Guest Writer #1 Dr Spencer Boyle
A Fitness Practitioner’s Perspective on Health, Wellness, Movement Competence and Outdoor Play.
If you have ever done a google search for health you get the standard wiki definition “Health is a state of physical, mental and social well-being in which disease and infirmity are absent.” Or if you search wellness you might get something like “Wellness is an active process of becoming aware of and making choices toward a healthy and fulfilling life.” The thing with the first definition of health is that is seems like a destination, something that you can actually get to whereas the second definition concerning wellness, sounds more like a journey, something that is in constant flux.
A journey into this profession.
To try and contextualise my philosophy and perspective around wellness, training, movement and play I thought a short idea of my journey into the field might help.
I always had an interest in activity, fitness and health, which I think stemmed from growing up in a very working class family and area. What I actually mean by that is that most of the people around me when I was growing up had extremely unhealthy habits – heavy smoking/drinking and no exercise, their hobbies revolved around social drinking at the working men’s club or the local pub. The most ‘strenuous’ exercise older uncle’s would undertake would be to play football at the weekend for the local pub team! I also fell into playing in these teams from leaving school. But, I really felt different to that whole scene that was going on around me and always enjoyed being outdoors and being physical in that environment, as it always gave me a sense of being alive and feeling good. From that young age I loved to train and my only knowledge of how to do that in my teens and twenties was going to local gyms, to keep things from being tedious I especially enjoyed different cross-training [not cross-fit, which didn’t exist] and circuit training. Ironically, something I would return to much later in my practice was that I would always get there by running, jumping over stuff and or biking slightly different routes each time.
However, getting into the ‘health and fitness’ industry from this idea of being physical outdoors was something that was not an easy journey as when I first started going down the route into the industry in 1999 in an urban Lancashire town it wasn’t really a thing, that was in the mainstream. So alongside other full-time jobs I pursued the industry recognised routes. And in order to not get too bogged down in my background, succinctly, I have ended up doing a degree as a mature student then working in secondary school Physical Education, sport and physical activity development projects, delivering group based exercise and personal fitness programming (from cardiac rehab, GP referral to healthy general populations).
How things change!
With the aid and sometimes hindrance of the internet, certainly over the past 10 years, the fitness industry has changed beyond recognition and athletes and the general public now are much more informed. I say this with a cautionary note as sorting out the ‘good from the bad’ in the online environment can be a minefield even for the professional.
However, undoubtedly fitness and physical activity should be a regular part of everyone’s life, an extension of the other things that people do. A healthier more balanced life has to include activity and the evidence of years of research and study into physical activity and fitness and its effect on prevention of ill health prove this relationship.
But what should that activity look like?
I call my little business Dr Boyle ‘Natural Fitness’ and the philosophy as stated is that activity, exercise and fitness should naturally be a part of our daily life and lifestyle, accessible to everyone.
Moving like a human being is accessible to everyone as we all, as babies, learn to explore our environment and develop through movement. We learn to move far before we learn to speak, therefore we communicate through movement first. But that’s not where it ends, if we want to maintain strength, health, wellbeing, happiness and an ability to thrive daily; we have to find an approach to sustainable activity to successfully age.
A little evolution
As we look at our ancestors Homo sapiens [that’s us] have been around for 2.4 million years – 84,000 generations have survived as hunter gatherers. The ancestral natural environment in which our current genome evolved through natural selection called for a large amount of daily energy expenditure in a many different physical movements. Can we really know this for sure, as there are not a lot of hunter gatherer populations to study, right? One such interesting piece of research from O’Keefe and colleagues (Prog Cardiovasc Dis 2011;53:471-479) followed 2 indigenous tribes. The GPS data they gathered suggests that the men in these tribes on average covered about 10 km per day and maybe around 1-2km on top would be in rapid pursuit in a hunt. This would often be followed by a ‘rest’ day, during which they would be actively engaged in low level physical tasks around the camp such as tool making. Tribeswomen too were active and would cover miles foraging for wood/food/water, often carrying children with them. The moral here is that this form of activity was not ‘full-on’ ‘all-out’ or highly repetitive motions involving lots of volume and reps done constantly. Although, when aerobically tested some of these older tribes people in their 50’s were in better aerobic condition than the equivalent American population.
But society and our lifestyles have changed, right?
We could say that by evolutionary time frames we have had a rapid shift from a very physically demanding lifestyle in natural outdoor settings to an inactive indoor lifestyle and it could be argued that this is at the origin of many of the widespread chronic diseases that are now present in our society.
Therefore, some of my thinking like other practitioners in this field is that a potential solution could be to replicate some of the native human activity patterns, to the extent that this is achievable and practical. As I mentioned earlier each of us Homo sapiens learn to grow, explore and learn through movement, (leaning on some of Katie Bowman’s writing here) we can crawl, balance, walk, run, swim, climb [all locomotion] throw, catch, use objects as tools, lift, carry [all manipulate], punch, kick and defend ourselves [all combative]. Now we hopefully don’t have to use combat anymore but much of the combative movements themselves could be seen to be health enhancing. Look at the ancient practice of Tai Chi Ch’uan, simply put it is a form of mind-body-spirit martial art, formed of flowing self-defence movements.
