Reduce Chronic Pain And Align The Body Through Nutritious Movement With Bam LionHeart

Why are more and more young people struggling with back pain, injuries, and chronic joint issues? Bam LionHeart suggests that just like we need to adopt a more natural, ancestral diet, we need to get back to natural movement patterns to reclaim our freedom to move with ease and pain-free. Bam is a natural movement coach and the founder of Primal Movement and today he offers insights on what is the source of our pain and how to incorporate more “highly nutritious” movement into our lives.

He discusses the patterns of movement found in crawling, walking, and running and how to reincorporate these into our daily lives. He also goes over the problems caused by our sedentary lifestyles. Finally, he suggests that it’s never too late to take on new-to-us yet ancient patterns of movement that offer benefits for today and tomorrow.

Visit Bam’s website: primalmovement.org

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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Bam LionHeart.

More and more of us are struggling with lower back pain, torn ACLs, and stiffness, and at younger and younger ages. What are we missing? Why is this happening? How can we reverse the issues associated with our sedentary lifestyles? This is episode 535. Our guest is Bam Lionheart. He is a natural movement coach and the founder of Primal Movement. Bam explains how we can reintroduce highly nutritious movement into our lives to reclaim healthy movement patterns, reduce chronic pain, align our bodies, and increase the freedom we all have to move.

Before we get into the conversation, have you made your plans to join us in Salt Lake City, Utah? The Wise Traditions Conference will be held this October, from the 17th to the 19th, in Salt Lake City. We want you there. This is the conference that nourishes in every way. You get to enjoy nutrient-dense foods, all Wise Traditions friendly, amazing speakers, and meet new friends. Join us. Go over to the Wise Traditions Conference and sign up. I hope to see you there.

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Welcome to Wise Traditions, Bam.

Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited.

Why Bam Walks Differently

What’s so cool is we’re going to talk about movement. I’ve watched you move. You don’t have a gait like most people do. You walk differently. What’s that about?

It’s an indigenous gait, or a baby gait, is what I say. If you look at toddlers as they’re first learning to walk, they have their butts out and chest forward. They’re like stomping through the world. It’s more of a natural gait that we’re looking at with humans, with the indigenous, and with the toddlers. When we reclaim the natural way that we’re supposed to walk and move forward through time and space, it starts to look a little bit different. It is because what is normal, the gait, is not common. What is common is quite an abnormal gait, where it’s more of a shuffle as people shuffle through life with their feet pointed left and right, as opposed to a more fluid and easy gait.

I’ve even heard you say something about how a more primal or a more natural way to move is to almost go from the inside out, to almost twist out a little bit with the hips. Is that right?

Very close. The best way that I can describe it is an infinity sign. All of our joints and our movement revolve around this helix or infinity sign as opposed to what we’ve been traditionally taught. It is that movement is linear and two-dimensional, up and down, forward and backward, and that walking is a controlled fall. Instead, it’s more of this wave-like movement that propels us fluidly forward through space.

If you look at movement in slow motion, crawling, climbing, swimming, especially, and then even walking and sprinting, you see these very big spirals or these infinity signs. The in leads to the out, the out leads to the in, and it continues this continuous motion. Once you start to tap into that, you feel how movement is continuous and infinite. It’s this regenerative process that creates our ability to do what humans do well, which is walk forward and run forward for long distances.

What you’re describing sounds so foreign. I know you said you’ve come upon it in part through your studies. You see how children move, how older people move, and how indigenous peoples move. Is that right?

That’s right. If you look at the way that toddlers and we naturally teach ourselves how to move, which is all purely instinct, we have these rotations, big spiral-like movements. If you look at a lot of indigenous populations who don’t have a modern lifestyle with chairs or being inside all the time, they also have a lot of rotational spiraling movement. If we also look at elderly populations who are still keeping their locomotion alive and thriving, you see that their joints have a little bit more range. They express a fuller range of movement that is not as common as today, as you see when you just walk down the street in the city.

