Ep4. MOVE

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

I thought this quote was appropriate as we discuss movement and exercise in our lives, starting with the concept that it is just a single step.

In episode 3; I mentioned exercise and movement interchangeably. But I want to clarify that distinction. Exercise is fabulous; it increases the oxygen flow in our body, triggers chemical releases like dopamine, suppresses cortisol, aids digestion, helps with muscle tone, and is crucial for maintaining bone density. However, exercise often embodies the concepts of high energy, high performance, high achievement, and competition. 

I want to separate that from movement, which is a gentler way of supporting the body—physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Transcript

 Hello and welcome back.  To inflammation, super highway. Recorded in Yarraville Melbourne. Australia  Hey guys. Thanks again for choosing to cruise with me this week.  The next four episodes will focus on four major lifestyle parameters that we can influence. Sleep, Stress, Diet and Exercise.  I want to highlight the importance of these things for our intracellular health. And our cell regeneration, with respect to auto-immune.  

So this week,  Which is episode four, we'll focus on exercise and movement.  

But before we begin.  

'I would like to honor the original custodians of this salt water and circled country.  Who live in harmony with the lands in the sea.  I honor the elders past and present.  And recognize that this is and always will be,  Aboriginal land.  '

Hey guys. I just want to check in before we go any further with your journaling diary, recording spreadsheet, notepad—whatever it is that you’re using to record your daily habits, as we discussed in Episode Three. I hope you're all doing well.

I acknowledge that some people might have recorded every day, while others might not have begun at all. But remember, it's not an exam or a test, and you can't fail. What I really want to stress about journaling is that we're trying to establish a baseline record of your lifestyle and daily processes. 

We need to focus on the next few weeks, or even just the next week. We don’t have to keep this up for more than a month, and it doesn’t have to be done every day. We just need to get a good understanding of your basic lifestyle behaviors with respect to sleep, stress, diet, and exercise. This baseline will help us understand what we might need to adjust. 

We’re doing this because current medical knowledge shows that our lifestyle and environment have the largest effect on our gene expression. These are the things we can ultimately control and have the biggest influence on our health. So, hop to it, do your best, and get a good understanding of your routines. At the end of the next few weeks, we’ll review this and explore our lifestyles more deeply.

For Episode Four, we’ll focus on movement. Today's quote is from Lao Tzu:

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

I thought this quote was appropriate as we discuss movement and exercise in our lives, starting with the concept that it is just a single step.

When we spoke about journaling, I mentioned exercise and movement interchangeably. But I want to clarify that distinction. Exercise is fabulous; it increases the oxygen flow in our body, triggers chemical releases like dopamine, suppresses cortisol, aids digestion, helps with muscle tone, and is crucial for maintaining bone density. However, exercise often embodies the concepts of high energy, high performance, high achievement, and competition. 

I want to separate that from movement, which is a gentler way of supporting the body—physically, mentally, and emotionally.

So, when I was diagnosed with MS, I was super fit. I've said it before: I was training for my black belt in karate, and that level of fitness was probably the fittest I have ever been in my life. It served me well for a really long time. However, if I have any critique or criticism looking back, it's that I didn't maintain that level of fitness.

This wasn’t due to my diagnosis but because my lifestyle circumstances changed radically at the time. I believe that if I had maintained my peak fitness for longer, I would have experienced longer positive effects on my body. The fitness I had held me in good stead for a long time, but I still believe that maintaining peak fitness for as long as possible is super beneficial—for your overall health and in your progression.

Over time, I found that MS progression makes you more sedentary. With balance issues, muscular weakness, and foot drop—which I now experience—there's an increased risk of falling. This makes you more cautious in your movements and high-impact sports, and activities like dance and running become more challenging.

Back in the day, my exercise choices were at a higher level: karate, mountain biking, hiking, backpacking. I hiked a lot around the world. I also played tennis from a young age. I chose sports that brought me joy, and I was committed to them. But if you're not a sporty person and have never had sports as part of your lifestyle, the concept of exercising and movement might seem daunting.

For those of us who were active, fit, and capable throughout our lives, maintaining a level of fitness isn’t as daunting. The challenging part is reassessing your choices, which I'll discuss. It’s important to recognize that simply saying things like “go to the gym seven days a week” or “get a membership” might not be practical, especially if a gym membership is unaffordable. From experience, having a membership doesn’t necessarily mean you will go to the gym. You need to find activities that create joy.

If nothing about exercise brings you joy, think of it as movement instead.

Most of us, regardless of how active we are, move because we walk around the house, for example. There are passive ways to increase your movement, and ultimately, there are great ways to add exercise. I’ll focus on exercise for now, but I'll also discuss my transition from high-impact exercise to movement.

