You are now listening to The Model Health Show with Shawn Stevenson.
For more, visit themodelhealthshow.com.
Today, you're going to experience a masterclass on movement.
You're about to discover how our modern culture has removed most of our normal movement inputs and is messing us up.
You're also going to discover why exercise simply cannot replace movement.
You're going to understand the distinction.
Yes, exercise is incredibly valuable, but you're going to hear an analogy that's going to make all of this make sense.
You're also going to discover why more and more people need therapy today due to dysfunction with their vestibular system, AKA the system that helps you to keep your sense of balance.
Do you remember when you were a kid just spinning around for no good reason at all?
I was supreme merry-go-round pusher.
All right?
You run.
Get on.
Everybody hop on the merry-go-round.
You know Sean got those wheels.
So I run, spin us all around, jump on, and we all getting dizzy AF together.
All right?
You try and pull that today, guess what?
Guess what?
They're going to have to come find you.
All right.
You're going to be laid out somewhere to throw up all on your shirt.
Just completely run amok from your own system.
All right.
What happened?
How can we do that when we were a child?
But then, even you know, a decade later, it is completely just that system gets thrown off so easily.
And so today again, there's kind of an epidemic going on that a lot of people don't know about unless you've experienced this, with having issues with maintaining one's balance, and You know of course there's vertigo is like one avenue of that, but there's many different manifestations of dysfunction with the vestibular system.
And with that, as one aspect of training the vestibular system, we're going to uncover the importance of training your eye and vision parts and why so many people are dealing with vision challenges today.
And you're also going to learn why training your feet is one of the most important keys to preventing injuries and performing at your best.
You're going to learn how movement changes through the different stages of our lives and how to best support these changes, and much more.
This is truly a rich episode with invaluable information and insights, very practical things that we can apply, to continue to evolve, to become better, to figure out these puzzle pieces and create our own unique kind of patchwork quilt of what movement looks like for us.
And I'm telling you this is giving you a lot of permission to get better, to feel better, and This individual has been so impactful in my life the person she want to hear from today.
As a matter of fact, She is the most frequent guests that we've had on the show, her and one other person.
They're my top two favorites because I learned the most from these two and Super smart.
But also just the articulation, the illustration of ideas is so powerful.
And I'm so grateful to be able to share this with you today.
One of the biggest normal movement practices that I witnessed during my lifetime was gently or maybe not so gently being siphoned away.
Being pulled out of our culture has been the normal practice of moving in relationship to preparing our food.
I grew up in the 80s, so this is where it really went to another level.
All right, we got delivery.
All right.
I still remember the neighborhood pizzeria phone number in my head today for alicia's pizza.
I still know the phone number.
All right.
Being able to get food brought right to our door, being able to have takeout, being able to have fast food.
The drive through was crazy.
I mean, just the innovation of the drive through like you got to come in.
We're going to put a hole in the wall.
We're going to pass you the food.
All right.
Just that idea is just audacious.
Sure, it's cool as it has its benefits.
But also again, it's just continuing to take movement out of the equation of just procuring our food and preparing our own food.
And so we want to acknowledge that and to appreciate the innovations that we have.
We want to call them innovations.
But just look at where this is removing movement from our own personal equation for our family's personal wellness and wellness equation.
And so one of the best things that we can do today is to be more human.
Yes, take advantages of great resources.
Sure you could door dash a meal here or there.
You know, have some great takeout, go to restaurants.
We got all this great access.
But one of the most health affirming things that we can do is to prepare food with our own hands in our own homes and to instill this practice in our children.
And so, with that said, having great kitchen tools that make it fun, that make the experience in the environment beautiful as well, because it's a vibe like being in your kitchen, especially number one if you love cooking or you want to rekindle or even spark a new relationship with, with being in the kitchen and creating delicious recipes experimenting, having a good time, the vibe matters.
So, being able to put on the music that you like or maybe you know, for some people, this is when they put on, maybe a quote trashy show in the background, maybe this is hanging out with your friends and family, your significant other, your kids, you know, maybe it's just alone time and just a time to be in quietude.
Right, we got to create the vibe that we like, but also the visual aspect.
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And PFOA has been found repeatedly in peer-reviewed studies to contribute to higher rates of infertility, liver disease and a variety of cancers.
One study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute concluded that PFOAs are a strong kidney carcinogen cancer-causing agent targeting our kidneys.
