Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Here's the challenge. Forget exercise. Forget working out. Just move. Start where you are, do what you can, and don't let guilt, perfectionism, or outdated ideas about fitness stop you.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: It's the youe Life Lived well podcast with Dr. Kevin Payne, a better way of seeing the life that you want to live.
[00:00:28] Speaker A: Hello and welcome. Let's talk about movement. Not exercise, not working out. Movement. Because the second we call it exercise, a lot of people check out. And I get it. The word exercise is loaded with guilt, with expectations, with decades of bad advice and failed attempts. But here's the thing. Our bodies are built to move. It's not optional. It's not about fitness trends or gym memberships or hitting a certain number of steps. It's about how your body works. At the most fundamental level. No matter our health status, we work better in bodies that move as much as they will allow. And yet, for most of us, movement feels like a chore. We avoid it. We put it off. We tell ourselves we'll start tomorrow, next week, next year. But why? Why is something so essential, something we're literally adapted for at the most basic level, so hard to do? The answer isn't laziness. It's not lack of willpower. It's a mismatch. For most of human history, movement was baked into daily life. We walked, we carried, we built, we farmed, we hunted. Movement wasn't optional. It was necessary. Our primal, pre rational brains understood the purpose of every physical action. You didn't go for a five mile run just to burn calories. You. You ran because you were chasing something or something was chasing you. But today, most of us don't need to move to survive. And that's where the disconnect happens. Our brains are wired to conserve energy unless movement has an immediate, tangible purpose. When that purpose disappears, movement starts to feel like a meaningless, optional task. Something we should do but struggle to make stick. That's why most people fail at traditional exercise plans. When we live with a chronic illness, it's an even bigger challenge, because that same primal brain gets all worked up with the best of intentions, trying to protect us. It's a not so subtle voice always warning us to pull back so that we can heal and get well again. It doesn't understand that the rules of chronic conditions are not like injury and acute illness. We need to change up our thinking. So here's the shift. Stop thinking about exercise. Start thinking about movement. Because movement is practical. It's useful. It's about building capacity so life doesn't overwhelm you. It's about ensuring our bodies can handle the demands of daily living without pain, without exhaustion, without breaking down. Or if you're like me, with a bit less pain and fatigue and the ability to go a little further before that inevitable overwhelm hits. When we're living with a chronic illness, recovering from injury, or dealing with physical limitations, movement is even more critical. And I totally understand this one too. In my adult life, I've had every sort of body imaginable. I've been a jacked mesomorph at 185 with single digit body fat. I've been a skinny ectomorph barely clinging on to 129 pounds. And I've been an obese endomorph, tipping the scale past 260. I've had to rehab back from injuries and surgery. I've also lived through major exacerbations to my Ms. That overwhelmed me with fatigue, pain and dysfunction, destroying whatever fitness I then had and forcing me to completely rebuild step by step from scratch. As we record this, I'm currently going through a bit of another rebuild, so I completely understand how frustrating and discouraging this can be. I've lived so many of its permutations. I still do. Please keep that in mind as I say what needs to be said in this episode. I know our starting lines are further back. Sometimes our health issues knock us down and we have to start over. Once we get to a good place, it can be a lot harder to keep ourselves there. That's not fair, but it's reality. And that means we have to be intentional about building strength, endurance, flexibility and balance. Not to impress anyone, not to hit some arbitrary fitness goal, but to reclaim our own ability to function in the world. I also want to emphasize I've got a lot of personal experience with all sorts of movements. I've been working out for over 40 years. But I'm not a trainer, physical therapist, or exercise physiologist. I make it a habit to stay within my expertise. So a lot of this episode is about how you can train your mind and behaviors to make space for movement in your lives. Where I do talk about the specifics of exercise, I stick to the basics here. I've run all this by some experts I know and trust. But if you're doing this for the first time or for the first time in a long time, I encourage you to seek out local experts who can learn about your specific health needs and design custom strategies. That said, today we're breaking it all down. Why movement matters, how to make it work for you? And why? Small, consistent effort beats every unrealistic fitness plan out there. We'll get to it right after a quick break.
