Hello, everyone! Welcome to today’s episode of Discover Health podcast. I’m Dr. Trish Murray – physician, best-selling author, and the Health Catalyst Speaker. I am so excited to have Jim Chaput today with me on our show! Hi Jim!
Good afternoon.
Welcome to the show. Jim, I’m going to read your bio and then we’re going to kind of get right into it. Okay?
Sounds great!
Great! Jim Chaput after a 19-year career in financial services, left a leadership position to focus on health and fitness. Jim is a Master Practitioner of Applied Movement Neurology and holds certificates in Applied Functional Science and 3DMAPS from the Gray Institute. His passion is empowering people to help resolve pain, tension, and insomnia that prevents them from living well.
Jim is also one of our Discover Health Movement Membership instructors. He teaches our Movement for Longevity class. The title and focus of our discussion today is understanding how your brain affects your movement.
So, Jim, the first question I love to just break the ice with and give people even more about your background and the personal input is, you know, what brought you to where you are today? What was your journey? What caused you to leave a 19-year career in the financial services to pivot completely from auditing of taxes and things or auditing companies to focusing on health and fitness?
Yeah, thank you. It’s great to be here. My journey was, I don’t know, I think in some ways typical of other corporate people. How it started is I was a really active person through my college years and my initial years in corporate. Then as I got caught up in the rat race, I kind of left some of my fitness behind and health. I had a couple of big moments that shaped where I am today.
One of them was realizing one day that I just didn’t feel great. I just got to the point where every time I ate, I really didn’t feel well and realized – wow, I’ve gained forty pounds in the last ten years. Maybe I need to do something. I just started with getting back into shape. I started with weight training and started just doing that a few times a week and started to get some good results. A couple months down the line I’d realize, I guess I’ve got to do a little more. Maybe I have to watch how I eat. I’d just make a little change and then a couple of months make another change. I just kept progressing like that when I would plateau, I’d say, okay, I’ve got to be a little more serious and do something more. That was my first big change is realizing how bad I felt.
The next thing that happened was I found CrossFit, which some people might have heard of. It’s constantly varied, functional movement performed at high intensity which means doing a lot of different things usually at high intensity and really getting into great shape. It did! It was amazing. Probably a year or so after I started doing CrossFit, I had actually moved to London a couple months ahead of my wife, Trish. When she came out to London, the last couple of months she hadn’t seen me I had transformed, and she almost walked past me at the airport. This was so shocking to her that I had gone back to my good weight, right? CrossFit was that final thing that really pushed me to get my health back. That was the second big thing.
The third big thing that happened to me was while I was still doing CrossFit living in London, I went out to Singapore to do this movement camp with a lot of different stuff just to try something new and explore movement and whatnot. I’ll tell you; I was getting my butt kicked from everyone including a sixty-year-old woman I was teamed up with at one point! Because I was really fit, but I moved badly. I was really tight, just not very limber at all. Even though I was at the fittest in my life, I could not do some of these basic things that these other people that weren’t really fit but they knew how to move, like people that had done tai chi and karate and judo were just – I couldn’t believe how well everyone could move, how much better they could move than me. That’s when I started looking into my own movement practice and I started studying with the Gray Institute and we’ll talk a little bit more about that and just focus on more movement quality. I did that for a while.
I think it was a couple years later, I was doing another one of these movement camps and I saw an advertisement for Applied Movement Neurology. They were looking for case studies of people with chronic tightness and whatnot. I said, “That’s me!” I went for a series of treatments and the founder, Dave, and I thought he was a magician. I would walk into the session and he’d say, “Just reach down and touch your toes.” I wouldn’t even come close to the ground. Then he’d do some weird stuff, touching different parts of my head and tapping on my body and say, “Okay, now try it.” Within a couple of minutes with no warmup or anything I would suddenly be touching the ground with no problem. I thought, what is going on here? It was all brain-based. Those couple of things just got me absolutely convinced that this was just amazing stuff that I needed to know more about. I started training in it and the more I learned about this stuff, the more I realized, I can help people with this stuff. That’s what I need to be doing. Once I made that decision, I just couldn’t keep going with the corporate stuff. The corporate stuff, I loved it for so long, but then once I saw a better path, a more fulfilling path, I had to let it go.
