MORNING FLOW

Discover movement. Be creative. Be like water my friends.

👉 Opening the body to different ranges and types of movement helps to maintain joint mobility and overall function.
Remember: if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.

Most of us tend to spend most of our time in very few positions like sitting at a desk, sitting in transport, or sitting at dinner. It's important to keep active and go beyond those limited ranges of motion, otherwise the window of movement you have available to you gets smaller and smaller. That's how poor posture develops and how you get stiffer and stiffer.

DON'T SHRINK

Earlier I said that "if you don't use it, you'll lose it." Our physiology depends very much on our environment. For example, if you are active and take your muscles through a full range of active movement, then those muscle cells will acclimatise to meet the demand, meaning it will change to meet the challenge. If the challenge on the muscle is higher, then the cells will likely get stronger and larger (too high and they will rupture though).

If you are bed ridden, your muscles will be immobilised and under very minimal demand and will get smaller and weaker as a result, in a type of cellular adaption called 'disuse atrophy'. It does this because why exert energy to keep something that isn't being used?

In a sitting posture (which most of us spend upwards of 8-10 hours of a day in) there are many muscles and tissues that aren't being used to their full range and potential. Tissues of the hips, spine, shoulders.. They will all get stiffer and stiffer because those cells are never being challenged in a way that makes them strong or supple.

So get moving! Be creative, be engaged in what you do, and keep supple.

REFERENCES:

Acclimatisation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acclimatization

Study on 'Skeletal muscle wasting with disuse atrophy..': https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3955994/

Let us know how you get on! Don't forget to share the love to somebody who needs to move more!

Author: Laurent Pang