[00:05:56] Speaker C: I'm Dr. Kevin Payne. Just jump with me into your life Lived well.
Half of us now live with chronic illness.
Mine is multiple sclerosis.
It's your life. Live it well. A chronic diagnosis doesn't mean goodbye to the good life you wanted. You don't have to feel overwhelmed or hopeless. I'll show you how to save yourself. Take your first step at justjump life.
[00:06:28] Speaker B: It's the youe Life Lived well podcast.
Don't forget to like, share and subscribe.
[00:06:38] Speaker C: This episode is not about weight loss. I know we'll talk about that in the future, but I'm just going to tell you right now, I'm never going to make any suggestions about diet and exercise to you with the goal of being thin or any other cosmetic reason. Instead, I'm going to suggest that fuel, movement and recovery are tools that we can all use to feel better and operate better in the world. And for me, that's what this is about. It's about giving our bodies and our minds and our relationships and our environments better tools so that we can have better quality of life. I have lived rehabbing back from exacerbations from my chronic illness, from injuries, coming back from being morbidly obese and really needing it to. I understand the challenges that you're facing.
[00:07:37] Speaker A: Okay, so we've established that exercise is weird and we don't want to do it. But the big question is, why? Because bodies are adapted to move, and almost any body improves with movement.
[00:07:50] Speaker C: But here's the thing. Exercise from our primal brain's point of view isn't movement with a purpose. Historically, we walked everywhere. We carried what we needed, we hunted or farmed, we built and repaired things. Our lives were full of both incidental and purposeful physical labor. And there was always a point to it, right? An immediate point that your primal brain could grasp. With exercise, it becomes a lot more nebulous and disconnected from immediate experience because you're not going to see the benefits to exercise for months. That's where the hang up comes in. Psychologically, we are not moving for a purpose that our primal cave children can understand. And that's why I think of what we're doing here as movement, not exercise. Because movement is more concrete, it's more instrumental, it's more useful. And that's the way we have to frame it in order to motivate ourselves to become consistent and to make It a part of our lives. But any way you want to slice it, with a chronic health condition, our starting lines have been effectively moved back. We have to work harder just to get to the baseline capacity of an otherwise normal Air quotes healthy person.
[00:09:18] Speaker A: That sucks.
[00:09:19] Speaker C: But it's what we've got. So we might want to exercise for a sense of personal accomplishment. But ultimately this is all about building physical capacity so that normal life demands don't leave us over our edge. I'll also add that there's a lot we can learn from the study of elite endurance and extreme athletes. Which sounds kind of weird, I know, but it's because they're looking to push their edges and their edges are a lot further out than ours are. But the psychological principles are the same. We are actually brains constructing minds in bodies, doing behaviors in environments. We're embodied minds. So bodies are adapted to move and almost anybody improves with movement. But because we are adapted to move and our modern lives tend to be sedentary, we need to introduce more movement into our lives than we probably normally get. That's just the long and the short of it. And this is true for everyone. Even though I have certain physical limitations that I have to be mindful of, and many of you who are listening to this podcast have physical limitations you have to be mindful of, each of us still needs to move our body as much as it can regularly, regardless of age or health status. Yes, we've got special considerations, but we're the people who are going to benefit from this more than anyone else. Because we're going to be bringing our starting line from way back there to something that is closer to something that is operable in day to day regular commitments. When we exercise, when we move, we build four physical capacities. And I want you to think about it like this. You're going to build strength, endurance, flexibility and balance. And those are all crucial and different kinds of exercises. Do the building of these different things. So you can't just go out and walk. That's great, do that. But it's not going to get you where you need to be. So what happens to our bodies when we don't exercise? We lose those capacities. We lose strength, we lose endurance, we lose flexibility, we