You know, Jim, that’s such a wonderful story. It’s such a perfect example of how life is a journey. Health is a journey. It’s not an overnight a-ha, this is the answer, and this is what you do. It takes time and it takes steps, but people have to make a decision, you know, that living the typical American lifestyle whether it be corporate or whether it be non-corporate or the idea of just we get so focused in our thirties and into our forties around work and life and family and finances and this and that. It’s like we lose sight of our own health. It takes time and it takes focus and it takes dedication to get it back. Then we find out – wow! This brings me joy, this brings me health, and it makes me happy. Then we can’t live in the life we’ve been living before, such as our jobs.
My example is with the traditional medical model. I was trained in the traditional medical model, I worked for a large institution, and it wasn’t too many years in when I started learning about functional medicine and alternative or complimentary or integrative concepts. I’m like, if research is supporting these too, why aren’t we blending things? Why aren’t we helping each individual figure out what they need? That led me down my journey. We all have our journey. I just love that first question I always ask everybody.
Let’s help people understand some of the modalities you’ve trained in, their backgrounds, and what they are. So, what is Applied Movement Neurology? Should we start there with that? What’s that?
Yeah. So Applied Movement Neurology is it’s primarily a system that’s used for therapy. I call myself a Movement Therapist. Different practitioners use it. A practitioner like yourself could train in this system and integrate it into your own practice. You have physical therapists and various other people that use it. It’s based partly from functional neurology and then uses some complex movement and some concepts from traditional Chinese medicine. It’s really about activating different parts of your brain and see how your body responds. Normally what you would expect is if you’re a healthy individual and everything’s functioning well, if you activate a particular brain pathway, your body should just go on as normal. Sometimes, if there’s something wrong, for example, if you’ve got lesions or you’ve just got dysfunction in say your balance system, if you activate a certain pathway your body will tend to either relax or exhibit some sign of there’s something wrong there. So, Applied Movement Neurology is a system by which you can interrogate a person’s nervous system to see, what does this person need at this time to actually improve their function? The main way I use that is in one-to-one sessions, but I do use some of it in the group sessions and the Movement for Longevity class. Some of the concepts you can actually, for some of the things, teach someone quickly how to activate a certain pathway and just see how their body responds. If I reach down and touch my toes and see, okay, where am I at the moment? If I activate a particular pathway, if I then reach and can reach a lot further, that tells me my system said, oh, what did you just do there? In that pathways something’s not going right. I just teach people say, “Hey, let’s try this really quick.” Then you retest. If you get a normal response after the retest, that drill we just did helped your brain function.
That’s one of the ways I use the Applied Movement Neurology in the group class. For some situations, you need more than that. You need a one-to-one session. I’ve seen some great results with people just doing some of these simple drills and have people quickly get improvements even though they didn’t get a one-to-one session.
I love that at the beginning of class. Every beginning of the class, the Movement for Longevity class that Jim teaches to us at Discover Health Movement Membership, he teaches each time like it’s the first time we’ve done it. The idea is he shows us two different exercises, as he says reaching down to touch the floor or your toes or however far you can reach! Then also you do another one where we sort of turn our torsos. Then we do exercises throughout the class and what I think you’re saying is that which exercises seem to relax and enhance our pathways from our brain to improve our movement and which exercises might challenge it and make it more difficult. Is that correct?
Yeah. So, once you have your baseline, the way I look at it is if you do a drill and you then can reach further or twist further it’s showing at least the mild deficiency in your system. That drill that you did will bring that thing either back to normal or will improve it. In some cases, what happens is you do the drill and then you actually can’t reach as far as you could have. Like you got worse, right? What that shows is there’s actually a more significant deficiency. Your system actually got stressed out by activating that thing or doing that drill. It’s something you really need to improve, but you have to be careful how you use it because that improvement is a bit stressful. Yeah, as you said I show it every time because one of the things is that I show it because I don’t know if someone who is watching the recordings say it’s the first one they’re seeing or it I have a new person in class that I’m not sure about. I’m making sure that everyone has the same knowledge to start with. Yeah, I use it every day. It’s one of these things, right, that I teach it in the group class and one of the reasons why I teach it is it’s so great! You learn over time and you get such this body awareness that you know exactly how your body’s feeling based on what you’re doing.
