Stop Asking if Your Exercise is “Good Enough”

The better questions are: Is it functional? Meaningful? Sustainable? Effective? And does it help you live the life you actually want?

When people ask what I do professionally, I say I teach and write about movement. Then they either say they know they should exercise, but…just can’t figure out how to make it happen, or they tell me the mode of exercise they do (cycle, lift weights, yoga, Pilates, salsa dance, etc.) and ask, “Is that good?”

I never know how to answer, because I don’t know what good means. Do they mean “effective” or do they mean “good enough” (i.e., did I fully check the exercise box?)? The answer to either is “it depends.” To assess if what you’re doing is effective or enough movement for you, I need to know more. What can and can’t your body do now? What do you want to be able to do with your body for the rest of the day? For the rest of the month? For the next ten years?

Are you trying to get the minimum amount of movement needed to decrease your risk of a cardiovascular event, or are you trying to fix your shoulder pain? Did you just find out you have osteoporosis and now have to think about balance and bone-loading? Or do you have a vacation coming up and want to be able to spend hours on foot navigating cobblestones and walking through museums with loved ones?

I’d have to know a lot more about you to know which movements are good enough, hard enough, long enough, challenging enough, targeted enough, for you and your desired outcome. So, your movement program being “good” for you (or “good enough” for that matter) depends on your answers to a bunch of other questions I have for you (which, P.S. I wrote out in a book so you could figure out your own perfect movement plan because ultimately, you need to know a lot more about you than you do now to know what’s “good” for you).

Also, “good” is just such a one-dimensional perspective, and I have such a 3D take on movement, my brain shuts down. Think of a worker bee, zooming around a lavender field. Taking off and landing, carrying up to half its body weight in pollen, again and again, all day long. Crawling into flowers, tiny legs pushing petals out of the way as needed, then back to the hive to pack the pollen into compartments inside the hive alongside their compadres. Vitamin Community!

Then, think of a different bee—a desk-worker bee!—with all the same anatomy and brain software as the lavender-field worker bee, that sits inside all day, repeatedly jabbing the ends of two of its six legs onto a small square most of its day, for most of its life. What’s “good” exercise for that bee? Is it yoga? Pilates? Spinning? Rucking? Is walking for a half an hour most days good enough? How about lifting weights twice a week? IS IT PICKLE BALL? I just can’t with the question.

Consider different words

Instead of asking “is that exercise good,” ask, “Is this movement ___________?” using these words I consider when building a movement plan:

• Functional: Which exercises will help you do the things you actually need and want to do?

• Meaningful: Does your physical activity connect to something you care about beyond “making you healthy?”

• Purposeful: Does your daily movement facilitate other things beyond personal fitness?

• Strategic: Are you putting your effort where it will make the biggest difference?

• Sustainable: Do these movements now affect the future you?

• Stepwise: Does your programming build capacity gradually, or are you plateauing, or constantly getting re-injured or overwhelmed and having to start over?

• Personal: Does it fit your body, preferences, schedule, and life?

• Systemic: Is your movement built into the domains of everyday life (sleep, leisure, occupation, transportation, and home), or is it isolated to exercise bouts in your leisure time?

• Joyful: Do you move in a way that makes your heart sing—or trains you to be physical in ways that you adore?

• Intentional: Are you choosing movement rather than simply reacting to what you think you “should” be doing?

• Mindful: Are you using movement to check out or check in? Can you tell the difference?

• Adaptable: Does your program change when your body, circumstances, or goals change?

• Specific: Are you training for something that matters to you?

• Effective: Is what you’re doing actually accomplishing what you want it to accomplish?

Many foods are nourishing but there is no single food that nourishes you completely. Similarly, no single type of exercise is enough to nourish the whole body (more on that in part 2). However, there is a giant buffet of physical activities—some exercise and some just activities of daily living—for you to build a movement diet that brings you joy, meaning, community, purpose, strength, fitness, and vitality. (I’d remind the desk-worker bee that some of the movements that make up its diet should look like what’s found at the hive, as these have worked well for bees for one hundred twenty million years, and the jury is still out on how long desk-worker bees will get to be a thing.)

A final note on “good enough”

Somewhere along the way—probably in the 1970s and ’80s, when exercise became more of a researched phenomenon—exercise became a separate box to check, isolated from the dynamic tasks that used to make up a daily life. Worse than that, the motivation for moving our glorious gift of a body became punitive.

“Our current model sets both food and movement as negative. Eating (a biological imperative) makes us feel guilty, and we turn movement (also a biological imperative) into punishment. Atonement for diet through exercise. It’s no wonder so many people feel unable to begin moving (or eating) in a way that honors both food and our innate ability to move. We’ve got it all backwards in our minds.”
— Katy Bowman, Move Your DNA

I think this punitive framing is a large part of why we’ve become so keen on getting our movement over with.

When my kids were toddlers, I can’t tell you how many people (whose own children had long since flown the nest) would come up to me, look right at my underslept face—dead into my weary eye holes—and tell me with complete sincerity to savor every moment because someday I would really, really miss it. I was completely exhausted, I couldn’t wait to get the day over with, but I could hear the urgency in their voices. Don’t miss out right now; this is your chance. “This is wisdom,” I thought.

And in writing all of this out, I just realized how to close this essay. I’m going to be that experienced person coming up to you and your tired, overwhelmed face and have the audacity to say: We’re missing out, everybody. We’re so busy trying to check the exercise box as quickly as possible, we are missing out. Missing out on the number of minutes we could be physically active and on all the ways movement fosters meaning, mindfulness, and joy. We keep thinking, "There will be time to move my body in all the ways," but the time is now. Don’t be blinded by the burden and the effort. When movements can no longer be performed, we will miss them dearly and wish we had savored our physicality more.

There are certainly days (or seasons!) where “good enough” is our 100%. Fine. Simultaneously, “good enough” is not a particularly helpful movement ethos. When it comes to physically engaging with life, “getting it over with” isn’t the goal, right?

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Retreat With Me This October

Retreats are different from vacations, where you’re looking to just get away. They are time set aside from the regular grind and dedicated to learning or practicing something you don’t often have the time to focus on in daily life—like specific movements for the state or state your body is in right now and how to weave these into your daily life. Plus…ANALOG! Real people in real life experiences! Movement! Laughter! Come alone or with a friend. We’ll be building personal movement plans at both retreats; I hope you can join me :)

• Menopause & Movement: Exercise for Strength, Resilience, Longevity
  Art of Living Center, North Carolina; October 2–4. THREE SPOTS LEFT!

• A Better Back: Moves to Help a Spine Last a Lifetime
  Kripalu, Massachusetts; October 30–November 1.