lose balance to the point that our ability to deliver is exceeded by life demands. We fail and we feel overwhelmed. We lose a lot more than this. Going to give you a scary list here. We lose muscles, Our muscles become deconditioned. So we lose muscle mass, we lose the ability to activate our muscles neurologically. The way that we normally would. We lose the muscles that allow us to breathe effortlessly. Our heart becomes weaker, our limbs become weaker. Our system has to work harder even at rest. Our whole body has to work harder all the time. So our blood pressure tends to go higher. We become more distressed because we're operating closer to our edge all the time. So our baseline level of stress goes up. Our metabolism slows. All those hormonal and other processes in your body slow down. They become less efficient. And that means that there's a lot of junk and plaques and things like that that are building up in your system. We have a greater risk of heart disease. Atherosclerosis, right? Fatty plaque building up in arteries. We lose neuroplasticity and have reduced neurogenesis. Okay, there goes Rene Descartes Mind body dualism right out the window. Our minds do not operate as well. And we will see this in more noticeable memory and cognitive problems. We become more vulnerable to age related brain declines and structural changes. We lose endurance. That means we get more tired more quickly. We lose the regulation of glucose levels, so our blood sugar levels become more erratic. Highs and crashes, right. We increase the likelihood of cancers, and especially some like colon cancer, breast cancer, others as well. We become more susceptible to osteoarthritis and repetitive joint injuries. We become more prone to any injuries. Our hdl, our quote unquote good cholesterol levels go down. And our ldl, that quote unquote bad cholesterol level goes up. So our cholesterol levels get out of whack. Their ratio is wrong. Our bones become more brittle and more susceptible to osteoporosis. We suffer a greater likelihood of depression. We become more sensitive to distress. We have a greater likelihood of obesity and the related issues. We have greater cravings for unhealthy foods. When we don't move, fundamentally, we lose both lifespan. We have a 500% greater chance of early death and we lose health. Spanish as well. Simply put, if you don't use it, you lose it. That holds for any living system. We must work to avoid decay. So your goal should be to develop more of these capacities than you'd typically be called to deliver in any given day. That's so that you're not out on your edge due to normal life obligations. That's why you want to move. You want to move because you want to build those capacities. So who should not exercise? Well, there are no absolute rules, but they have certainly changed in my lifetime. There used to be all sorts of conditions where the medical profession would say, rest if in doubt, you need to check with your medical team, obviously who know your condition best. But in general, what we say now is that you need to move your body as much as your body will allow you to move it. So there will be windows of time when absolute rest is called for, right? Especially for example, when you're fighting off some other condition, like an infection on top of everything else you're already dealing with. But with modern research, it's possible to develop a movement program for almost anyone. So my point here is there's no excuse not to move. And there's so many benefits. And I didn't even list all of them when I had that huge ginormous list just now. We have to practice and build every capacity, physical, mental, emotional, in relationships, all that stuff. It's part of being human. And once we get there, we can't rest on our laurels. We have to keep working or the natural processes of entropy will take over and we will start decaying and lose what we gained. I want you to think about why are you not exercising? If we are trying to build in four areas, so endurance, that's aerobic fitness. We're trying to build strength. Those are going to be resistance exercises. We're trying to build balance and flexibility. And those are a variety of stretching and balance exercises. And we'll talk about these here in a minute. I want to take you through some approaches that you can take in each of these areas. There's no right or wrong exercise, there's no magic bullet. The exercises, the movements that you will find most useful are the ones that you will keep doing. And it really is just as simple as that. Many of us have conditions that mean that we don't want to deal with high impact aerobic exercises. So we don't want to go out running on the roads or jogging or things like that.
