For most of my life, I thought about exercise the way I think a lot of us do.
It was something you did to lose weight. To burn calories. To build muscle. To change the way your body looked.
And honestly, that made movement pretty easy to measure as either a success or a failure. Did I exercise enough? Did I work hard enough? Did the scale move? Could I see a difference?
But somewhere along the way, my thinking about movement started to change. Living in a body that doesn’t always move the way I want it to has made me appreciate movement for an entirely different reason.
Our bodies are made to move. And I’ve started to realize that sometimes when our bodies are asking us for movement, it isn't because they need us to burn more calories or work harder. They’re asking us to keep using what we have.
That old saying, “If you don’t use it, you lose it,” means something very different to me now.
Because when you've experienced times when walking across a room, getting up from a chair, keeping your balance, or trusting your legs to carry you hasn't been a given, you start to understand just how precious the ability to move really is.
Movement isn't punishment for what I ate.
It isn't something I have to earn because I want my body to look different.
It's one of the ways I can care for my body and support what it can still do.
And I think this is where listening to our bodies can get a little tricky. I've talked a lot about learning to listen when my body tells me it needs rest. That's been an important lesson for me. There are days when pushing through isn't helpful, and resting really is what my body needs. But I've also learned that sitting isn't always what my body needs either.
For me, sitting too long can be just as hard on my body as walking too far. My body needs me to get up. It needs me to move around, stretch, change positions and use my muscles throughout the day.
Sometimes the answer really is rest. And sometimes my body is saying, Please move me. I'm learning to recognize that difference.
I'm also learning to pay attention to what happens after I move.
There is something about the way I feel after yoga or a good stretching session. Or after a walk or a hike, paddling my kayak, or spending some time swimming. My body feels different. Sometimes I feel looser. Stronger. More energized. Sometimes I simply feel good.
Those are such simple things, and for most of my life I probably took them completely for granted. Now I appreciate them in a whole different way.
I appreciate the fact that I can go for that walk. That I can stretch. That I can paddle or swim. That I can do yoga or hike.
But I also appreciate the way my body responds when I do.
And maybe that's one of the things I've missed in the past when I've talked about “listening to your body.”
For a long time, listening to my body mostly meant noticing when something felt wrong—the pain, the exhaustion, the tension, the poor sleep. All those signals telling me my body wasn't happy about something. But the more I've learned to listen to my body, the more I've realized it communicates the good stuff too.
Sometimes my body tells me, “Yes. That. I needed that.”
And I want to get better at listening to those messages too.
Movement doesn't have to look the same for everyone. It doesn't even have to look the same for me every day. Some days it's a walk or some time outside. Some days it's yoga, stretching, or following along with a workout on YouTube. And some days it's simply making sure I don't sit in the same chair for hours without getting up and moving around.
I'm learning that rest and movement aren't opposites.
They're both ways of responding to what my body needs.
And these days, when I think about movement, I'm not nearly as interested in how many calories I burned or whether it changed the number on the scale.
I'm much more interested in something I used to take for granted:
Helping my body keep moving for as long as it possibly can—and appreciating every time it reminds me how good moving can feel.
Maybe that's something worth paying attention to in your own body, too.
What kind of movement makes your body say, “Yes. That. I needed that”?
Thanks for spending a little time with me today.
Wellness doesn’t have to be about fixing yourself. It can start with learning to listen, getting curious, and discovering what support looks like for you.
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