Movement As Nutrition

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We are movement-deficient in this era of conveniences as close as the click of a mouse or a word to Alexa. Author and speaker Katy Bowman of “Move Your DNA” and “Grow Wild”  offers insights on how we got this way and what we can do to reverse the trend. She suggests that we make small environmental changes (like limiting screen time, switching positions when we are on our computers, and more) that can help each of us integrate more movement into our lives. She also makes a strong case for diversity of movement, and she explains how that nourishes our body in ways we might not have expected.

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Listen to the episode here:

Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Katy Bowman.

Many conveniences are available to us 24/7, washing machines, cars, dishwashers, even deliveries at the click of a button or even a word to Alexa but we may have sacrificed something essential at the altar of convenience. That is movement. This is episode 313. Our guest is a Biomechanist and Speaker, Katy Bowman, the Author of Move Your DNA and Grow Wild. Katy invites us to return to movement. She explores how we came to be such sedentary people, mostly indoors for the better part of the day. This is true for adults and children alike. We all have movement deficiencies. Katy explains how this is essentially a nutritional deficit of sorts.

She also offers ideas for what we can do to change our movement habits for the better. She suggests that we make small environmental changes like limiting screen time, switching positions when we’re on our computers and such. Each of those changes can help us move a little bit more. She also makes a strong case for diversity of movement. She explains how that nourishes our body in ways we may not have anticipated. Coming up, Katy gives us advice on how to reverse movement deficiencies. She explains what types of movement we should include in our lives and the movement that she recommends the most above all.

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Welcome to the show, Katy.

Thank you for having me.

I am so excited to talk to you. I have heard about you ever since you wrote Move Your DNA. You’ve got the Dynamic Aging book and Grow Wild: The Whole-Child, Whole-Family Nature-Rich Guide To Moving More is phenomenal. What motivated you to write this book?

I have spent years working with adults who found that they were missing certain movements in their life. There’s a spectrum of movement. Some people are not active at all. Some people are very regular with their exercise but only one modality of exercise. That whole spectrum of people wound up finding their way to meet for a better-balanced movement diet. They were missing certain movement nutrients. I think that they didn’t understand one, the importance of movement and two, they needed different movements for the body. By the time they came to me, they’re usually 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 and 90. Every one of them was like, “If I had known this at a younger age or if I had been raised in an environment that better supported me physically, in this way, I wouldn’t necessarily be having the ailments or the physical expressions of movement malnutrition.”

After working with thousands of adults, I thought, “How about I then create the book so that we could start off kids on a better physical foot and explain the importance of movement?” I did it in Move Your DNA the distinction between exercise and movement because they’re not the same thing and then, “How would you raise a dynamic kid or a kid who was fluent in movement?” Because it is the environment. Kids don’t need exercise like we have come to use exercise. They just need a lot of permission and space to move. I’ve always found that through understanding how movement works, people are much more willing to create those environments and prioritize movement. That’s what this book is. It’s the book too if you wanted to start yourself off on a more nourishing movement culture. This hopefully is the toolbox.

I can relate so much to what you’re speaking about because I was a fitness professional, teaching exercise classes several days a week. I would do that and I feel like I would hardly move the rest of the day. I would spend the rest of my day seated at a computer and then maybe I would stand in the kitchen preparing a meal. I wasn’t in that movement-rich environment that we were made for. You said in your book that most of us have opted for convenience over that movement-rich environment. Can you explain that more?

It’s a cultural phenomenon. I’m trying to explain that we live in a sedentary culture. We can’t even see what movement is yet because it’s been almost all eradicated from our lives. What I mean by, “We’re opting for convenience,” is most of the technological advances that we’ve made as a culture, so many of them are tethered up with, “Reduces the amount of movement we need to do for the things that we require.” That’s it in a nutshell. We’re not used to viewing convenience this way. We’re used to viewing convenience in terms of saving us time like we’ll pick this over that because this saves us time.

The point that I tried to make in the book that I wrote, Movement Matters, is while we have been able to create the technologies and environments that got rid of the movement that used to occur, we would exchange our movement for the thing at the most fundamental level. Even though we’re sophisticated enough to create these environments, we have not done a thing about the fact that our body still required all of that movement. Meaning we can get rid of it from the environment but we can’t get rid of the need for it in our bodies. We’re stuck with this paradox where all the movement is gone. The paradox is that we’re hardwired for lots of movement and also hardwired to move as little as possible being natural beings. All of the natural elements’ default is to try to conserve energy.