If I go to the gym, I walk in, we’re getting ready to warm up. The first thing I do is a test my range of motion, am I at my normal? If I’m not, if my system’s a bit stressed out, I’ll do a drill or two just to relax my system and then I’m like, okay now I’m ready to warm up. Then I’ll warm up! This is one of the challenges with group exercise classes is what we’re doing right for everyone in the class, well I don’t know. If we do something in the warmup before I start doing my main work of the workout I’ll check myself again because what if we ended the warmup on something that really stressed me out? I don’t want to go try to pick up something heavy when I’m really stressed out. I want to make sure I’m at my optimal for that moment. It is about empowering people to know your own readiness state and then be able to affect your own readiness state and improve your readiness right at that moment because you know which drills are the ones you need.
That’s so important. There are so many people, Jim, over the years that…some people are very in tuned with their bodies and when they go into a gym they can say to themselves, I’m not feeling my best today. I’m here, but I’m just going to sort of run through the motions. Whereas a lot of other people don’t have that insight a lot of the times and they’ll push themselves too hard and end up getting hurt. They may end up in my office or your office. The idea is if people simply had a tool that takes less than ten seconds to do and say to themselves, oh, I’m not even at my norm right now. I can’t even go past my knees let’s say and bend forward. Wow! I need to do something to relax my system and make sure I’m prepared for today’s workout, before you dive into the definitive workout. That tool alone which you teach at every class, and repetition is so important that we get it. The first time we’re ever introduced to something so many times we may do it, but we may not truly understand why or how to utilize it in our lives. The more people take the classes, especially your class, Movement for Longevity, and they learn this again and again, they start to then, oh, I get it, and start to use it. That’s what’s so important.
So, now what is Applied Functional Science and how does that help you? I guess you did that first and then you worked into the Applied Movement Neurology. Tell us about Applied Functional Science and what that is.
Yeah. So, my initial studies were with the Gray Institute and I got the certificate in Applied Functional Science. Applied Functional Science is looking at the body in a holistic way and saying that anytime we look at movement we have to recognize that you have to consider gravity, mass and momentum, ground reaction force, and the chain reactions that occur through the body through any movement. A lot of the stuff in Applied Functional Science is looking at simple things like walking or lunges and seeing the chain reactions that occur when you do those movements. If you imagine if you just are standing there and you take a step forward lunging with one foot and then bring it back, a lot is happening in that movement. In fact, there’s a chain reaction through your whole body as you’re walking. So, Applied Functional Science teaches you just the principles of how that works and how to evaluate when you see someone moving. Where is their deficiency? If you look at these different chain reactions, what’s going on there? What can I do to help fix it? A lot of the things, many of the movements I use in the Movement for Longevity class come from either the same movements the Gray Institute uses or the concept.
The big thing that I got from the Gray Institute is the importance of three-dimensional movement. In many of the movements, and you’ve been to class so you know, we’ll do movements going forward to backward but then we’ll also go side to side and then we’ll do rotation as well. In real life our body moves through all three different planes of motion. One of the challenges that many of us have depending on our backgrounds, we tend to focus mostly on that forward/backward plane, and we do hardly anything in the other planes.
Over time we get these deficiencies that we don’t even realize until something goes wrong and your body is completely unprepared to deal with this unexpected thing. That’s one of the ways I help prepare people for the future is using drills in class to push people through the other ranges of motion and find out, okay, where are you deficient and how can you correct that? A lot of that stuff comes from my Gray Institute training.