But then somewhere in our childhood people stop exploring through movement and some of the movement issues learned from that point then become engrained in adults. Those who come through the sport system-i.e. those people who took up a sport and pursued it from school until their 20’s rarely come through that period without losing some of the Homo sapien movement abilities mentioned [unless involved with a good S & C coach like P.P.]. Growth, maturation and development all play a part in this but it could be argued they were probably lost mainly because they over-train movements for their sport [volume and intensity] and undertrain movement that would enhance their health. I only have to ask about injury in a class of 20 year old sport students to see a vast majority have sustained one or more and some so serious to require surgery, through training for, or playing their sport. Those movements that would enhance health that I mentioned, all of us learn through our physical development, are lost through lack of doing them and replaced (in the lucky few) by sport movements (many movements also not sustainable long-term) or by lots of sitting in chairs and general nothingness (for the majority of the sedentary). If for example all of the general population did a flat foot squat or the splits every day from childhood right through to adulthood, those movements would not be lost, regardless of any other factors that would have a detrimental effect on their health. Lack of ability to move freely with the strength and stability in all of the ranges of motion mentioned above [locomotion/manipulation/combat related] is what much of the general population present with. Putting this back, filtered throughout a person’s day is far better than just the bouts of 1 hour exercise a person might get in a training session spread across a few days of the week.
Pre-requisite
So to ask the general population to throw themselves into replication of our Homo sapien/hunter gatherer ancestors is generally too big a step. Just to go ahead with poor and inefficient quality movement would at best mask something detrimental to their health and at worst hurt someone, whether that happens quickly or further down the track.
Therefore, mobility (joints)/flexibility (muscles)/strength/stability/balance/co-ordination all have to be carefully thought about when building these people back towards the locomotion, manipulation, combative movements that us Homo sapiens all at some point had.
A little on sustainability,
Sustainability in terms of the general populations’ activity and movement is also an important concept. The way the health & fitness sector has developed and also how strength & conditioning has filtered into it in some aspects has encouraged people to seek group and individual programmes that encourage masses of volume and intense repetitive movements carved off into a ‘power hour’ during their ‘normal’ day. Homo sapiens cannot expect to sustain this in a healthy manner especially into our latter decades. Often programmes for ‘exercise’ or ‘Sports’ done in someone’s teens/20’s/30’s is a restrictor for them moving well and being in a strong, pain free and healthy state later in life. These ideas we have called sport and exercise may well be ‘human-made’ but are they ‘made for humans’?
No stress and some play
It is well over a decade since Michel Poulain and Giovanni Pes, discovered a population in a Sardinian island had an unusual number of their population living an active and healthy life into their 100’s. Their work was taken up by American Dan Buettner who wanted to find more areas in the world that these pockets of populations or Blue Zones existed. The interesting body of work now behind the Blue Zone is beyond the scope of this blog but the thing to pick up on in terms of applying this to my ‘Natural Fitness’ principles is the following: Two of the nine common themes people who lived ‘healthy’ lives to a century were essentially the avoidance of stress [cause of chronic inflammation], which is at the centre of many if not all age related diseases, and secondly staying active throughout the day by removing many of the automated conveniences in our daily lives.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) said “We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing”. The idea that we stop moving because we get old and not that we get old because we stop moving are both vital elements to the sustainability of being physically active.
Play!
But not only is this a movement training paradigm I want to ensure that I can impress on our clients that fun has to be an element of the way we train the general population. How many years is it since some people have played? And I’m not talking competitive play which is what adults normally associate with the word. Something even as simple as cooperative fun activities like keepy-up with a ball, throw catch games with a stick or clowning around imitating animal shapes or moves. Inclusion of aspects such as these is part of the ‘deal’ because alongside fun there is much more happening at the same time. Co-ordination, balance, proprioception, spatial awareness, afferent feedback feeding cognition and that’s not an exhaustive list. Even some of our more formal training like aerial fitness, has lots of elements of fun climbs and drops on rope or silk.
Why outside movement?
Research shows us that there are innumerate benefits to moving and being active in natural outdoor and or green spaces. Some of these include; vitamin D. It is essential to take in this nutrient which helps protect our immune system and helps in bone growth and maintenance of bone to prevent such diseases as osteoporosis – especially important in winter months. Energy expenditure; research has shown that people can use up to 30% more energy outside because our core temperature will always work to keep around 36.8C. It takes energy to do this, the body’s currency for this is calories, and so people use more calories by simply being outside, let alone the many other benefits associated with being active outdoors.
Coupled with all of the above [and others not mentioned] is the fact that the outdoors gives us a terrain that works constantly on our proprioception (our balancing ability), a vital part in our everyday health, and well-being as opposed to a rather controlled indoor training environment.
Obviously nature is very important to the ethos of ‘Natural Fitness’. This approach to general physical preparedness means essentially people should be able to move almost anywhere and importantly in the outdoors. While training clients in some of our offerings at our unit in Northumberland is obviously not outside and some of our movement activities [like aerial fit] have to be delivered inside. It was important for us to be in a location and have an environment that still had a connection with the outdoors. We wanted to be somewhere appropriate and we think we found that blend, residing in a conservation area. This again is important as when we work with clients our sliding doors open right up to the beautiful natural sound and sight of Cowgarth Burn running by.
Notable teachers I have learned from.
There are several practitioners I have learned from over the years and it would have been impossible to outline my ideas above without mentioning the likes of Katie Bowman, Erwan Le Corre, Steve Maxwell, Dewey Nielsen, Dr Andreo Spina of FR systems, the team at GMB, Rafe Kelly, Ben Medder with the Evolve, Move, Play philosophy and Mike Fitch among others. In addition to this I am lucky enough to have met and now collaborated with colleagues, who have become friends, who have a similar practice beliefs and thinking as myself like Dr John Metcalfe and Peri Zourides.
Last lines.
One thing I firmly believe is that there are multiple ways to get results, which completely depends on what yours or a client’s goals and aims might be. And just because my beliefs and philosophy are as I described it does not mean it is the only way! Read the research filter through it and piece together a practice as you will, but remember humans are meant to move.
