Practice: Create and Maintain Minimums

Respect your movement minimums

What does it mean to “create and maintain your movement minimums”?

This practice is about:

1. Having clarity and confidence in what your movement minimum is each day. It could likely be changing on a day-to-day basis.

What's right for you today?

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being rock-solid confidence, how confident are you that you can achieve that minimum? If it's less than an 8, dial down the minimum until you get at least an 8.

2. Adapting to changing circumstances in the moment, to keep your minimum non-negotiable.

Keep it creative. All movement counts.

3. Assessing how you did each day.

If you fell below your minimum, no worries. Why? Was your minimum too high? Or could you have done more to prepare your plan or mindset more appropriately?

Or, did you underestimate yourself? Can you make your minimum more challenging next time?

4. Constantly adjusting your future minimum according to the day's data.

Considering what happened today or this week, what can you adjust about your minimum — either dialling up or dialing down — to make yourself even better tomorrow?

Why and how to practice

Your "movement minimum" is the answer to the question,

What, specifically, is the minimum amount of movement that I want to do today in order to feel successful and on-track to my goals?

Daily movement is non-negotiable.

The human body evolved to move. Healthy functioning of the body depends on frequent and varied movement.

The basic inputs of human life are air, food, sleep, movement, and tribe. We all require some minimum threshold of each to stay alive.

Like eating a minimum amount of protein in order to prevent malnourishment, similar thresholds are true of movement. As humans, we need a lot of movement to stay fully nourished.

That movement doesn't have to look any specific way. It doesn't need to be very hard, fast, or heavy. It doesn't need to be in a gym or at a particular time of day.

The type of movement is less important than moving often.

For your body's movement appetite, any and all movement counts. Just as is true in eating, everything counts.

Daily movement in a sedentary world is hard work.

For most people, it might be obvious to see and easy to say that we need more movement. Making that happen is hard work.

Being more active often means working against your environment, within a jammed time schedule, or among endless other responsibilities.

Minimums are typically a small amount of movement and a short amount of time.

For example, a minimum could be:

• practicing 7 min of yoga or mobility in the morning

• walking up the stairs at the office 4 times

• taking a 12 min walk after lunch

• taking three 5 min breaks from the desk for air squats and lunges

Breaking it down to a tiny piece is a way to momentarily bring movement to the top of your priorities, even when it feels like your environment or other commitments are competing against your plans for movement.

Make it as small and manageable as you need it to be. The primary requirement of the minimum plan is that it gets done.