Why Does Moving Give You More Energy?

Moving does more than just exercise your body

There is something rather strange about energy that most of us have experienced without giving it very much thought. You can spend several hours sitting at a desk, driving, watching television, or working at something that requires almost no physical effort and somehow end up feeling completely drained. Your first instinct may be to conserve what little energy you have left, because getting up and moving seems like it would require even more of something you already feel short of. Then you finally get outside, walk around for ten minutes, or simply start moving through the house, and sometimes you come back feeling more awake, clearer, and more capable than you did before you started.

How does that make sense?

Movement certainly requires energy. Every time a muscle contracts, the body has to supply the energy required to make that contraction happen, so technically you are spending energy when you move. What is easy to miss is that the human body does not operate like a battery that simply starts full in the morning and becomes emptier with every activity until bedtime. The body is continually producing, using, replenishing, and adapting its ability to generate energy, and movement itself is one of the important signals influencing that process.

That changes the conversation considerably, because movement is not simply another task that uses up the energy you have. Movement helps tell the body what kind of energy-producing capacity you need it to maintain.

The Body Builds for What You Ask It to Do

Our bodies are remarkably responsive to demand. When we regularly ask muscles to work, the body adapts to that request by becoming better prepared to do the work again. When we ask for very little movement for long periods of time, the body adapts to that as well.

Inside our cells are structures called mitochondria, which are heavily involved in producing ATP, the usable form of energy required for much of the work carried out by the body. When we move regularly, particularly when movement challenges the muscles and increases their energy requirements, the muscles receive signals that encourage changes in the number, efficiency, and activity of these energy-producing systems. In very simple terms, the body recognizes that more capacity is being requested and begins preparing for that demand.

This creates one of the more interesting contradictions in the way we think about tiredness. When we are low in energy, we often want to preserve it by reducing movement, and there are certainly times when true rest is exactly what the body requires. Illness, significant exhaustion, and recovery are not circumstances where the answer is simply to push harder. But ordinary inactivity can become its own cycle when day after day the muscles receive very little reason to maintain the same strength, endurance, and energy-producing capacity.

This means conserving energy and building the ability to produce energy are not always the same thing.

Sometimes the five- or ten-minute walk that seems as though it will take energy from you is actually part of the message that tells the body to become better at supplying it.

Your Muscles Are Talking While You Move

We tend to think of muscle as fairly mechanical. Muscles contract so we can stand up, lift something, climb stairs, or move from one place to another, and that appears to be their main job.

It turns out that muscles are doing considerably more.

When skeletal muscles contract, they can release signaling substances known as myokines, which participate in communication between muscle and other parts of the body. Researchers now understand skeletal muscle as an important signaling organ, capable of influencing processes involving metabolism and communicating with tissues such as the liver, fat, bone, and brain.

That is quite an extraordinary change in the way we can think about movement.

When you get up and walk, you have not simply moved your legs and burned a few calories. Muscle contraction has started a biological conversation.

This fits remarkably well with something we talk about frequently at Casaroma: the body does not operate as a collection of completely independent departments. What happens in one area affects another. The muscles are not sitting off by themselves, waiting for exercise while the rest of the body carries on separately. When muscles are used, information is being generated, and the entire system responds to the fact that movement is occurring.

That is one reason I think we should stop seeing movement only through the lens of weight loss, calorie burning, or formal exercise. Those things have their place, but they can make movement sound like punishment for something we ate or another obligation we need to fit into the week.

Movement is communication.

And the body is listening.

Sitting Still and Resting Are Not Necessarily the Same Thing

Another thing worth separating is rest from inactivity.

Rest can be deeply restorative. Sitting with a cup of tea after working outside, lying down when the body genuinely needs recovery, or having an afternoon where very little is required of you can be exactly what is needed.

Remaining in essentially the same physical position for hours, however, is something different.

Muscle contraction plays a role in circulation, particularly in helping move blood from the legs back toward the heart. When we walk or use the muscles of the lower body, those contractions act somewhat like pumps, assisting circulation. Movement also changes how the muscles use glucose and other fuels, which is one reason even short periods of activity can create measurable changes after prolonged sitting.

This helps explain something many people already recognize. You can sit through several hours of work and become increasingly foggy and tired, yet a short walk can change the way you feel even though the walk technically required additional energy. Studies looking at prolonged sitting have found that breaking it up with short periods of light movement can reduce feelings of fatigue and increase reported energy compared with remaining seated continuously.

Your experience may already have told you this before the research did.