As we’ve made these amazing environments, at the end of the day, we didn’t move at all and yet our movement requirement is still the same as it was. We haven’t saved time because now I still have six hours of movement that I needed and there’s no place for it anymore. That convenience didn’t save me time. It just saved me temporarily the movement to get what I needed. We all culturally have this slowly amassing deficit in our personal movement and there’s no cultural place where the movement fits in anymore.

I am picturing people who I’ve met in villages, who the women walked down to the river to wash the clothes, the whole action of beating the clothing against the rock and then coming back. You need water for your family to drink, so you’re going to go to the well. They’re using their bodies to do these things. Whereas we have tap water and a washing machine. We think we’re so modern. It saved us time but only in the short-term because we still need to move.

Not having to go wash the laundry by hand and do that walk, it then allows us to advance in other ways but we’re behind on the movement parts. It’s hard at first to see the movement that we’re losing in certain things but being a Biomechanist, which is my training, it’s how I see everything. Sometimes we opt for convenience that doesn’t get us a darn thing. One of those examples would be a key fob. The fact that you push a tiny button to unlock your car versus do the very minute motion of sliding your key in and turning it. This idea that leaning over across the seat to unlock someone’s door versus the new technological flick-a-button on the driver’s side to open up all the doors.

 

There are ways that we look for saving movement that makes sense that free up people from tasks that they don’t want to do or don’t feel that they should have to do. There’s the completely, “Doesn’t do much at all,” except now it requires that every single person who has a car also has a battery and plastic widget and then no longer do these other simple motions. There’s a spectrum of ways that different technologies move us less or more. The fact is, almost all of them are taking away some physical labor from our bodies. We need to deal with it because it’s very tied up with not only our individual wellbeing but it’s tied up with how many resources we now extract in order to be sedentary. You would think that sedentary groups would consume less but they consume more because the infrastructure required to be sedentary is quite robust.

What do you mean?

I mean that If I’m going to walk to the river to wash my clothes, I’m walking over natural ground, using rocks and river water. If I have a washing machine, everything that goes into bringing the washing machine to be is mining the earth in some other places. It’s plastic knobs, metals, manufacturing and shipping. The footprint of washing in these two different ways is quite different. It’s not only that they’re different in movement. It’s the robusticity. The infrastructure to bring you a washing machine versus you walk to a body of water to wash your clothes differs in more ways. One is movement-rich and one is movement-poor.

Every single movement technology has massive hardware that needs to be regularly replaced. We’re at the point now of consuming where we’re not recognizing like, “If you were eco-conscious or eco-aware and you’re thinking about some of these things where we don’t tend to focus so much.” In the book, in the afterword, I wrote about a carbon footprint. We don’t assess a carbon footprint as what is the standard for our lack of individual motion. The group that consumes the most and has the biggest footprint is the group that’s moving physically the least.

I’m processing what you’re saying. It’s reminding me a lot of the work of Allan Savory, the wildlife biologist from Zimbabwe. He talks about holistic management. You’re giving us a bigger paradigm from which to look at our choices not only the lack of movement but what happens when we choose convenience over what may be more natural and better for the earth. How can we step out of this mindset, that convenience, over everything?

I’ve chosen to frame it. It’s hard not to choose convenience over everything because we live in a fast-paced society now more so than ever and it’s accelerating. To keep up with what we perceive we need to be able to do, it moves fast. Convenience does save us time in the sense that we’re not considering our movement like, “I can do more in a day.” We’re all trying to meet all of our needs individually, which is why I talk so much about this idea of movement permaculture, stacking and compartmentalization. We’re all trying to multitask. If this is all just to say that, I understand. I work full-time and I have two children under ten. I understand why we make the choices that we make. I feel the pressure to make them as well.