All right.
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It was only recently outlawed, only to be replaced with another conglomeration of chemicals that was found to be equally as toxic.
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And without further ado, let's get to our special guest and topic of the day.
Katie Bowman is a biomechanist, best-selling author, and founder of Nutritious Movement.
She's written many books on the importance of a diverse movement diet and she was named one of Maria Shriver's Architects of Change.
Katie has been featured all over national media, including the New York Times, NPR and the Today Show.
And she's worked with companies like Nike, Patagonia and Google, sharing her life-transforming education around movement as nutrition.
Let's dive into this conversation with the one and only Katie Bowman.
All right.
I titled this episode for myself personally.
Instead of Katie Bowman 2 or 4, this is Katie Bowman Legacy.
Oh, no.
All right.
Okay.
It's my greatest hits album.
Greatest hits.
That's what I'm talking about. been around the world and i two people my most frequent guests two of the smartest people that i know and two of the people i've learned the most from all right jim quick katie bowman all right jim's up here all about the brain you're all about this body but they're connected of course they're connected and today i just want to crack this whole conversation open i think that we've unconsciously created a bit of a fatal flaw in relegating movement to exercise.
And I think that we're doing ourselves a disservice.
So can you talk about the concept of movement versus exercise and why we need to be more movement centric people?
Right.
Well, and it doesn't even have to be versus.
I think of them as nesting dolls.
You've got exercise and that is movement done with intention to make us physically healthier.
There's a duration, a dose, an intensity, a mode that we've picked.
It's very regimented.
But it nestles inside of physical activity.
And then physical activity is a little bit broader.
It still meets all those health criteria.
It's a way of moving that uses our musculoskeletal system.
It uses our energetic system in a way that makes us healthier.
But physical activity isn't necessarily always done just with the purpose of making us physically healthier.
It could be like, I got to rake these leaves in my yard.
So it makes me physically better, but it also makes my environment a little tidier.
Maybe you want to ride your bike to work because you're trying to save money on gas, or you want to actually calm your mind a little bit.
Do something for yourself before you step into work your nine to five job.
And then both of those live within the concept of movement overall, which is just my body's changing shape.
I'm changing locations with my body.
And when we talk about movement, if you hear the word exercise, it means that you might be in the tiniest possible doll, meaning the volume of activities that are available to you To not just make you physically better but enrich your life.
You know, going out and throw in the frisbee with your friends.
You know, on the weekends, being able to take a vacation with your family members and join in on like a long walk through the museums.
Like you're, you're strong enough to be on your feet for six or seven hours.
It doesn't.
Leave you feeling like I have to stay.
I have to stay here while everyone else goes.
When we start to incorporate a larger doll of movement, a larger container for movement, then the possibilities are endless when it comes to not only making us physically healthier but enriching, I think, our lives overall, our relationship with each other, with the environment and, with them, the way we want to physically express ourselves.
I love that.
One of the things that you really changed my perception of was how, over time, the way that our culture is structured has been taking more and more of those movement inputs out of our daily lives, right.
Procuring our food, there was a time we had to go get it, right?
Whether it's hunting, whether it's gathering.
Now, you push a couple buttons on the phone and it shows up.
And so I think one of the things that I want to advocate for us today is number one.
Let me ask you this question.
What are we missing when the culture is taking away those movements?
What are some of the big things that you see as gaps in our movement today?
Well, I think of.
Let's think of like a food.
You know I like to pick an apple because it's pretty accessible.
Like you could say like, what is an apple?
Like, what is the experience of an apple?
You know, there's picking it off of a tree.
There's the experience of holding it and eating it, maybe peeling it or slicing it.
And then there's what's inside the apple, vitamin C, fiber, water, pectin.
That's right.
That's right.
So if you were to pull out all the elements of what's inside of an apple.
And you know, and you had like a fiber supplement and you had a vitamin C supplement and pectin, you know, and here's a package of pectin, the thickening agent.
And you said that these are an apple.
Like, what are you missing?
If someone told you that fiber and vitamin C and pectin was the apple, when your relationship to the apple could be.
I mean it could start with planting the tree.
Planting the apple tree, tending an orchard, looking at it day after day.
And that's the way I really feel about movement, which is when you reduce movement to the things inside of it.
I think, through the scientific lens, we've deemed that these are some essential elements and they are.
