 Hey guys, it's Dr. Nathan Cashin at Natural Family Health Clinic here once again with my weekly book review and this book is a quick one, a short one, so I'm just going to be sharing three lessons from, don't just sit there, transitioning to a standing and dynamic workstation for whole body health and this is another book by one of my favorite authors currently, Katie Bowman. You can find her at NutritiousMovement.com and she's got a bunch of books, a couple that I've already done, Movement Matters, Whole Body Barefoot, Move Your DNA and her first one was Alignment Matters. Lots of writing on her blog but this one really is about the current fad of stand up workstations. So three lessons from this book, number one, sitting is not the problem and standing is not the fix. So if you think about it, sitting at work has not really been around for that long, right? Within the past hundred years we started standing, more industrial jobs, lots of injuries occur then so you can get just as many injuries by standing for eight hours a day as you can sitting. So moving from these low desks chairs to a standing workstation is not really going to be the fix because the real problem is simply that we're not moving enough. So the problem is sitting in static postures where our joints do not move through the full range of motion, our hips get tight, our calves get short and we're just not moving the way that we were meant to. So that brings me to lesson number two which is the right way, the right way to stand, the right way to move, the right way to work is as many ways as possible. So what does that mean? Variation is really key. So sitting in one position all day is not healthy. Standing in one position all day isn't really that healthy either. If you lay in bed for a week at a time that isn't healthy. So what do we have to do? We have to vary the way that we sit, move and work. So she's got a couple photos in here and if you follow her on Twitter you see her workstation is very fluid so it will be sitting on the floor in the splits with a laptop in front of her. It is squatting sometimes. It is putting a pile of books on her desk so that she can stand at her computer. It is finding as many different ways to move and position yourself throughout the day to keep the joints moving and keep your body moving. My favorite quote I think in the book is if you want to make your body stronger I think you can fill in healthier, fitter. If you want to make your body stronger you have to move, period. That takes me to lesson number three and that is that it's not just your body that suffers, right? So we have this idea that oh I've got low back pain or oh my shoulders are hunched forward and I need to move because it's it's all about the body. Well it's not just that. The other thing that happens is we're sitting in front of these devices that are within a couple of feet from our face and our eyes which are meant to gaze off into the distance are stuck looking at the short distance and so we become very myopic. The muscles of our eyes actually shorten and lose the ability to go from that far distance to the near and this is something that I've kind of been playing with lately myself is I will just gaze off into the distance like I am now I can see the trees off on the horizon taking a break for about two to three minutes every 20 to 30 minutes so about every half hour you get up you move you look out the window you look as far as you can and allow your eyes to adjust so it's not just about our bodies it's also our eyes but then the other thing that she talks about really briefly is blood flow. So when standing was very common varicose veins became a big problem. The reason is blood pools into the lower extremities those veins get a little bit dilated there's a lot of pressure there and those veins lose the ability to pump blood. Well the reason they do is so our arteries the veins or vessels that take the blood from the heart and lung to the rest of the body work because of the heart pumping and so there's pressure this is when you get your blood pressure that's 120 over 80 or whatever it is that first number is the pressure of your blood going away from the heart but the only thing that makes it move is is the heart. The heart doesn't pump the blood back to it the way that blood comes back is through the veins which have a series of valves up and down those tubes but the blood has to get pumped up to each level it's kind of like the locks like the Panama Canal where the blood fills the gate shut they open the next one the blood fills the gate shut it goes to the next one so what is the pump it's our muscles it's movement especially our calves for those lower extremities they pump more blood through the body than anything else other than the heart so if we're not moving throughout the day our blood tends to pull down below and that can in turn lead to these varicose veins so one way to prevent them is to continue moving throughout the veins so it's not just our bodies the physical movement but it's also the internal organs it's our eyes and the veins so standing up doesn't fix the problem the right way is as many different ways as you can and it's not just our bodies that suffer I should mention also it's also our minds right there's a wonderful quote by Henry David Thrill where he talks about sitting down trying to write and not having thoughts come to him but the moment that he begins to move thoughts burst forth and fertilize his brain it's a wonderful quote really emphasizing the importance of movement not just for our physical well-being but our mental and our emotional well-being so in the end the suggestion is to restructure our work day by throwing in these micro breaks of two to three minutes where we do stretches we do movements and she's got a lot of great illustrations and images in here she talks through how to do them that you should vary on certain days you do all of them during your breaks on other days you focus on one and really try to stretch deep and taking breaks like walking meetings phone calls while you're walking around the office so restructuring the work day but then also restructuring the entire concept of work really taking a look at is your job satisfying is it fulfilling the needs that you have and maybe there's a way to work from home so that you can sit on the floor and stretch and squat and change your position more frequently so it's not just about getting a fancy expensive desk stand-up desks or sit-to-stand desks can run anywhere from 300 to thousands and thousands of dollars these are all things that we can do on a budget without having to buy anything new it's simply rethinking the way that we work highly recommend don't just stand there it is or don't just sit there it is only about a hundred pages so I read it just in this past week and I think it's really important for us to understand that movement is key even in the workplace so thanks for watching again I hope you're enjoying these please leave me comments down below if there's a book that you think I should review and if you have any thoughts on sitting and standing at work good to talk to you again keep moving I'll see you next week