What I’ve chosen to do with all of my books and career is to frame, “Asking people to sacrifice is very challenging. Instead of looking at it as a sacrifice, look at it as a way of accomplishing more of the things that you yourself want on paper.” I hated chores growing up. I felt like chores were extremely, to a child’s mind, oppressive in nature. They’re taking you away from what you’re wanting to do. There’s all this sense of having to as I got older and grew into loving physical fitness, movement and feeling competent with my physical body. I realized that chores were like, “I can work on my physicality right now. I can stack wood and be happy about it, not see it as something that I have to do.”

We’re in the exercise mindset that we will drive to a place to pretend-carry and throw things around but not wanting to do that labor for our own needs. We feel differently about it. There’s a psychology to when something is choice or leisure-based versus something as what I call a physical necessity. I’m trying to reframe that to say, “If you could look at the opportunities in your life that they are nourishing you when you change your psychology about it, you’re going to be stepping into your physical labor, choosing less convenience and seeing it as a positive choice. Not seeing it as ‘I’m going to choose the harder thing.’ You’re choosing the thing that’s more what you wanted.”

It’s that subtle psychological shift. Your emotions are going to be the same. Recognize the benefit. It’s seeing that it’s a personal benefit to you or worked for some people. For other people, they’re not necessarily interested only in making themselves better. Some people think on the community, societal level or species level. Identify who you are. Do you feel best taking care of yourself individually or your family, community, society or species? Because these are all different scales at looking at the problem. Frame your individual action as benefiting those populations and then it’s easier.

You mentioned that movement can be nourishing or is nourishment in a way. Can you explain that a little more?

My company is Nutritious Movement. There are two reasons I choose that as a name. One, the framework for nutrition that took hundreds of years to be established is where people best understand that it’s not only that you need to eat. Eating calories is not the only objective of food, that there’s more to food and calories. It gets more nuanced. There are macronutrients. You need to make sure that you’re eating not only calories but your calories are coming from these macronutrient categories, fat, protein and carbohydrates. Add another 200 years of investigation, it’s like, “It’s not even only these three categories. There are smaller categories of things that are coming from our food. We call these chemical compounds. I have to make sure I get those, too.”

Even if you had adequate calories and a good breakdown of your macronutrients, you can still be ill when you are not consuming 1 or 2 of these micronutrients and there are trace minerals. We keep refining this idea that there was more in eating than we realized. What defines something as a nutrient is that in its compound’s absence, there are predictable symptoms that occur across most physiologies. When you reintroduced the compound back in, those symptoms go away. When we use the word nutrient, that’s what we mean. That’s how it’s defined. Nutrients are always discovered in hindsight. Where we are with movement is where we were with food 500 to 600 years ago. We are at that, “Everyone should move more.” Which would be equal to like, “Nobody should starve. Everyone needs to eat,” which is great. There are categories of movement that we also need to make sure that we get.

Nutritious Movement was capitalizing on that framework to say, “There are actual macronutrients to movement and then there are micronutrients to movement.” It was to use that framework. The second reason I’m using it is because I believe and argue and it’s my own scientific work to establish the fact that movement is also a literal nutrient. It’s not just a metaphor of it for food. You eat a chemical compound. It’s changing the behavior of some cells through that process. While we don’t eat movement and movement is not chemical, at first, it’s mechanical. When you bend your arm, you’re bending the tissues of your arm, which in turn move the cells of those tissues.

 

As cells are bent, squished and twisted, what happens inside those cells is that mechanical input becomes chemical. On the chemical level, based on how you bend, where you bend, how you move and where you move, each one of those movements has a unique chemical created either systemically or locally and so it works like a dietary nutrient does. Mechanical nutrients are like dietary nutrients. The process is different but once you get the movement “in the body” those cells are now responding to it. We know that there are very predictable outcomes of people who are movement-starved. If you’re a physio reading or if you’ve ever gone to physical therapy, a physical therapist is saying, “When you move your arm in this way, I noticed that the form that you’re doing, the fact that maybe when you raise your arm, your shoulder blade also lifts. Your elbow flips out to the side or some minute little rotation.” Over time, that minute rotation is leaving some areas over-moved and some areas under-moved.

In the same way, a dietician will say, “You’re consuming too much of this nutrient and not enough of that nutrient.” They’re going to take you off some of what you’re eating and add in some things that you weren’t eating. That’s essentially what a physical therapist or sometimes a trainer is also doing as well. They’re looking at the way that you’re moving and saying, “You’re moving this too much and you’re not moving this enough.” Like dietary nutrients, there’s no idea out there that if a nutrient is good then an endless consumption of it is good. It’s all based on an amount and a relationship with other nutrients and movement is the same.

