Heart of Motion
The Heart of Motion Podcast is an exploration of the heart, soul and science of movement - and what it means in our lives.
Movement connects us more deeply to ourselves, to our bodies and to the things and people that are most important to us. Beyond a fitness routine, why do you move? And what moves you? When we can look past the hamster wheel of ''fitness" - we start to realize that when we really live the lives of our bodies - life can be a whole lot more fulfilling, and a whole lot more fun!
Host Susannah Steers is your guide on a quest to understand how we can move better, feel better in our bodies and connect more deeply to our people and the world around us. Join her for some conversation, interviews with experts, and conversations with everyday people about what movement means to them. You might just find movement feels a little different on the other side...
Heart of Motion
Movement Matters! Fitness & Mobility for Lifelong Health
Uncover the truth behind society's fitness myths and why your daily workout might not be enough for holistic health. Join host Susannah Steers for this episode of the Heart of Motion podcast as we explore the profound difference between fitness and movement training. Our modern conveniences have created a movement deficit, often leaving us with chronic discomfort despite those frequent gym visits. Let's shift the spotlight from visible fitness markers like sculpted abs to a richer understanding of our body's capacity and language. Together, we'll redefine what it means to be truly fit, enhancing our mobility and quality of life, especially as we age.
We'll also tackle how the decline in manual labor has changed our physical landscapes, and why exercise alone might fall short. Discover how practices like Pilates can transform your flexibility, strength, and body awareness, offering gains for both everyday life and athletic performance. Understand the importance of rehabilitating movement patterns at a pace that fosters learning and exploration. Plus, let's focus on nurturing healthy movement habits in children, who face the challenges of limited physical activity and premature sports specialization. Tune in for insights that promise a more active, vibrant, and connected life through intentional movement.
Heart of Motion Podcast host Susannah Steers is a Pilates & Integrated Movement Specialist and owner of Moving Spirit Pilates in North Vancouver, BC. She is passionate about movement, about connections and about life.
Through movement teaching, speaking, and facilitating workshops, she supports people in creating movement practices that promote fitness from the inside out. She loves building community, and participating in multi-disciplinary collaborations.
Along with her friend and colleague Gillian McCormick, Susannah also co-hosts The Small Conversations for a Better World podcast – an interview based podcast dedicated to promoting the kind of conversations about health that can spark positive change in individuals, families, communities and across the globe.
Social Media Links:
Moving Spirit Pilates Instagram
Moving Spirit Pilates Facebook
Susannah Steers Instagram
Welcome to the Heart of Motion podcast. I'm Susannah Steers and I'll be your host as we explore the heart, soul and science of movement as a pathway to more active, vibrant and connected living. Nothing happens until something moves, so let's get started.
Susannah Steers:A few weeks ago, I was at an event talking to people about the work that I do, and in one conversation I made a distinction between fitness and movement training. The person I was chatting with looked at me a little bit sideways and asked but what's the difference? So that, my dear friends, is what we're talking about today. Thanks so much for joining me.
Susannah Steers:In 2025, we're still fixated on visible markers of fitness defined abs, bulging biceps and rapid weight loss and, while these goals absolutely have their place, we're overlooking a crucial element in our physical well-being the quality and the variety of our movement. I'm talking about the fundamental ways our bodies are designed to move Twisting, turning, reaching, bending these are all movements that form the foundation of our physical health. You would think that we get all these movements in daily life, wouldn't you? Well, actually, not so much. In the Western world, our modern conveniences have pretty much eliminated much of the physical work of day-to-day living. We drive in cars or buses to the places we have to go. We take elevators instead of the stairs. We don't hand wash our clothes and put them out on the line anymore. We have washing machines and dryers. For all that, people sit at their desks for hours every day before going home to plunk down on the couch. Unlike our ancestors, we actually have to make a concerted effort to get even the minimal recommended amount of physical activity for maintaining health. Now, I'm not recommending we go back a few hundred years to reclaim the hard physical realities of daily life back then, but we need to recognize that our current physiology is not really designed to manage the lives we're leading. But wait, you say I go to the gym several times a week. Great, keep doing that.
Susannah Steers:But tell me, do you experience chronically tight hips or deal with low back or neck issues? Are there little discomforts or major pains that keep showing up in your body like inconvenient little flies in the ointment? Maybe they're not enough to slow you down, or maybe you've just chalked the changes up to aging. I'm going to suggest that maybe it's not just your level of fitness that's an issue there. Maybe it's the movement that you're doing that's the problem. Do you notice that you prop yourself up on something. When you get up from the floor, do things that require balance make you a little nervous. Can you jump down from that high curb with ease? How's your shoulder check in the car? Can you catch yourself easily if you lose your balance? At first glance, all these seem to be quality issues. Right, you're still getting up and down off the floor. You're just a little slower than you used to be. You can still do it. So what's the problem? Have you noticed that? Maybe you've begun to avoid doing movements that sometimes feel challenging? Maybe it's not a conscious choice, but for the sake of time and convenience and for the preservation of our own fragile egos, we take the elevator more. We don't do that deep knee bend. We ask the kids to take over.
