Peter and Darius dive into the vital topic of movement, encapsulated by their powerful mantra: “Move it or lose it.” They explore how movement transcends physical exercise, impacting mental and emotional health and well-being, emphasizing the importance of staying active as a lifelong practice. They share personal anecdotes highlighting how movement has been integral to their lives, from childhood sports to current practices like yoga, weightlifting, and surfing. Common barriers to movement are addressed with ways to overcome them.
Key Points
- Movement is essential for maintaining the interconnected health of the body, mind, and spirit. Without it, we lose physical strength, flexibility, mobility, as well as emotional and energetic balance. Impact to mental health is also critically important.
- Engaging in movement with focus and mindfulness heightens clarity, brings balance to the body and mind, and fosters a deeper connection between the two.
- Everyone’s body and needs are unique, it’s important to start slow. Movement offers benefits regardless of intensity and should be embraced as a lifelong intention.
Peter
Welcome. Good day. Welcome to our audience. Welcome to this episode of 50 to 70. Meaningful conversations between men. I'm one of your co-hosts. My name is Peter, and I'm here with my fabulous co-host, Darius.
Darius
Today's topic is going to be on movement.
Peter
Oh yes.
Darius
And we have titled it simply and impactful. Move it or lose it.
Peter
Yes. And why? Why did we do that, Darius? Why did we focus on move it or lose it?
Darius
Yeah. If you think about the ethos and the genesis of what we're trying to accomplish with age differently, it's to bring common sense and principles that benefit, not only men, but women as well. And one of those key principles that gets lost, is movement. And if you don't move well, you become more sedentary and eventually you are unable to move.
Darius
So to kind of hammer that point home right from the start, move it or lose it.
Peter
Yeah. And what is it that we're losing? Let's talk about that.
Darius
Yeah. There's so much that we can lose. We lose our flexibility. We lose our mobility. We lose our strength. It's not just the physical body that I think suffers when we stagnate. I think it's the emotional body and the energy body as well that diminishes. Or you've, you know, realize or deal with some of those negative emotions that come up because you're not releasing the chemicals that come out after a workout or after a walk, or even after a gentle stretch.
Darius
So you lose so much by not moving your body.
Peter
Yeah, that's such an important concept that took me years and has taken me decades to fine tune and understand that we're not just physical bodies, we are also a mind. And so we have emotions. We have energy that flows through us, and they're all so inextricably interrelated that we find ways our immune system, our minds, our spirit finds ways to keep things in balance.
Peter
But we're very easily distracted by our emotions, negative thinking. And some of the offset to that is not being sedentary, like you said, moving your body.
Darius
Well, I can tell you, for myself, movement's always been an important part of my life. I was a little kid. I was told I had ants in my pants because I could not sit still. I played soccer, I ran track, I ran cross-country, I did martial arts, I went to the gym. And the feeling that you get not only while you're doing the exercise, but after there's just a natural high.
Darius
There's no other way to say it. It centers, it grounds, it rebalances. And not just physically, but emotionally, mentally and spiritually as well.
Peter
And for me as well. I started young with sports football, basketball, baseball. Even younger than that. And now remember tetherball. I don't know how many people thought they were going to relate to that, but…
Peter
I did that as well. But it was just movement. It was just out there active. It was what's natural for a child to get out and move and play.
Peter
That's what we do naturally as humans. And so that continued, with high school, high school sports. And that opened up for me a movement that has been weaving and threading throughout my life, the fabric of my life. It was yoga when I was, a youngster that I picked up a book and I said, you know, these movements might help me be a better athlete.
Peter
I'll be more flexible. I'll prevent injuries. And so I started engaging in the movements and practices of yoga, but I also started studying the philosophy. And that was, a life changer. And so it led me to all these other practices. These are like alternative practices that are holistic. And I would use the word holistic with a W at the beginning rather than an H to encompass the whole body.
Peter
And so we'll talk about that a little bit more about get your body moving, different expressions of movements we could use. And for me it started with yoga and just led and continue to weave. But obviously I was a collegiate athlete, triathlete. So movement has always been something that's just been integral to my well-being.
