Principles of Intentional Movement
5 guidelines to help you get more out of exercise
One of the most important factors in the successful outcome of physical therapy patients is what’s called “meaningful activity.” Seems like a pretty obvious statement: give people an exercise relevant to their lives and they’re more likely to do it.
There is, of course, a nuanced and tested process that physical therapy professionals follow to determine what constitutes meaningful activity, but we’re going to take the phrase at face value and ask: what constitutes meaningful activity in exercise?
It could be a specific reason (desired outcome, activity relevance) or process-related (exercise-related sports like powerlifting, marathon running, etc), but whatever it is, it is the reason why we exercise. For exercise to have a positive impact, it must have context. Meaningful activity has better outcomes, more adherence, and greater enjoyment for participants than arbitrary exercise.
Intention
I don’t remember exactly where I heard it first, but describing that reason—that meaning behind the activity—as intention is an excellent way to attach meaning to exercise without imposing unnecessary morality or dogma. It allows us to organize and direct both specific exercises and general exercise-related activity toward relevant and measurable results in a self-directed fashion.
Intention, in short, is a way that we can figure out why and how we want to exercise.
The concept of intention is simple—the reason why you exercise—but enacting it in an exercise situation can be difficult. In order to make this undertaking easier, I put together this list of the Principles of Intentional Movement: a collection of ideas and guidelines to aid in the process of determining and implementing intention.
These Principles are not necessarily themselves Intentions, but rather a set of characteristics or guidelines that can be applied to activities to help evaluate their relevancy to you.
Each of the Principles is also linked to a physiological principle: a quantifiable physical outcome that can itself be considered an intention.
The Principles of Intentional Movement
Autonomy: All trainees should have a say in why and how they exercise. This one is simple, but it is all-too-often overlooked by the exercise community. It is your body. You are the final say on what happens to it.
Physiological principle: Position, load, volume, and exercise selection all depend on individual needs.
Relevancy: Seems a bit redundant since these list is to help determine Intention, but meaningful activity must have relevance to our lives. A clear link between the exercise and our reason for doing it makes all the subsequent steps much easier.
Physiological principle: Task determines position which determines function.
Benchmarks: If we’re going somewhere, we need to know where we’re going, but we also need landmarks along the way. The journey from A to Z is massive and daunting. The step from A to B is much more digestible. Exercise should be broken up into chunks over time with clearly identifiable endpoints.
Physiological principle: In order to progress an activity, we must exceed our existing capacity in small increments over time in order to induce adaptation (known as progressive overload).
Knowledge/Skill Acquisition: Exercise should help us become more, not less. This is the intersection of relevancy and benchmarks: we should gain from exercising, whether it be capacity, strength, impractical skills/tricks, or practical life skills (neurological and physiological).
Physiological principle: the brain is an adaptive organism and learning new physical skills helps us learn and adapt better and faster in all facets of life.
Effort: Exercise can and should be hard. That’s the whole point. In order to
become resilient to stress we must increase our ability to handle it. When done in a safe, comfortable environment, getting uncomfortable is an important skill. It also must continue to be hard, or else it loses its potency. Having things get easier as we practice them is great (and a great way to measure progress), but once an activity becomes easy (easy being a relative term), we must progress it in order to continue to get stronger.
Physiological principle: Stress leads to accommodation, which facilitates the need for greater stress.
Having a clear intention greatly simplifies the process of exercise selection. It cuts through the noise of social media and marketing, which tells us EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT ALL THE TIME. Much like life, having a clear sense of your personal values helps you determine what is actually relevant to you and your life.