Functional movements

Functional movements? What are those? Well it says just that, movements that contribute a function to your bodies. For example there is a marked difference between sitting still and standing still. Standing still burns 60 calories per hour more than just sitting. An hour sitting in front of the TV will take off 22 minutes of your lifespan. Six hours a day on the TV takes off about five years of your life. Studies have confirmed the correlation between sitting and premature deaths. So the more you move the more you burn off what you ate. Some idiots called it exercises and that had put a lot of people off. Most people do not like to exercise, except for athlete freaks. Exercise is a very bad word and mostly misunderstood. Try functional movements. Move well and move often, and do as much as you can.

I just finished reading Mika Brzezinski and Diane Smith’s best seller in the New York Times Obsessed. Yes, admittedly the book is a ladies book. But then don’t men have bodies too? This book is all about obesity and how a Goddess framed Mika overcame her obsession for junk food and an obese Diane Smith could eat no thin.

People are fat because they do not move enough, read exercise, to burn the calories consumed. Obesity leads to a host of ailments including cancer. If you just diet without exercise or movements 25 percent of every pound you loose is lean body mass. And the more lean body mass you loose the more your metabolism slows down. The higher the lean body mass the more calories you burn. Calories not burnt up end up as fodder to your cancerous cells. They have a grand eating party and grow unabated. Movements are reflected in your METs score.

Read David Kirchhloff’s blog Man meets Scale here for motivation. David preached for many years that you can’t lose weight without changing your diet, but you can’t keep the weight off without exercising pretty consistently. If you do decide to give it a go, start slow.  Learn proper technique.  Most importantly, begin building a weekly routine that you can develop and build over time.  There is no reason to start with four days of heavy lifting per week, but two days might be pretty manageable.  My only advice is that once you get going, keep trying to gradually increase the amount of weight you are using so that you are doing the 8-10 reps, struggling a bit on the last one.  Most-most-most importantly, don’t quit.  Build it into your schedule, simply stick with it, and the results will follow. We can and should measure our healthiness as one of the most crucial metrics of our personal success. Weight can be the measure by which we keep track of our progress on improving nutrition and activity.

Just get moving, any which way, it is all functional.

I am off to break a sweat.

Allen Lai