 Welcome to Ancestral Health Today, evolutionary insights into modern health. Hi, Katie. Thank you for being with us today and welcome to the Ancestral Health Today podcast. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. How are you doing? I am doing well. I mean, maybe a different answer to that is too long for a podcast. But, you know, I'm just trying to, like probably all the listeners, manage my well-being in a time and place that doesn't support it very easily. So I deal with that. I have ups and downs. And so, yeah, that's how I'm feeling is just looking around at that again, going, oh, time to make some more changes or adjustments. Yes, that's a great thing to be conscious of. And I think that's something that all of us really need to work hard of because we have such a mismatch from what our biology and what our just mental health needs to, you know, the life that we live today. Yeah. And it's hard not to always say you're fine when someone asks you, but I think maybe if we could answer more honestly and, you know, like, where are you today in navigating you and your spaces? And it might, we might be able to articulate it and get more support that way. So, yes, I am, I'm tired. I am tired. That's a really great way to reframe it. And maybe in that reframe, we can also build more community, you know, and let people know where we are and just help each other. That's something that, yeah, more honest community, like more, it's more intimate, right? You're more a little bit more vulnerable by saying, what's actually going on with you. Someone can allow people to respond. Yeah, absolutely. So talking about community, let's have our community get to know you a little bit better. Tell us about yourself, where you're coming from, what got you here, and anything that you would like to share with the audience. Well, hello everyone in the ancestral health symposium community. I mean, yes, it's, my name's Katie Bowman. And I am coming to you literally from Washington state. And figuratively, I'm coming to you from a particular path or set of choices that I've made about what I wanted to study when I was in school, which was movement. And then the different choices that I've made about how I've set up my lifestyle to incorporate more ancestral. I've spoken at the ancestral health symposium before on different things having to do with movement and lifestyle, movement rich lifestyle and movement rich parenting. And that's, I guess, sort of my platform from which I speak, talking about the importance of movement and maybe offering a broader perspective on movement beyond exercise. That's something that I've been talking about for 10 years now or more. It's scary, scary to think of. But yeah, actually, I think I was at the ancestral health symposium in 2012, if not 2013. So it's been 10, you know, it's been 10 years. So yeah, that's sort of how I approach life is thinking a lot about movement. I'm a biomechanist for those that don't know that someone who studies the overlap or the intersection of biology and mechanics, which is a branch of physics that deals with just simple things like lovers and pressures and the way our body is affected by the mechanical environment that we create through positioning and through movement. Wonderful. And what brought you to wanting to become a biomechanist? Yeah, I did not start on the path of I don't know how many people wanted to be biomechanists, but in short, I started studying math and physics first. Those were just natural interests of mine. I always did like general mechanics, like putting things together. And also, I've told the story on podcasts before. I was always really interested in the Tin Man of the Wizard of Oz when I was a younger child, like the thought of seeing the joints on top of the way that costume was designed in that movie. I just I was really attracted to that early on. And I spent a lot of time just thinking of my own hinges. I used to always ponder sitting in a rocking chair, like how am I making this rocking chair move? That was something I did a lot as a kid. And I can see that my own kids now, they have a lot of insights that they that they feed me just like, hey, I can move my kneecap. Hey, I can move this eyebrow. But you know, like I think kids naturally do that, but they're very vocal about it. And I just really remember that and never really stopped and never really stopped just being at amazed at what my body could do. And then when I got into university, I was sort of bored in math and physics. And I also was an emerging mover. I was pretty sedentary and studious through most of my childhood, although I'll put a footnote there. When I say that my level of sedentaryism was nothing like the kids today. Like I was still a pretty active child, like kids were in the 70s and 80s, like riding bikes and being outside all the time, like we didn't watch TV or spend a lot of time inside. But relatively speaking, like I would prefer to read most of the time. But when I was eight, 16 and 17 and 18, I just slowly started to move more. And then when I was at university, my, my emerging interest in movement overlapped with my boredom studying math and physics. And I found this department, excuse me, called kinesiology, which is the study of human movement. And I found an option or what was called the emphasis at that time within that degree for biomechanics, which I had already taken all the math and physics for in the first two years of my degree. So I changed departments and I finished up in biomechanics. And then I went to graduate school to continue to study that, that option or that emphasis. And, and I had no conscious memory of making a choice to do that as a job. But it was more like just I was really interested in, in pursuing and embodying that, that the information that I was gathering while I was following that those degree paths. And so here I am, a biomechanist, and I don't really know how I got here other than just a nice accident, I guess. That's amazing. How did you become entrenched into the concept of nutritious movement? If I were to, you know, look at the majority of people that work in this environment, they may go to work for, you know, a large shoe company or to work for a company that emphasizes braces or things of that nature, more of the fixing the problems at the end rather than preventing. And you speak a lot about nutritious movement. So can you break down what that concept is and how that particular concept evolved for you? Well, that's a very long journey that actually started on the first day of graduate school for me. And so this is a very personal story. But I grabbed, I was, I grabbed like a free magazine on campus that had an advertisement. It was LA Yoga Magazine, which is like a freebie sort of like alternative health magazine. And there was an ad in there for earth shoes. So earth shoes was a brand of shoes that instead of having the heel raised above the toes, they had it the other