Darius
So what's our advice, Peter, to someone who doesn't have a history of movement or who had a history at a young age and has been sedentary for 10 to 15 years, or is it too old for them to start? Well, what's our advice?
Peter
You and I have talked about this frequently. All of the advice or experiences that we're sharing they are our own, each and every one of us has a particular unique aspects to our being, and some movements will be more appropriate for them than for us. Our movement, our experiences are not what we're saying everybody else has to do.
Peter
It have to be yoga, doesn't have to be tai chi. There are other exercises that you know. For instance, why don't you share the kind of movement practices you engage in?
Darius
Yeah. So I think just wrapping up that thought to get your body moving, even if you haven't for a while, do something gentle that your body can accept and build from there. If it's a walk, if it's a gentle stretch. Myself, right now I've got three primary practices. I do yoga for many of the reasons that you articulated the strength, the flexibility, the balance between the body and the mind and the emotion when you're doing it and pairing it with intent and breathing.
Darius
I love going to the gym, as you can tell by my Arnold-esque physique that I've got going on over here.
Peter
Remember, the audience can't see you. Sorry.
Darius
Oh, they're going to see this on YouTube, so I'll make sure that I got my shirt off for that one. I've just loved lifting weights at the gym, and I have for years. I started going when I was in my late teens, and I go 4 or 5 times a week. And then the third thing I do whenever there's a, whenever the conditions are appropriate, is I'll go surfing and surfing is it requires strength, it requires agility, it requires balance, it requires endurance.
Darius
And then there's a harmony. When you're out on the water, past the break by yourself, just sitting there with nature, breathing and enjoying the experience. So those are the three things that I routinely do as well as walking.
Peter
Yeah, walking is one of those movements we should highlight, can be done at any age.
Darius
It is. So what are some of those movements that, for someone who's just getting started, what let's talk about what they can tangibly and practically do. What are the options that you would give them?
Peter
Well, the first thing is I would suggest is the mindset that just move. Just as Nike says, just do it. Yeah, just get up and walk around your bedroom, walk around your house, stand up and down, rather than just sit in the sit up and down, rather than just sit and watch a movie or or TV show, get up and move periodically.
Peter
And that's a start. And the movement can be as simple as just us flexing your knees and then standing back up. It can be walking around, it could be walking your neighborhood. And if you have a history, an experience with water sports, you might go swimming. That is probably one of the best low impact exercises we can do.
Darius
Non weight bearing. Good for people with knee and hip and ankle issues.
Peter
Yeah yeah yeah. And then there are whatever sports or you've been engaged in that are comfortable for you. A lot of people play tennis and and save age. They can't play tennis well or with such impact. And they play pickleball now, which is great. So there's always expressions of movement that an individual, our audience can engage in. It's just important to emphasize, move your body.
Peter
Yeah.
Darius
So building off of those three you've got a history in martial arts as well. I've got a history and martial arts. That's something that you can do. The more physical disciplines karate, kung fu, jiu jitsu, aikido. And I say physical because there's usually a part of the practice where you're working with a partner or, opponent, depending on the branch, or you can do something a little more internal, like tai chi.
Darius
Yeah. And Tai chi something I think you got a lot of experience with as well I do.
Peter
And doing Taichi like yoga.
Peter
Touches on aspects of again are being more than just physical. And it's thousands of years old this practice tai chi like yoga. And so what resonates for me is that this maybe inherent to all of these practices, a wisdom that we're in the West just beginning to understand, it touches on an aspect that we don't talk about because there's not a lot of science to, evidence it, which is the energetic component of our bodies.
Peter
And I always take the assumption, I take the approach. Well, what if there is an important energetic aspect to our being? Wouldn't it be important to, train it, practice it to, just like you train your physical body and just like you train your brain when you're meditating, how about your energy component? Will Tai Chi does that with these subtle movements.
Peter
It also balances the energy, the body, the mind. And so it's a wonderful practice. It's very gentle.
Darius
If I think about it from a scientific perspective in my days in the lab are decades behind me now. But an atom is 99% open space.
