Lifespan has a movement component. Let's figure out yours.
Dr Jeff Almon, chiropractor ·
I played fullback in the CFL.
If you've never watched the position up close, picture a train hitting a train. Over and over again. Running starts, 230lb guys, head to head.
It doesn't have a long lifespan as a position. The impacts add up.
So after I wrecked my body, I went to learn how to fix it. CMCC. I studied especially hard at neurology. School gives you the base and teaches you how to think - it doesn't give you the juicy stuff.
The juicy stuff came later. On a floor.
I studied infant movement patterns before it became a thing. I did a 10-day vipassana retreat and felt what it did to my nervous system. I merged the two, practiced every variation of the infant patterns I could find, and that became Ground Control. I started doing it at 7am at the old clinic on the 6th floor and invited patients to join me. That turned into 50-person classes.
Very old, human technology. We just had to turn it back on.
Here's what has been bugging me since.
Everyone is talking about lifespan. Healthspan. Living longer and living better. Blood panels, wearables, cold plunges, sleep scores. A whole industry is measuring how long you'll last.
But no one has cased movement.
And movement is usually the first thing to go.
Li Li at Georgia Southern University put a name on it this year in the Journal of Sport and Health Science. The paper calls it movement span - "the duration of life during which an individual can move with confidence, responsiveness, and adaptive control." The point is that movement span narrows before health span collapses. The slide starts well before anything shows up on a diagnosis. And people quietly stop doing the things that feel risky, which speeds the whole thing up.
You stop jumping off the dock. Then you stop carrying the canoe. Then the stairs get a hand on the rail.
Nobody writes that down. Nobody measures it.
So should I be worried that my knee talks to me at 45?
Not worried. Curious.
Think about movement as a folder in your brain. A subcortical program, somewhere in the brainstem network, away from conscious thought. It starts running the day you're born. Gravity hits the receptors in your skin and connective tissue and the program propagates - lying, rolling, crawling, squatting, kneeling, standing, walking.
It's all automated. You don't think about it.
That's the Automatic State. The brain running the body so you don't have to babysit it.
When we get injured, stressed or startled, the brain unplugs that program and diverts it to a protective pattern. The threshold to protect gets easier to trigger. We get tight in the protective muscle groups and movement starts to bog down. Then we go to the gym and train right on top of the protective pattern.
Stuck in a loop.
Here's a strange one. Healthy walking doesn't keep perfect time.
Jeffrey Hausdorff and colleagues in Boston recorded the stride timing of healthy young men walking for nine minutes, back in 1995. Every stride was a little different. But the differences weren't random - each stride carried a trace of the strides hundreds of steps before it. A fractal. When people walked to a metronome, the pattern disappeared. In certain neurological diseases it falls apart into something close to random.
So healthy movement lives in between. Too rigid and it's a metronome. Too loose and it's noise.
The Automatic State lives right there.
That's what we're trying to measure at MVMTLAB.
We call it somatic engineering.
It's solving the cause. Why the stability isn't there. Where the bottlenecks are in your physiology - we look at that through multi-omics. What your neuromarkers are doing under movement stress, and where the gaps are in your recovery.
Then we look at the links between the systems to find the main causative factors. Hit those targets. Retrain the neuromarkers with efficient repatterning, so the brain can take the wheel again.
Back to the Automatic State. Easy, efficient movement, as we're designed.
(Where it hurts is almost never where you start.)
The brain side of this - EEG while you move, force plates, motion capture, a digital twin of how you move - is experimental. We're measuring and learning with it. We're not diagnosing with it. We're building it as a member of SFU VentureLabs' Perago program, starting with a first cohort of 30 people.
I gave monthly talks to the engineers at Microsoft for a year, trying to explain why humans are more advanced than the machines they were building. I still think so. Nothing they make is as advanced as a seed.
You can't buy health points. You have to earn them.
Our brain tries to protect us. Like a snail in a shell.
Make the environment safe, and the snail comes out.