Longevity Starts With How You Move Today
Healthy aging isn't something that starts when you're old. The strength, movement, and physical capacity you build today can shape what your body can do for years to come.
By Mira Rasmussen, Exercise Physiologist & Founder of Fitness Beyond Training
As summer ends, there is a brief window of time before the holidays begin. Fall has always felt like a natural reset. We become a little more focused, a little calmer, as if the change of season takes us out of the constant motion of summer and allows us to settle back into a routine.
Maybe this brief change of pace is an opportunity to turn some of that attention toward ourselves. Not just to think about getting back into a workout routine, but to ask a more important question: How do you want your body to feel?
Feeling free to move without pain or strain doesn't have much sex appeal. It's not typically highlighted on social media or advertised in fitness. But almost all of us want it.
We want to get out of bed without thinking about our back, reach overhead without worrying about our shoulder, hike, run, lift, play with our kids, work in the yard, travel, or simply move through a normal day without constantly negotiating with our bodies.
Strength is absolutely a big part of that—and a big part of longevity—but it's not the whole picture. Physician and longevity author Dr. Peter Attia describes his framework for exercise around four areas: stability, strength, aerobic efficiency and anaerobic performance. He considers stability the foundation that allows us to safely build and use the other three.
I’m now 21 years into my career as an exercise physiologist. I spent the first 7 years missing a key piece: assessing and progressing stability with my clients. Why? Because I didn't know. It wasn't part of my formal education, and frankly, it wasn't what people came in asking for. They came in to get stronger, lose weight and generally get fit. That was true across all ages. But do you know what else is relevant at every age? Longevity. I know—isn't that something older people need to think about? Not really. Not when limitations in movement can start showing up while we're still young.
Longevity isn't just about how strong you'll be at 70 or 80. It's about preserving your ability to move and do the things you love throughout your life. Training for that is a lifelong investment.
I see 15-, 20- and 25-year-olds who already experience back pain when they exercise, shoulders that bother them when they lift, or neck discomfort that has become part of everyday life. They are young, and some are quite strong. Youth and strength alone don't guarantee good movement.
Modern life also gives us plenty of reasons to move less, even in our early years. We sit through school, sit to build careers, commute, work at computers and spend hours on screens. Being younger doesn't mean we have years before movement matters. It means we have more years in which to build physical reserve—and more years to benefit from it.
Humans aren't born knowing how to move upright. During our earliest development, the nervous system progressively organizes the stability, coordination and movement that eventually allow us to roll, crawl, stand, squat, walk and explore the world.
Development certainly doesn't stop after infancy. Strength, skill, gait, balance, coordination and motor learning continue developing afterward. But those early years give us something important: the basic movement capacity that we continue to build upon throughout life. The question is what happens to that capacity when we stop using parts of it.
So I come back to the same question, regardless of your age: How do you want your body to feel and perform? What do you want to keep doing in your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond? Strength training and cardiovascular exercise are important pieces of that picture, but neither one represents our total physical capacity. We also need balance, coordination, mobility, stability and the ability to control our bodies through the movements life requires of us.
If you're already noticing things your body doesn't do as easily as it once did, that doesn't mean you've missed your opportunity. It may simply be worth finding out why. A movement assessment can help identify where mobility, stability or movement control may be limiting what you're trying to do. Instead of simply training harder around a limitation, you can start making your training more specific to what your body actually needs.
Yesterday is gone, but today is still a very good day to start changing the trajectory. Take inventory of your body without worrying about the number attached to your age. Does it feel like you're physically surviving or thriving?
At Fitness Beyond Training, we help people understand how their bodies move, restore capacity where it's been lost, and build strength on top of it. Not just for what they want to do today, but for everything they want their bodies to keep doing.
Fall naturally gives us a moment to notice ourselves again. Pay attention to how you move today—and train for how you want to keep moving tomorrow.
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