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Adding joy back to exercise with intuitive movement

Maybe you’ve heard of intuitive eating, but what about intuitive movement?

Exercise and daily movement helps the human body feel better, and moving regularly doesn’t need to feel like a challenge. It usually feels harder to exercise up to their physical ability because of a negative relationship towards exercise.

That’s where moving away from thinking you “have to” exercise towards intuitive movement can help.

What is intuitive movement?

Intuitive movement is trusting what your body needs over trackers and trying to follow a “perfect” workout routine. 

You may have heard trusting your body before in mine and other intuitive eating spaces, but what does that really mean?

Trusting your body when practicing intuitive movement means:

  • Paying attention to how your muscles, joints, and overall body feels
  • Noticing your energy level
  • Testing different amounts and types of movement to see how it influences your body

And with that information, decide how much and what types of movement are best for you. So, instead of working to meet a plan or tracker, you follow what your body actually needs that day. 

Just like with intuitive eating, learning to listen to your body’s movement and rest needs takes practice. Especially after years of exposure to diet and health advice (which really are rules).

Diet culture and your relationship with exercise

You’re not really taught to listen to your body. You may come across some programs that tell you to listen and modify when you need to, but it’s more common to hear people telling you to push through. While that’s not inherently bad, the mind is often wired to conserve energy, so, of course, the inner voice can tell us to stop working out. 

But we aren’t taught to prioritize what our body tells us. Because sometimes the best thing for our body is to keep going in a workout, and sometimes your body really needs rest. 

Diet culture can lead to an unhealthy and complicated relationship with exercise. 

When I was young, moving was play to me. Then when I started watching my weight and trying to be healthy, exercise and movement became this challenge I had to do every day. 

I dreaded working out and thought of it as a way to earn more calories. 

I’ve spoken with many clients, who tell me they know they should workout, and they even enjoy it, but they just can’t get themselves to do it consistently. This usually always comes back to their relationship with exercise and how they’re thinking about exercise. Once they start improving how they view exercise and listen to their body more, they always end up enjoying movement again and feeling better because of the trust they feel in taking care of themselves. 

How to add more mindful movement to your day

I recommend a couple of stages to add more mindful movement. There’s no particular order to these, and you can do more than one stage at a time. 

The three basic stages include:

  • Challenging your current beliefs about movement and exercise 
  • Practicing how you want to think about exercise
  • Practicing listening to your body’s needs

Challenging old beliefs and practicing new ones go hand-in-hand together, but I still like to list them as separate stages because you need both. If you just try to practice new thoughts like “I love how exercise feels” without addressing beliefs like “I just can’t stick with my workouts”, your relationship with movement will stay complicated from the old beliefs. 

It’s truly working on your relationship with yourself, your body, and exercise. 

And you’ll want to practice resting instead of working out plus different types of exercise to just notice how it impacts your body. 

There’s no right or wrong. 

There’s no having to meet certain metrics like a step goal or number of calories burned, it’s just learning what makes you feel better.

So test out different types of movement you enjoy like walking, running, dancing, gardening, lifting weights, swimming, or any activity that you want. 

If you’re just getting started in this area, I’d recommend finding some mindfulness meditation exercises, like body scans, that you can do on walks. It’s one way to practice getting in touch with how your body is feeling when moving.

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