That’s such an important thing for people to understand. The idea that – yeah, there’s three holistic systems of the body. The vascular system, the nervous system, and the fascial system. Really with Applied Movement Neurology, obviously you’re focused on the brain and the nervous system. When I talk in my book, No More Band-Aids 2.0: Finding Answers in a Broken Medical System, in my chapter entitled, “The Missing Link to Healthy Aging,” I’m focusing on the fascial system. We work on both of those systems through Discover Health Movement Membership. The idea is that both the nervous system and the fascial system can get patterned. They can get patterned like you’re saying in this one-dimensional, rather than three-dimensional plane. Like this backward/forward linear movement rather than the brain and the nervous system and the fascial system understanding and realizing and being exercised in rotation as well as side bending as well as forward and backward. We just need to be able to be reminded that we have to keep all of these in mind.
What is the Gray Institute and 3DMAPS? Talk about that.
Okay, so the Gray Institute is the organization that provides the training in Applied Functional Science and then 3DMAPS was an additional training course that they created later after the original CAFS. The 3DMAPS gives you a series of movements and chain reactions to use that if you take someone through these different chain reactions and you see where are they most successful and where are they least successful, it helps you pinpoint where you have some of these challenges. Then it complements the Applied Functional Science. All of the Gray Institute training uses Applied Functional Science, but the 3DMAPS certificate and the Applied Functional Science certificate complement each other. What happens is you can use the 3DMAPS, take someone through the movements and say, okay, where are they most successful? Where are they less successful? It helps you pinpoint where they have some challenges and you can use those things to improve it. Then, if you need to get more into isolating and figuring out more specific strategies that if you’re not able to fully resolve the issues using the 3DMAPS things, the CAFS certificate gives you a lot more specific tools to use, more isolated movements, breaking things down. Those are quite complementary. I use both basically in Movement for Longevity. I take parts of each and I take things from Applied Movement Neurology. I kind of pick and choose and get a combination of different things to get to each class. Each class has some of the same stuff and has some different stuff. What I do is I have a foundation of a handful of things that are just the best things I’ve ever found. Because of that, you see them in almost every class. Then I’m always picking a couple of different things that are going to be new to people to figure out, maybe this is the one that this person really needs so let’s keep exploring. Instead of just doing the same stuff every time, let’s do stuff we know that works but let’s keep looking for stuff that might even work better.
Give us some examples, Jim. Let’s talk specifically about the Movement for Longevity classes. What are some of the exercises that you do on a regular basis? Give us an example of how you might throw a monkey wrench or add something different for folks.
Yeah! Each class starts with a bit of a warmup. Some of the warmups might be just taking your arms and swinging them up over your head and behind you and side-to-side and rotating, just getting that spine moving and getting the fascia mobilized a bit. Other times, we might do that same spine mobilization laying on the floor and just sometimes actually a position of stability and safety of being on the floor might allow you to feel things that you didn’t feel while you were standing up. Other times we might even do it seated. I’m always looking for different options. Some people might struggle to do some of the exercises while they’re standing up. I give them an option, “If you need to do it while you’re in a chair, this is how you do it.” Other things I do…I love functional movements, things that will help you every day. One of the favorite things that I like to do is get people getting down to the floor and getting back up. Sometimes I keep it simple and just say, “Get down however you like and get back up. Just try this slightly different way,” and other times I mix it up.
A couple of weeks ago we did one where we first tried what if you have to get down to the floor by moving forward? What if you had to do it by moving backwards? What if you could only move to the right? What if you could only move to the left? What if you had to spin in a circle in either direction? You do that for five or ten minutes and it’s actually surprising how good of a workout it is, but it’s so good because many of the people that come to class when they first come to class, they’re not confident about getting down to the floor. After a few weeks it’s amazing to see these people – they don’t think anything of it anymore! It’s easy!
Just within a few weeks they get this confidence that they just lacked before that.
It’s such amazing to see! I take your class regularly and first of all, to get up and down off the floor as decades go by it gets a little more focused. I used to do it without thinking and now I have to think about it.
Yeah.
