Motion is the Lotion

There’s an old physical-therapy saying: motion is the lotion. It’s corny, and it’s true. A lot of the stiffness and achiness people chalk up to “getting older” is really the result of joints that don’t get moved through their full range often enough. In this episode, Dr Burgess explains the surprisingly simple mechanism — how movement literally feeds your joints — and why the worst thing for a stiff, achy body is usually more rest.

We name the real culprit (it’s the chair, and how much uninterrupted time we spend in it), bust the myth that one hard workout can undo a day of sitting, and walk through the four everyday ranges civilization quietly takes from us: a deep squat, spinal rotation, overhead reach, and getting up and down off the floor. You’ll leave with a maintenance routine that takes three to five minutes a day and an “every hour” rule that costs you a single minute but pays off for decades.

**In this episode you’ll learn:**

- Why movement — not rest — is the medicine for stiff, achy joints

- How your joints actually “feed” themselves through motion

- Why one gym session can’t undo a day of sitting

- The four ranges to protect: squat, rotate, reach, and floor get-ups

- The “once an hour” habit that keeps you mobile for life

**Your action this week:** Set an hourly reminder during your workday. When it goes off, stand up and move for 60 seconds. Break up the sitting, once an hour, all week.

*This podcast is educational and is not medical advice. Talk to a qualified provider about your individual situation.*

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:06

I'm Dr. Victoria Burgess, and here we break down what's actually happening inside your body. Hormones, recovery, inflammation, fat loss resistance, and physiology without trends, gimmicks, or gets more. Welcome back. So here's a question worth sitting with, actually, worth standing up for. Can you get down onto the floor and back up again without using your hands? For a lot of people listening, that simple act is quietly getting harder and harder year by year. And most of us never notice it until the day it's gone. We tend to blame stiffness, aching joints, and a body that just doesn't move like it used to on age. But a huge share of that decline isn't the calendar at all. It's disuse. It's non-movement. The people who stay loose and capable into their 70s and 80s usually aren't genetically special. They aren't doing some heroic program. They just never give their bodies a chance to stiffen and forget how to move. They keep that range of motion going. And keeping that range, it turns out, is the most and greatest secret to a body that still works later in life. The good news is that it costs almost nothing. About a minute, an hour. That's what we're going to talk about today. So today we're going to get into the body's movement and specifically a piece that almost nobody trains until it's already gone. Mobility. The everyday range of motion that describes and decides whether bending, reaching, kneeling, and twisting feel free or feel like a negotiation point. My promise for you today is that you'll understand a real difference between staying mobile and just exercising. Why sitting is quietly stealing your range of motion, and a couple of almost insultingly simple things you can do about it starting right now. Educational, not medical advice. If you're recovering from an injury or surgery, clear this with your provider first, please. Okay. There's an old physical therapy saying that motion is the lotion. It's corny and it's true. A lot of stiffness and achiness people blame on age is really the result of joints that don't get moved through their full range of motion often enough. We need that movement to get that fluid that's in between our joints moving around and just lubing them up. And we don't do it often enough. Here's the mechanism simply. The cartilage inside of your joints doesn't have its own blood supply. So it gets the nutrients and stays healthy through movements. When you move a joint, because you're pumping the fluid in and out of the cartilage, like squeezing and releasing a sponge, basically. Movement is literally how the joint feeds itself and clears out waste. So when you stop moving a joint through its range of motion, you don't just lose flexibility. You're starving the tissue of the very thing that keeps it healthy. Squeeze that sponge a little every hour for decades, and your knees still kneel. This is also why the worst thing for a stiff, achy body is usually more rest. People feel a twinge, so they protect it. They move less. And the less they move, the stiffer and more fragile it gets. It's like a downward spiral. So the body adapts to what you ask of it. If you ask it to do nothing, it gets very good at doing nothing. That lotion is motion. You can't bottle it and you can't buy it. You can only move. And this goes, you've seen it, I'm sure, especially for you, those of you who are my age and older, is um, and I won't say my age, but I'll say it's several decades. Um, when people used to have surgeries and they used to keep people in bed rest, nowadays you're up and walking about, I don't know, 10 minutes after a knee replacement. So they want you up and moving around. So if movement is a medicine, what's the disease? For most of us, it's the chair. And we've all heard it. Sitting is the new smoking. But not because sitting is evil, but because of how much we do it uninterrupted. So the average person now sits for the majority of their waking hours, often in one position and often hunched towards a screen. And if we're standing, we're still hunched looking at our phones. But we're talking about sitting now. So here's what prolonged sitting does: it parks your hips in a shortened position for hours. So the muscles at the front of the hip tighten, and the muscles in your back side switch off, which by the way is a huge hidden driver of the exact back pain we talked about in episode one. It rounds your upper back and pushes your head forward, stiffening the shoulders and the neck, and it sends your whole body a signal. We are not using this range, so let's stop maintaining it. Use it or lose it isn't a slogan. It's biology, literally. The cruel twist is that a single hard workout doesn't undo a day of sitting. You can crush an hour at the gym or a run and still spend the other 23 hours stiffening up. Actually, if you sit right after you work out, sometimes you're even more stiff. So that's why every hour and every hour movement habit beats most people's gym routine for staying mobile. Even if you're doing yoga or stretching for an hour and then you sit for the rest of the time, still the same. Right? It's not about intensity, it's about frequency, breaking up the stillness before it sets in like concrete. And I don't know about you, but as I age, starting to feel like concrete. So the goal isn't to sit less by becoming a fitness fanatic. It's to interrupt the sitting, often with small doses of motion. So we don't have to think, oh, she's asking me to go train for a marathon or a half marathon or this and that. No, just little small doses of motion. Let me give you a practical version here. So there's a handful of ranges that civilization quietly takes from us, and you can keep all of them with a few minutes a day. I'll describe them to you so you can picture it. And I'm also gonna walk you through them in the short videos that I'm gonna post on social media this week. Range one, your hips. Once or twice a day, get into a deep squat. Just lower down as far as you comfortably can and hang out there for 30 seconds. Holding on to something if you need to. It's okay. If you can't squat very low, that's fine as well. You don't have to have, you know, a full entire squat where you're sitting on your calves. And yes, like I said, you can hold on. Even if you have somebody else holding you there. This is a position humans rest in all over the world. And most of us have abandoned it. Reclaiming it does wonders for the hips, the knees, and the ankles. Once again, I'm gonna show you these in some social media videos this week. Range two, your spine's rotation. Okay, so what you do for this is you sit or stand tall and gently twist to look behind you. One side and then the other. Your spine is built to rotate and sitting at a screen erases that twist. A few simple slow rotations day will help you keep it. Don't do it fast. Don't fling around your head, your back, anything like that. Nice and slow. Range three, your shoulders overhead. So, what you're gonna do for this is you're gonna reach both arms all the way up to the sky and slightly back, like you're the happiest person at a concert.