Why Sitting Is The New Smoking

I have heard that sitting is the new smoking. I feel like you’re aligned with that thinking.

Yes. Sitting causes a lot of problems for the human body, but it’s not specifically sitting or being sedentary, like we are right now. We’re technically sitting, but it’s when we sit in the traditional chair that it puts us at these 90-degree angles. The chair is traditionally made for somebody who’s about 5’8” around there. The chair is something that people have to conform their bodies to. When we conform our body to an unnatural structure like a chair that puts us in these 90-degree unnatural positions for our body, it forces us to compensate and hold on to this position with our hip flexors.

Wise Traditions | Bam LionHeart | Movement — Movement: When we conform our body to an unnatural structure, like a chair that puts us in a 90-degree position, it forces us to compensate and hold on to that position with our hip flexors.

That’s what I was thinking. We have tight hip flexors. People are so messed up right now, like young people with back pain, torn ACLs, and all these things that I don’t feel like people used to deal with so much before. Am I right?

We didn’t use to deal with that. If we look at the statistics, the amount of injuries, like chronic injuries, acute injuries, low back pain, ACL tears, and all of this, is steadily increasing. It’s rising as we go deeper into our modern lifestyle. We have to ask the question, “Why?” One of the reasons why I do what I do is because I’m asking the question, “Why are we experiencing this as humans? Why are more of us experiencing this at an earlier age as well?”

Going back to sitting, do you blame the chair?

I blame the chair for a lot of different things 100%.

We go through elementary school, middle school, high school, college, and then our careers, most of the time seated in that position you were describing, the 90-degree angle.

The best way that I can describe our relationship to the chair is bringing us back to the original position that the humans developed in, which is our safety position. That’s the fetal position. We all developed in our mother’s womb in the fetal position. If we ever get really tired or there is something that is going to fall on us, we subconsciously revert to the fetal position because that’s where we’re safest. That’s where we’re most protected. It’s very natural for us to be in that position. When we’re sitting on the ground, these are small fractals or small expansions of the fetal position itself.

The chair takes the fetal position and completely neglects it, or puts us in a position that is not natural. If the chair position were natural, we would develop at 90-degree angles within our mother, but we don’t. We develop in this almost Fibonacci, spiraled, compressed position in our mothers. The human body compresses and expands in a very specific pattern. All of our sitting, standing, walking, running, and jumping patterns are an expansion of the fetal position. Anytime we move out of that natural pattern, that natural sacred geometry, it asks our body to do a lot more work than it’s supposed to.

Sitting, standing, walking, running, and jumping are expansions of the fetal position. Anytime we move out of that natural sacred geometry, we ask the body to do more work than it is supposed to.

The chair is not necessarily the enemy or bad, but it’s the amount of time that we sit in a chair. It is the amount of time that children are sitting in chairs in school. It is the amount of time that normal adults are sitting in office chairs working for their job. It’s the time that we spend in these unnatural positions that creates the compensation patterns, the tightness in our hips and our necks, the rounded shoulders, and the tucked under tails. All of these things that most people are experiencing come from our lifestyle choices.

Let’s say we’re not in school. We’re not working that hard in the office. When we come home, we’ll get on a couch or into a chair. Like you said, we’ll round and get in that banana position. I’ve heard you call it.

We call it the banana because we don’t want to look like a banana. That’s what happens if you spend a lot of time on the couch or sitting in a chair. When you go to stand up, your nervous system and your tissue adapt to that. Our nervous system is constantly learning and wondering, “What do we need to do?” If we’re constantly going to the couch or in the chair, our nervous system is listening. It says, “We’re going to get strong in that.” It develops strong and tight hip flexors, a strong front of the neck, and keeps you in that banana position. When you go to stand up and walk, these unnatural shuffle walks happen because you’re in this banana position. You’re in a seated position, and you’re trying to go into an athletic walking position. They’re confusing for our nervous system.

Analyzing The Movement Of High Performers

You’ve also analyzed the movement of high performers and even people who keep moving and keep their mobility up as they age. What do you notice about the way in which they move? Are they avoiding chairs? How did they understand this spiral way of moving, do you think?

