The Impact of Movement
A lot of our body is made up of muscles. The function of muscle is fundamental for our body’s survival. Muscles are responsible for a variety of tasks in our body and make up their own organ system, the Muscular System. The Muscular System’s main function lies in locomotion and other movement. Our body contains 11 different organ systems, all separated by their primary function. Nonetheless, they all work very closely together. No system can function perfectly without the proper functioning of the others. That’s why it’s important to balance all of them when striving for health.
For example, let’s look at the impact of movement on our Digestive and Circulatory Systems. When moving, we use our muscles, which need energy and oxygen to function. The Circulatory System’s primary function is transporting energy-bearing molecules, oxygen, and hormones, meaning movement requires proper blood flow to ensure our muscles are supplied. These energy-bearing molecules are produced through digesting the food we eat. Therefore, to provide enough of them, our body needs to digest food properly. This results in increased digestive activity, which not only benefits your muscles, but your whole body’s function. Increased digestion ensures that toxins are being removed, keeping you feeling clean and looking young. High amounts of energy also keep you awake and motivated, and enable all of your organ systems to work with high efficiency.
The main group of muscles in our body benefiting from movement is our Skeletal Muscle System. This group’s most important task, besides locomotion, is providing stability. Higher stability results in higher resilience. A proper amount of skeletal muscles not only helps complete everyday tasks with ease but also prevents pain. A trained back reduces back pain by stabilizing your spine, and trained legs can help avoid knee injuries or reduce pain by stabilizing your knee joint.
Referring again to the Muscular System’s close relation to the Circulatory System, good muscle density positively impacts your body’s healing process. Wounds benefit from increased circulatory activity, as they are supplied by blood flow. Muscle uses up more calories, even when not used, than fat, meaning overall blood circulation in muscles is higher. Therefore, wounds in muscle-dense areas are supplied with oxygen more quickly.
Movement also positively impacts your sleep. As we’ve stated, muscles use up energy. If you consume or retain more energy than you use in a day, you will have a hard time falling asleep. Moving and building muscle balance the amount of energy you use in a day, gifting you a good and restful night of sleep, which leaves you waking up energized and motivated.
As you can see, movement has a variety of positive impacts not just on your muscles and physique, but also on your functionality and efficiency, as well as your mental health.
Unhealthy Movement
Unhealthy movement can go both ways: either you do not move at all, or you excessively move without adequate rest. Both represent an unbalanced state and are detrimental. Let’s have a brief overview of the negative impacts of unbalanced movement on our health:
1. Neglecting Movement
It’s more commonly known that not moving at all is unhealthy. Neglecting movement is frequently attributed to plain laziness. However, there are often more complex reasons, such as lack of time or mental health issues. Remember, someone who judges you without understanding the reason behind your behavior isn’t someone whose opinion should matter to you. Such individuals live off their own perceptions, not driven toward the truth but toward always being right, toward always knowing better; these are people who, in reality, know nothing and will never know. With that said, let’s stop wasting energy and words on them and get back to movement.
Even if there are various reasons why your movement might be minimized, it is still not healthy. Not moving your body has many negative consequences for your health:
Muscle loss: It’s no surprise but not using your muscles will result in your body breaking them down. This is due to the “muscles use up more energy” that we’ve explained before. Your body won’t maintain unused muscle to not waste energy. When losing muscle, you will just as well lose all its benefits, like stabilization and reduced pain, a higher amount of burned calories, or strength.
Bad sleep: As explained before, movement is crucial to a proper night of rest. Therefore, it’s pretty self-explanatory that not moving will leave you with more energy stored than used and therefore keep you awake.
Water retention and bloating: Neglecting movement decreases circulatory activity. This leads to water retention or bloating as your body can’t deport properly. Movement on the outside increases movement on the inside. Your body’s motor is being stimulated by physical activity.
Weight gain: Just as with muscle loss, weight gain is a commonly known consequence of lacking movement. If you consume more energy than you use, your body will store the excess amount which is what we see as weight gain. Besides the physical causes of weight gain, mental problems resulting from neglecting movement can also have an impact on one’s physique.
Hopefully, you now feel motivated to give movement your best try! Here are some tips on how to stay on track with your movement journey:
Set goals: What exactly motivates you? What are you trying to reach? Do you want to have a certain physique, do you strive for health, or do you want to prevent pain? When having a clear objective you can recall, it is easier to keep your motivation up.
Focus on achievements: Most people are easily demotivated by one setback. This is an important hurdle to overcome as setbacks will be a recurring theme throughout your self-improvement journey. Focus on what you have already achieved and think of the way you felt during it. Embrace the belief that this wasn’t an incident, this was you and your capabilities!