I'm not arguing that they are.
I'm just saying that they're not the total apple.
They're not the full experience of movement.
And what are we missing out on?
Like when you were talking about this idea that we've always had to move for our food, for example.
Well, it wasn't even like going out and you know, getting a deer and bringing it back, or getting a bunch of tubers and bringing it back.
It was time with all the people, right?
It was hanging out with your bros, as my kid would say.
You know like, as you're working towards a common goal.
It was being able to read the landscape, knowing that your strategy would change by season, how you were going to accomplish this.
It's failing a lot of the time actually and reinforcing yourself, not only your physical self, but your mental self.
Here's where maybe Mr Quick and I overlap a little bit where there's a lot of brain activity that goes into moving your body.
And so when you start to look at what is lost when we outsource a lot of movement, a lot of our conveniences are really just Places where we've outsourced movement.
The intention is that I'm going to get rid of these movements that I don't want to do.
Rake my leaves, peel the apple you know like, so that I can then fill my life with more of these wonderful things more time with people to do things, more time in nature to read the landscape, maybe even more time to exercise and not spending so much time cooking.
But we're not doing that.
We are not getting rid of the movement to then engage in this really nourishing nature-rich people-rich, culture-rich time.
We're just not doing the movement.
And then we're sort of scrolling with all of the downtime and going, Where'd all the movement go?
I have no time.
It's like added more stress.
We've kind of filled it in with more busy work.
So I do like stepping back and saying what if we chose less convenient things sometimes and recognize that while we maybe aren't saving time in that sense that now I can go do a bunch of other busy work, this slow version of me moving gave me more time with my friends, more time with my family, more time alone outside, more like a better relationship with these plants over here or whatever else it is that you like.
I mean, I think of stacking wood, I think of labor.
Labor is a category of movement that no one really talks about too much.
We know we talked about exercise, but labor is also one of those nesting dolls.
I'm imagining those, the Russian nesting dolls, So exercise is actually the smallest one.
And labor is another small doll that sits inside of physical activity.
So it's like physical activity holds a couple dolls and labor is one of those.
But labor offers, in addition to accomplishing chores and things, your responsibilities for being a human on this planet.
It also moves you quite a bit.
Sometimes I think that you just, you sit around just how am I going to blow Sean's mind?
How dare you?
Right.
Sit around.
Who are you talking to?
Move around.
And you're just like, how am I going to blow Sean's mind this time?
Because that just thinking about the apple and breaking it down into its parts, it's not the same as the apple.
Right.
And so that it's such a great visual idea for us to kind of piece together, thinking about okay, I can train to pick an apple right.
I can go to the gym and like do lightweight lat pull downs like reverse or like neutral grip lat pull downs?
I'm going to emulate picking an apple so that I could train for it.
It's not the same thing as going and picking the apple because of all the other inputs that that entails, right?
It requires me to go into that specific area.
It requires me to, you know, find a tree that is, you know, fitting for you know, and using the visual part, like you said, the visual landscape, like what apple looks the best for me?
What can i reach?
Do i need some kind of a tool to be able to get up there, a ladder or something like that, or can i extend my body in a certain way that it just you cannot emulate that in the gym because it doesn't have a purpose, it doesn't have the same purpose, And then getting that apple and being able to snatch it in the recoil, you know, so I don't get slapped in the face by the branch or whatever the case might be.
And then eating that apple and all of that like directly from that tree and all the nutrients that are alive and well.
I can keep going on and on.
The peeling, right?
Peeling the apple, whatever it is, you just can't replicate it.
Right.
And so, yeah.
Well and it's very interesting just since we're on the Apple theme the vestibular system is another piece that, as people get older, they're finding they need to get physical therapy for, you know, people who get vertigo or dizziness because they don't spend a lot of time changing the orientation of their head relative to gravity.
You know, like when kids, you know kids will get in your office and they'll get on that spinny chair and they're just going to spin themselves around all the time.
They're always, you know, just trying to challenge these.
I mean, it's not the limbs.
It's not just these muscles that we've got in the gym.
It's these other systems that humans sort of naturally gravitate towards playing with.
But when you get older, you know now, when your kid's like, go on the merry-go-round with me, you're like I don't want to throw up.
You know, thanks for the invite, but I'm not going to throw up.
So now...
A lot of the vestibular system training is using VR goggles, and they put you in an apple orchard.