I’m still pretty darn good at it, but to tell you the truth, like you say it’s the idea of usually I’m right hand dominant, let’s say, so I can go to the right easily but to go to the left feels really awkward. You notice again, when I’ve gone to the left and I get up and go to touch my toes I can’t quite get as far. Back to that tool at the beginning. Versus if I go to the right, something my brain, my nervous system, my fascia is used to – it doesn’t tax my system at all so I can go down and touch the floor again. Again, folks this idea of the tools to know what’s taxing your system and the tools to tell you which is enough, let’s say, because it’s not taxing you or pushing you very hard in a workout. I’ve been an elite athlete in my life and so has Jim, and I’ve taken a class with you and another gentleman where it was just three or four of us and he’d been a professional skier. During that class by the end of it we were all pretty exhausted even though what we were working on were the things you’re saying.
Also, during a typical class of Movement for Longevity, who are the typical folks coming to take the class? Who should be in the class, Jim? Can anyone take the class?
Yeah. I would say most of the people I see in class are probably Baby Boomers. We occasionally get some younger people or older people. I’ve had people in their nineties in the class. I would say the one thing is for everything I ask people to do I will offer a slightly easier version or if someone needs it, a more difficult version. When I get someone very athletic in the class like the skier that you mentioned, I often will give some options to make it a bit more challenging for him. For other people I might say, “Okay, instead of getting down to the floor I’m actually going to show you different ways to get down to a chair and back up.” That’s a progression and when you can suddenly do all these different ways to get down to a chair slowly and controlled, you’ll actually get stronger. Over time you’ll get the confidence to go to a lower chair and even lower maybe to a stair. You might even get to the floor at some point.
I think anyone can come to the class and I’ve actually run this class at the CrossFit gym and there’s quite a lot of young, fit people there and they got a lot of benefit from it as well. Even if you’re quite fit, you could still get some really benefits from improving your balance system and just challenging yourself with these novel movements.
I think that’s one of the things actually that I really push for is adding enough complexity to the class that you have to pay attention because that’s going to help with your brain health. One of the things that I’m thinking about and concerned about for people is cognitive decline. If I can get you sometimes doing stuff that’s not physically difficult but is a little bit mentally challenging, that’s going to help your brain health.
I think the things that would make the class more challenging would be if you suffer from say vertigo or really significant balance issues you can come to class, but I’d give you some specific things that you have to consider because you want to be careful that you don’t drive your vestibular system and your balance system too hard if you’ve got those things. Some of the things we do in class will really help those things. You definitely have to be more cautious I’ve you’ve got mobility issues or balance issues, but you can come to class, and I will help you improve. It’s just we’re going to be a little more conservative of the movements in those cases.
Jim, that’s why we chose this class; Movement for Longevity says it. We’re working with people of all ages but predominantly older folks as we’re decade after decade feeling our age. Discover Health Movement Membership wasn’t set up for the twenty-year-old. It was set up for the forty-something and above that’s starting to feel our age and then as we age we want to be able to move in the world and optimize our ability to move and our brain function and our nervous system function and our body’s movement. That’s exactly what we’re doing, folks. You don’t have to be someone that comes from a background of elite athletics of any way, shape, or form. People come that have come from all facets of life and they just want to make sure they can move. We’ve had people who have had injuries that have kept them from being able to move. For example, I can think of two different people in your class, Jim, that within three weeks said they can now get up and down off the floor and they hadn’t been able to do it prior to coming to your class. I’ve had people say that they couldn’t go for a walk because they had concerns about their leg pain or their balance, and now they can do it comfortably and without fear that they’re going to fall down particularly because of your class which is again Movement for Longevity. So, how quickly will people see improvements?
This is one of the great things is that in some cases you’ll actually see improvement just in the first class especially some of these people that have minor issues in their balance system. Sometimes a drill we’ll do just getting someone to spin a little bit and if you find the right drill for someone even doing that drill in that one class can get you some sustained improvement. With some of the longer-term issues, what we’ve definitely seen is three to four weeks of class you get big differences. One of the things we do at each class is I have people test their balance just to get a baseline. To say, “Do you know how well your balance system is working? Here’s an easy version of a balance test.” If that feels okay, I get a couple of harder versions to try. Most of us with one of those harder versions will start to struggle and you get an idea.