way around the toes were elevated over the heels. And this was a pair of this was a style of shoes and a brand of shoes that had been around since the 70s. Oh, wow. But the way that they had structured this full page ad in the back was a diagram of the orientation of the rest of the body parts. So again, it's like a callback to how I used to look at the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz where you could see where the hinges work. So the way that they did this side by side, graphic and shoes, I was just like, that's really interesting to me. Like I don't even really remember thinking, thinking. I remember noticing it and like feeling it go in. But I didn't really mull it at that point. But then like a half an hour later, I stepped into the first seminar of my first day of graduate school. And it was this really awesome biomechanics seminar where it was led by Dr. William Whiting who eventually became my mentor and my thesis advisor. And it was a class where everyone could just talk about and work on the thing in biomechanics that interested them the most. And so he went around the room and was asking what everyone was interested in. It was it was mostly the things that you see again. It was like biomechanics and athletics, you know, that you're talking about designing exercise equipment, orthopedics, designing support for a variety of reasons, usually disability, but sometimes like post surgery. So more of like more medical, less athletics, athletics and medicine. And I was still sort of look looking in my mind at this graphic from an earth shoe ad where they were talking about like the natural way to walk. And and I just said I had just said I'm really interested in and again, I've never even met any of these people in my life or this professor before like I'm interested in in the way like our orientation of parts or our posture. I don't even think I had the word alignment really. Like I use it now about how that differs around the world and what are the elements that arise depending on this sort of orientation of parts or the postures with which we carry ourselves. And I remember I guess remember, you know, the teacher in front going like, huh, okay. And so like that was always my everything that I chose to do during those two years was always an extreme outlier of again the sports and and and medicine or therapeutic type stuff. It was always more of an anthropological cross cultural perspective. So I've just always been interested in a real broader picture. So the second part of your question is like where how does movement nutrition come out of that? That that's like a 15 year journey that I'm still on. But it was in trying to again back in the school in the kinesiology department in movement science, you're taught that there are three types of human movement, that there's athletics, fitness and dance, that those are the three types of human movements like that's that's in textbooks. And I just had this like cross cultural these cross cultural insights going like, I think that there might be more than that. Because like where would we put I was already like, I really focused on pelvic health, pelvic biomechanics, low back pain and how all the parts of the pelvis work for vaginal expulsion during delivery of a child. Like I was just really interested in like not so much in the pitching arm, but what was happening in this really mundane thing that so many people on the planet do. And, and again, it's that broad perspective, right? It's like, it's like that this is what I'm interested in. And so all my papers are on sort of obnoxious things like that, which I didn't think were obnoxious. But but but the staff, the teaching staff, the mentoring staff had never really I think had a student who came came through interested in those types of things. So as I began to look at movement, not in the fitness dance or athletic lens, but as something that all all bodies, you know, outside of disability, but like generally speaking, that our anatomy has evolved to expect because of the movements that were around for a long time. Like I just started to really be interested in quantifying what these, you know, so called natural movements are and arguably it might be time for different language around that. But whatever the language is, these movements that are like the backbone of all of the people before us that got us to this point that are rapidly falling off sort of unprecedentedly, unprecedentedly falling off, even though they have been trending movements been trending downward for a long time, it's accelerated now at this point of trying to reframe movement using the language that we use for dietary nutrients. So that came up for me like maybe six or seven years ago because because I don't I don't think many people even recognize what a nutrient is like what what makes something a nutrient. So that was what I was interested in flushing out a handful of years ago. And it's like, Oh, well, what makes something a nutrient is that in its absence, there are predictable things that arise in the body. And when that compound is introduced, those symptoms go away. So, so nutrients are defined in hindsight after a period of loss and then targeted reintroduction, usually scientific reintroduction where different things have been tried trying to figure out the right thing. And I was like, Oh, well, we've been doing that same thing for movement. Without realizing it, it's more of a natural experiment. But I just took that same nutrient framework and the idea of there being different types of nutrients that relate to each other, macronutrients and micronutrients and saying it goes the same for movement. And then we have we do have a movement diet. It's just the compounds aren't chemical that you're ingesting them. You're not ingesting chemicals to get the chemistry inside. But with movie or DNA, which is a book I wrote, it's the same thing where ingesting isn't the right word, but the loads or the squishes that are happening to your body when you're in your mechanical environment, go on to create chemicals within the cell. So in that way, it's very similar to ingesting their orally or through sunlight, some external compounds. So I call them all inputs. Now you've got your dietary inputs, your sunlight inputs and your mechanical inputs. And then those are all things that you need. And when you don't get certain ones, there are certain predictable things that arise. And then there are inputs that you can do to target and make some of those things dissipate. That's a great explanation. And those mechanical inputs also affect the other inputs and how they affect the body. And that's a great definition of the nutritious movement framework, because we can look at it from the lens of preserving that function and not letting that deteriorate over time, which is what unfortunately is happening a lot. And you framed it very well within people who are able to move. There's no disability