It’s important to acknowledge that the spiral movement is natural to us. It’s usually before kindergarten. If anyone can imagine, if you have a park, or even a kindergarten playground, you will see kindergartners sprinting, like beautiful Olympic sprinters. They weren’t coached. They weren’t taught. It’s just a natural phenomenon. It’s how instinctively we teach ourselves because it is the most efficient way to move forward through time and space.

Most children around the kindergarten age and high-level athletes all do very similar patterns. These patterns are not necessarily talked about in the institutional way, like how we talk about gait from the institutional models. It is linear and two-dimensional, even looking at it from the side. When you look at running from the front, you see this almost helical, spiral-like movement. You wonder, “Where does this come from? How can we maintain this as we get older?” If I can maintain that sacred spiral, I can maintain my ability to walk forward through life. Walking is the foundation of who we are.

We might need to revisit how we are walking.

At times, if you had a traditional upbringing, where you spent a lot of time sitting in a chair, you didn’t have the opportunity to develop your walking gait. As humans, we’re supposed to develop into our adult lives, walking, moving, squatting, and hinging, working with our bodies as they change and mature. We should also be in concert with that. If we break that by being sedentary, as our body grows older, then we’re going to have to reclaim that natural movement. It’s almost like we weren’t a part of the process as we evolved.

The Right Movement For Gym Sessions

What about going to the gym? What if I’m like, “I like this idea. I need to move more naturally. I’m going to go work out and do some resistance training.”

Going to the gym is a great thing. It’s ultimately a supplement for what we’re lacking in our lifestyle in our current day. We have this idea that muscle equals strength. If I just have a lot of muscle, then I’m going to be healthy. There is some truth to that, but the muscle is there for movement. It reverses how we’re supposed to evolve as humans in a natural setting. If you look at children, even day labor workers, or indigenous people, they have strong musculature. They have that because their movement environment or their movement inputs ask their body to create certain musculature. What we saw and what we see aesthetically is saying, “We need muscle. What’s the best way to make muscle?”

We put our movement in service of muscle, when in a natural setting, muscles are always in service of movement. If we understand that movement is the foundation of our life, and not only is it movement but locomotion or bipedal walking, and that going forward is our ultimate movement as humans, that is where everything revolves around. The pyramid starts to make sense to us. If we break that pattern and say, “I don’t care about movement or walking. It’s not important to me. What is important to me is having muscles,” that’s when we can build up a large structure on a house of cards. It can easily crumble.

We put our movement in the service of muscle. But in a natural setting, muscles are always in service of movement.

You’ll see that time and time again, people go to the gym and build up all this muscle, back pain, knee pain, or shoulder pain. They come out of the gym because the gym is hurting them. They have to go into rehab. They have to rest until their body heals. They go back into the gym. It’s this recurring cycle that should raise red flags in most people, saying, “This way that I’m going about this is not in alignment with the actual biology or anatomy of the human.”

Can you give me another illustration or parallel of our misunderstanding, how we’re putting it backwards by saying we need muscles for movement instead of movement for muscles?

Another way to think about that is that we should be strong, or we should have a lot of muscles. Strength is how we know that we are fit or athletic, but the entire human body is designed anatomically so that we can walk and run. Locomotion is much more important than how much you can pick up, how much you can press over your head, or how much you can bench press. Anatomically, we’re designed for how fast you can run. How long or how far can you hike up a hill? That’s much more important anatomically to us and more aligned with our structure than how much you can bench press or how much you can back squat. When our primary focus becomes strength output, we go against the grain of our natural anatomical makeup.

Why We Should Always Sprint

Have you heard of that guy? I can’t think of his name off the top of my head. He suggests that if we all just sprinted a couple times a day, and not even for very long, we can have exactly the physiology that we’re desiring. He’s proven it. His body looks great. He’s over 40, I think, but he just says, “Just sprint and watch what happens.” Do you think that’s true?