I had a woman, the first time she came to class when she tried the more challenging balancing position, she had to use a wall to support herself to get in the position and if she took her finger off the wall she couldn’t do it at all. She came to class I think three or four weeks in a row. One week she came to class and she said, “Hey, Jim, look at this!” She got into the more challenging balance position with no wall and held it. She couldn’t quite get to the point yet where she could close her eyes and still be really good balance, but just in a few weeks she got to a point where she suddenly was confident that she could do this thing that was impossible a month before. It’s amazing sometimes how quickly things can improve. Part of it is because you might have deficiencies that you’re not really aware of because you’re not exploring these more challenging movements. When you do, your system actually can adapt quite quickly.
Then what do you expect and what do they need to do between classes? Do they need to do anything?
Ideally, what I suggest to people is if you could just do ten minutes a day between classes, you’ll get much faster results. The way I think of it is, if you could do one class a week and then if you only came to Movement for Longevity and I’m not going to see you again and you’re not going to do another class until the next week then try to do ten minutes a day and what you’ll get is that “use it or lose it principle.” If you actually remind your system of these things every day, even if it’s just for ten minutes or sometimes even less, your system starts to recognize, oh, that’s important to you? You keep doing that. I guess we need to keep that. Whereas sometimes if you come to class once a week, you’ll sustain the benefits for a bit, but then maybe it starts to degrade again and then you’ll freshen it back up at the next class and you keep going through that cycle. It will stick after a certain point, but you’ll get there much faster if you do that ten minutes a day. Even what I tell people is, “Just find two or three drills from class that you know work really well for you. Just do those. Don’t worry about everything else. You don’t have to do an hour. If you come to class and you find two or three drills that work really well for you, just do those two or three drills every day and what you’ll find is in a couple of weeks, you need new drills because those ones are too easy now! That’s how we get these people three or four weeks later they can’t believe it. I have people that struggle to get down to the floor and a few months later one of them is now practicing getting down to the floor not using his hands. This is someone who could not get down to the floor comfortably and now is like, “I’m going to try no hands and see how that goes.” That’s how quickly you can get big improvements.
Yeah. I see it every week with people, and it’s just amazing. It makes my heart sing. Jim, let’s talk to folks and make sure they understand Discover Health Movement Membership. What is it? What are the classes? How is it presented? Do people have to come to a specific place or is it online? Let’s have people understand it.
Yeah. So, I think what we’ve come up with is very flexible, and it is great no matter what your schedule is. You have three different classes. You have the Movement for Longevity that I do. You have the Self-Myofascial Release and then you have Discover Yoga. You get three different classes each week. You can attend the class live, but if it doesn’t work with your schedule you can access the recording instead. The great thing is you can look back at any of the previous recordings. What you could do is say, “Oh, I remember there was that class that we did spent ten minutes getting down to the floor and back up. I want to do that routine again.” So, I can just search on the archive, find that video, and watch either the whole video or just even go to that section. It’s fantastic. We get a small group of people that religiously attend the live classes, but then we have a lot of people that say, “I can’t make the live class, but I’ve been watching the recordings. Keep doing what you’re doing because it’s working really well for me.”
Yeah, and all of it, folks, is online. You don’t have to leave your home! Of course, we went to this with the beginnings of COVID-19 back in March, but the idea is we are just doing all of this online. I even saw a question in an email today – will fitness classes even move back to in-person after COVID-19 is finally done with? When there’s a vaccine and that sort of thing. We’re not there yet, but at some point we will, and life will go back to “normal.” The idea is people are becoming so used to doing these online classes and they’re so effective and you don’t have to get in your car and drive somewhere, get out of the car, bring your equipment and everything else. You’re just at your house. That’s how this is. It’s all online, folks. The three classes a week – twelve classes a month and you get as Jim has pointed out, if you can’t make it during the live classes then you get it all recorded and you can do it at your leisure. It’s just an amazing value. Jim, where do folks go to learn more? How do they check this out?