involved. That decline over time is just, it has accelerated significantly. So tell us a little bit more about more of the concept of how that movement has evolved, or in this case, egressed in a way. It has, you know, it has gone backwards, rather, and how that evolution has affected everything that we do and our environment nowadays. Well, so there is no really going back. And I think halfway through my career, you know, I was always very interested in studying movement, studying movement. And about halfway through, I realized, oh, the piece that I don't really understand is sedentarism is the absence of movement. So to thoroughly study movement, one needs to really understand sedentarism, because if our bodies require so much movement, and they do, how is it possible to get ourselves in a state which could be the time and the place where so little movement is being done? Like, I just think as far as other things in nature, like how do you get yourself so far away from having your needs met? And so that's, I mean, that too was a writer on the time when I was writing with your DNA, which was looking at as we've moved forward in time and have become more technologically advanced, many of our advancements are, they're not usually framed this way, but they are creating technologies that allow you to meet some need without the movement that used to be packaged or bundled up with that need. So we would say a lot of our convening, a lot of our technologies are about convenience, right, they save time. But you still need all that movement. So they didn't really save you time because all you're left with is the end of the day. And guess what, you didn't get any of your movement done. So that's kind of a huge inconvenience. It's the fact that that nothing in your day moved you any longer. So now when you've, when you're done, you know, with all the things that you've done in the day, you still have four hours of movement that needed to be done. And guess what, there's no more time for it because we are in sort of a fixed time situation. So one thing I like to say about the body or about our DNA, you know, there's a lot of talk about this blueprint that we have in our DNA or these needs that we come with for movement. Paradoxally, we also have alongside this tremendous capacity for a need for a movement, generally speaking, is equally all of the software that has us not move as much as often as we can, right? So we're always trying to conserve energy. That is equally as natural as is our requirement for movement. So what do we do with this? So we've got this tremendous paradox that we have to deal with which is we, like all things, like all other living things on the planet, depend on our environment. We depend on our environment, not only for the compounds that we extract from it, but for the situation or the pressures that it creates for us in order to get what we need. So we have radically modified our environment. And really, if you could think about, and I think people who are listening to this podcast probably already have a little bit of this framework. If you could think about your physical situation as not only something going on or going wrong with your body, but maybe your body expressing itself correctly based on the environment that it is in, then we could a lot more attention or energy to modifying our environment for greater change than simply trying to modify our behavior within the identical environment. So I'm a big fan of modifying the environment so that you just moving through it creates that environmental pressure that gets you the behavior and then the resultant adaptations that you are seeking. So what do you think are the biggest factors in our environment that either facilitate or impede movement? And we can go into cultural, the amount of time that people work, you know, go in any direction that you can because there are a lot of them. It's all of it. I mean, it's really, it's, it's all of it. I can tell you about some of the modifications that I've made so that there's like a two, there's two level payoff. One, you can hear how I've modified the environment. And then two, I guess it's which part of the environment I have deemed as something that needs addressing. So most simply, we have really reduced the number of chairs or seats in our house. And so like, I know that sounds, I know that just, I know how it sounds to people hearing it for the first time. And again, on this podcast, it's a totally different audience who are like, yes, high five, I get it. But for other podcasts, it's like, you are saying nonsense. But, but again, that's that cross cultural perspective in me, which is our perception of like what humans do with their bodies is sort of an outlier compared to a lot of other humans on the planet. So one, just, I'm not even talking about going back into time. I'm talking about today, June 27 2023, just go to different part of the planet and you're going to see radically different physical behavior than what we've got going on right now in podcast landia, right, the land of podcasts. So modifying furniture to make it so it's at different heights. Like one of the things that we've got built into sort of the fabric of our society is that all chairs are at the same height and that you people are really just going from different chair seat to chair seat, whether it's at work or in their car or home. And so just modifying that a little bit more. So you're varying up your body use. So it looks a lot more like not only your own ancestry, but other people around the planet right now today, right? We're just using our bodies a little bit more. And then I do think I wouldn't have said this 10 years ago, but I would say today, the smartphone environment is probably superseding the chair situation that we've got going on now. And it's staggering to think that 10 years ago, this wasn't even a thing, but it has become ubiquitous. And I don't even don't only mean across all people in podcast landia, but also throughout the day. Like there's not even like, oh, this is something that happens at this discrete time in the day. It's diffused throughout the day. It's going to be diffused throughout a lifetime every day of the year, right? Like so that this is just again, more novelty, more novelty. And we don't have good use practices. And I'm not even talking about the content that you're consuming, which is its own set. That's a whole other set. I'm simply talking about the mechanical nutrients that are found during the periods of time you're spending with this using this device. And of course, the nice thing is that technology, I'm talking about smartphone again, doesn't require you be in any particular physical position to use it. We have simply stepped into using it sort of mindlessly as far as both, you know, as far as we didn't realize that there's a lot of options or choices to be made around how we're positioned, you know, and like, what is our relationship to movement