I do think it’s true. It’s almost that we have an idea that we do have to go into the gym. We do have to develop strength because we need to be strong. Inherently, I believe that we are born extremely strong. If you’ve been around babies or toddlers, with the things that they can pick up and the places that they can climb or jump off of, they’re almost like extremely resilient. They have this natural strength that they exhibit because their nervous system and their movement patterns are really good.

If I had to do it again, or if I did have children, it’s how do we protect and maintain this? It is by continuing to run, continuing to sprint, continuing to walk and move forward, trying not to sit in the chair or be as sedentary as possible, and just giving our nervous system and our body these little doses so that it keeps it alive. When we stop doing those things, that’s when we start to lose them.

A lot of people do stop. I heard a stat recently that most people over the age of 35 never sprint again. I guess they don’t have a need to, or they don’t realize how useful it would be. I don’t know. Why do they give up, do you think?

It’s because we haven’t prioritized our ability to sprint. We’ve prioritized things like strength training and our aesthetics as opposed to wanting to be fit and in shape. Aesthetics are more important than your ability to move. Because we have airplanes, cars, and bicycles, your ability to run or even sprint doesn’t necessarily make a lot of sense if we live in our modern age. If all of a sudden, those things were gone, or you were in a situation when you did need to run and sprint to help somebody or to run away from something for some reason, you would realize that this is foundational to our ability to be alive and be a human.

Reconnecting With Our Kinesthetic Intelligence

I’ve noticed as I’ve traveled around the world that the most isolated indigenous people groups don’t have gyms, but they’re still in great shape. Women in the Omo Valley are able to carry huge jugs of water on their heads without having worked out to be able to do that.

We have phrases or analogies to this. The one that I grew up in martial arts world said, “He’s got farm boy strength. He’s got farmer strength.” We know that there is a natural connection with manual labor or doing work outside with our hands that equates to some really strong people that haven’t been in a gym or haven’t done traditional exercises. Exercises are a supplement for what our lifestyle has missed.

Exercise in and of itself are a supplement for what our lifestyle has missed.

My favorite image that I create or that I’ll tell people is that you don’t see indigenous people exercising. If you were an indigenous culture or indigenous tribe and you started going to the down and doing push-ups and burpees in front of everyone, they would look at you like you’ve got mental problems. “What are you doing? Why are you doing this?” It’s not for any task-based reason. It doesn’t make sense in a natural and indigenous environment. It’s because their life is a movement.

In order to live, they have to move. We’ve broken that cycle because we don’t have to move to garden or to hunt. You just have to walk to the grocery store. You can just use Instacart, and you can get all your food. It’s not that important. To make money, you have to type with your fingers. The amount of movement that we have to do to survive in our modern day is extremely low. We’re back in a natural setting. In order to survive and thrive, you have to be able to move at a very high level for a long time, throughout our entire lifetime as well. Our movement was precious to us.

Given that we do live these modern lives and are mostly making money with our fingers by typing away, doing emails, or whatever it is, maybe that’s why that supplement of working out in the gym is so important to us, because we don’t need to garden, hunt, or gather. What do you suggest? Is there a remedy, or do we just live in that tension?

I would invite people into the analogy of food. It wasn’t too long ago that we started to understand our macros. There’s a certain amount of protein, carbohydrates, fats, or sugars where there’s an ideal setup. That was our very rudimentary understanding of nutrition and diet. As we start to evolve, ask more questions, and see more people who are sick, we start to say, “It’s not just about what we eat, but it’s about the qualities of them.” That is extremely important.

Just going to the gym and doing exercise is important, but it’s about how we exercise and the quality of our movement, just like the quality of our food, that is essential to us. In order to engage with a high level of quality of movement, we do have to have an underlying awareness and education on what types of movements are less nutritious for the body and what types of movements are highly nutritious for the body.

As it turns out, the movements that are highly nutritious are the same ones that we did when we were babies from 0 to 2. It was lying on the ground on our stomach and our back, crawling, walking, single leg work, a lot of rotational types of movements, climbing, and jumping off of things. The movements that we express as children are the ones that keep us alive and vital. With the ones that are a lot of high-resistance training, there is a high risk, high reward for those movements. There’s a give and take with all of that.

