Welcome to The MOVE Project (Medical Optimization via Exercise)—our ongoing research initiative to establish clinical guidelines for true exercise prescription in modern healthcare. 

The MOVE Project mentality is that no medical care plan is complete without accounting for how the patient should be using their body—not just what they’re putting into it or having done to it. While “lifestyle modification” has long been accepted by the medical community as first-line treatment for just about any chronic condition, we have yet to apply the same diligence, rigor and acuity towards exercise prescription as we do for procedural or pharmaceutical interventions. 

The actual writing of a “prescription” requires not only detailed directions for the patient (frequency, timing, route of administration), but also all the information a healthcare provider would need to understand the therapy in the context of the patient's condition (diagnosis/indication, drug name/formulation, dosage). Without these details, instructing a patient to “exercise” is merely giving them permission to go figure out how to design, monitor and execute an entire aspect of their medical care. It’s not a fair position to put patients in.

For a drug to go from just a random molecule to an established medication that’s part of the standard of care for a certain condition, it must first go through a multi-phase research process to make sure it’s safe, effective and dosed appropriately. Then, the drug and its treatment protocol need to be scrutinized and approved by the FDA. Once approved, the last step is for literally everything we know about the drug to be outlined in what’s called a Structured Product Label (SPL). After that is when mass production ramps up, the commercials come out, and doctors can start prescribing the new medication despite not having learned about it in medical school. 

If our goal is for exercise to be precisely integrated into the standard of care for the conditions we know directly benefit from it, the initial research is already out there. For decades, the safety, efficacy, and practical application of various exercise modalities has been formally researched at length in both health and disease. The next step is to synthesize all of this information, and use it to build specific “exercise formulations” and “exercise SPLs” for specific conditions—the same way we approach pharmaceutical innovation. 

Below is our free, open-access research database and documentation catalog of this journey we call The MOVE Project. Follow along and let’s change healthcare together.