Susannah Steers:Mobility issues seem to sneak up on people you don't realize. You can't do something until you need to do it, and you can't. When we're young and our restorative powers are still vigorous, it's probably a relatively quick fix. As we get older, though, it takes a little more time and a little more effort to address, and as we reach our elder years, mobility issues can become a threat to independent living and sometimes even to life itself. All the latest research indicates that having good muscle mass as we age is a key element in the pursuit of a long and healthy life. I agree. It's just not the only thing to think about.
Susannah Steers:Let me draw you a picture. Imagine you have two people trying to communicate, but each of them speaks a different language. At some point, one of them gets a bit frustrated and starts speaking more loudly, as if raising their voice will somehow power their message across, so the other person will finally understand them. This is a comprehension problem, not a volume issue. Louder isn't going to do anything except irritate everyone. When your body doesn't move well, indiscriminately, throwing more muscle training at it is a little bit like speaking too loudly to someone who can't understand the language you're speaking. Loading, poor movement patterns and unstable joints with lots of weight may not be your best strategy. You have to learn your body's language and the capacity it has as it is now, not as you remember it from your youth or how you think it should be from all the fitness advice that floods your internet, but the language your body can speak right now. So maybe we should go back to that first question.
Susannah Steers:What is the difference between fitness and movement. Well, a dictionary definition is that physical fitness is our ability to execute daily activities with optimal performance, endurance and strength, with the management of disease, fatigue and stress, and reduced sedentary behavior. The measures are typically cardiorespiratory capacity, muscular strength, muscular endurance, body composition and flexibility. These are pretty accepted norms. We've all learned them since we were kids. We know those parts. These are pretty accepted norms. We've all learned them since we were kids. We know those parts. It seems pretty comprehensive, especially when evidence shows that if you score well on those traditional measures of fitness, you are likely to live longer and with less illness than if you score poorly. And since we can't rely on the activities of daily living to help us score well in those measures anymore, a lot of us choose to exercise as a way to support our health or just to feel good.
Susannah Steers:Exercise is really just any kind of bodily exertion for the sake of developing and maintaining physical fitness. We perform exercises to develop or improve a specific capacity or skill, and maybe that's where some of the difference really lies. Maybe it's the gap between capacity and skill, because there is skill involved in movement, in just walking around. You likely don't remember learning to walk, but it took a lot of trial and error, muscle development and likely some bumps and bruises before you could reliably walk across a room. Still more time and effort before you could walk for a while or begin to run. Picture the hesitant, almost falling steps of a toddler. Then the more gangly movements of an older child compared with the smoother, more fluid movements of an adult. As you grew up and learned your movement skills, your movement patterns became more organized, more fluid and coordinated. Maybe you learned some sports or specialized in something along the way. All those things were movement learning that accumulated in your body and in your brain and gave you a certain degree of movement literacy. And as long as you keep moving and working on them, you can rely on those movement skills to support whatever it is you do in your life.
Susannah Steers:Skills are something that we have to keep working on, though. I learned to play the piano as a kid and I played in a high school band. I wasn't very good at either, but I could read music well enough to plonk through a few tunes. I love music, but I haven't really played an instrument since I was a kid. If you put a piece of sheet music up and asked me to play it, I really couldn't. I would read the notes like a child sounding out their first letters. It's been too long. I'm sure I could regain those skills with practice, maybe more quickly than someone starting fresh, but it would still take some extra time and energy. So why is it that we expect that we can just do movement?
Susannah Steers:If you haven't been active in a while, there'll be some relearning to do. How do you support your spine as you do your squats, for example? You've likely never actually had to think about that, but if you're someone who spends eight hours a day at a desk, your body is predisposed to supporting you in that sedentary position, however well or poorly you do that. Even if you head out for a run every day after work, your body first has to deal with the hangover of the tight hips, poor posture and inactive core. It's managed all day before it can give you what you really need for a solid, supported and efficient run. It's like you're starting way back from the official starting line without even knowing it.
Susannah Steers:When we go to the gym or into our favorite activities, all the habits we have come with us. If you have chronically tight hip flexors, we'll find ways to compensate for that as we add load or increase range of motion, it might work beautifully, or we might be stealing that mobility from other parts of our bodies. You won't notice that until either the function is impacted or maybe something starts to hurt. Perhaps you're someone who loves to hike. You start to notice that you're getting more winded than you're used to, or maybe that your legs are getting really tired. So you decide you need to strengthen your gluteal muscles, those big, powerful muscles in your butt, which are definitely useful when you're going uphill.