But there are lots of low and no impact aerobic exercises that we can do. The granddaddy of all of them is swimming. So if you are a fish, then go swimming. If you like the water, go swim. If it's easily available to you, go swim. I've never been a huge fan of the water, so I swim well enough to save myself if I need to. And other than that, it's not really a thing in my life. But we can also cycle. And if you don't like riding a bike out on the road, then get a stationary bike, a recumbent bike, which helps with some physical limitations. Use that elliptical trainers. I like to row, so I have a rowing machine. All of those are low or no impact. And if you do like to walk, jog or run, do it on the sand or the grass or a nice padded track and you have all those good options that are probably around. One of the fascinating things that we found with aerobic exercise is you can get started with really tiny bursts. Do it vigorously for 30 seconds, then rest for, say, 90 seconds, then do another 30 seconds, then rest for another 90 seconds and do those two minute cycles for, say, 10 minutes. Start with one, just move vigorously for 30 seconds and that may be a lot. And don't get down on yourself because you have to compare yourself to yourself. If you are on average doing a little bit better each day, taking into account that someday you're going to have. Sometimes you're going to have good days and bad days, right? On average, you want to do a little better each day, week to week, month to month, then you're going to see benefits out of that. And pretty soon you'll do your 30 seconds and you think, oh, I can do 45. So do 45 and rest for a minute. 15 and do another 45 and keep stacking those up. So you're breaking this into tiny, little, almost embarrassingly small morsels. And the thing that you have to keep in mind is first, we talked about this in other episodes. You are building a place in your life for the habit. That's the most crucial thing, because you have to build that place in your life. If you don't, then you're always thinking, oh, what am I missing out on if I'm spending my time doing this? You have to make this time, the time that you are doing your movement. And once you have made that time in your life and started developing that habit, and it's going to take you a few weeks, a few months, you may be several weeks in before you actually feel really comfortable. And then you'll get to the point of, I'm only doing aerobic exercise for two minutes here. And you'll be in the middle of it one day and you'll say, oh, I'll just keep going. Because this seems like it's not very much. And that's how you do it. You've got to start so small, smaller than you ever imagined you would need to start. Because you have to make it easy to have a place in your life. And you have to do that first. And then you have to start, maybe not looking forward to it, but feeling weird if you are not doing that thing in that time. For me, I hit the rowing machine. And when I was getting back after all the stress and the injury, I began with short bursts and pauses, just like I'm talking about. And then you extend the bursts and shrink the pauses until you get to your full time. Now, for me, I devote 20 minutes to aerobic activity and I increase the intensity once I'm comfortable performing all out for those 20 minutes, then I gradually increase the intensity. So I have no interest in running or rowing or walking or biking or anything like that for an hour of my time. But what we do know is that each, if you do this right, and then you, you get into something called HIIT training, right? Which is high intensity interval training. So if you're on say a, a treadmill, maybe you're running at, you know, you're just, you're jogging or fast walking and you want to do that for 20 minutes. You're at a fast walk for 20 minutes. Now you start into introducing these high intensity intervals in there. So every, maybe at the beginning, every five minutes, you're going to crank that up five more miles an hour on the treadmill for 30 seconds and then you're going to come back to your brisk walk. And then after another five minutes, you're going to do another interval. These intervals are really effective way to build those capacities for me. Then, like you, you will find that you have your specific concerns with each kind of exercise or each kind of movement that you're doing. So I have a narrow operating temperature range. Heat sensitivity is really common with Ms. So when I get too hot, I can't feel my legs. And in fact, sometimes more of my body starts disappearing and I become really weak. When I become too cold, I get spasticity, my legs just seize up. So I've got this narrow operating temperature and I've got to make sure that the environment's not too cold, even though I want it to be cooler when I work out so I don't get too hot, right? So you will understand your concerns as you do it. If we're dealing with resistance, if we're wanting to build strength, we've got those big rubber bands that people use. We've got body weight exercises, we've got dumbbells, we've got barbells, we've got machines.
All of those give you an opportunity. I like dumbbells. I like dumbbells because when you use dumbbells instead of barbells, it recruits more of the stabilizing muscles because you can't use one side of your body to cheat or the other. I would Also add then that you can get to the point where you don't take breaks between each set and you can also get aerobic benefits from it as well. So like for me, once I work into my full workout, which I'm back to now, I will usually do a circuit of 29 free weight exercises with the dumbbells in 22 to 30 minutes. A deliberate pace, no breaks, full range of motion, pause on extension and contraction. And I never stop and I'm winded and I've got a really good workout by the end of it and then I go to the rowing machine. But when I was coming back to this, I started with about 10 exercises in 10 minutes with light weights, low reps, because I'm building the habit and I'm building the space and I'm building the movement. The first time, start small, don't be afraid to start small. And then there's balance and flexibility and sometimes you can tie these together. And there are lots of stretching exercises.