and position with this device? So the good news is like I spent a lot of time working on trying to create good use practices, things to consider, of course, addressing volume of use time is another way to do it. But yeah, definitely, definitely the smartphone is a thing. And so it's creating a good use set of practices that do address volume or I like to call it, I call it digital minimalism because someone else smarter than me call it digital. That's not my name. But you know, this like really going, I need to consciously choose in the same way I chose minimal shoes and minimal furniture. I'm also choosing minimal digitalism in our in my personal life, in our family life. And that has its own set of steps. How do you manage that with your kids? Because we should do hard podcasts on just that. Yes. And I know parents have such a challenge managing that. And it comes from also the example, but when you're not with them or they're seeing other kids, you know, using it significantly, then naturally they want to grab tape there. Yeah, I mean that this is its own podcast. And it's always a it's always a like, have to set the like no judgment here, like parents, we've we have no role models in this whatsoever, right? Like everyone is parenting through this completely unique environment without warning, you know what I mean? Like you just stepped into it. And and there's not again, with those good use practices, there's not even like what where we had other things like we've been around different types of drugs before and alcohol and cigarettes and like, but we sort of came into parenting as people already been dealing with it. There was already campaigns and people who had thought about how to talk to your kids about this and that, like all these things had come down. Sure. But not this, right? Because everyone's sort of like, this is all amazing, you know, or a round of smartphones for all my friends. And so so when everyone sort of enthralled with the new thing, it's really hard to imagine what's going to come 10 years down the road. But here we are. And so now we're starting to see things like, okay, we don't even want to introduce these until a particular age, you know, so, so I guess to answer your question about what we have done, keeping in mind that my children are almost 11 and 12. So they are differently aged than people who will be answering this question for older teenagers or younger children is, I mean, one, just not having them, just not having them is and delaying the start time. And then that's, of course, that's sort of like, abstinence is not always the easiest answer. So trying to, and I'm trying to work on a longer piece about this, because it needs to be a little bit more well thought out. But some of the things that we have done was when the phone is so poorly named, because it is not a phone, if we look at time spent using it, we keep calling. No, no, it was a phone 14 years ago. Now it is so many other unlit bottomless things, right? I jokingly call I jokingly call it another organ. It's, it's like a lung. But I guess the thing is, one of the things that's so challenging is it's bottomless. It can be anything. And how does I am 47 and my strength, my internal mental in different situations, my willpower, my ability to choose what's best for myself at 47 is a challenge. And I'm, and I, you know, have good mental, you know, strong health physically. I've got strong mental health. I've got lots of resources to read. You know, I've got all these things going for, for me. And I still feel it challenge, feel challenged to, you know, to walk through life, make, you know, always choosing what's best for me. I can't imagine giving that exact same thing to someone who's 10 or 12, or, you know, like, for me, it just seems like I just try to keep describing it. It's so easy to call it a phone and to say everyone else has one, but when we talk about what it is, it makes it easier for me to maintain my resolve. And then, again, the practicality. My kids, just like I did when I was their age, want to talk to my friends all of the time. That is also completely a natural thing to do. So we got a landline, right? Like we just went and other friends got, and shared with our, again, it's community. We open with community. It's the same thing. So many of these things require having a community that's on the same page as you are. And so it requires that uncomfortable dialogue having and getting together with people and going, it can't be just me raising my kids or if there's two parents. It can't be just us raising these kids. We need aloe parents. Like we need a broader community. We need more families and friends and a school or a school district that can support some of these things. And then it's like anything you have to advocate. You have to advocate for the way that you see the world and listen to other people advocate for the way that they see the world and then try to find, try to find the medium, yeah. So how do you manage these conversations and building of that environment? Because I'm not going to lie. I have to say that even within the community that I am in and having a lot of people who are conscious about all these concepts, when I go to the supermarket and walk two miles to get my groceries and bring a backpack and carry a watermelon back, people think I'm absolutely insane. Yeah, I know. It can be a big deterrent. And at the same time, I also realize what a huge privilege it is for me to even have the time and the ability to be able to do that in the first place. There are days when, you know, I absolutely cannot manage because there are too many, too many things on my plate. And I know that a lot of people, you know, are living like that for the long term. So how do we reconcile all of that and still do the things that we need to do to build that nutritious movement and that community into our lives? I don't know how to solve that entire problem. Or rather, I would say that the way I solve it is by doing what I do, like by by talk, by break by writing, you know, by breaking down movement and by offering lots of differently shaped solutions is the only way that I know how to deal with the fact that the broader, like so now we're talking about the broader environment. We were talking about the environments of our home. Now we're talking about something that's more about the way societies are shaped. And and certainly, there are just straight up the cities and towns are shaped that makes things right. So there's so many levels to this. And I do think I do I try to do a very good job at representing all these layers that you're talking about because it is so easy and very common in health spaces to boil the problem down to you're just you just need to try like you just need to do it. You just need to try. And certainly there is ultimately this, I need to make a choice in one way or the other. But I mean, that's the thing about barriers and obstacles and hurdles is