I saw this little one-year-old at this event I was at. It was so cool to watch him maneuver. He was crawling across the stage and getting near the edge. He didn’t go over it. Some people were watching him, thinking, “Where’s his mom?” He was looking at it. I think he was trying to figure out, “Should I lower myself?” He was doing the movements you’re describing, Bam. He was doing it all naturally. He was having fun. He wasn’t like, “My side, I shouldn’t have done that.”

When we look at children, especially toddlers, we see that they communicate with the world, with others, and with themselves through the language of movement. They have a kinesthetic awareness of their body. That is foundational to their ability to operate in the world. The moment you start to learn language, communicate, and go through more of our rational mind, that’s when we start to move away from that limbic system and use our kinetic, instinctual feelings to communicate with ourselves, our environment, and the rest of the world.

We can reprioritize that in schools and say that kinesthetic intelligence, our ability to move, feel, and understand how to balance and navigate our environment, is just as important as arithmetic or our vocabulary. Kinesthetic intelligence is foundational to our ability to live to be able to move through our life. We just don’t prioritize it right now.

Difference Between Nutritious And Non-Nutritious Movement

You’re giving me lots to think about. I want to go back to what you were saying a moment ago about the difference between nutritious and not-so-nutritious movement. You were saying nutritious is the one that invites us to move more naturally, and the not-so-nutritious may be the resistance training, for example. Do you have other things that you would categorize as nutritious or not-so-nutritious?

The easiest model that we can look at, and this is what we use with Primal Movement, is what is the natural way to move? The natural movement is that all movement is spiral. Most of it is unilateral and rotational. If we think about walking, it’s from one side, the left side, to the right side. We’re using one hand or the other. When we’re throwing or when we’re running, we use the diagonals of our body as opposed to both our arms and both of our legs. Our spine is also bending and rotating a lot. Movements that are highly nutritious allow our spine to bend and rotate. We usually use one side of our body primarily, and it’s spiral in nature. Oftentimes, it’s a fractal of the locomotion or a fractal of the fetal position.

The non-nutritious movements are ones that require our spine to be stiff, rigid, and upright. They ask us to use both our left sides and our right sides at the same time. Those movements are going to be more unnatural for the body. They’re very few and far between when we use those in our lifestyle, in our natural environment. Most of the time, we’re doing these spiral side-bendy spinal movements where we’re using our left and our right independently, like crawling. Our left side and our right side are doing these cross patterns where our nervous system has to understand how to work our body in concert with one another, as opposed to doing a linear up and down type of two-dimensional type of movement. The two-dimensional movements are really difficult for the body.

You mentioned crawling. That makes me think, didn’t the American Medical Association suggest that crawling is no longer a typical milestone for an infant?

Yes. It was the CDC. The CDC removed it from the developmental milestones for humans. It was extremely concerning because of how important crawling is to our ability to walk and to run, and to use our left and our right to move forward. At one time, crawling develops the backside of our body. It teaches this cross-body spiral pattern that we use with upright walking. In order to upright walk, we have to go through crawling on a horizontal plane to understand this spiral movement and do this entire pattern. Then, we get the strength to end up doing that on two feet, which is a miraculous thing that humans do.

We are the only mammal that really does this bipedal walking. It’s a miracle that we do it. In order to do that, we have to go through the fundamental stage of crawling. If we don’t go through that fundamental stage of crawling, when we go to upright walking, that’s when we get the shuffle walk or the side-side waddle walk that you see a lot of people do. It can be harmful and degrade our joints and our connective tissue much faster than if you’re moving efficiently from an early age. Crawling is fundamental to us being athletes, or us knowing how to move forward through time and space efficiently.

Why would they say, “Let’s take this milestone out.”? I don’t understand.