That’s why I say it’s a nutrient because one, it is. Two, it helps the reader go, “I never thought of myself as having a movement diet before. I know that I get exercise every day or I know that I should exercise every day. I hadn’t thought of there being more than a motive exercise like running or taking the class that I liked to take. I hadn’t thought about that maybe I have sedentary areas within an otherwise exercising body. Maybe I’m very active but I’m not getting enough of this specific movement vitamin.” This is a framework that allows people to take control over their mechanical nutrition.

I know you can’t analyze each reader but I would love to know more about these categories or vitamins in a way that some of us may have been missing in our movement nutrition.

That’s hard. The framework is emerging. Generally, fitness has said, “It’s not only exercise. You want to get some stretching, strength and cardio.” Those are attempts at macronutrient categories. Without getting too deep in the weeds here, you could consider that every one of your joints needs to be moved. If you wanted to look at something on a more micro-scale, you could look at your mode of exercise. This is why I called out that section activities in Grow Wild, “How do you assess your movement diet?” How to do that is in the activity section in Grow Wild.

If you’re doing it for your kids, you’re going, “My kid does this. My kid loves riding their bike.” That’s okay but as far as the skeleton goes, it’s not a great form of movement because the skeleton has specific loads it needs. We’re not being weight-bearing all the time. If you only swim, bicycle or do other things on wheels, it’s not as nourishing of a food or it only has certain nutrients. You have to look at like, “What are my weight-bearing activities?” Meaning upright and carrying weight for children and older people as well, this idea of like, “How much impact do I have because my bones need that to thrive?”

Do your shoulders, elbows and wrists all get moved in certain ways? Are you already showing signs of movement malnutrition where you can’t be on your wrists? It would be a symptom of, “I’ve been on my wrists so long.” People will go to exercise and they find that they can’t be on their wrists for more than a minute or two, that’s a sign that the wrists need attention. You would tend to go to physical therapy. They would give you all these smaller motions or teach you how to use your shoulders or regenerate those parts. It’s like regenerative agriculture or things that you can take that framework and put over your whole body. We haven’t been doing things that add nutrition back into our movement habits. Restoring or regenerating is helpful.

In Move Your DNA, my framework is Evolutionary Biology, the fact that we haven’t been doing what we’re doing as humans for very long. Even though it feels like this is what humans do, if you look at the human timeline, we’re total outliers of behavior. We’re penguins if you consider the bird family. That’s a common analogy to say. You don’t want to look around and assume that everyone is behaving in a way that’s necessarily suiting the body, even though almost everyone is behaving in a very similar way. I would use like, “What are the baseline human movements?” I’m also a wild animal tracker as a hobby. We often work with baseline gates, rates of walking and biomechanics to do something similar for humans although it’s more influenced by culture than it should be.

Walking, squatting or being able to carry something as you’re walking, you have the arm strength to be able to do that. Being able to cross a set of monkey bars, your hands, elbows and shoulders have a strength-to-weight ratio of your body weight. Those are simple, old categories of movement that have been across the human board for a very long time. They’ve all been slowly depleting. We had the agricultural revolution, industrial revolution and then home computer evolution. Now, we have something new, which is the fact that almost every single human, including infants, will have a technological device in their hand. What that does is it takes the movement down a notch more so than any other one of these transitions has done. It eradicated.

At the beginning of Move Your DNA, I’m like, “At this point, you can find shelter pushing a button on your phone. You can find a mate pushing on your phone. Your food arrives already made at your door with a push-button.” There are no other needs left. They’re all a swipe away. What happens to a culture when you make every single need involve only a small motion of the finger and thumb is you have unprecedented physical consequences. This generation of children will be the first one living this reality. They’re the first group in this environment and we’re the first group parenting them. It’s a brand-new landscape. It’s like we all just landed on the moon and we’re going to wait and see how it goes.

The movement deprivation is real. It’s been a while since I’ve eaten out in a restaurant. When I used to do it, you would see these children with iPads or phones. The parents are using them as pacifiers. They’re not squirming and crawling under the table, which includes movement. They’re staring at something and I don’t think we’ve realized what we’re doing to them. Let’s talk about kids. A lot of them are doing virtual learning as well. What can we do to take away the pull of that convenience and that little pacifier and get them moving again?

