How You Move

Most of us just want to feel better. We want to be less creaky in the morning. We want to get up and down off the floor with ease, be able to sit through a few hours on a plane without it wrecking us, or rearrange furniture without low back strain.

I see so many people who prioritize the extremes within one type of movement: lifters who try to lift as heavy as possible or dancers and yogis who stretch to end range. They repeat the same movement patterns over and over. Unless you have some really specific training goals or a particular sport you play, movement variability is the key to feeling a little bit better. One of my favorite rehab specialists David Grey says, “it doesn’t matter how much weight you lift, it matters how you move.”

While repetition is important to getting better at a skill, I see so many people who are only good at a few skills and they tend to be skills that don’t translate well on their own to real life tasks and movements. But if you compliment strength training with some mobility or add load to dynamic stretching, this is the kind of balance and variability that keep a body feeling and moving better for many years to come.