Beyond Biomechanics: Fighting Monkey and the Enactive Inference Approach to Health and Movement

Why do we exercise? To date, the most popular justification for movement has centered around physical health, typically operationalized through biomechanical outcomes such as muscular strength or cardiovascular capacity. This reductionist view produces narrow adaptations that leave individuals vulnerable to complexity in the real world, and ignores the embodied nature of our minds.We present an alternative framework, drawing on insights from enactive cognitive science and the Active Inference Framework. Combining notions of the human as nested agents across scales, we recast health as competent problem solving across scales (from cellular to whole-organism) and spaces (anatomical, physiological, conceptual). Using an approach to movement informed by enactivism and active inference, we provide two examples of such an approach in practice. This reframing should allow for increased adaptability and expression across the human lifespan, and has implications in all domains of movement development.