And they have the apples and you're supposed to bend down and twist and rotate your body and reach your arm up.
So now your inner ear is doing all these different things.
And I'm going...
Yes.
Great for therapy.
And also get yourself to your local apple tree.
And because picking an apple isn't even just sometimes you're on your hands and knees.
I grew up on actually a apple farm.
That's my my childhood was on a not like a small commercial apple farm.
And you'd go out and you pick things off the ground a lot of the time.
So it's very complex getting an apple.
And also an apple is not one thing.
You know, if you laid all the, there's not only fiber, pectin and vitamin C and water in an apple.
There's flavors and you can have one apple that doesn't have any bit of the other flavor.
And so like, let's not even limit ourselves in our mind to this single exercise.
That is what an apple is, because it's just much bigger than that.
Ah, mind blown.
This is the apple episode, the big apple, big apple, you know what?
So you know about that fresh apple cider as well, obviously.
Oh, come on martinelli's.
Martinelli's apple cider.
I'm not sure if people know that sparkling stuff that you tend to get at the holidays.
Those are from our hometown apples, very small town in california, and that's i used to drive with my grandpa and haul our apples to be juiced for that cider.
See the model health show.
Man, you've learned something big time every time.
And that's a part of that vestibular system.
And, you know, being able to regulate things as well as that visual input.
But today, our eyes are just so craving and deficient in movement, our vision and not just our eyes.
Let me be clear.
It's not just our eyes.
It's our eye brain connection.
So vision vision is bigger than just being able to, you know, to see with our eyeballs, right?
And so can you talk about why are we lacking so much movement with our eyes?
And what can we do to Get some more movement inputs and strengthen our vision, because that's going to lead to better balance.
It's going to lead to being able to read.
What a concept.
And being able to just associate with the world around us for a longer period of time, if we have healthy vision.
Well, I think the simplest thing and probably people are familiar with this is breaking up so much near work.
You know this idea that so much of you know.
If you, if you think of, if you're doing a bicep curl in the gym, you know you put a weight in your hand and you watch as you do that bicep curl, you bring your hand all the way up to your shoulder and you lower it all the way down.
That's the range of motion of your elbow.
Well, your eyes also have a range of motion inside the ciliary muscles, the focusing muscles, within the eyeball itself.
So when you look at a screen, and i should say really when you have a distance of a screen so maybe you hold your phone you know 12 to 16 inches from your face, and maybe your computer's a little bit farther from that, but the bulk of your time your eyeballs are looking at something you know within two feet of your face.
That would be um, If we imagine that bicep curl, that would be like picking up the weight and coming almost all the way to the top and then only moving from that point to the top and back down two or three inches.
They're mostly staying in this tight, constricted position, and we're barely letting the weight down at all.
And that's the eyes experience of your day would be like your biceps experience if you held that weight up all the time and only toggled it between two inches down and back up to your shoulder.
Real tight, narrow range of motion.
If you want to take your eyes for that full range of motion, you need to be um focusing on something that's really far away.
You know, going out to a window and like looking at what's the farthest thing that I can focus on.
You know you're looking for the tree across the street and then maybe you know the tops of houses, if there's mountains and you're letting your eye essentially set that weight all the way down, just like your bicep.
You know, in a bicep curl you lower all the way down.
So that's one thing.
Natural light is another thing.
So you could be inside and using the computer window relationship, but you're still not getting natural light in that situation because a portion of it is blocked from the glass.
So you got to go outside.
You got to let your eyeballs interact with that natural light.
And then also because it's not only about vision focusing.
You know um, this is sort of um.
Have you probably spoken to a Dr Bryce Applebaum?
Yeah.
You know, talking about why the brain is involved in everything is also the way our brain interprets depth perception with our eyes.
So if you're not going up and down stairs, if you're not navigating terrain, that's complex.
Um, it's not, you're not doing as much work with your eyes as you can.
So this is not necessarily a range of motion, but it's like a range of function of your eyeballs and your brain together.
There's a bunch of different things that they can do.
And so the more your landscape, the pathways that you take, are very flat and repetitious, then the less they have to stay equipped for navigating the things that require balance and stability.
So even physical balance training can help with your vision system.
And also spinal curvature too.
The more we get sort of rounded over, you end up playing with your depth perception just because I think normally you're your head in.
In the perfect world your head would be over your hips.
