Suzanne Bechard

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Fitness

Your optimal daily movement routine

For the first time in human history, we live in a digital world that doesn’t require us to move enough to maintain basic physical and mental health. All too often, many people in their 50’s, 60’s and 70’s find it difficult to sit, stand or twist without help or pain. Many people complain of back aches, neck and shoulder pain, hip and knee pain, as well as depression and anxiety. A sedentary lifestyle interrupted by an hour-long workout at the gym consisting of predictable repetitions of aerobics and resistance movements is not the kind of movement hygiene we need today. Our physical training has to change because what we are required to do in the world has changed. As we move towards the future, physiotherapists, kinesiologists, and other movement specialists are beginning to map the intelligence of the body in motion to ask questions about what kind of movement—and how

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Fitness

The importance of staying in motion

Take the first five minutes of the day to help you stay supple and strong. In fact, you don’t even have to get out of bed. My 80 year-old mother bent down to reach into the depths of a cupboard to retrieve a wayward item that had fallen off the shelf. Her spine stiffened and her hand shot to her low back. “Ouch, my back!” she exclaimed. Wincing with pain, she returned to an upright position. “I guess I’m getting old,” she said. As someone who studies posture and skeletal alignment, I desperately wanted to say something helpful in that moment that would change her perspective on aging and restore her hope for the future. I wished she’d had a user’s manual we could reference to figure out where she’d gone wrong and protect her from injuring herself in the future. I searched for words to lift her spirits, but I came up

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