If you go to discoverhealthfmc.com/#Movement it will take you to the page with the info. There’s a little taster video on there and you can get signed up. I agree with you, I think this is an amazing value. If you only want access to the recordings, it’s about $25 a month. If you want the live classes and the recordings, about $30 a month. To me, sometimes I think we’re crazy actually because it’s just so cheap, but at the same time we started this with COVID and it’s like, okay we need to make it really accessible to people. People need something. People are stuck in their houses. We want to keep people moving and get people still feeling healthy. Let’s make it as accessible as we can. Honestly, it’s just a fantastic value.
One of the things I tell people in my classes is if you’re doing something and you feel like, this movement’s really giving me some issues. Okay, well maybe you’ve got really tight hamstrings. Go check the Self-Myofascial Release class and find one that deals with the hamstrings and then you can go watch that video, you can work out those kinks and then go back to your movement and go, oh, okay my movement’s feeling better because I’ve worked on that tissue. The same thing for Discover Yoga. You might find, I’ve been working hard all week. I need a nice relaxing session. Just go through some flow yoga and if you’re doing the yoga class and you realize, I’m really struggling with this movement, you can search through the other classes to see, what’s the thing that I need that’s going to help me with this other thing? Our three classes complement each other quite well because each class does things a bit differently, but they all will either help your fascia and your tissue, your brain health, or both. If you can make all three, that’s amazing!
If you can’t, you have the video option to always go back to the one you missed, and you can play around with combinations of the classes to see what works best for you.
That’s exactly it and why we put this together and why it’s a brainchild so people can understand how their brain affects their movement and that you can optimize your ability to move so that you can continue to be able to play with your kids, play with your grandkids, move and do the things that you want to do in your life so that you have a high quality of life for as long as you want. Jim, this has been awesome. Thanks for being on the show.
The last question I always like to ask all of my guests is – what’s your number one secret for living a healthy life?
Yeah. I think for me, it’s learning to listen to your body because the lesson I learned back when I started changing the direction of my own journey was recognizing that I just didn’t feel well. Then over time what I’ve learned is if I just pay attention to how I’m feeling, I know whether things are working for me or not. As I’m doing different things…I’ll give you a couple of examples.
If I stay up late, I don’t feel great the next morning. I’ve learned over time that I’ve got to be honest with myself even if I like staying up late, I always feel best if I get to bed by about 10:30. The further I get past 10:30, I just don’t feel as good. I’ve just got to be honest with myself and say, you know what? I need to do what I need to do. Get it done. Get to bed by 10:30 and then I’ll feel good. It’s the same thing with food. If I make healthy choices with my food, I feel really good. The more I stray from that path and just do whatever…if I’m in a rush and just grab something really quick, and I’m like, I don’t really feel that good. It’s just learning to pay attention is a great guide for what you should be doing. It’s not necessarily about that you’re going to know everything right away, but if you just start paying attention and listen to those signals and make small changes, three months from now or six months from now you can just feel a whole lot better.
Jim, that’s just such awesome advice. Again, we’ve talked about it a little bit before today, the idea of just being aware and actually cluing into your own feelings and how you feel and asking yourself, “How am I feeling today and why?” Over time, it’s like anything else – it’s a journey. You’re going to start to learn what are the things that make me feel well? What are the things that don’t make me feel well? Such as times that I go to bed, or things that I eat, or things that I drink, or the people I hang out with sometimes!
Yeah.
All of those things! That’s awesome! Thanks for being on this episode of Discover Health Podcast, “Understanding How Your Brain Affects Your Movement.” Make sure you go to discoverhealthfmc.com/#Movement and learn all about and sign up for Discover Health Movement Membership and improve your quality of movement. Thanks, everybody! We’ll see you on the next show. Thanks, Jim!
Thank you!
Contact Jim Chaput
- Email: info@simplybettercoaching.com
- Website: https://www.simplybettercoaching.com
For more information on the Discover Health Movement Membership