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The guide
The Movement and Circulation Guide
You have more than one pump. Besides the one in your chest, there are pumps built into your own muscles that switch on only when you move. This guide shows what happens when they go unused, and how to wake them up.
For you if your legs feel heavy by evening, your hands and feet stay cold in a warm room, and you want somewhere gentle to start.
29 pages · PDF
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A look inside
The whole thing in ninety seconds
Your muscles are a second pump.
Your heart drives blood out, but lifting it up your legs against gravity, and pressing it through the smallest vessels, is helped by your muscles squeezing every time they contract. Move, and the pump runs. Sit still, and it idles.
Movement is a signal, not only a workout.
When blood runs faster along the lining of a vessel, that rush itself tells the lining to release its "relax and open" signal, a gas called nitric oxide. Movement affects your vessels, not only your heart.
Sitting is the quiet other side.
Long, unbroken stretches of stillness are linked with the vessel lining working less well, even in healthy people. And the good news from the same research: simply breaking the sitting up appears to keep that from happening.
Little and often beats rare and heroic.
Short movement breaks scattered through the day set the small vessels working again and again, whereas one heroic workout does it only once. You don't need an athlete's program. You need to stop sitting for so long.
The smallest vessels answer fast.
Of everything that supports your microcirculation, movement is the lever that responds soonest, and it's free. Walking counts. Standing up counts. This guide ends with a gentle routine you can begin today.
People often arrive sure that something is wrong with the heart. By the middle of the day the legs turn heavy and tired, the feet are forever cold, and worry does what worry does: decides that if it feels like this, it must be serious. Very often the heart is not the story at all. What has changed is something else entirely: a desk job, and a day that no longer includes the movement it once did.
