#1 potent stimuli for your cells.

INSIGHT (what we need)

Every cell in our bodies is affected by movement – the ultimate medicine.

Step aside celery juice, transcendental meditation and collagen powder: scientific studies continuously confirm that the single most important thing we can do to be healthier and smarter with age is to move more; with intensity and variation. Of course managing our holistic wellbeing is important, but prioritizing more generalized movement throughout the day is superior to squeezing in an hour long workout within your daily sitting marathon.

Our proprioceptive prowess (awareness of our bodies in space) is what grows our brains. Movements that enable stability, coordination, and precision are not only what prevents falls or delays early onset of dementia with age, but what trains us on the very concept of managing complexity in life. Which is great for adaptable, growing brains. This opens new neural pathways throughout our lives with learned activity at any age. From simple movements as babies learning our environments, our brains grow as we add more complex movements, variation and challenging situations to how we literally wrap our minds and bodies around a puzzle. Coordination itself is the skilled interplay between creating tension and relaxation in the body. If we don’t hone these two modes of carrying ourselves, rigidity sets in far before our elderly years and creates a compounded snowball effect – from overall systemic stagnancy to minute cellular deficiency. So if you’re one to care less about 6-pack abs or setting personal records…consider working out for sexy cellular efficiency!

INSPIRATION (what we want)

Never Leave The Playground: a program of activities that stimulates the growth of the brain and body by specific training of hands and feet.

I first came across Stephen Jepson’s site over a decade ago when researching the Natural Movement craze at the time. He continues to inspire me today, where at 82, his simple mission statement and disposition continues to shine: to promote good health and to have fun. Quirkiness also never expires.

People believe exercise needs to be strenuous but with Jepson’s system, it’s neither arduous nor boring. He focuses on the types of movements and games that simulate what we as children might play on the playground as we’re learning how to master our bodies. Beginning with simple movements, he teaches clients how to progress into more complex challenges for the body and brain as they develop real skill. For example:

• Training left and right, hands and feet, to manipulate large and small objects with increasing precision.

• Promoting balance and dexterity which prevent falls and increases eye–hand coordination.

• Developing the large and small muscle groups to foster stability and physical coordination.

• Using external objects that aren’t stationary machines so that your body has to learn ambiguity and agility while stimulating muscle growth.

• With an MFA in pottery, he loves to create his own ceramic ‘workout objects’ within obstacle courses as a creative way to continuously evolve his repertoire.

INNOVATION (what we wish for)

Minutiae: an augmented reality game where you spend 10-minutes a day sharpening your proprioceptive skills and improving your embodied brilliance.  

Replace your morning coffee routine with a game! Movement can be fun and intrinsically rewarding — the missing puzzle to our daily mind-body training that gives our system a boost of progressive complexity as we move through stages of skill development.

• Bite-sized training games where you move through physical puzzles in your immediate space to exercise your proprioceptive prowess.

• Turn your living room or open space into a virtual puzzle playground.

• Work all four aspects of our proprioception:

  • sense of position (ie, postural tasks of aligning your hips/ribs/shoulders)

  • sense of effort (ie. timed movements for agility)

  • sense of force (ie. Increasing levels of intensity of movement to hit / jump / swing at objects)

  • sense of heaviness (ie. imagined loads where you push against surfaces or pretend to carry light vs. heavy objects).

• Choose your cartoon cheerleader avatars who comment and cheer you on to various tasks (in Duolingo-esque style) and earn points towards your proprioceptive age. Why not start the day with some encouragement?

• Compete with your parents, kids or spouse — this is a game for all ages – from 8 to 108.