Susannah Steers:You go to the gym and, based on advice that you'll find anywhere about strengthening your glutes, you'll probably decide doing a variety of squats is a good way to go, and for lots of people that works just fine. For others, though, especially those with poor core stability and really tight hip flexors, they may just experience increased tightness in the thigh muscles and hip flexors, maybe a sore back, and they may not get the results squats are famous for. If this is happening to you, despite how much work you throw at your glutes, you're not just failing at squats. It's probably something more about your movement patterning. You might be better off with a strategy to improve how your body accesses your gluteals, by lengthening your hip flexors or stabilizing the spine, and once you can access those things better, you'll have better success in gaining strength in your buttocks. Resolving to do more squats or heavier deadlifts may not be your best path From a fitness perspective.
Susannah Steers:Movement training addresses how well you can move your joints through their full range of motion. That might mean working to improve range of motion in your hips or your spine or your shoulders or your sacroiliac joint, really anywhere, even your feet. More than likely it'll mean improving joint motion in all the joints. As you mobilize, you'll learn new strategies for supporting your new mobility. As you unlock new mobility, entirely new chains of support and strength become available. An active mom will have different needs than a competitive mountain climber. So understanding the demands not just of your favorite sports but of your daily tasks can make big differences to the choice you make of your favorite sports but of your daily tasks, and make big differences to the choice you make for your exercise.
Susannah Steers:The way I see it, go to the gym, do the run and, instead of punishing yourself for what isn't working, maybe start to pay more attention to how it feels. Where does it feel? Smooth and effortless? Where is it sticky or tight? When do you lose coordination? Just because it's hard doesn't always mean it's good. Be present to whatever is going on in your body. Learn your body's own language and start to increase the vocabulary of your movement along the way. Try new things, rebuild your own movement literacy, that ability to plan and execute even basic motor skills like running, jumping, catching, kicking and throwing, with agility and balance and coordination. Instead of pursuing these activities in spite of movement challenges, you can learn to move better and feel better doing the things that you love to do.
Susannah Steers:Movement training often looks like mobility training. It's about how well you can move your joints through their full range of motion. Control and stability are as important as power and flexibility. Think of it as if you were training technique around your own habitual movements. An active and energetic client said to me not too long ago that the work we do together doesn't feel like exercise. It feels like learning a brand new sport, and that kind of made sense to me. Learning to notice and experience specific things in your body and in your movement, encouraging new pathways that provide greater stability or mobility and generally offer a more fruitful platform for movement, takes a different kind of energy than working to max load and max reps at the gym.
Susannah Steers:Because of this, I think a lot of people have looked at movement and mobility training as being somehow less valuable than traditional fitness and strength training, which I've never understood. Instead, I think they go hand in hand. Movement and traditional fitness are not mutually exclusive. They actually go together like peanut butter and jelly. Every movement we do is a whole body movement. When we can't rely on good, stable mobility in our hips and spine because we've been sitting at a desk for too many years, how can we expect that we will run, squat, ride a bike or ski? Well, good quality fitness training includes improving movement skills and mobility. Training includes improving movement skills and mobility. So if squats, deadlifts and planks are the staple diet for improving your fitness, it's time to expand your horizons. I'm starting to see a shift toward a more holistic approach. People are beginning to recognize that it's not just about burning calories or building muscle anymore. But in the search for a fitness program that we can fit into just a few hours a week, people tend to prioritize strength and cardio. It's only as they get older and the training they've always done starts to deliver diminishing returns or maybe they just can't keep up that they start to explore what they often see as softer options.
Susannah Steers:I mean, let's face it, we didn't see this coming right, this shift in the demands of our daily movement. Maybe we did. Magazine ads for washing machines and cars from the 1950s sure looked ahead at a future where manual work was a thing of the past. Perhaps what we didn't fully comprehend was the effects on our bodies of this lack of physical activity. We're built to move. Movement quite literally nourishes every system in our bodies. So here we are, having let go of a lot of the daily work our bodies once did, and now, understanding that most of us live in a movement deficit, we look to exercise as a way to improve that. The blind spot now is that the way we move matters too. All we need to do is create a little more intention around moving well as we do these seemingly harder exercise activities. So what does that look like If you're just starting out?
Susannah Steers:Incorporating more movement into your life doesn't require a complete lifestyle overhaul. Start small. Take a walk during your lunch break, do some stretches or try a Pilates class. Pay attention, bring some awareness to how you're moving. How does it feel to bend, twist, jump, lift, roll, extend, reach and fall. Open yourself up to exploration. Try activities you've never done before. Don't expect to be good. Just vary your activities in as many ways as you can, be curious and if you run into stuff along the way that doesn't feel good, do some research, either on your own, in your own body, or with someone who can help you learn something new about your body. A seasoned movement pro can help shine a light on things for you to help you take the next steps.