some of them are bigger and more fixed than another's. And so just constantly addressing those through my through my my own work through examples and trying to point people. I mean, there's so many organizations like America Walks, for example, is an organization completely dedicated to city design, you know, and this idea of mobility justice, this idea that we should be in a space that would allow us to to walk or roll or use some sort of not use a car essentially to get from point A to point B without without fearing a life, you know, like not being run down by cars, you know, so many people again depend on it. It's not only for people who want the fitness, it's also to recognize that there is a very large population that depends who does not have a choice should I take the car or should I walk for my health. There's there's only walking, you know, there's and and so it's just I am a big supporter of those organizations that are really trying to do that work and then put those conversations on display for other people to start thinking about and participating in not only for themselves but again on that community on that community level as well, because we do not have a strong enough community period, but we also don't have a well developed community that centers or considers movement because it's such a brand new thing to start considering, you know, I think more people would be more tolerant to you. I mean, just even the tolerance is I'm laughing at the word tolerance to people who are gluten intolerant. It used to be a joke, right? Like that was a punchline. Those people were a punchline. Yeah. As having all this extra these extra needs or whatever. And then lo and behold, you know, here we are 20 years later. And so there's a lot more accommodations made through more understanding. And so the more we understand sedentarism and the way everything sort of set up to make it harder to move, then the less I guess fringe the choices of walking to and from the store would be like it would just be like it. So I just when you hear it's fringe again, this is just a it's it's good. It's good to travel. It's good to go to other places in the world where you just sort of go, okay, right. The way we feel about stuff is based on what we've seen in our in our lifetime. And so the smaller the less you've been exposed to the more radical everything. Yeah. And I grew up with that framework. So when I, you know, heard you speak about it, it wasn't earth shattering to me. Right. But I know that for a lot of people, it is. But talking about barriers, go ahead. Well, I just wanted to point out too. I had done another talk such as this, and with other people who were not from North America who are coming from countries for which the solutions that I was presenting for North America were like these are our traditional practices. And I, you know, there's a lot of I think validation, but then also like, I feel like in order to assimilate, I had to get rid of all of these things that I was already doing because I felt backwards. And I that right there, I've been trying to work on something for this particular group of people who who now who are like, how do I, how do I explain why these elements of my culture that I want to retain and not only like retain, but like fully embody and display, like how do I explain to them that they are also solutions to the same problems that all my friends are complaining about, you know, like how do I how do I get into this new environment and thrive and you know, arguably it's easier for me as you know, someone coming from this North American culture say, Oh, just do it for your health. But then there's this other group of like, in order to fit in, I had to like get a car, you know, or just I think I just think of those are really necessary conversations, not only for the people who are talking about it, but for everyone to listen, you know, for everyone to hear and to recognize and support. Yes. And that assimilation happens not just in terms of the individual actions of like getting a car, for example, but also the fitting into the system, whether it is, well, not always by choice, most of the time, because the system is what it is, like not having closed family around and not having an environment where there's a lot of contribution and community. So you do have the time and the ability to do this other things that are playing into your health, that you don't when you become, you know, the family with just the two parents go into work for eight hours a day, then come in home, and you're the only two that have to take care of the kids and make dinner and clean the house and, you know, do the rest of the social activities that you may want to do, it is just a complex system that you come in and you assimilate into that environment as well, and some of those actions end up changing by default. Yes. Yeah. So again, going back to the barriers, I work with a lot of people who have a lot of challenges in terms of chronic conditions. So movement may be something that they want, but it can be very difficult to accomplish, either because of limitations or because there is pain involved or in a subset of people because the movement itself and the exertion causes something called post-exertional malaise, not just movement, but also with other things as well. So how do you how do you focus around these people? What is your advice? How do you go about helping them engage with movement in a way that is safe and in a way that does offer improvement rather than setbacks? Starting small, I guess, is the easiest way to say it. And the small could be in terms of time that you spend, like start with short duration. It can be low in the sense of intensity. I think for so many people, the definition of exercise is so bound to intensity that someone will be seeking, like it only counts as movement if it's intense. So just getting up to take a short walk wouldn't necessarily count. And so what's the point of doing it? Because it's too small to actually count. So starting small could be just doing something for a little bit, could be doing something a little bit and at a lower intensity or longer, but at a lower intensity. Or it could be, I do a lot of part-by-part explanation of movement where you're just started, you're sort of exploring the way your body works through movement. And the movements are not intense and the movements are subtle, but they are a good starting point for, I think of it as like, if you haven't flossed your teeth in a long time, you know, to floss your teeth is this big deal when there's been a buildup of you not moving the muscles in there for a long time and you can get bleeding in the gums and all sorts of things. And so people really resist flossing because they don't do it regularly. And it's the same thing with moving their hinges. So I really like to differentiate between whole body movement, like that's moving your whole person from point A to point B, up