You can use yoga or tai chi. You know, those have a lot of great moves and there are a lot of good routines that you can get access to on the web for free and follow those patterns. For me, it's a 10 minute set of yoga, tai chi and track exercises that I use. And you know, my special considerations is I get Ms. And my balance goes wonky, so I have to have a nearby chair or a bench sometimes for support. On a really good day I don't need it. On a bad day I do. So I've got that there so I don't fall over. So switch it up. Especially when you've plateaued and you're no longer seeing progress. Body BUILDS habits so if you're not stretching toward your edge, it's not triggering to grow and develop. But a good movement routine is going to have elements of all four of these things. You're going to be working on strength, endurance, balance and flexibility. Not for their own sake, but because you don't want to lose all those things that happen in that list that I gave you. And you want to be able to meet the demands that normal day to day life throws at you. And I know it sucks, I know this. We've got more that we have to deal with and either we're going to or we're going to allow ourselves to become swamped under all of it. This is not a choice. What kind of benefits are you going to get out of this? Your muscle neurology is going to become more effective and more efficient. Your brain is going to wire itself better to your muscles. It's going to be able to recruit more fibers more efficiently, more effectively. You're going to gain muscle mass and your muscles are going to operate more easily. Your whole body is going to operate better and more easily. You're going to crave better calories because your body is demanding more. Nutritional things is going to be more effective because you're demanding more of your body and your body is making better requests. It's as simple as that. You're going to get better sleep. Regular movement helps increase the sleep pressure that you feel. By the end of the day, you become less prone to injury. You don't get winded. And let me tell you, I wish I had some of these on video, but I don't normally have somebody videoing my landings. But when I started out back with the skydiving, I bounced ferociously. I mean, I had. There are a couple of times where we. I got a buddy I jump with who's an EMT who. He, like, looked at that and he was, like, getting his rig off and getting ready to run over to me, and it's like I'd pop right up. So, fortunately, I'm a very bouncy human, and that's really good. I can plf like a boss. PLF is parachute, landing, fall. You're not going to get winded when you're moving regularly. You're going to have a better mood, better cognitive operation, better emotional resilience, and you're going to live longer and have a better quality of life when you do, etc. Right? So just reverse that list from a few minutes ago. Remember that to do this, to get this to a point where movement is a habit in your life, it takes a long time. It takes months. It takes longer than you think it should take. So first, we're making a space for your habit. Second, we're becoming comfortable with how movement feels. We're practicing and we're building interoception, and that's our ability to sense what's going on within our bodies. We're practicing and building proprioception. That's our understanding of where our bodies are in space. We're practicing and building our kinesthetic intelligence, our ability to just naturally have the body do what we want it to do. And we're building bodily trust. Most of you are probably like me, and you've been through some experiences in your life which make it difficult for you to trust your bodies. That was one of the things that I had to really build when I went back to becoming a skydiver, because you got to trust yourself. You're going 120 miles an hour toward the earth, and if you don't pull, you splat. So you have to do something, and you have to trust yourself to do it. You are building that bodily trust, reducing your fear and knowing your true edges. There are a lot of mental things going on that try to protect you, that try to keep you from pulling back from an activity before it's going to get to your edge. So it makes you think that you're at your edge when you're not really. And you're going to