Start slow: Especially for beginners, it’s very important to start slow. If you’ve never engaged in any sports and now try to go to the gym 5 times a week, this one, wouldn’t work, and two, wouldn’t be healthy. Give your body time to adapt to a new lifestyle. Remember, movement isn’t restricted to intense sports. Try to engage in easy exercises like walking every day to get used to increased movement step by step.
2. Excessive Movement
Engaging in excessive physical strain without adequate rest can also be harmful. Society often idealizes extreme fitness and muscular bodies, leading to the dangers of extreme movement being overlooked. Always be careful with the way you treat your body. Keep in mind, there is a difference between moving a lot and moving excessively, which varies from person to person. Moving every day is not automatically bad; as stated, movement does not equal intense sport. You can mix easy activities with demanding exercises throughout the week without overstraining yourself.
Now, what happens when pushing your limits in sports? Intense training leads to micro injuries in your muscle fibers, felt as muscle pain or soreness. These are normal, and your body can repair them easily, but as they’re still injuries, they need time to heal. Not giving your body time to rest leads to various health issues:
Prevention of proper healing: Intense sport prevents healing and is therefore very harmful to your progress. When having muscle pain, know your body is building up to be even stronger than before, so don’t stop it from growing! Don’t treat these injuries differently from a cut on the outside just because you can’t see them!
Muscle and strength loss, stagnation: This might sound controversial at first, but if you’re training over and over again, without giving your muscles time to heal, your workouts will get worse. Injured muscles lack resilience which will result in less strength and endurance for your exercises.
Bad sleep and overall discomfort: Surprise, your body won’t rest well if it’s hurt. As well, every task will feel twice as hard and take twice as long if pain makes moving seem like your worst nightmare. This can navigate you into a negative circle of less efficiency resulting in less rest and so on.
Unwanted calorie deficiency: Calorie deficits are most often wanted, especially by the ones trying to lose weight. But, important to know is, a deficit that’s too big can lead to harmful deficiencies. These truly backfire on your progress and your health. Growing muscle will never be the priority your body uses energy for. First, your organs and functionality are being covered. Afterwards, excess calories can be used to add to the existing. Calorie deficiencies can cause water retention, making it appear as if you’ve gained weight, you can lose hair and lack energy, decrease the functionality of your immune system and in very extreme situations even gain weight as your body will switch to hunger mode. All of these can again be extremely impactful on one’s mind.
Hopefully, you now realize that extreme movement isn’t any less harmful than not moving at all. More does not always equal more. Here are some tips on how to make sure your body has time to recover:
Set resting days: Dedicating set days a week to resting and recharging can help especially more advanced athletes to tone down. It can be hard or feel weird at first, but after some time you will learn when it’s time to rest and when your body needs movement, not needing to keep up to a set schedule if you don’t want to.
Listen to your body: I indicated it just before, learning to listen to your body and its needs will be fundamental to optimizing your workout routine. Also, this will not just be beneficial to your exercises, but to your overall self-improvement journey as well. Stop seeing your body as an object working for you, learn to work with your body.
Blood flow stimulating movement: When experiencing sore muscles or muscle pain, start engaging in blood flow stimulating activities, such as easy exercises that don’t overstress your muscles or massages. This way you ensure oxygen reaches your muscles and therefore help the healing process.
3. Mental Issues of Unbalanced Movement
Depression, lack of motivation, mental fog, and feelings of worthlessness – the list of mental symptoms of unbalanced movement is seemingly endless. Whereas some of these can be directly connected to physical deficiencies (mental fog due to decreased efficiency of the Circulatory System, or lacking motivation due to lacking energy), most seem to occur out of nowhere.
Your body and mind are closely connected, constantly exchanging information about everything happening within you. This includes not just the world we actively experience around us, but also every process happening in your body at this moment. If problems occur, your mind subconsciously knows and will try to tell you through a variety of feelings of mental discomfort. This is a protection mechanism supposed to bring problems to awareness, avoid or correct them, and keep your body alive.
Mental issues might occur from a slowed digestion and accumulation of toxins from neglecting movement, or unhealed inner injuries restraining your body’s energy from excessive movement – none of these extremes is less harmful to your body!
Find balance in your body’s movement and grow to be the strongest version of yourself. Instead of sleepless nights, experience refreshing rest; instead of mental fog, experience efficiency; instead of muscle pain, experience muscle gain – the impact of balance creates a seemingly infinite list of physical as well as mental benefits! What are you waiting for? Just like a baby learning to walk, take your first steps again.