I believe exercise is crucial in your life. As mentioned before, it maximizes your cellular health and mental well-being. Whether you have a diagnosis or not, maintaining physical health and strength is important as you age. You need to find something you enjoy doing, or you won’t stick with it. So, don’t follow any guru’s suggestions blindly. Don’t attempt something you've never done before. Be realistic, be honest with yourself, and do what you can based on your current stage of life and health.

The bottom line is not to set yourself up to fail. I love exercise, but I never really loved the concept of exercising just for its own sake. I love sports and have always enjoyed them. During my relapsing-remitting phase, I continued to be as adventurous as I could. It’s my personality; I traveled a lot and enjoyed carrying my life on my back. I fully embraced my adventurous spirit.

I engaged in rock climbing, skiing, ocean diving, skydiving, and running, although I didn’t run a lot. Volleyball and mountain biking were also part of my routine. All these activities were great when my balance was stable. If you're fortunate enough to be in the early phases of any diagnosis, a high-energy exercise lifestyle will carry you well into later phases. I can’t definitively say whether maintaining a high level of karate training would have slowed my progression, but let’s face it, those answers are elusive—no one can tell you for sure the "shoulda, coulda, woulda" aspect of life with a progressive disease. But I can't do those anymore. So, in the joy of living a full and adventurous life, I do believe staying as fit and healthy as you can, while something is trying to slow you down, is important for not just your physical health, but your mental health as well. These days, I'm much more grounded in my approach to physical activity. I do a lot more exercises in the pool and practice yoga and other things that are more sedentary. 

I haven't stopped. I've never stopped exercising. I had a job for 30 years that was very physical. I had many jobs over my life, but they always had a major portion of physicality to them. In some ways, I was a lazy exerciser, but I was also fortunate that I enjoyed it. So, in the process of progressing, I have shifted my daily routines to a more passive way of exercising—one that requires a lot more thought.

What do I mean by this? I mean that I no longer do karate, high-level dancing, or backpacking. But I do exercise every day. Instead of running now, I use a cross-trainer. The cross-trainer allows me to maintain a high level of cardio without lifting my feet or tripping over. I’ve also shifted from karate to activities like Tai Chi and yoga. My yoga practice is now predominantly done on the ground or in a chair, and my Tai Chi movements are done while holding onto a ballet bar.

I still use movements for my body's muscle memory, but in a more passive approach. This is where I feel I have shifted from exercise to movement. I challenge my upper and lower body through what I used to do just from going to work, but now in the pool. I was never much of a swimmer at school; I always competed in athletics, and swimming was something I left to others. But now, I find a lot of joy in the pool.

The water aspect of my life used to be about being at the beach and body surfing. As an active person who loved the outdoors and summer, summer meant swimming at the beach or in rivers. Accessing those environments is a lot trickier now—not impossible, but a lot trickier. So, I’ve shifted that feeling of support from water and floating and the joy of being immersed into doing hydrotherapy in outdoor pools with saltwater. Hydrotherapy is a really gentle and comfortable way to focus on every muscle in your body.

It helps me relax my entire body and concentrate on all areas, and it also targets many areas that I don't use as much as I used to. In a perfect world, I would do hydrotherapy every day. Honestly, my body wouldn’t let me, and I know there would be days when I’d have to relax or just regroup. Funding, budgets, and life priorities—work and household duties—often interrupt doing something like hydrotherapy every day because it takes about four hours in total. This includes getting to the pool, changing, exercising for an hour, swimming laps for half an hour, then getting out of the pool, showering, getting dressed, and leaving the pool complex. So, yes, it's not something I can do every day.

Working with a hydrotherapy practitioner required me to, I suppose, a bit like finding a mechanic or a counselor, try lots of different people before I found the right fit. I was super fortunate with my practitioner up in Cairns, and I’m currently working with an amazing practitioner here in Melbourne. They are around.

I find that for me, hydrotherapy is a lot more active than for many people who do hydrotherapy in warm pools and seem to have a fairly passive approach to it. That’s great for some people, but for me, I needed someone who was going to challenge me, and it took me a little while to find the right combination of practitioner and my personality. But I’m super happy right now.

I feel very grateful and blessed to have found these professionals. I never wanted to work with someone who just instructed from the side of the pool or had generic exercises that were repeated every week. The people I work with are in the pool with me, and they challenge me constantly. I will say that whenever we do a new exercise, which is pretty much every week, I find the new exercises quite exhausting because we are targeting different muscles all the time. But it is such a joy, and these magnificent therapists are worth every cent. They are expensive, and again, I feel blessed that I can afford to work with them once or twice a week. The funding for all of this is a topic we will discuss in a few weeks’ time. But for now, my budget and my energy are the two major restrictions to working with anyone more often than, let’s say, once or twice a week.

So that process of shifting from high-energy exercise to consistent movement was a challenge. For anybody who has been highly active, this would be a challenge if your MS progresses.