I don’t understand either, but it shows globally that we are lacking in our understanding of what the natural way for humans to move is. Even being okay to have our children sitting in chairs for a prolonged period of time through our educational years or adults sitting in chairs throughout the entire day working in an office shows that we are ignorant of what is necessary or what the movement nutrition is that we need to thrive and to succeed. When they remove that, it shows that we don’t really fully grasp what it means to move naturally as a human and how we can protect that.

How did you come to this understanding, because it is profound?

The first time that I came to this understanding was through martial arts and jujitsu. On the mat when you’re training movement, you become very good at saying, “This movement is helpful for achieving my goal,” or “This movement is not helpful.” You start to break somebody’s body down into unnatural and unsafe positions, and you exploit that. You understand how to take somebody’s arm and contort it in a way where the rest of their body becomes weak. When somebody does that to you, you understand how to put your body in positions that are strong and safe for you.

They are strong and safe positions for my joints. When you start to understand that on a martial arts level, then when you look at exercises or normal lifestyle movements, you start to see, “This exercise is putting my body in a not safe or not an ideal strong position. I don’t want to train that on my nervous system.” You start to see more of your body and your movement from a neurological standpoint and less of a muscle-strong two-dimensional standpoint.

Once I saw that in martial arts, I asked a ton of questions as to why people are getting hurt, why people are unable to do the things that I was able to do at an early age, or why some athletes are good and some athletes are not. This rabbit hole led me down to learning from so many amazing teachers like Andre Miller, Eric Goodman with Foundation Training, Peter Gaskill, Esther Gokhale, and Jose Boesch with GOATA. There are so many other teachers that have helped me understand and have moved all of our awareness closer to answering the question of how humans move naturally.

Reclaiming Your Natural Movement

I want to play devil’s advocate here for just a minute. Most of us, honestly, and maybe even you, too, have spent all those years you were describing in the chairs in school and the chairs at work. Is it too late for us? Are you saying, “Forget it. We’re all moving wrong. There’s no way we can turn things around.”?

No. At any time that you want to start moving yourself and reclaiming your natural movement, you can do that at any age. It is just like if you didn’t know about diet, and you were eating a very poor diet. When’s the time to start? It’s right now. It’s right here. When you start that, you’re going to start to feel better and better and become this upward spiral as opposed to a downward spiral of feeling a little bit worse, a little bit more crunched in your body. We can age gracefully with our movement. We can invite anyone into that practice at any time. The best way that I would invite readers is to start at home and look at your relationship with the couch. Look at your relationship to the chair. How many times have you gone down from the floor and up, inviting you back to the floor?

Back to the Floor, that could be a movie. It is like Back to the Future. I like it. You’re inviting us to reconnect. In a way, all the styles of movement that you were saying the child or the toddler has sound like a lot of fun to me.

It’s so much fun. Moving well and moving with freedom in a natural way feels like I just have so much joy because it’s fun to rest on the ground. It feels good for my hips. It feels good for my mobility. I get my mobility when we’re doing this show, where naturally, it’s good for my ankles, for my knees, and for my hips. When we get up from this show, sitting on the floor, I’m going to feel a bit more ready to move. My nervous system and my mind are going to feel that. I’m going to want to run.

I’m going to want to go climb something, even go to the gym, and do some fitness. It’s the very same as if you look at the kindergarten playground. You would say, “Why are these kids running? Are they doing this because they’re trying to improve their cardiovascular health?” No, it’s simply because they want to feel the wind on their face. They want to feel the grass underneath their feet. They want to feel their body move because movement makes us feel really good. Good movement should make you feel good.

You don’t know how many people I’ve talked to who were in the CrossFit movement or own gyms. They were like, “Something’s got to change.” Though they looked strong because they had all the muscle, they were struggling with a lot of pain.

It’s common for so many people to be struggling with pain. Because so many people are struggling with pain, we have this idea that it’s natural or it’s okay.

It’s normal aging.