Darius
Right. You've got the nucleus and you got the electrons and it's the electrons that make up the space. And it's the charge between the electrons that form the molecules, which form the tissues, which form the organs. So playing your hypothesis all the way out, there's absolutely an energy body how tai chi impacts it I bet you somebody probably studied it that we haven't seen yet, but I would I wonder in my experience, I don't practice tai chi, but when I go to the gym to lift weights, I do it with an intention which is I'm here to lift weights, I'm here to experience this.
Darius
I'm putting my, my intention and my present moment awareness right on the being. And I've learned that if you don't have that focus when you're lifting weights, well, things don't go very well.
Peter
Yeah.
Darius
So I'm wondering, Peter, if that energy body manipulation or energy body training can be done using any form of physical movement, as long as you put the mental acuity and the mental focus into it, which is, think about martial arts. If you don't have your mental focus there, you're getting hit. Just simple as that. You get immediate negative feedback, surfing the same thing.
Darius
Yoga when you're in that flow and some of those balances, it requires your full attention.
Peter
Yeah, all of those have the intention of, heightening your focus, increasing your clarity, which is the essence of what happens when you're meditating and when you're trying and working to be mindful. And so the connection that I've experienced and I others have shared with me, is that when you're in such a deep state of focus and clarity, you're in what modern parlance we call the zone.
Peter
Whatever sport you're in, you're running, you're in martial arts, you're playing basketball, you're playing football. There's just these moments where you feel like your focus, your clarity has slowed everything around you. And I. I attribute that to you're just not distracted. You're so in the moment.
Peter
And so practicing that with your body, with your mind, like tai chi, yoga, dance, dance. Living a good one. Yeah, yeah. All of those are movements that can render you into such focus and put you in such a zone that you don't even feel the movement anymore, because the energy is in such a flow. You're in a zone and that's, that's the essence of what I think we're trying to share.
Peter
That movement can bring you there. But you need to engage in it.
Darius
So let's talk about a, a challenge that people have with movement, overdoing movement, resulting in some kind of injury. How do we move forward when let's say we have ran too far and our knee is feeling it, or our hips are tightening up? How do we encourage continued movement in that situation?
Peter
Well, I'll preface that by my response to that by saying, developing a respect for your body.
Darius
Is.
Peter
Honoring your body. It's a mindset that I think is really important. We lose sight of that a lot. We lose sight of it when we don't eat right, when we don't sleep right, when we don't exercise, we don't move. What we're talking about today. So with that is the premise that you begin, the consideration of what your body needs.
Peter
You're always, I'm always attentive to not overdoing, not going beyond what my body can at that moment, not going beyond the foundation that I've laid. I can't just suddenly get up and run a marathon.
Peter
And if I have overdone it and my body has felt the effects of it, I have an injury. Then I, I learn to back off, pay attention. Notice when I don't feel the pain or the discomfort. Notice when it feels like I can start moving in whatever movement it was, whatever expression it was that caused the the injury.
Peter
And then I gradually move back into it. We in the West, I believe, are too used to having timelines within which to train. I'll have to be in shape six months for my marathon, or I have to be ready in pre football season training, baseball seeding, training. That's when I do my training. That's when I do my preparation.
Peter
And I think what we're trying to do here, I'm trying to do here is emphasize movement. It's a life long intention. It's not just to prepare you for an event is to prepare you and lay a foundation for health and wellness throughout your life. That's what we're talking about here.
Darius
Absolutely. So I think you raised a really important point, which is listening to your body. And as we get older, it's important to hear the small signs that your body is giving you before they become major issues. Yes. So you feel something you continue to push through it, it gets a little bit worse. You continue to push through it.
Darius
Well, you can't push through it anymore. And that's one of the biggest differences I've noticed as I've entered my just my sixth decade now, the body if listen, if, if you listen to it will tell you when you need to back off and when you don't listen to it. Well, that's when that injury occurs and you are forced to listen to it.
Darius
So hearing the body, I think that goes back with what we're talking about, having the mind engaged, because when the mind is engaged and not reading a text or thinking about a text or thinking about what you have to do when you're out of the gym, you're better prepared to hear what your body is saying and respond and proceed accordingly.