And so your brain has a sense of the distance your eyes are for something.
And I think the assumption is, and your body below it is that same distance.
But as we start to get curled, curled forward posture, our face is sort of getting there first.
And so now let's just say the inner mathematics in our brain are off a meaning.
It's about the vectors to the rest of the body.
So working on keeping your body back.
So as we just develop poor musculoskeletal posture overall because of our habits of just sitting a lot or doing a lot of forward activities, not really using our body through its full range of motion, then that affects our ability to do things like perceive depth, for example.
And that goes on to be a risk factor for falling.
You know um, and other things that become more important, probably as people get a little older.
Oh, my goodness, i didn't know you're gonna bring that piece up because you know, i see, you know especially.
You know kids.
You know adults as well, just like tech's neck yeah, just down here just tapping away and starting to get hyper development back here as well, getting a little, getting a little quasimodo going.
You know, quasimodo was a man of the future, that's right.
That's not right.
He was ahead of his time.
His head was literally in front of his body's time, right?
I laugh way too hard at that.
Oh my gosh, that is so funny.
That is so funny to me.
You know, and here's the thing you know, like we don't think about how our body is always making these adaptations, And many of these adaptations, you know, we might call them symptoms.
Right.
But they're like signals.
They're like this feedback that we might want to change.
And this is the great thing is like learning information like this.
We have the ability to change and to train for it, to think differently.
Right.
And that's one of the things you encourage for all of us is like think differently about your environment and yourself and how you're part of all this stuff.
Because that can instantly change things.
We have an epidemic right now, to say the least, of nearsightedness.
And it's not an accident.
We're staring at this fixed position.
For most of us, this small screen for several hours a day.
And this has never been done before.
Several?
More than that.
A lot.
A lot of hours.
And inside.
I think that we should also focus on and inside.
Inside... forward positioning, but forward static positioning.
You know it'd be.
It'd be one thing if you're doing activity out in front of you, but it's very static positioning.
So it's, and there's nothing wrong with the position.
It's the sheer volume of it.
So it's just again like I use the nutritious movement construct to explain.
You know it's like there's no.
You can have a nutrient, you can have an input a, And it's not really good or bad in and of itself.
It's about its relationship to all other ones.
So if you have this posture, that you have to use this rounded forward posture sure, maybe you're carrying something or you need to get extra muscular force to dig something up.
There's nothing wrong with the position.
It's that this has become a high volume, passive positioning in the absence of anything else.
And so you know, the most nutritious food in its singularity, will make you sick.
It's still.
You're still not nutritionally balanced, even if you pick the healthiest food and eat that exclusively.
Yeah.
Thank you for that.
Cause, even when I was in this is for the people that could see me on the video version but when I was emulating like having my head completely, my chin on my chest, looking down at my pretend phone, and it actually felt kind of comfortable.
It felt kind of good.
Right.
But being in that position for an well I don't know the term, but maybe just abnormal amount of time or just overfed.
Hyper.
Yeah.
You're just too much.
Overfed in that position, can absolutely it's going to change all the just everything that my body's doing.
It's a completely different system of communication that has to take place for my body to adapt.
And so, all right, we just took a trip upstairs.
Let's take a trip downstairs all the way down to the ground.
And this is there's a revolution happening right with this subject as well, which is our relationship to the ground and our feet.
Finally, I just saw and just saw and I showed it to my son because, you know, we've been about this life for quite some time.
My son's a basketball player, but LeBron had on some five digit shoes.
He's notorious for having the cramp like, full-on cram, like if you want to have nightmares before you go to bed.
Look at pictures of lebron's feet.
All right, just like it's not a good time, and so he he's getting into these.
And like We can achieve so much having dysfunctional feet.
But it usually comes at a cost, right.
And so we can be experiencing issues all the way upstream with our neck because of what's going on with our feet.
Hip issues, shoulder issues, you know, issues with our low back.
You know, these are more common, right?
Knee issues, ankle issues.
And so much of our movement capacity starts with our feet.
Let's talk about – and this is one of your best-selling books, by the way.
It's Whole Body Barefoot.
Yeah.
All right.
And really, you've been that person for me personally that pushed this idea into my consciousness.
15 years ago before it was cool.
Come on.
So long ago.
It's what you do.
Well, and that's funny.
That book Whole Body Barefoot.
The last couple of sentences in that book was – or something to the tune of you're not putting a shoe, just on your foot.