If you looked at it like food, then you could say, “For school, maybe my kids had to do so many hours of learning.” Look at their body position. I break down everything into variables. That’s my natural way of doing things. What is a device exactly? I think of things in terms of movement. For the eyeballs, most people don’t know this. When you look at something up close, you have ranges of different muscles in your eyes. Not only the muscles that look to the right, left, up and down. There are the ring of muscles inside your eyeballs that have to contract to focus on something. The size of that ring, the closer the thing that you’re focusing on, the smaller that ring.

Go ahead, take your arm and bend it like you’re doing a bicep curl. The closer you’re looking at something, the tighter and shorter that muscle is. When you look at something and focus on something far away, the longest position it is in. In order to use the full range of motion of the eyes, you have to be able to focus on things that are far away like a mile away, half a mile away, a quarter-mile away, 500 feet away, 200 feet away. Unprecedented times were already upon us in 2019 and then we have these new unprecedented squared. This is also in the Grow Wild activities, “What is the distance that your eyes can see and are doing during this activity?”

 

If you look at schoolwork, for many people, a computer is 30 inches or 2 feet from someone’s face. That means their eyes are sitting in a very contracted position all day long. You can’t balance the eyes but you could also look at the whole body shape and say, “Maybe the child is on the device now but do they have to be in that chair? Could they be standing on a wobble board? Can I change their workspace? Maybe every day move some things into the kitchen so they can stand while they’re doing it? Can I give them a ball to sit on?” You’re trying to break up the repetitive positioning associated with the task. The other thing would be look at the time around schooling. There used to be a recommended limit for device use for kids.

If you’ve put most of the things that all of us require to participate in the society online, even though it used to be a pediatric recommendation that there were no more than two hours of online time a day for kids for their biology. If the culture makes a different decision, then that biological guideline should hold, which would give our culture a way of assessing itself of whether or not it’s going in the right direction for the physical well-being of the people who make it up. We have a sliding baseline problem, which is like, “We can’t say that you should only go online two hours a day if we know that kids also need schooling and community and the only way to get that is online.” The baseline for online time goes up until everyone is like, “I’m still operating within the guidelines, only now the guidelines are six hours a day.” Biology would say, “It’s a sliding baseline.” It’s hard to evaluate the same thing over time if you keep changing the variables that way. It makes it almost impossible to see the decline of an entire group. Physically is my perspective here.

Keep objective tabs on it. Try to eliminate screen time the rest of the time. Maybe in your family everyone went to school all day and you went to work all day. You came home and enjoyed screen-time together. Maybe it’s time for a different what we do together since everyone’s online time is their work and school time. Feel free to adapt to other things. Maybe now what used to sit around and watch Netflix in the evening is family walk time. It’s like, “I’m online all day for work. You’re online all day for school. We’re switching to game family. Now, we go out to a park and hang out there for three hours in the night instead of watch TV.” Because that would be the balanced diet approach of going, “I shifted my online calories to meet my school and work needs versus my entertainment needs so I’m going to have to flip it.” That would be how a nutritionist would try to balance a diet for you.

Also, move before you sit down. We get up and we go right to sitting down on the computer. Changing that family culture to say, “We’re all going to need to go to bed half an hour earlier. We all need to wake up half an hour earlier because we are going to take a walk and go outside. We’re going to have a jump rope contest. We’re going to play before we all go into our online offices.” We have to be proactive in that way. That’s where you’re working against the human brain because human nature is like, “Sit there. It’s going to be fine. You’re going to conserve energy. You’re going to survive.” That worked in a different environment. That doesn’t work in this environment.

You’re going to have to muster, maybe even write down on a piece of paper and tape it by your door, “We want to walk for twenty minutes outside, throw a Frisbee or play. We will feel better if we do this before we sit down.” It’s creating these other family guidelines. You have to be malleable enough as an individual and as a unit of family, an office or whatever group of people is dealing with this issue to say, “If some things have changed like we’re all on the computer for five hours, then other things have to change too to balance it.” Don’t be afraid to let go of other routines that you had that maybe don’t work in this new environment.

