by Leroy on June 15th, 2025.
No body has an instruction manual and nobody was born with one either. As I've gotten older I've come to realize that there's a fundamental level of maintenance that's required to keep our bodies, including our minds, regulated and running properly. I wish I had known about my body's idiosyncrasies a lot earlier as knowing them would have saved me a lot of pain and trouble.
What I've learned is that the body requires movement. Movement is a need like food and water.
Most of us live in such luxury that our bodies are taken for granted. We can fuel our bodies without taxing them so much, but that also means we know them a lot less. Regular exercise, aside from the expected healthy positives, provides regular feedback from your body. If you regularly move your body for any reason, it can become a tool to measure the quality of your life. Exercise can then become a measure for your body. For example, on my usual runs I can tell when I've slept poorly, eaten too little or too much, and when I've had too many to drinks from the lively night before, or even two or three nights before. I can also tell when I've been favoring a leg when I sit with them propped up on my desk and I can tell when I've been tensing my shoulders as I type on my laptop.
My body's physical capabilities ebb and flow with the quality of my meals, my posture, the weather, the quality of my sleep, my mood, and all the varieties of life -- but I only came to know this when I started to use my body regularly and began to measure it.
Something very interesting happened to me when I did start using my body regularly: I started to realize that a lot of people give out unnatural or unheathly advice. The advice is given earnestly and without malice but unfortunately the advice is without any real factual basis because the persons sharing the advice don't have a reliable method of measuring the advice.
I'm going to share some of the advice I've heard, some I agree with and some I don't -- how do these compare to what you know about your own body?
The lack of movement in modern American communities and Western society at large means that general falsehoods about exercise, fitness, and health become easier to spread. When there's less people who know from firsthand experience to tell others what they've learned then misinformation is bound to spread because words are usually communicated from outside of experience.
The most common example of misinformation are from online sources: how can you be sure what you're reading is accurate, truthful, and based in reality? Unless you experience it yourself, you can't be sure unless you place your trust in the source you're consuming. Be the person who experiences it themselves, be the primary source, so you can start writing the instruction manual for your body.