Your shoe is going onto your whole body.
I mean just because of the way mechanical forces work.
Whatever you put on your feet is what's loading the cells, a trillion bodies that your single body is made up of.
And so yeah, I mean it's absolutely, it's such a simple thing that can be done.
That again affects your whole body for a high volume of time.
So this is not.
If we're looking at those uh, the nested dolls, this sits out of exercise as far as movement is concerned.
You know, this is just you walking around a little bit here or there, the way you're standing, when you're standing in line, things that don't count as physical activity, that don't count towards exercise, that don't count towards labor, but yet they make up our movement diet, they're a part of our movement diet, and so when you make these environmental changes that are high volume, in effect, like what you put on your feet, You can get a lot of positive benefits for such a small investment.
And I'm talking about money.
I'm talking about time, you know, because everyone's like, I don't have time to do all the things.
It's like, well, you're going to put shoes on your feet regardless in the morning.
So you can pick one that allows you the opportunity to articulate your parts better, to stack your body parts better, little bit better, and then should you then go move within those shoes, experience Fuller ranges of motion through a lot of these parts for the steps that you were already taking anyway.
You're going to come up short every time.
You can't cram in all the different movements we need into that short bit of time, but you can expand your thinking to changing your form, you know, changing your alignment, changing your posture, changing these micro movements in all the other non-exercise time, which is, you know, 23 other hours of the day, and come up with great results.
And I think you know you're talking about athletes.
Now Athletes, really interestingly of course it depends on the sport have never really had, like all of us, feet on their radar as a body part to train.
So when you think about the capacity for how well humans have done in sport recently, we'll just talk about modern sports that we watch, not training their feet.
And I've gotten to work with different high-level athletes and professional teams who bring foot training into their training paradigm, not always yes, sometimes for increasing performance, but for decreasing timeout for injury, which is a different metric.
You get more money out of your investment when someone is not on the bench as often due to injury.
And so there's a complex relationship there, but you can get more out of your body when you bring on all of it.
And again I like to say you know, the feet really, really from like the lower leg, the ankle down is 25 of the number of parts in the body.
It's not the mass.
It's not the most massive area in the body, but as far as hinges and bones that are all doing something slightly different, the feet have, you know, this largest portion, just like the hands.
There's a lot of little pieces here.
And all it takes for anyone who's had foot injury is for like the tiniest spot in your foot to not work or feel good and you can't do anything with your whole body.
So even though those hinges are tiny, they're mighty in their impact in the body.
So definitely, if you have not done this yet, this is like low-hanging fruit.
If we're going to go back to the apple this, we're going to keep it on brand for you know a fruit fruit podcast, this is low-hanging fruit as far as general well-being it's concerned yeah, apple bottom, Apple bottom.
Yes.
Yes.
We will keep this going.
Now, if people are wondering like what relationship?
Why would pro athletes now be looking into training their feet in order to reduce injury risk?
Right.
And just as an intro as I pass this to you, our feet are picking up data in relationship to again, how we're in contact with the ground, the impact force And if there is any data that's misinterpreted, that's blunted that is blunted is a good word that is disrupted because that ground strike is informing your knee ligaments what to do right.
It's informing your ankles what to do.
It's informing the disc in your back what to do, that data.
It's an information superhighway that's taking place, And if we're muting a part of that information by cramming our feet into shoes that don't allow for that data to be communicated efficiently, that's when we're opening the door for all manner of dysfunction to happen.
Yeah, and the way I like to explain it is you know I'm a biomechanist, so I like to stick with levers in this way.
All of our cameras now are pretty... well pixelated.
You know, you get a really nice image.
But if you think about the cameras that we had 10 years ago and 20 years ago, the image that you got wasn't very refined.
It was sort of blurry.
There wasn't enough separate bits of information coming in.
So the resolution was fuzzy.
So it's the same thing.
You know one of the reasons.
Well, it's hard to say reasons, but one of the effects of having all of these tiny pieces is they all articulate to give a very refined picture.
If you step on something in in in the book, move your DNA, which is like my first book 15 year long time ago.
I use those.
Um, they're like a desktop toy of pins and you'd push your hand in it to be able to see your hand print.
Do you remember those?
Or you put it against your face and you could push into it and get the outline of your face.