a flight of stairs, to your car, from your car to your, like those are whole body states. Even like getting on a bicycle or doing a Zumba class, whatever, like your whole body is moving. But again, I'm a biomechanist. So I look at the way hinges and levers are working. And I can see people who are quite active are still not moving all of their joints well. There's like these sticky sections to their body that even though they're getting a lot of whole body movement, they are not distributing their movement throughout their body very well. So there's these sedentary areas that live with inside their body, similar, different differently, but also similarly, people who are not active can also have, can also work on just de-clumping, de-clumping some of those sticky parts. It doesn't have to take a lot of whole body movement from point A to point B. You can do a lot of things just sitting in one place, standing in one place, lying on the floor in one position, and then slowly explore the way some of these joints want to move. And that's another really great place to start because you're not, the chances of you getting into that malaise situation are very low. If you're going for a short duration, small intensity or just sort of doing these corrective exercises throughout your body, you're not, you're not, you're not going to easily trigger post exertion because you're never really getting, you're, you're, you're not really exerting for the most part. Now, you know, with the caveat that certainly some people can exert themselves doing the smallest thing. So you're going to scale what I'm saying to yourself, right? I'm not saying that anyone walk a certain rate, move a certain volume. It's just where you are right now, wherever that may be, think of adding a little bit of volume. And then, and then you can scale it. That's why I try to never give block recommendations because we are all just starting from where we are starting. And then, and then you are building up, you know, it's, it's a habit that you're doing. Like when we build up habits, when we change habits, there's a whole brain thing happening. But then there's also our tissues are not really prepared well to move when we don't move often. So there is this strength gap. I'm going to call it a strength gap, but it's like a peer, like there's the state of your body before, and there's a state of body after you move, and there can be discomfort in between if you make too big of a jump. So the idea is to make these small changes so that you never experience like a tremendous setback so that it disrupts the, the, the mentality that has to go into making that choice to do it again, right? If you, if you start too big or too hard and you have a setback that almost reinforces, see movement isn't good for me every time I try to move. And so we want, I want to always not set someone up to have that process happen in their mind. So it's all about, there's, there's certainly always a discomfort that's going to be associated with movement. We all perceive discomfort differently, but like even if you're a regular runner, even if you're like a triathlete and you do lots of big movements, you might have a different, you might not call it discomfort, but your heart rate adjusting and you're, you're all these things happening to you physiologically with the onset of exercise. For some people, they experience all those things. It's going through the filters of their mind of what movement was beforehand, previous experiences, like almost like trauma response, right? Like you start to, you start to filter movement through that. And so we need to have a different relationship with movement. So we go stepwise. It's like any sort of relationship work that you do psychologically dealing with people that are challenging. It's like smaller doses. You have some parameters, good boundaries. And then what happens is you get yourself into a loop where you're able to master those situations a little bit more and you can go through them with less dread and then you choose it and then it pays off and then you choose it more often and you go from intrinsically motivated, extrinsically motivated, I'm sorry, to intrinsically motivated and you're doing it because then you just feel better. Yeah, great. So outside of, you know, going too fast too soon type of situations, is there such thing as too much movement? Well, I think that there's, of course, there's always going to be something, some movement that is too much. I could easily come up with a situation where you're moving too much for a particular situation. But, and are you still talking about this, your specific population? No, just in general, yeah. So outside of that population and outside of, you know, someone who has been maybe sedentary for too long and just went too fast and got hurt or way too uncomfortable, is there such a thing as moving too much? Well, certainly. I mean, there's, I mean, even movement could be drugified, right? Like, there's been the drugification of movement. There are people who use movement, just like everything's been drugified. You know, really, we can go into that more probably another time of what that means. But where you, I guess it's the easiest way to look at it would be, if your movement is blocking you from meeting other needs, then that is too much, right? Like, that would be a general way of looking at it. Now, I said movement is there's the whole body movement and there's part by part movement. A lot of times, I was talking about those sticky spots that are sort of sedentary, right around those sedentary spots in our body when we are active, the areas surrounding that sedentary spot tend to be over moving. That's what instability often is within our joints. So in that case, that too is too much movement of a particular area. And for many people, they need to learn how to stabilize certain parts. So that it's like, it's like, if you've ever had, if people have had children or worked with children, it's very challenging when a child is learning how to do something because it's so easy to step right in and do it for the child and the child never learns. And then here you are always stepping in every time the kid needs to do a task. And so the solution for that is to back off, let the kid sort of fumble through it until the kid has mastered it. And now look, both of you can go on and do your own work. But in our body, we have a lot of these parts where certain areas have never developed the skill and other areas or parts keep stepping in. And because, and I'm just going to call back to what you're asking about, what are some of the problems with modernity, I think pace might be the underlying cause. Like everything is so fast. We have to do things so quickly. We have to do a large volume and we have to keep doing more and we have to keep doing it faster or we're choosing to do it faster. So when we're trying to move so quickly through life, there's not a lot of time