have a better understanding of those things. You are learning what your edge truly feels like, how to recognize it, how to recognize when you're approaching it so that you don't push yourself too far when you're out in the world and you can back off and relax a little bit, and you can become more comfortable there because you're building that trust, right? And you're building proper form early on. And proper form is the most crucial. It's not about lifting a lot of weight. It's not about lifting it a lot of times. It's not about running really far. It's about doing these things, making these movements in the right ways, in healthy ways, having great form. And you want to canalize those habits. You want to deeply build those habits of doing these things in the right way. And then you're less likely to move in a way that's going to injure yourself later on. And then I'll throw out here this one idea of the just noticeable difference, right? So it turns out, and this is a fundamental concept in the psychology of perception, but it happens all over the place. And that is, we don't notice changes until they become big enough. So we often have little, tiny, little tiny changes going on around us, and we don't notice until it becomes a lot. If you are trying to make a place for movement in your life, first start embarrassingly small, because first you're making space for your movement habit with resistance exercises. Slow, purposeful, mindful movements. If you see some guy jerking the weights around, he's hurting himself. If you have to make a sudden, harsh movement to move that amount of weight, don't move that much weight. Slow, purposeful, mindful movements. Because you're not only building these habits, you're reacquainting yourself with how your body works. Now, with aerobic exercise, anything that comfortably raises your heart rate a little bit works. Play to your strengths. What do you enjoy doing? Or hate less whatever it is. Number four. Substitute more movement intensive options in your life. If there are two ways of doing something and one is really easy and really efficient, do the one that's a little more effortful. Take the stairs instead of the elevator a few times in your day. Choose to substitute the more intensive option. Number five. I'm going to go back to my tried and true advice. Have a plan A, B and C. Nothing isn't an option. So your plan C for your movement is going to be so tiny, embarrassingly small that you maybe don't even want to fess up to it. Okay, I got those Plan Cs and the reason why I have it is because you must always protect the space that you're making for movement in your life. And plan C protects that. And it also is protecting your identity and your self esteem because you're doing something and something is cognitively miles different from nothing. No big plans. Number six. No big plans. Whatever you'll actually do is the best. This isn't about pie in the sky dreams. It's about the next step. Number seven. Eat better. Give your body the right fuel. I know there's going to be some episodes about this coming on. 8. Sleep regularly when we move when we exercise, the gains don't happen when we exercise. The gains happen that night when we sleep and we allow our body to consolidate and repair itself. If you have the world's greatest nutrition regime and you're getting the right fuel in and you have the world's greatest exercise regime and you're doing all the right moves in all the right ways and you don't sleep enough, you will not see the improvements. Simple as that. Our goal is is to build and maintain a little more capacity than we use each day. So why do I move regularly? Because I know the quality of life I experience is better, full stop. And if you do this, you can too.
[00:34:16] Speaker A: I want you to really think about all that, mull it over and visualize the impact that practice would really have in your life. And we'll be right back after this quick break.
[00:34:29] Speaker C: We all have challenges.
Mine is multiple sclerosis. We each have this one life and we didn't choose to be saddled with chronic illness. But there's a better way.
So I choose to just jump and you can too. It's your life. Live it well.
Justjump life.
[00:35:01] Speaker B: It's the youe Life Lived well podcast.
Don't forget to like, share and subscribe.