Darius
Yeah.
Peter
Yes. Yeah, definitely. This is a concept, this concept, the being that's so difficult to share and communicate, not just being your body but being the whole of yourself. Whenever you're engaged in activity and so being mentally there with your physical body will help you be more attuned, helps me be more attuned to what's going on with this physical body.
Peter
What's what's feeling overused today. My hamstrings, they're a little tight. Did I overdo something the other day? Maybe I won't go as intense today. Or. I've been sitting for a long time, and I'm ready with my New Year's resolution. I'm going to give myself some patience.
Peter
And not pick up some, some workout plan and jump right into it at a hard intensity. No, I'm going to build up.
Darius
So Peter, how do you feel when you're done working out. Not physically. How do you feel mentally, and how do you feel emotionally. Obviously we're not going to talk about the physical benefits of exercise that's well covered territory, but how do you feel emotionally, mentally, spiritually?
Peter
Well, I feel a certain kind of ecstasy, to be blunt. It's it's, it's a feeling that life is so wonderful in that moment. It's a feeling that I'm so attuned to my mind, and and my body and the emotions, and there's no sense of affliction. It's just a sense of kind of peace, inner peace. For that moment that I've brought everything into balance for a little while energetically, physically, emotionally, mentally.
Peter
And it feels good as opposed to you know, my mind being wandering off with all the negativity and all the conditioning and all the difficulties that we face, you know, challenges as human beings. Here's a moment. Moving my body, finishing with it, where I just feel I feel wonderfully at peace, balanced and calm.
Darius
Yeah, I can tell I have similar feelings, but leading up to it, if I haven't exercised for 4 or 5 days, I get edgy, I get short, I get cranky and, the story that I always makes me laugh. I was running a a consulting team of six people, and it was a U-shaped office and I people around, and I was just pacing back and forth and they were all looking over their shoulder because they didn't know who I was going to stop and basically pull out and go through their work, and probably wouldn't have been the kindest moment of their day.
Darius
And so my number two wonderful and looked at me and said very sheepishly, when was the last time you been to the gym? And I snapped five days and they could tell. She just looked at me and said, you need to go. And I thought about it for about 10s I said, she's right because my reaction is, don't tell me what to do.
Darius
Which is, oh, all right, I'll see you guys tomorrow. And now what? I went and it's just so powerful the the mental and emotional benefits of exercise, regardless of whether you're in the flow or in that heightened state, it changes your biochemistry. It changes what's being secreted in the body, which changes how you're feeling and how you're thinking.
Peter
Yeah. So maybe we should talk about why it is that people don't move and what we might suggest to help them engage in movement, maybe with a different, I keep coming back to the, mindset. Yes.
Darius
So why don't people move? It hurts.
Peter
Okay.
Darius
It hurts. It's easier to sit and watch TV. I don't want to put the effort in after a long day, which is ironic because you know when you have no energy, if you exercise you come out with ten times more energy. Yes I think there is habits. I think there is conditioning. I don't go to the gym.
Darius
I don't like exercise. That's not for me. I think you have beliefs, conscious and subconscious. I'm not an athlete. My body isn't built for that. I think you have fear especially in your in the 50 to 70 range if you haven't moved and I went through this, I didn't move for a couple of years and as I didn't move I could do progressively less and less and less and less.
Darius
Yeah. And then my mind would take over and it would, imagine scenarios in the future where I could get injured. So I wouldn't do that. And now that I couldn't do that, well, I won't do this. So it kept getting smaller and smaller and smaller. So I think there's a good, healthy dose of fear, whether accurate or in my case, inaccurate, that needs to be addressed.
Peter
So this is one of our keen intentions of this podcast, is to make a difference to one person in our audience, one person. Can you suggest to that one person, how can they, if they are in the circumstances that you just described, how do they get started? How do you get out of that malaise? How do they get unstuck?
Darius
I think first, I think you have to trust your gut, trust your intuition. Go talk to your health care practitioners to make sure there's nothing structurally wrong with you that needs to be addressed. Assuming there's nothing structurally wrong and you're in a similar situation that I'm in, get your body moving. I remember the after Covid, I went back to the gym and saw a friend of mine looked at me and said, this your first time back?
