaker
So I want to add also to like my answer to the question of what's my mission is like, what is, what do I see movement logics mission as?
Empowering Movement Teachers
00:54:55
Speaker
And I really think that.
00:54:57
Speaker
For me, the reason that movement logic exists is to help movement teachers like me who are not necessarily, um, or not at all, actually like officially not a PT. I am not a PT like that's very objective statement that I can make. I'm not a PT. I am not a clinician. I am not a rehab specialist. However, I do have tools to help people get back to meaningful activities.
00:55:26
Speaker
I do have tools to help people feel better in their body. I do have tools to help people improve their movement, their exercise, and their sport as a movement teacher. But what I need and what I've been helping us at MovementLogic put forth is a course content that helps
00:55:53
Speaker
movement teachers understand topics of pain, anatomy, physiology, as they relate to the particular types of students they might be encountering who are post rehab, right? We're not teaching rehab. They're post rehab, but they're still, they need some more bridging. They need some more help getting back to those activities of daily living, those meaningful activities that exercise that they really,
00:56:21
Speaker
you know, love for their physical and mental health, that sport that they really want to get back to. Where do we fit in? Because I feel like, unfortunately, there just isn't enough bridging between rehab and then getting people back to the things that they want to be able to do in their life that give their life meaning. And I think this is really where the movement teacher comes in. The PT sessions end and then what?
00:56:46
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And it's a potent space. And it's a valuable space. And it's a space that I think all of us who consider ourselves movement teachers should want to try to inhabit, if only for your own skill set, your own mastery of
00:57:10
Speaker
movement itself, right? I mean, that's kind of, that's kind of the goal, I think. Yeah. We want to, we want to help people. And I think that our tutorials help people like me movement teachers who, you know, RPTs help their people. Yeah.
00:57:24
Speaker
Um, Hey, Sarah, I think we did it. I think we just recorded our first podcast. It's amazing. I think it's, I think we're, I think you're right. High five. Don't hit, don't hit the mic. Don't hit the mic. High five to the camera. Wait, no, I hit my spot. I got to do it again. Sorry. Okay. Motion high five to the screen. Okay. Yes. All right. Well, um, talk to you next week. All right. Okay. Sounds great.
00:57:50
Speaker
Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed today's episode and you want to support us, please subscribe, rate, and review on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you'd like to watch, head on over to our website at movementmagictutorials.com forward slash podcast, where you can watch the video version. We'll be back in your ears next week to nerd out about movement without taking ourselves too seriously in the process.