Just because it’s common doesn’t mean that it’s normal. It’s common for a lot of us to be suffering from a lot of chronic pain, but it’s not normal for the human condition for us to be suffering in these ways. We can start to recognize that and ask those questions. Why am I experiencing this knee pain? Why am I experiencing this tightness in my hips or my shoulders? It’s difficult for me to squat to the floor or even reach down and tie my shoes. It feels like labor, just tying my shoes or picking up my kids. Why is that?

When you start to ask those questions and look for answers, they’re out there. People like me are trying our best to provide at-home and easy solutions where people can reclaim their natural movement. You can squat down to the floor, no problem. You can pick up your kids. You can run outside with your kids and not feel in pain, out of breath, or out of energy because that’s naturally how we’re supposed to be living.

A Story From Pain To Pain-Free

I have two more questions for you. One is not a question. It’s a statement. I want you to tell me a story of someone that you’ve worked with that you’ve seen go from a situation of pain and some everyday tasks to pain-free. I know that the goal of Primal Movement is to help people be strong, pain-free, and healthy.

One of my favorite clients is in his mid-50s. He had the common upbringing of in-school college chairs and then working at a desk job. He luckily got to retire in their 50s. He did a very common path of retiring in their 50s and said, “I just want to spend a lot of my time playing golf.” When he reached out to me, he said, “I can’t play golf because every time I play golf, my back hurts. I love golf, but my body hurts. I cannot live life anymore because the thing that I want to do, my body no longer allows me to do.” We say, “Our goal is to get you to play golf.” Is golf a natural thing? Not really, but it’s a beautiful thing.

It seems like it gets you twisting like you’re saying that.

Like surfing and golfing, we have so many ways that we can express the joy of being alive and as humans. After three months of working, the back pain subsided. The chronic back pain went away. We slowly started to come back into golfing. When it’s not snowing outside, he’s golfing. He’s feeling great. He’s having a good time. What makes me happy is when we move beyond a place of “I can no longer do this because my body hurts,” to “I can go and reclaim my hobbies. I can go play pickleball. I can go play golf. I can go for a walk. I can go outside and play with my kids. I don’t have to worry about my back or my knee hurting or anything breaking.” It’s my favorite thing when I can help somebody facilitate their healing so that they can reclaim and do the things that make them feel alive.

Having Dinner On The Floor

I can only imagine how satisfying that is. I want to pose to you, Bam, the question I love to pose at the end of the show. If the reader could only do one thing, and I usually say to improve their health, but in this case, to move more efficiently, more beautifully, and more naturally, what would you recommend that they do?

The number one thing that I recommend, especially if you’re a mother or a father, is to invite your family when you’re around the dinner table to put your dinner table on the floor and to share your meals on a cushion or a small, seated raised thing. Make that ritual a ritual that is not only nourishing for your community or your family and for your body with the nutrition, but also for your joints at the same time. If you do that, maybe once a day or twice a day with your families, that’s going to start to move you in the direction of healing, regenerating, and reclaiming your natural ability to move, to squat, to reach on the ground, and to walk pain-free.

Wonderful, Bam. Thank you so much. This has been a pleasure. On behalf of the Weston A. Price Foundation, thank you.

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

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Our guest was Bam Lionheart. You can visit his website, Primal Movement, to learn more. I am Hilda Labrada Gore, the host and producer of this show on behalf of the Weston A. Price Foundation. By the way, you can also find this show on YouTube. You can see Bam for yourself. He lives out what he talks about. Remember that you can subscribe to this show on your favorite platform or get our app.

Just go to the Apple store, for example, on your iOS device or your Android device. Go to the little search bar for wherever you get your apps, put in Wise Traditions, and you will find us. That way, there’s no middleman. You can share the episodes whenever you’d like. Thank you so much for reading, my friend. Stay well and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

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The content on this show is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended to substitute for the advice provided by your doctor or other healthcare professional. It is not intended to be, nor does it constitute, healthcare or medical advice.

About Bam LionHeart

Bam Lionheart is a natural movement coach and founder of Primal Movement. His work helps others reclaim healthy movement patterns to reduce chronic pain, align the body, and increase the freedom we all have to move.