Darius
I said, yeah, he's like 20%. And I said, what? It's like 20%, start at 20%. He walked away like, okay, 25% of my course, he's right, 20%. Start slow and look at not only the physical body, but look at all of the things that are contributing to that physical discomfort. Look at what's going on in your head mentally, right?
Darius
How much time are you spending thinking about this and creating this reality? Figure out how to how.
Peter
Did you counter that.
Darius
Mindfulness training? Recognizing when I wasn't present, recognizing when I was fixating and creating a future that I didn't want, and stopping it and then changing the programing diet. We're going to have an episode on diet coming up, looking at what we're eating, what we're putting in our body recovery, listening to the body when you've exercised, if it needs it needs a day off or if it's ready to go again.
Peter
Yes.
Darius
Balance, really bringing, trying to bring it back into harmony.
Peter
Maybe we should talk a little bit about what's different in that stage of our lives when you hit midlife, and when you're approaching retirement.
Darius
It's a major inflection point.
Peter
Yeah. For me, what was different was the need to, really make this shift that I mentioned earlier that it was no longer about training for a period of time.
Darius
For some tenuous.
Peter
Yes, exactly. So if I would share something with those in the audience or in my age group in the 60s and 70s, I would say that, you know, just do something.
Peter
Minimal and build on it with a different kind of approach to, well, this is not just for a six month period.
Darius
This is my lifetime.
Peter
And why? Because there is no greater hedge to your overall health and well-being than moving your body. It's the hedge that can kind of guarantee, given everybody's individual physiology, whether you maintain a, a good level of health and and, well, well-being.
Darius
Vitality, aging with vitality. Yeah. We're talking about aging differently.
Peter
Yes.
Darius
And incorporating movement as a key aspect of aging differently. So it sounds like we're getting to our call to action. Peter, what is our call to action in the Move It or Lose It podcast? And if you've been listening, this one should be pretty simple to figure out.
Peter
It should be, you got to move it for people. You got to just do it. And just doing it doesn't have to be overthought. Just get up and walk. Move your arms. I mean, there's chair yoga out there where you could sit in a chair. You could sit. And I've taken.
Darius
A class of chair yoga.
Peter
Yeah, and you could do that. There's pickleball, which is a little less impactful. Whatever appeals to you, whatever you have an interest in, whatever you've been a fan of and just watching is now time for you to walk.
Darius
Tai chi, Pilates, the gym, aerobics, swimming, cycling, rock climbing, tai chi, martial arts.
Peter
I've got one for you.
Darius
Dancing, dancing, whatever your body is telling you it enjoys doing, just make it happen and quit coming up with excuses as to why you can't exercise. Yes. Find ways.
Peter
Yeah, so I think we've come to the end of this episode, and normally we'd like to end by sharing a poem or a quote with our audience. You have one for it.
Darius
I've got two. So I've got a quote which I think is, it's an old proverb. It's pretty simple. Health is wealth.
Darius
Health is wealth. If you're healthy, you have a wealth that so many other people on this planet don't have. And we need to celebrate and be grateful for that.
Peter
Yes.
Darius
The second one, and I'm going to read this because I don't want to misquote it, is how the Dalai Lama responded when he was asked about what surprised him most about humanity, and his response was, man, because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. Then he's so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present, the result being that he does not live in the present or the future.
Darius
He lives as if he is never going to die and then he dies having never really lived.
Peter
So powerful and loved it is.
Darius
So take time for your health now before you have to take time for the disease that inevitably will follow.
Peter
Yeah.
Darius
So that's it.
Peter
That's it. That's, end of our episode for today.
Darius
Feedback and comments. Age will be posted on age differently.com as well. So please go on to the website. Let us know what you benefited from in this episode and how some of these principles have been working for you. We'd love to hear from you guys.
Peter
It would tell us what you like, what you dislike. Then let us know what's impactful for you. And again, we hope we have impacted at least one of you. Thanks for listening.
Darius
Thanks, everyone. Till next time.
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