Um, In that book I took a picture of my hand pushed through one of those, and then I put three pieces of tape across the back of one of those pinned pieces so that when I pushed my hand through you couldn't actually see the outline of my hand.
What you saw was sort of hand-esque with a lot of rough edges.
It was more like a blocky version of of a hand, more like Minecraft.
You know, if Minecraft was trying to draw a pig, it's like, here's two blocks.
It's a pig because one of them is pink.
So when you have all this mobility, all of these individual pieces able to relay their snapshot of the picture, then your brain can have a much more refined sense of what it's standing on.
And your hands are the same.
So imagine if I put your hands into mittens or I'm also kind of famous for duct taping my hands and then trying to type on the keyboard you can still type.
You know, it's very... blunt to use your words.
It's not really, uh, I'm not able to articulate all of my fingers to do it.
And what happens when you type that way is it's not just my hands, my elbows and my shoulders.
Now, in order to hit a key, I have to lift my elbows and my shoulders in this weird way where, if my fingers had the mobility, I would barely have to load or displace my elbows and my shoulders.
And is it's more like you're having to lurch around.
Even if your whole body is sort of moving forward on a smaller scale, your movement is not as refined as it can be because it's sort of getting blocked data instead of you know, I just keep naming shows now.
Matrix, you know, it's not the zeros and ones toggling of all this information.
It's like, here's your Minecraft pig.
Now, what are you gonna do with your hips on this rock?
And that's why it's really nice to start switching shoes and then, as i like to write about not just not only switching shoes but going up and breaking up some of that stickiness.
Because if you wore mittens on your hands or duct taped your hands for 20 or 30 or 40 years, once you free them from the tape of the mittens, even if you put on really flexible mittens, They have such an ingrained either habit or now structure that that needs to be dealt with.
Or else you will sometimes risk going through those lurching movements now with less support, where you had sort of adapted to this lurching movement.
With this block movement, a block of a shoe you remove the block of the shoe.
Sometimes for some people, it's hard to get out of that shape.
So there's some exercises and some stretches and some reprogramming to all of these parts to learn a new way of moving.
That's such a good analogy.
That reminds me of this recent study.
And we'll put it up for everybody that's watching the video version.
But of course, being aware that the toe cramming can obviously lead to bunions.
Mm-hmm.
And so the researchers were looking at ways that they can possibly help to reverse the bunions by putting these individuals into wide toe box shoes right.
And so they had a study group to put on the wide toe box shoes and to wear those habitually.
And there was another group that also did toe spreading as well.
The group that simply went from always cramming their toes together and they had bunions to and they put them into wide toe box shoes.
There was no improvement.
Their foot had been trained to be a certain way, but having the toe spread as well helped to reorient and actually dramatically reduced the bunion.
And it was like, it was quite profound, actually, the results that they got by doing that.
And just makes sense, just mechanically being able to open up that big toe again.
And so again, it's not just about like you do suddenly do this one practice.
I'm freeing myself, right?
I'm going barefoot.
You might have to actually train your feet to get back online again.
Yeah.
If you've ever been in a cast, you know you take that cast off and things have atrophied and tendons have shortened and we get physical therapy for these things and essentially that's what we're doing when we switch shoes.
Now it all depends on you know how active you were overall, what type of shoes you wear, because you know there's not just minimal shoes and non-minimal shoes.
Minimal shoes are really a collection of features and so are non-minimal shoes.
So you, if you were really really narrow shoes and you happen to have really really wide feet and you've been really adapted to those and you also did a lot of walking, you could have more ingrained habits.
So again I just like to cheerlead for making sure that you look at the whole pie and Um, although you know sometimes just dropping into a zero drop shoe is enough to really take the load off some areas.
So for some people, the transformation is immediate depending on the variable looking at it.
And sometimes it's not just for some people, for some variables, they take a little bit more um manipulation.
Yeah, that's great.
I'm a big fan of like, just putting in dosing.
And you are too, obviously, like dosing in certain things intentionally.
So what I started to do this was about a year and a half ago now was to and it's stacking as well which I love being able to do.
Because again, it's just like, there's so many things to do.
What if I stack these things together, which is to put on my Paloova five digit five finger shoes and walk?
And so I'm stacking that thing.
I'm already walking, so I could throw these on when I'm doing that thing.
That doesn't mean that I gotta put them on to go to the studio, to go to the gym, to go out on a date, whatever it is.