But it is really important to find something that brings you joy, whatever it is. It’s also important to find a mix between working with professionals and finding things you can do at home on your own. There are things I used to do at the gym that I thought I wouldn’t be able to do ever again, like weightlifting. 

But I have found an approach that I can do at home with dumbbells and chairs. Instead of doing both arms at the same time, I now hold the back of a chair and do one-arm raises and bicep curls. I can lean over a chair and do, I don’t actually know what you call them, where you put the weight on the ground and then lift your elbow up to shoulder height—triceps, maybe? I also hold weights and do what’s called a sit-to-stand. You go down to the chair and rise up with weights in your hands. I’m using a combination of my body and equipment.

I’d have to say that supporting yourself as you move forward with a progressive diagnosis like multiple sclerosis means you do need to adjust and shift what you do. But you’d have to do that anyway as you age. So, instead of feeling like “woe is me!” and lamenting what you can’t do, remember that I’m 57, and in many people’s worlds, they wouldn’t be doing anywhere near the stuff they used to do when they were 27.

But I do feel a twinge of jealousy when I look out the window sometimes and watch people passing by the street—some jogging, running, even just walking, playing, or moving at different speeds. The observation I have with the joy of movement is that it’s really important, and I never put so much importance on it before. What I used to think was something...

So, I've mentioned hydrotherapy, Tai Chi, and yoga, which I do a lot on the ground these days. My yoga practice has evolved, and I’ve found that when I go on holidays and do less structured exercise, my body isn't as happy as when I maintain a routine every day.

In this episode about exercise and movement, I also wanted to mention massage. This ties in a bit with yoga, but massage is something you definitely want to honor your body with.

Massage is a way of releasing tension in your muscles and body. When you move less, your body tenses up and holds tension in various parts, and it’s really important to release some of that tension. I used to rollerblade and ride mountain bikes—activities that required balance and were high-impact. The impacts you experience from sitting are different but not dissimilar. 

We don’t realize how much we tense up and how much our muscles need release when we're not doing high-intensity exercise. You might think you don’t need it, but you do. Your body feels joy when it’s had a really good massage, and everything moves more fluidly. This aspect of fluidity is crucial for your internal organs as well.

I mentioned massage here in the movement section because I think it's as important as exercise. I try to honor my body with a massage, but I don't always manage it once a month as I’d like. Recently, when I found myself really tense—not quite a headache but a feeling that everything needed to stretch more—I went for a remedial massage. There are many types of massage, and I was amazed at how stiff I was. 

Straight after that massage, my body felt so much joy, and everything moved more fluidly. I also occasionally visit an Ayurvedic clinic in Bali, where they offer various packages—three-day, seven-day, 14-day, or 21-day—depending on what you can afford. Their massages are part of a comprehensive package that includes diet and herbs tailored to your needs. Their high-intensity oil-based massages, infused with specific herbs, are particularly effective.

Massage, diet, and movement are all vital parts of the exercise story. They are intertwined, and it's important to honor every aspect—from the large, gross movements to the smaller movements that come with a massage or craniosacral therapy.

So, whether you choose a massage or any other modality, it’s all exhilarating and good for you. I understand there will be restrictions of time, budget, and access for some people. I used to live quite remotely and didn’t have everything on my doorstep, but there was always something. For instance, when I could no longer ride my bike, I found joy in using a tricycle, which allowed me to exercise, elevate my heart rate, and support my cardiovascular health.

What I’m emphasizing is optimizing every area of your health, whether it’s a gross muscular movement or a fine motor skill. From massage to swimming, riding a tricycle, or using a cross-trainer and lifting weights—these are my choices, but you will find something that suits you and your life. There were times when I couldn't afford much, so I adapted to what I could do.

The point of this episode is that moving and optimizing movement is extremely important for your inner health, mental health, body health, cellular health, and muscular health. Whether you have a relapsing-remitting, progressive, or secondary progressive diagnosis, there will be something for you. Some days, you might need someone else to help with exercises, and other days, you can do things on your own. But one thing you can’t do is nothing.

When I was first diagnosed, I had an amazing GP who said, “Look, Claire, on your really high-energy days, don’t do too much, but on your low-energy days, don’t do nothing.” This means you need to adapt constantly. Adjust your movements to the energy you have each day, as it will change from day to day, week to week, month to month, and year to year. It will cycle and rollercoaster, but choose to move.

So, we’re going to wrap it up here. Honor yourself and your body. Love everything you can do, respect what you can’t, observe others with joy, and look at yourself in the mirror and say, “Well done, you’ve got this.” This is your journey, your story—a journey of a thousand miles that begins with a single step. My friends, I honor you, I respect you, I love you. Thank you for joining me, and until we meet again, MOVE, MOVE, MOVE and enjoy the ride.

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