The surprising part is realizing that the tiredness you feel after hours of sitting does not necessarily mean the body needs you to remain even more still.

Sometimes it is asking for movement.

Movement Changes More Than the Muscles

There is another part of movement that cannot be understood by counting steps.

Think about how differently you can feel after walking outside when something has been bothering you. The problem may still exist and nothing in the external situation may have changed, yet your thoughts can become clearer and the emotional intensity can shift. Put on music and move around for a few minutes, and another kind of change can happen. Spend time stretching after being physically tense for several hours, and you may suddenly recognize how much you had been holding throughout your body.

Human beings have noticed this relationship between movement and internal state for a very long time. Yoga, tai chi and dance are three very different examples of traditions that deliberately use movement as part of physical, emotional or energetic practice. The people who developed these systems did not need to understand mitochondria or myokines before they recognized that the way we move the body can change the way we experience ourselves.

From the physical perspective, movement changes muscle activity, circulation, metabolism, and internal signalling. From the energetic perspective, movement has also traditionally been used to encourage flow, shift something that feels held or stagnant, and bring awareness back into the body.

Those explanations do not have to compete.

They may simply be different ways of looking at an experience humans have observed for a very long time:

When we move, something in us changes.

Why We Often Wait Until We Feel Like Moving

One of the easiest traps to fall into when we are tired is waiting until we feel energetic enough to move, because it seems logical that movement should come after energy rather than be one of the things that can help change it. The problem is that the desire to move does not always arrive first. There are many days when we may not feel particularly energetic before a walk, a stretch, or a few minutes of moving around the house, but we notice afterward that something has shifted and we are thinking more clearly, breathing a little deeper, or simply feeling more capable than we did before we started. If we always use the energy level we have at the beginning as the deciding factor, we can miss the possibility that appropriate movement may be one of the things that helps change the energy we have available.

That does not mean every tired person should force herself through a hard workout, because intensity is not really the point of this conversation. There is a very real difference between gently increasing movement within an ordinary day and pushing a body that is genuinely ill, depleted, or in need of recovery. What we are talking about here is something much simpler: giving the body enough movement to create a response and then noticing what happens. A five-minute walk, a few trips up and down the stairs, or moving through one favourite song can be enough to tell you something useful about how your own system responds.

Before you move, notice how you feel, and then notice again five or ten minutes later. Maybe your physical energy improves, maybe your thinking becomes clearer, or maybe that particular day there is very little change at all. All of those responses are useful because the goal is not to convince yourself that movement magically fixes tiredness; the goal is to become better at recognizing the relationship between movement and your own energy.

Your Body Is Responding to the Life You Ask It to Live

We sometimes talk about energy as though it is simply something we either wake up with or do not, but the body is much more responsive than that. It is continually adapting to the demands placed on it, which means the life we ask our body to live influences what it prepares itself to do. Food provides raw materials, sleep allows for recovery, and movement creates demand and information, with all three working together rather than existing as separate parts of health.

If the muscles are rarely asked to work, the body receives one kind of message. If they are used regularly, another message is being sent. Neither response is a judgment about whether we have been good or bad; it is simply adaptation. The body becomes more prepared for the things we repeatedly ask of it, and less prepared for the things we rarely ask it to do.

This is also why increasing movement can feel difficult in the beginning. If the body has adapted to very little demand, suddenly asking it for a great deal can leave someone exhausted enough that she decides movement is not helping at all. The better approach is usually to create enough demand that the body has a reason to begin adapting, without creating so much that recovery becomes the only thing you can think about afterward. Movement does not have to be extreme to matter, because consistency itself is information the body can respond to.

So Does Movement Give Us Energy?

In one sense, movement does use energy, and there is no getting around that. Muscles need energy in order to contract, walking requires work, and any physical activity places some demand on the body. But that is only half of what is happening. Movement also helps maintain the muscles and systems involved in producing and using energy, encourages adaptations that improve physical capacity over time, and creates signalling throughout the body each time those muscles contract.

Even something as simple as interrupting long periods of sitting can change circulation, metabolism, and the way we experience tiredness or alertness. That is why the question does not always have to be, “Do I have enough energy to move?” Sometimes the more useful question is, “Would moving change the energy I have?”

The next time your energy begins to disappear halfway through the day, rather than immediately assuming the rest of the afternoon is lost, try moving for five or ten minutes and then pay attention to what happens. Your muscles are doing much more than carrying you from one place to another, and the movement you give your body today may be part of what determines how much capacity it is prepared to give back to you tomorrow.