Susannah Steers:Now I'm probably a little bit biased, because something like Pilates can provide a way in Pilates seems to me to exemplify effective movement training. It's a whole body. You're moving all the time in all kinds of different ranges of motion. It improves flexibility, builds strength, enhances body awareness. It's low impact too, which makes it accessible to a wide range of people. It works systems rather than isolated muscles. It can reveal some of the relationships between you and the various parts of you that you might never have connected with before. There are lots of other ways to do it.
Susannah Steers:If you're an athlete or someone who considers themselves to be very fit, you can use movement training too. I ran into athletes all the time who are, by all traditional measures of physical fitness rock stars. Their numbers are through the roof and yet overuse patterns, patterns of attack, lack of adequate rest these are things that can create vulnerability to injury or holes in the integrity of the moving body that result in everything from less than optimal performance to fatigue and a whole bunch of other things. It might be a matter of learning to move better so you can survive the demands of your sport. Athletes are used to pushing the envelope at every opportunity.
Susannah Steers:The idea of a softer approach can feel like you're slacking off. It might not feel as though you're taxing yourself enough to be gaining anything, and it's true it won't feel like it takes a lot of effort to retrain movement habits for better control and efficiency, but it does take attention, curiosity, brain power and some high-quality repetition. At first it might feel more like mental gymnastics than physical work, but gradually, as you find your way, your movement gets easier and your performance improves. Remember it's about improving communication, not just increasing the volume. We begin by bringing awareness to where old patterns aren't serving you as well as you might. Then we identify a new, more effective pattern and we work to gain control with appropriate muscle actions at the right time. Then it's stamina You've got to be able to repeat the new pattern and sustain it, or you won't be able to carry it into your higher-level activity. Only then can you start to build strength and grow the range of motion that you're playing with. It's that simple and it's that hard.
Susannah Steers:Rehabilitating movement patterns takes some time. In my experience, it doesn't often work well at Mach 10 and under heavy loads. There's got to be a little space to explore, to try and fail and try again. If we load too much too soon, we just go back to our old patterns to get the job done. So to some degree.
Susannah Steers:If you're doing high level physical activity and wanting to add some movement training, it might initially be a case of separating these out a little bit in your training. At the beginning, you're going to add some time for movement and mobility that is separate from the other stuff that you're training. What most people find, though, is that once they've started to find new patterns in their bodies, they can bring that new awareness into everything they do, and then, suddenly, every training activity becomes not just an exercise in building strength and stamina and technique for the sport, but an opportunity to improve movement skills overall. I think it makes for a more skilled and resilient athlete. And whether you're an athlete or a fitness junkie or someone who enjoys just moving around in the world, adding some movement training into your week has a multitude of benefits for your health and well-being. You will start to find support better support for your structure, a more balanced and sustainable strength with fewer compensations. Better injury prevention. Better brain-body relationships. There are positive effects on your nervous system balance, which can support better mental health. You'll discover more effective ways to support your own daily movement, whatever the heck that is. Tuning in and attending to your movement as part of your overall fitness integrates your body and mind as a whole, so you get to know and understand yourself better too. I don't think it's an either or conversation.
Susannah Steers:If many of us are involved in efforts to reclaim healthy movement in our bodies, I think our kids would be well served with some attention to their movement too. They're faced with many of the same things as we've been Too many screens, not enough varied physical activity. Too many kids just aren't getting the fundamental movement skills and practice they need to be healthy. Among those who are, a lot of kids are specializing in individual sports way before it's healthy to do that. It really changes the adaptability of their systems. In many school districts, physical education has been eliminated to prioritize other learning, and before that, pe was often just about learning sports. Nothing wrong with that, but I would love to see some courageous educators take on the idea of increasing movement literacy as a basic life skill, like learning to read or write and understanding how to use those skills not just to be good at sports because not everybody's an athlete but to improve health and well-being, to be comfortable in our own bodies. We need more physical education in schools as well as the arts. We need more physical education in schools as well as the arts, not less. With better movement literacy overall, maybe our kids will have better success moving into adulthood and old age in good health and independently.
Susannah Steers:So remember, movement isn't just about fitness metrics. It's about living life fully, being able to play with your kids, explore new places and tackle life's challenges with ease. It's about connecting with yourself and building resiliency. Whatever you're up to, include a little more movement. After all, in this grand dance of life, it's not about perfecting the steps, it's about enjoying the music. So get out there and play and keep moving, y'all. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Subscribe and if you love what you heard, leave a five-star review and tell people what you enjoyed most. Join me here again in a couple of weeks. For now, let's get moving.