I noticed that you mentioned in your Grow Wild book, nature. What is the role of nature in helping us find that balance and get the right amount of movement nutrients in?

Nature is everything. As I’m sitting here on a computer inside a building full of stuff, looking at the walls, it’s easy to look at all of this and think that this is the world but this is not the world. This is a very big beaver dam that I’ve created using other parts of nature to assemble around me to protect me. As we lose sight of the fact that humans are part of the animal kingdom that uses nature like all other animals, it’s important to remember that we’re not the only humans around. It’s challenging not to confuse your culture with humanity. There are many humans who live much different lives than the ones that we live.

Because we’re outliers in behavior, “Humans are very used to and have the equipment to spend the bulk of their time outdoors.” The abundance of movement that I’m talking about is the movements that you get when you are outside more and when you’re trying to exchange your labor for the stuff that you need directly. That would be the difference between growing some food or not growing some food or growing plants and food for pollinators. There’s a lot of movement to be found in a garden. You’re growing movement when you grow a garden.

Your audience is probably tuned into the fact that many humans have nutritional deficiencies. I’m saying that there are also many movement deficiencies. There are other experts who will say, “Children also have huge nature deficiencies.” The term “vitamin nature” was coined because what happens is you can use nature as a medicine to restore. They’re finding that in these situations kids are under-natured. When you put them back into that environment, some of their symptoms go away. As a parent or as any human trying to optimize your wellbeing, it gets overwhelming when they say, “You have to learn an entirely new way to eat. You have to cook food. You have to do and learn about all these things.” Someone adds movement and then someone adds nature. It’s way overloading. It’s too much.

What I’m trying to explain is they’re all the same deficiency. Your nutritional deficiencies are a result of your movement and nature deficiencies. If you were extracting your food directly with your body directly from the landscape, you would have the most nutritious, nature-rich, movement-rich version. As we’ve pulled ourselves away from nature, foods that come from nature and using movements that come from nature, now everything is synthetic and separate. Our dwellings are synthetic. The foods are synthetic. Meaning that they’re not whole. You can use the same way that you perceive whole food, this idea that it’s not only not packaged but it hasn’t been processed. It looks very close to its source in nature.

That’s the same thing for movements. We’re looking for the movements that look very close to a human moving through nature because that’s their source. Why were humans moving through nature? Humans are only motivated to move through nature for food. That’s the natural relationship. Food and movement have always been intrinsically intertwined. The landscape upon which all of that was happening was nature. As we sit in this ultra-modern environment, it’s easy to get confused that it’s always been this way but it hasn’t. This is an extremely rare and new scenario. There are many humans living on the planet, not in this outlying scenario.

Keep that in mind and less we get confused over what it is that we require. That’s what nature is. When you improve your nature time and increase your competency in it then you can use your nature time for food and movement and then you’re getting all of the things that you need at once. That’s what I call a Stack Your Life approach, where you’re finding the tasks that are improving all of your biological or nutritional deficiencies at the same time.

It reminds me of my friend who I interviewed, the Fit Farmer. He was like, “I don’t have to go to the gym. I’m in God’s gym here.” He’s hoeing and doing labor not in a sterile environment inside with the rubber and the machines. He can simply split logs for his family’s fireplace or work the grounds that he can better grow the vegetables he is growing. I get it. We’re far removed when it’s all of a piece. I’m intrigued and happy that we’ve had this conversation. I want to pose to you the question I often pose at the end. It can be related to what we’ve already discussed or it could be something personal that you want to share. If the reader could do one thing to improve their health, what would you recommend that they do?

Walk more.

You can’t walk too much.

I might not be the right person to ask because 20-mile walks are a part of my regular monthly thing. Walking is very important not only to the body. It’s important to communities. It’s important to shape that society is going. Active transport is included in that. You can add cycling too but walking and cycling are different. We want to make sure that the preservation of the practice of walking occurs. One way you can do that like the version of saving the seeds is taking walks and teaching your children to walk for transport, not only for fun and fitness.

Katy, thank you so much for taking the time. I enjoyed the conversation.

Thank you for having me.

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About Katy Bowman

Important Links:

• Move Your DNA
• Grow Wild
• Katy Bowman
• Dynamic Aging
• Movement Matters

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