Reconciling Moving and Working

One thing I’ve learned from my stupidly severe back injury is that if you don’t access ranges of motion often, you lose them.

Sounds simple – but life will force you into certain ranges at times, and if you don’t have access to them, you get injured. Plain and simple. It was very helpful to look back and dissect what lifestyle factors led to my injury, as it wasn’t easy to figure out. But here are a few:

1. I love to work! I love cranking out hours and hours of computer work. Sitting still for 10 hours, not good. Not good at all, esp for the lower back.
2. I get warm super easily. My preference was always to be either working out 100%, or completely still, so as not to sweat profusely in the office. This meant I wasn’t doing much casual movement. When I think about it now, there’s no amount of work you can do in a 2 hour period of exercise to account for 22 hours completely still. You need to get casual movement, temperature be damned.
3. My workouts were super hard and infrequent. I now realize that going as hard as I would in the gym hurt me, because I was always off & on with respect to my fitness. I’d be sedentary, then try to blast myself, then be sedentary again. Take 2 weeks off, try again. I didn’t have consistent exposure to overload, so I was constantly getting small injuries that forced me to take time off, perpetuating the cycle.
4. I had bad posture. Simple as that.
5. I had bad thoracic and hip mobility. Never worked on it enough.

Now, I’m doing a way better, more sustainable job balancing movement and work. I still want to lay down a good 10 hours of work per day, minimum. But I can’t sit and do that. I need to sit/stand – hence why I build myself a standing desk station, move around during my phone calls, get into a deep squat as often as possible (which means some wardrobe changes), and play more.

Portland has gotten me into tennis, jiu jitsu, kickboxing, mobility, biking, so many things. I’m very thankful for that environment here. My roommate too – shout out to Carl who is always on the move.

I start my day with dedicated mobility work 4-5 times per week. That should only go up as time goes on. Feeling good in your body is such a release. But it takes work! 

Lastly, I ask myself often – what can I do that’s super productive, but not in front of a computer? Tough for me right now. It’ll come to me though…

Signing off,

Team Health & Team Wealth