to slow down and let these other parts fumble through their less coordinated movement and sort of step back. And that's what I like about corrective exercise or sort of doing what I was talking about where you're walking through your body and learning how to hold some parts still by other parts move because it pays off for you in the long term where all of your parts are sort of matured and are capable as opposed to having some parts that don't fully, like they're still sort of adolescent parts and then you've got parts that are just sort of worn out like a friend, like a frenzied parent. You know what I mean? Like we're doing too many things. We got to slow down, do less and let these kids take on a little bit more work. So that's something maybe also for the over-exercisers to look at. There is a subset of people that are very proud, rightfully so. They have a lot of discipline. They go to the gym or they do a certain activity and they exercise every day. But their exercise tends to be of one particular type whether you're a runner or you are a weightlifter or you're a climber. It tends to be focused on one area. So how can they expand that and make sure that that movement happens throughout? So thinking about yourself as having a movement diet, right? So the thing that you're talking about is the mode. A lot of us are drawn to a particular mode and so that's what cross-training is about is like it's really challenging like pursuing a single mode even daily as your only type of movement can still leave you with injuries as strange as it sounds. It leaves you with injuries but it can also leave you undermoved. It leaves parts of you undermoved and so it's like if you were to try to eat a single food every single day even if it was the most nutrient dense thing that you could find because of what nutrients are they like the challenging thing with the nutrient this is part of movie or DNA too. The challenging thing was the nutrient is having two like nutrients are about the context of all other nutrients and that only eating a single nutrient will not make you super healthy it will make you sick so so nutrients dietary nutrients like mechanical nutrients are about the context of all the nutrients together and so when you have a single mode that you do to a lot that you that you stick to primarily over time it lends itself we call a muscle imbalances you can call them overuse injuries like these are the languages that we're using but what's happening is your mechanical nutrients are not being distributed well throughout your body it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to back off of the thing that you do it means that you might need to supplement with other other things throughout the day and not necessarily supplement with more exercise but just mixing up the way that you sit when you're taking rest walking more and driving less like you don't have to be pushing into that intense zone of exercise but movement is very broad and so it's this idea of you need more low intensity continuous activity that use that uses different shapes of your body and therefore different muscles and joints than where you spend the bulk of your time so whether that's sitting in front of a computer or maybe you you have a labor intense job so you're actually working quite a bit but it's in the same position or same narrow positions that you would want to look at taking rest in other positions like just think of yourself as a constellation your body's in a constellation and be like what shape am I spending the bulk of my time in because there's plenty of people who actually labor physically they're not actually sedentary but they are using a very narrow range of their body still and so that sort of disrupts the narrative like that all it takes to be healthy is just to move more that's not really what we're saying we're saying dial in your movement diet so that you're not eating too much of any one particular food and certainly some foods you can eat quite a bit of right like it's not to say that you need the same amount of all foods because you don't need the same amount of you don't need the same volume of oil as you do leafy greens but there is a right amount for each nutrient and the same goes for mechanical nutrients too yeah and we do tend to take a reductionist approach it's easier it's faster yeah yeah it's like the standing desk so people are still sedentary whether you're sitting or standing because you're in the same position all the time yeah so Katie you're a very accomplished author in this space you've written many books how many as of now i don't know nine or ten i don't i don't remember i think it's a little bit more than that it could be i know my collection is quite big thank you so if you were going to start someone um on this concept of movement and moving more of you which book would you pick to get them there i think if you are already a regular exerciser you could start with move your dna and i think if you are an emerging mover or if you're dealing or or if you're in either group but you're dealing with like musculoskeletal things or other sort of um parts of your body that already are not working well that you'd like to address first then rethink your position those those two books together are really good set of taking you through the part by part and then introducing you to the idea or the concept of a natural movement framework wonderful how about for parents parents who want to get their kids on the track of moving from the very beginning grow wild so grow wild is my my book for for kids and families and then also just anyone who wants to understand their own body now through the lens of how they grew up or just for anyone who holds space for kids like any teachers or any health professional you know who deals with children to just be thinking about their mechanical environment giving a critical eye to the mechanical environment which is something we have not been trained to do yet wonderful and um how about the older generation where should they start dynamic aging so dynamic aging is a great book especially if you want to look at movement from this idea i mean we are we are all aging like everybody ages like that's just what's going on but dynamic aging is told also with my four co-writers who started moving there they're all had exercise practices but they were all in their 70s and or like late 60s early 70s and they were their movement diets weren't robust overall even though they were regular exercises and and looked on paper like so many of us do at that age like here's the things that are broken and here's the things that need to be fixed or altered and they started addressing their movement diet at that age and started to get those parts moving again that were sort of stuck and it tells about how their next 10 years went you know the fact that they actually became more active more flexible did more challenging things and so it's to disrupt that idea of