Your wonderful body has 640 muscles and 206 bones and is engineered to be active.

I have some non-conventional ideas about movement and exercise.  Recently I was at lunch with a friend and some people we had only just met.  We got to talking about food and diet; a topic, it seems to me, women inevitably gravitate to.  My friend said “Ingrid is a health coach” and one of the first questions was “What do you think about exercise?” 

My response was “I think exercise is over rated” which seemed to please the woman who asked the question.  My assessment of the tone in which the question was asked was that this is exactly what she wanted to hear.  I often have clients ask a similar question, "Do I have to exercise?" with that same tone; a tone that says "I don't really like exercise"

Everyone has their own approach to and beliefs about exercise. Everyone has had their own experiences. My early childhood was filled with joyous activity - lots of walking, swimming, surfing, climbing,vigaro, softball, all the normal outdoor growing up things.  Sport in my high school years was excruciating.  I did everything to avoid Wednesday afternoon sports.  Now, as an adult I cannot imagine a day without movement and enjoying the variety of ways to engage as many of my 640 muscles and 207 bones as possible. 

As I reflect on my own approach now, I wonder what happened in those high school years - and you know what? I don't waste one molecule of energy thinking about it!

I believe that the reason many people are now traumatised by the thought of"exercise" is they have memories of similar traumatic and excruciatingly painful experiences in the past.  Let those memories go .....

My suggestion to anyone who does not like even thinking about exercise is to look for activity, look for movement, look for enjoyable ways to engage those 640muscles – call it some thing else !!

Go for a walk in the park, swing your arms, listen to the birds, smell the air, think about how many of the muscles might be engaged at that very moment – think of this is pleasure, think of it as invigorating, energising, this is getting your blood flowing so that all your organs receive fresh oxygen.  The body is amazing and even a small amount of movement raises the heart rate.  When our heart rate rises we trigger our metabolism and the blood flows and pumps more oxygen into the blood which is taken all the way around our body.

There are so many ways to incorporate really lovely activities that increase our heart rateand improve our blood flow, into our day.

If you don’t like exercise – don’t exercise.  You do need to do something to get moving.  It is all about being kind to your self, not torturing yourself!!

The clients I work with have a burning desire to make the necessary changes in their lives; they are prepared to "do what it takes" and for many of them it has been a struggle to include movement and exercise into their lives.  I will tell you about one very overweight woman that I worked with years ago – in fact she was one of my inspirations for my concept of “just getting moving” as a strategy for incorporating activity in the lives of previously inactive people.

Beth was a large woman and pretty much house bound when I met her.  The idea of joining a gym or training for a marathon was not a goal that was going to have any resonance for her. 

I am astounded at how many people who work in the health industry have expectations of clients that are so far beyond what they are physically or emotionally capable of  considering – a topic for another article!!

Back to Beth’s story.  We discussed what she wanted to be able to do in the future.  Her desire was to be able to walk past and see some of the lovely gardens in the suburb where she lived, and smell the flowers etc. It is a large and hilly suburb and this is some thing she had been able to do in the past, but now with health an weight it was no longer possible.  Beth bought herself some comfortable walking shoes and the first day she put them on and walked to her front door.  The second day she went out of the front door.  By the end of the first week she was able to get to her front gate.  All the while she did stretches and warm up.

For some people this might seem almost unbelievable, that some one could reach a point where their body and muscle mass has so deteriorated that they have so little ability to move.  You only have to see people after major surgery to know how quickly the muscles atrophy and wither. 

The great news about Beth is that the next spring she was in fact able to walk about her suburb and see all the gardens in the annual garden competition and then decided to take herself on a walking tour of the Lakes district.

It was the joy of gardens and the pleasure of being able to experience that for herself that inspired Beth.  She could watch a dvd about gardens – not the same.

“getting moving” is about doing things you enjoy. The benefits to our physical and mental selves is enormous.

Find some thing you enjoy and do more of it !!