Enhance Healthspan with BLOCK App: Quality Movement for a Healthier Life

Tell us about the BLOCK app that you co-founded? 

BLOCK Training was created to show people how adding quality movements into their lives can extend their healthspan – the good health years where we’re unrestricted by pain and avoiding chronic disease. Our team believes in the importance of working smarter and not harder when it comes to building a daily, repeatable habit of movement. We have full-body workouts, sport-specific prep and recovery classes, and an 8-minute mobility and stability routine. The “Daily 8,” as we call it, demonstrates our core belief: you don’t always need high-intensity or high-impact work to make a difference. You just need purposeful, quality movement.  I learned so much during my career to extend my playing days, which made a huge impact on my life, and I really wanted to democratize that knowledge. You don’t need to be a professional athlete to improve your quality of movement, or to see positive results from that change.   Each BLOCK routine is designed by my own team—including Dr. Rick Celebrini, the Director of Sports Medicine & Performance with the Golden State Warriors — to be an accessible introduction to movement training, just like I’ve used.  Life can be unpredictable, and it’s only through improving these that we’re able to better address that unpredictability. We were adamant about including different intensity levels so that no one is left out and everyone can build their quality of movement, no matter where you’re starting from.

As a busy dad and professional, how do you incorporate exercise into your daily routine?

With three kids at home, two in college, and busy days, my wife and I are both purposeful in finding that time and creating space for it ourselves, in addition to daily play and activity with our kids.  Soccer and tennis 3-4 times a week are my primary exercise.  Living with a long-standing back condition, doing those things necessitates a disciplined sleep schedule, good diet and a healthy, regular, intentional routine of daily mobility and stability work. It’s become a habit now: I do 8 minutes of low-impact work after my morning coffee every day (I’m a BLOCK regular), and it’s really kept my back mobile, prevented other injuries, and kept me competitive. I also mix up my workouts with resistance training and different types of cardio. I get real joy from it, but also from the longevity it lends, the social piece of it, and the healthy modeling I know it’s providing for our kids. Finding that happy, healthy activity – whether it’s sports or walks with friends or volunteering in an active job – and integrating into your days just adds to our healthspan.

Why is an active lifestyle important for Canadian men?

Activity is a cornerstone of our healthspan.  It makes sense: we feel better when we can move without pain, when we feel better we’re more likely to move more, and engaging in quality movement and activity perpetuates our health – better sleep, better relationships, healthier choices.  That goes for almost everyone, whether you consider yourself an athlete or not, because activity isn’t just sports or athletics, right?  It’s running for a subway, it’s scooping up your niece and playing, it’s awkwardly trying to juggle top-heavy grocery bags and a sleeping kindergartner while walking on an icy sidewalk digging for your keys and opening a door with your foot while balancing on one leg.  To do those daily things without injury requires stability, mobility and strength, all things that we can gain through an active lifestyle.  And it goes beyond us, too – being able to show up as our most productive, most empathetic, most helpful selves reduces the stresses other people in our days experience, fostering greater community health for all of us.

How can fathers be the “best assist” for their children?

So much of it is just showing up in any and every way you can, as early as you can start.  When we started investing in early childhood education and development at my Foundation (www.stevenash.org), one of the books Jenny [Miller, Executive Director of the Steve Nash Foundation] and I read had a chapter called “Your face: your baby’s first toy.”  And I think that’s such a key part of what current science tells us: engaging with your babies – infants, toddlers, and older kids, too – matters.  And we’re still learning just how important dads can be to brain development: studies have found that, even at eight weeks old, babies whose dads played bigger roles in day-to-day activities related to their children’s care (feeding, changing, calming, etc.) were more socially responsive than babies whose dads didn’t participate as much.  And at six months old, higher levels of involvement with dads correlated to higher developmental scores.  By two years old, these babies also showed more resiliency when confronted by stressors.  Premature babies have also been shown to benefit from their dads’ involvement, with positive effects on weight gain and other risk factors.  That’s why my Foundation has been so excited to be able to get some of those best practices to dads through our Let’s Talk Dads program (in partnership with the TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health).  It’s based on the neuroscience of how children’s brains develop and grow.  One of things we know is that talking with kids – even before they can talk back – has tremendous benefits; taking turns talking back and forth, paying attention to what’s capturing theirs, really tuning in to what they are seeing and learning is the work we can all do.  Being a dad is such an incredible opportunity, and we’re lucky to live in a time where so much good information exists to point us in the right direction to grow health in our kids.