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Woo-hoo!

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Most adults have quietly lost the ability to get their arms fully overhead. Crazy to think about. I mean, some of us have shoulder pain and so on. We do this, we can do this slowly. Reach up as much as you can. And you only really notice the day you reach for the high shelf, and you're like, ouch! So let's practice this one once again. I'll post it on social media. Range four, the master test. Getting up and down off the floor. For a lot of people who stay capable into old age, this is really the whole routine over and over. Okay, practice lowering yourself to the ground and standing back up using as little support as you can. It's strength, balance, and mobility all in one move. And it happens to be one of the better predictors that we have of how independent you'll stay as you age. I'm sure you've read or seen many videos about this. Once again, I'll show you this in a video on social media this week. So squat, twist, reach, floor. That's it. Not a workout. It's just a daily maintenance check on the ranges of motion that life tries to take from us. Three to five minutes. The cost of skipping it isn't paid today. It's paid in your 60s and 70s in the form of a body that slowly shrinks the territory it's willing to move through. So don't push it off. Literally, it takes hardly any time, especially when you get used to doing this in your daily functions. So in the practice, I see the long-term scoreboard of all this. I see people in their 40s who move like they're 60 because they've sat and stiffened for two decades, and people in their 70s who move like they're 50. The difference is almost never some heroic exercise program that worked. It's the accumulation of small, frequent movement or the lack of it. I've been guilty of it myself. I worked in a job where I was in a car for quite a long time. Um, at least six years, I was in the car, pretty much, I would say four to six hours a day. Um, I started getting some serious hip flexor hip flexor issues. So there's really, you know, sometimes things that you're gonna have to do outside because you can't, obviously, I couldn't quit my job, right? So you're gonna have to take that time to go through these motions. And it matters for, you know, everything else that we do here. So whatever the goal, maybe you're recovering well from a procedure, you're getting the most from a body composition plan, you're staying active enough to keep results. It all rides on a body that can actually move through its range of motion. Mobility is that quiet foundation under the more advanced stuff. You can't out-treat a body that has stopped moving, just can't do it. So when someone comes in and they're focused on a specific fix, I'm always almost always asking, how's your daily motion? Because that's the soil everything else grows in. A great training plan, daily movement, steps. A good recovery from a procedure, walking. Maybe not a ton at first because you're just getting over a procedure and you're recovering. Maybe it's a couple minutes an hour. Maybe it's 10 minutes total for a few hours or within a few hours. But it's all movement. So here's your action, and it's built to be impossible to forget. Ready for it? Set a gentle reminder once an hour during your workday. On your phone. That's probably what we're all gonna use, I would say, on your watch, but either way, some sort of a reminder. When it goes off, stand up and move for 60 seconds. That's it. Then you're gonna do one of the four ranges. You're either gonna walk to get water or get anything. Just break the sitting once an hour all week long. That's the whole thing. You're not adding a workout to your life, you're adding commas to the long sentence of sitting. So it's gonna be sit, comma, stand every hour. Period. The decades of mobility gets built one hourly minute at a time. So you can start that compounding effect tomorrow morning. Okay? Simple, right? So remember that one idea that runs this whole episode: motion is the lotion. You can't bottle it, you can't buy it, and a stiff, achy body almost never needs more rest. It needs more frequent movement. Refuse to sit long enough to rest. Let the simple math of a minute and hour compound for years, and that'll carry you into a vigorous old age. That option is open to all of us, and the price of entry is very, very, very small. So next week we go from mobility to its powerful sibling strength. There's a phrase, strong people are harder to break, and I mean it almost literally. We'll look how people reserve their own fraily, and I'll show you to why building strength might be the most single, best insurance policy you can buy. Until then, be awesome, and I will see you all next week. If this episode helped you understand your body a little bit, share it with someone who needs it. And if you're ready to stop guessing and start working with your physiology, or at the new shape method in the links below or at the shape and u s h a p e method.com. Take care of your body, and it will take care of your