Move Like Your Life Depends on It—Because It Does
Introduction
Picture yourself in your 80s or 90s. Can you still do the activities you love? Can you move freely, travel, and enjoy time with family without physical limitations? The truth is, your ability to move well today determines how mobile, independent, and strong you’ll be in the decades to come.
Much like a car, your body relies on proper alignment to function optimally. A misaligned car wears out its tires quickly, just as poor movement mechanics cause unnecessary strain on your joints, leading to pain, stiffness, and even joint replacements. But what if you could prevent that entirely?
Baseline movement is the key—it is your body’s set point for optimal function, allowing you to track changes and take action before limitations set in. By maintaining baseline movement, you ensure mobility, agility, and resilience as you age.
Peter Attia, in Outlive, emphasizes that exercise is the most powerful intervention against aging-related diseases like diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and dementia. But to fully benefit from exercise, you first need a solid foundation—baseline movement. Without it, movement becomes inefficient, increasing wear and tear on the body and making exercise less effective.
This article explores what baseline movement is, why it is essential for longevity, and how you can measure and maintain it to ensure lifelong mobility, independence, and health.
What is Baseline?
Baseline body alignment is the foundation of movement longevity. It ensures that your body moves efficiently, reducing unnecessary wear and tear on your joints and muscles. When movement is aligned with baseline mechanics, forces are properly distributed, preventing premature breakdown and dysfunction.
However, if we don’t actively maintain our baseline, we lose it. Over time, lifestyle habits, injuries, and compensatory movement patterns pull us further from optimal function. This leads to overuse of the wrong muscles and joints, creating excess strain and increasing the likelihood of pain and injury.
The further we drift from baseline, the harder our body has to work to accomplish even simple movements. This extra effort can result in stiffness, chronic pain, and reduced mobility. By restoring and maintaining baseline movement, we remove unnecessary stress, increase efficiency, and keep the body moving freely for life.
To illustrate baseline movement, we look to babies as the perfect model of unadulterated, unrestricted mobility. At birth, infants display pure joint movement and natural muscle activation. Unlike adults, who accumulate restrictions over time, babies demonstrate what baseline function should look like. Throughout this article, we’ll explore how their movement patterns can serve as a guide for reclaiming our own baseline and optimizing lifelong movement.
Defining Baseline Body Alignment
Baseline is the body’s optimal movement state, free from compensations and restrictions. While returning to a perfect state may not be possible, the goal is to get as close as we can from where we are now. Baseline gives us a clear target to work toward, helping us refine movement through awareness, exercise, and tracking progress.
Instead of relying on how we feel—stiff, tight, or in pain—objective movement tests allow us to measure and track changes over time. These assessments, which will be available in accompanying videos, help identify limitations in alignment, mobility, and function. With routine checks, we can spot small losses before they turn into major dysfunction.
Most people don’t realize their mobility is gradually declining until it reaches a tipping point—when pain, stiffness, or injury forces them to take notice. Because we don’t typically consider baseline in recovery, we often treat symptoms rather than root causes, missing the chance to correct movement before it leads to long-term issues. Identifying and maintaining baseline alignment helps prevent these setbacks, allowing us to move more freely, efficiently, and without unnecessary strain.
Why Babies Represent the Ideal Baseline
In my workshops on measuring baseline movements, I often use my son, Thibaut, as an example of pure hip and shoulder mobility. Watching him move, I’m reminded of how much range of motion we naturally possess early in life—before stress, injuries, and lifestyle adaptations take their toll. His unrestricted movement serves as a powerful benchmark, showing us just how far we may have drifted from our own baseline.
As adults, we can’t turn back the clock, but we can use this understanding to gauge what’s possible within our own bodies. When we observe how a baby’s hips, shoulders, and spine move freely without restriction, it offers a glimpse of what we could reclaim. Instead of accepting stiffness and limitation as inevitable, we can work to restore as much of our natural movement as possible, reducing strain and improving long-term function.
The Importance of Measuring Baseline for Longevity
A baseline assessment acts as a reference point to track changes over time. Once we establish our baseline, we must check it routinely to see if we are gaining, losing, or maintaining our movement quality. Without consistent measurement, people may not realize how much they’ve declined until dysfunction or pain forces them to take action.
Relying on an X-ray is like checking your bank account once a decade—you’ll see the damage, but you won’t know how you got there. Regular baseline assessments act like financial tracking, allowing us to make small adjustments before major problems arise. Similarly, baseline tracking is like stepping on a scale—it helps you catch small changes before they become big problems.
Baseline: Your Foundation Against Aging and Disease
Peter Attia, in Outlive, emphasizes that exercise is the most powerful intervention we have to fight the diseases that shorten our lives—diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and dementia. But without a solid movement foundation, exercise becomes ineffective or even harmful.
If exercise is our most powerful weapon against aging, then baseline movement is the foundation that allows us to wield it effectively. Without maintaining baseline movement, we lose access to the very tool that keeps us strong, independent, and resilient.
This isn’t just about moving better—it’s about preventing the very diseases most likely to take your life. By committing to baseline movement, you’re not just improving mobility; you’re actively protecting yourself from metabolic dysfunction, cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, and physical frailty.
Future Articles: How to Measure and Track Your Baseline
Understanding baseline movement is the first step, but how do you measure and track it effectively? In upcoming articles, we will provide step-by-step guidance on assessing your movement patterns, identifying limitations, and implementing corrective strategies. These assessments will help ensure that you are maintaining optimal function and preventing decline before it becomes a problem.
Conclusion
Key Takeaways:
Baseline movement is the foundation of longevity, helping maintain mobility, function, and resilience as we age.
Neglecting baseline movement leads to compensations, stiffness, and eventual dysfunction, often unnoticed until pain or injury appears.
Babies exemplify pure movement mechanics, providing a model for reclaiming lost mobility and restoring efficient movement patterns.
Tracking and maintaining baseline prevents decline, just as stepping on a scale helps monitor weight before issues arise.
Baseline movement is essential for disease prevention, serving as the foundation for effective exercise, our most powerful tool against diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and dementia.
Final Thoughts:
Movement isn’t just about staying fit—it’s about maintaining independence, preventing disease, and ensuring long-term quality of life. By taking control of our movement today, we set ourselves up for a future where we remain strong, capable, and thriving for decades to come.
About Paul: Paul is a writer, speaker, and master storyteller specializing in brand development and thought leadership. With a background in chiropractic care and a passion for longevity, he partnered with Luc on the Longevity Project to shift the aging narrative from decline to lifelong adaptation and peak performance.
About Luc: Luc is a chiropractor, biomechanics expert, and movement specialist dedicated to optimizing human function and longevity. A passionate cyclist, endurance athlete, and chiropractor for the Canadian Olympic cycling team, he co-founded the Longevity Project with Paul to make sustainable longevity habits accessible to all.