There are good things on Instagram! Like THIS from strength coach, Alison Heilig.

Current estimates are that there are around 30-40 trillion cells in the human body. And each of those cells is constantly adapting to your current lifestyle, altering tissue structure and function to make you more efficient.

When you move or load your body a certain way, your cells listen and start building you tissues that can support it — constantly changing the architecture of your body in response to what you ask it to do.

So if your lifestyle requires a strong body, your cells will build you one. If your lifestyle requires a heart capable of pumping out high volumes of oxygen-rich blood, your cells will build you one. If your lifestyle requires a body that can sit still for long periods of time and not much else, your cells will build you one.

We get to decide for ourselves. We can choose to live our lives in a way that maintains our capabilities — if we use it, we can preserve it. And I’m not just talking about fitness training either.

I sit on the floor often to preserve my ability to get up from the floor as I age.

I take the stairs often to persevere my ability to climb & descend stairs as I age.

I practice non-repetitive forms of yoga with movements in different planes and directions to preserve my ability to move in all directions as I age.

We often think about training our bodies as what we do during our workouts, but the reality is everything we do and everything we DON’T do is training. We can intentionally train them to be functional, strong, and supportive through a variety of challenges or we can unintentionally train them to shrink or narrow their capabilities and potentially be unprepared for movement variety (which BTW is a contributing factor to pain & injury).

- Adapted from Alison Heilig, IG @itsalisonheilig

Join my Calm + Strong newsletter to get really good yoga and helpful content like this delivered to your inbox.