Sponges and Health. What's the connection?

It always amazes me how awful I begin to feel after about a week off from my regular fitness routine. I know that it's important for me to take a break from teaching but when you're used to as much movement as I am - about 3 hours a day of either dance, Essentrics or yoga- my body starts to rebel by about day 4. My back and hips grow stiff and my energy level drops into the basement, to the point where I find myself tired after a night of sleep. Still when I'm on vacation, part of me wants to be as lazy as possible. Sleeping in and eating whatever I want to eat, whenever the craving hits.

Recently, I came across a TED talk given by exercise scientist, Keith Diaz. You can find episode here https://youtu.be/rKgtm81yi94?si=8pYlvD17KZOBS4Q7 where he studied the effects of a highly sedentary lifestyle. What I loved about his lecture was his comparison of our muscles to a sponge. I am always eager to share the perfect image to get my point across and his imagery really hit home.

As Keith explains, our muscles are not just used to move our limbs around, they help us to regulate our metabolism and he used blood sugar as an example.

"Our muscles are like a sponge for blood sugar. When we regularly use and contract our muscles, they're like a moist sponge, soaking up the sugar from our bloodstream. But when we dont regularly use and contract our muscles" they become like a dried out sponge which is not good at soaking up anything. Exercising rewets the sponge.

The troubling discovery though is that regular exercise is not enough. I learned this years ago at a Canfitpro event where Maureen Hagan told all of the fitness pro's in the room that we had to ask our clients to move more! BUT don't dispair. Keith claims that his tests revealed that while working out during the day formally is still needed, we must build in short movement breaks every 30 minutes to an hour to keep our muscles functioning optimally.

If you work in an office, take a water walk break. Grab your bottle and do a short tour of the workplace. Keith suggests that while 5 minutes is the minimum, he discovered that even a one minute walk each hour is helpful. Add a timer to your Smart Watch to remind you when it is time to take a stroll. And by the way, it really is just stroll. Keith claims that we don't need to power walk...simply move at a pace of about 2 miles per hour.

This added movement made the study participants feel better physically and mentally and brain scans showed that they were in a better position to learn after the walk, which made them more efficient and productive.

I will never look at my sink sponge the same way again, ha, ha and it may encourage me to walk right after standing and doing the dishes!

Keep moving my friends.

Beth