SPORT MEDICINE
Simple daily strategies to replace prolonged periods of chair sitting, such as sitting on the floor will help create strong, functional, pain-free bodies.
Born This Way – Rehumanizing Movement Make exercise a natural part of daily life rather than a supplement BY NICK ST. LOUIS – Curious human that loves to play, leader of the Foot Collective in Ottawa, ON THEFOOTCOLLECTIVE
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THEFOOTCOLLECTIVE
fter spending several years questioning knowledge I acquired during my Master’s of Physical Therapy program, I’ve learned that the way most of us go about improving our health is built on some false assumptions. As a culture, we strive to achieve an image of health that is sold to us but isn't true to our biology. We seem to think health is a destination we eventually reach by working really hard
34 Inspiration Issue 2021
and doing things that make us miserable, like eating bland salads or running on a treadmill alongside others who also wish they weren’t there. We view fitness as a quest to become tanned and lean, with abs that show and a marathon to brag about. And we view movement as a supplement to be taken (called exercise) and our physical body as an innately flawed machine that falls apart as we age. I am proposing a new story. One that
expands awareness, gives hope to those who have given up, and one that I have found to be true both in my own life and from the feedback we receive every day from our Foot Collective community. In this new narrative, health isn’t a destination we reach, but a process we engage in daily. Movement is seen in a broader context as a fundamental basic need and a part of everyday life rather than a supplement prescribed by a doctor. In this new reality, the body is an amazingly adept, self-healing machine that adapts to the inputs we give it and only fails us if we’re not using it correctly. Through this new lens, fitness means being physically capable to live a life aligned with our physiology and being resilient enough to withstand physical challenges that we encounter along the way. It’s time to shift our cultural perspective and rehumanize movement, basically going back to the way we were built. We need to drop the exercise-based, workcentric mindset and, instead, adopt a
IMPACT Magazine