[00:35:11] Speaker A: Alright, let's bring this all together before we go back into the world. For another week, we spent this episode breaking down why movement matters, how our brains and bodies are wired for it, and why so many of us struggle to integrate it into our lives. But if there's one takeaway I want you to leave with, it's this. Movement is not about exercise. It's about function. It's about life. It's about quality of life. Our bodies were built to move, not to meet some arbitrary fitness goal. Not to chase weight loss, not to punish ourselves for what we ate yesterday. But because movement is the foundation for being able to do what we need to do in this world. And yet, most of us have been trained to think about movement all wrong. We tie it to guilt, obligation, and unrealistic expectations. We get bombarded with fitness messaging that has nothing to do with actual sustainable well being. So we try to force ourselves into exercise routines that feel miserable, unsustainable, or completely disconnected from our real lives. And then we wonder why we struggle to stick with them. That's not a failure of willpower, that's a failure of framing. The reality is movement is not optional. We either move regularly and intentionally, or we slowly lose the ability to do what what we need and want to do. That's not fear mongering. That's just how human bodies work. And if we want to keep that ability to function, to live well, to stay capable, we have to build movement around all four of those movement pillars. Strength, endurance, flexibility, and balance. Strength isn't just about lifting heavy weights. It's about having the muscle power to carry groceries, to stand up from a chair, or to hold your body stable when you slip. Endurance isn't about running marathons. It's about having enough energy to get through your day without exhaustion forcing an early into it. Flexibility isn't about doing splits. It's about keeping your range of motion so you can bend, reach and move without stiffness or pain. Balance isn't just for gymnasts. It's about preventing falls, improving coordination, and making sure your body reacts well when something unexpected happens. When we ignore any of these, we make life harder for our future selves. When we train for them, we keep our independence, our mobility, and our ability to fully engage with the world. Your movement is for you. It doesn't have to be brutal or exhausting. It just has to be consistent, useful, and suited to your body and your needs. And I will emphasize again, just because many of us are living with chronic diagnoses does not mean we get a pass from the same life requirements as everyone else. That just means we must work harder or more creatively. It also means that we get more out of this than someone who's otherwise healthy. Here are some life changing consequences of regular movement you should consider. 1. Your body needs movement no matter what your health looks like. That's true whether you're perfectly healthy, living with chronic illness, recovering from injury, or dealing with mobility limitations. Every single body benefits from moving as much as it can, as well as it can. 2. It's okay if your starting point is further back, if you're rebuilding after injury or illness, if you're struggling with fatigue or pain. If movement feels overwhelming. That's real and it's valid. But it's also why movement is even more important. The goal is never perfection. It's function, capacity and resilience. 3. Functional movement should be a priority. Instead of chasing abstract fitness goals, focus on movement that makes daily life easier. Lifting groceries, getting up off the floor, climbing stairs without pain. These are the real tests of strength, endurance and mobility. Functional exercise isn't just for athletes. It's for anyone who wants to keep living independently and comfortably. 4. Plyometrics isn't just for elite athletes. Plyometric movements, quick, explosive motions like jumping, hopping or skipping help build power and reaction time. Why does that matter? Because as we age or if we live with chronic conditions, we lose the ability to react quickly. Training, even light plyometrics, things like stepping quickly onto a curb or catching yourself when you lose balance, can make the difference between a stumble and a serious fall. 5. And speaking of falls, fall training is one of the most overlooked forms of movement. Falling is one of the most common causes of injury as we age, but most people never train for it. Learning how to fall safely, how to regain balance, and how to get back up is just as important as strength and flexibility. Simple drills like controlled descents, rolling and stability training can literally protect your body from from devastating injuries in the future. I feel so strongly about this that I'm thinking about doing a whole episode on falling the right way. I've had a lot of training and experience here. Fall training doesn't just protect you. It gives you a crucial confidence you wouldn't expect. 6. Small, consistent movement beats everything else. You don't need extreme workouts. You need habits that you can sustain. Five minutes here, 10 minutes there. That's how you build strength, endurance, flexibility and balance without burning out. And 7. Your body will thank you not just today, but years from now. Movement is about preserving your independence, reducing pain, improving energy, and making sure you can keep living the life you want and the best time to start right now, exactly where you are. So make it happen. Here's the challenge. Forget exercise. Forget working out. Just move. Start where you are. Do what you can and don't let guilt, perfectionism or outdated ideas about fitness stop you from doing something that will make your life better. Train for function. Train for reaction time. Train to prevent falls. Train to keep yourself moving not for a number, not for an ideal, but for the reality of your body and your life. Movement isn't about achieving some peak state of fitness. It's about making sure you can keep showing up for the life you want to live and that that's worth practicing. So until next time, go forth, be well, do well and do good.
[00:42:30] Speaker B: If you've enjoyed today's topic and want to join the conversation with Dr. Kevin Payne, find your life lived well on all of your favorite social media sites, Patreon and of course yourlifelivedwell co.