once you're older it's all a decline physically they were good examples and still are they still are i guess it's been five years since that book was out so now we're 15 years into that journey and it's good it's good to have role models and it's good to see people actually doing it you know as opposed to just me yeah that's amazing um and there are so many little things that people don't even think about that can be incorporated just like having a manual coffee grinder um you know something that is just so simple that you can do daily that brings more movement into your life um and can help yeah and and it takes us back to the slow you know i talked about that speed thing so many of these changes are gonna be like i can't do that i have i don't have time like i don't have time so the nice thing about the book grow wild is i'm really talking about this idea of stacking your life it's like when we go slower we can choose better activities to do that meet more needs at once versus trying to meet one need out of time because that's where that's what we're running into right now is we've we're so parsed out and away from from nature where everything is layered as far as needs met per time that we're trying we're struggling to try to catch up and there's no way to catch up we can't extend the period of the day so we have to go more slowly and choose more thoughtful activities and then it's possible and it's less stressful too and it's more joyful it's more it's like it's like um we're trying to increase the nutrient density of each moment in time what are some examples that families can do that um well so if you were i mean if you were concerned about not connecting with your kids as much because they are off doing other things they're inside so much more often than you were as a kid you'd like to see them out more often they're not they're not eating as well as you would like their be spines are all curled over looking at their device it's like okay well especially now i'm not sure when this podcast will come out but it's the beginning of north american summertime the idea of throwing a picnic blanket out in your backyard or on your patio or on your friend steps and making a little picnic of just the food you were going to make for dinner anyway and bring it outside to sit down and eat it as a family you know or or with their friends like i will even do this just throwing it out and snacks are outside or when i when my kids were younger and i still do this when they come down and they're like what's for breakfast or where's breakfast it's like it's outside so i'm up before them and so they have to go outside to do the thing that they must do which is eat all the food in my house and then they're outside now and you made that transition for them so instead of letting them come down and plunk to where the bowl resides which is only 16 feet why would they ever go anywhere they know there's nothing about the environment that makes moving or being outside natural anymore so if you throw the food out there they go out there they didn't you didn't have to plead cajole beg demand they didn't have to they want breakfast they're not going to fight with where it is walk outside and guess what you won they're outside they did it and the chances of them staying there because again we're creature we're lazy creatures who want to conserve energy they're going to stay out there throw some games out there throw a book out there go invite a friend over you know just so like if you just make it so that where they end up is in those places where you want them to be and ultimately their physiology needs them to be it makes it removes a lot of the nagging like i'm all about low nagging low conflict parenting yeah parenting in that way you know just set it up so it's a celebration set up it's like magical like if if your parents may do a picnic that's magical you know and it just takes throwing a sheet a dirty blanket doesn't matter doesn't have to be i'm not talking about fancy and a picnic basket i'm not talking about that i'm just talking about just not putting it on the kitchen table because that's always where you put it right here but you know yeah and those are the things that build the greatest memories that well as adults you go back and look at and you're so appreciative yeah all the moments that i actually remember for my childhood are the things that were a break from the routine yes and so it's not about the expense it's not because they were expensive or grand it was like they were just not the norm and so you can make special celebrations with no money and no time just by doing something that breaks up a routine a little bit yeah one of the things i did with my youngest one was walk him to his friend's houses so and it was a great time to catch up and have some conversation you know on the way and build some movement and build some time together so all of that is met just by replacing getting them there in a car by walking together yeah so that's great a lot of pulling them from the road so they didn't get run over by car but you still have to parent you still have to parent but i guess it's a thing is like if you're looking for the work free solution to get your needs met that doesn't exist right and and i and i think that's like we're just like well when is it just going to be easy and happen to me never okay next question now yes okay so so once you realize that you were looking for the work that you were looking for it and that there it is it's here and that there's always a whining phase whether it's your kids or your partner or your friends or yourself once you get yourself over the whining phase because the whining phase is just the way inertia works on the other side of the wine is you know the spirits of life like you gotta you gotta get over the wine hump that's inevitable you're not doing it wrong if you get the wine you might be doing it right oh that is a great place to end katie thank you so much for this time and for you know bringing your expertise in this area and quite frankly all of your wisdom to our audience we really appreciate it oh thank you for having me i i love talking to this community and i always love talking to you so oh thank you likewise where can people find you nutritious movement dot com is is like the house for everything on social media it's nutritious movement and if you like podcasts because you're listening to this the movie or dna podcast is a good place to to explore a lot a lot of the nuances to be found in movement but while you might be able to move while listening yeah i highly highly recommend it it's been an amazing resource for myself and i know that a lot of people will find the same thing in it yes yeah thank you so much thanks for joining us on this episode of ancestral health today we hope you enjoyed our discussion on how evolutionary insights can inform modern health practices be sure to subscribe to our podcast to catch future episodes