But I'm stacking this thing together to get, for me it was really like rehab, prehab.
So just being able to spend time, but over time I was.
I started wearing them more and more and really just wearing them around the house Right, because I'm around the house anyways, you know.
But I'm training my, my feet again to just all this data and also now, and I was just looking at this the other day, like It's really surprising to see me, versus the other people in my house, being able to like individually move my toes and Right.
It's just like this date, like it's connected.
It's all it's been connected.
But we kind of again, we blunt that data.
And so, yeah, shout out to Palooza.
And by the way, you like Palooza.
Yeah, they really feel the feel, the niche in minimal toe articulation, but with a little extra cushioning for athletic activities.
And that was something that the market was missing.
So I definitely like them for that.
I mean, I like all shoes for different activities.
When I'm doing something that's a little athletic, that's got some impact, that's what I'll reach for.
Yeah, you just said it perfectly, because I have videos of myself from like 15 years ago at the gym, wearing the early iterations of other shoes brands and just like having so little cushioning on the bottom.
And so you know, i was, i was early in the game but i just really kind of strayed away from that, like it just i don't know, it just didn't feel good to me, it didn't feel durable right, but with the paloovas it was pretty instant and i was resistant because you know just the cool factor as well, that's right.
But i was, i was walking by, i was leaving the park, and so i was at the park by my house and just you know, i was up there doing some road flow, just walking around, getting some sun, And I was leaving and it was a group of young people.
They were probably early 20s or whatever.
You could see the vibes.
They're very vibey.
They got the fashion.
They got Jordans on.
And the one who was the clear leader, or at least the coolest one, I walked by.
I had my Paloovas on.
He was like, yo, those are some nice shoes, man.
Did you just be like, thank you, Lil Blush.
Thank you.
I was like, thanks, bro.
But yeah, I could have been like, oh, gosh.
You know, but just like for somebody and it looked like they were about to go and hoop or something.
But just to acknowledge, like, we can make this stuff cool.
We can make this normal.
Right.
And I think that's what it was in that moment is like that just looks normal.
It looks like something that's good for me, too.
Right.
And so, by the way, so everybody who's listening.
If you go to paluva.com forward slash model, you can actually get 15% off.
All right.
That's an exclusive.
You got to use the code model at checkout.
All right.
So paluva.com forward slash model.
That's P-E-L-U-V-A.com forward slash model.
Use the code model for 15% off.
Huge part of my life, my family's lives.
My wife's got the little cute red ones.
I like the mesh.
They got these new sport mesh.
But then they've got some that Mark wears for when he's doing business meetings.
That's his thinking, of course, is elevating the brand so this goes outside just working out.
So there's different shoes for different purposes.
They just launched golf.
And they're golf shoes?
Low-key, they look fire.
They look really, really good.
But I've yet to test those out.
So maybe you could test those out before me.
So again, paloova.com forward slash model.
Use the code model at checkout for 15% off.
Back to you, Katie.
Yeah, that's great.
I just got a text from my 21-year-old niece.
She's living in some college town.
She was like, these shoes, these five-toed shoes are in fashion now.
She's like, you guys were doing these like 15 years ago and now everyone's wearing them.
You're trendsetters.
So I accept.
I accept.
As you should.
We accept.
It's nice to see the young.
I would say that there's definitely a surge of wellness mindedness in this younger generation.
Like really trying to do things that are good for them in some way, probably because you know people are always bagging on them about all the other non, like how much time are you on your phone, you know, and all this stuff.
But i think that there's a lot of them too, that are trying to be well, you know and um maybe, maybe there's a tiktok culture of wellness going out there or something there is that you just said it.
Some of these creators right, and that's one of the things that i will watch with my youngest son, you know, like he's got these certain YouTubers that he likes.
Obviously, Mr. Beast is the guy out here.
Then there's Jesser, who's like basketball related.
So we watch that stuff together.
But then there's some guys who are really about like fitness and health and nutrition.
And so and a lot of these guys collab with each other.
And so that's how he finds out about him.
And also Nick Digiovanni is another one that he loves, who's all about cooking.
And so now like that got him interested in making food.
Right.
And so it's this creator generation.
But the big thing is, what are you plugging yourself into?
Right.
And we all even as adults, you know, we're just big adult babies.
Right.
So we have this same programming.
We can be intentional about what we're plugging ourselves into.
And so I want to ask you, are there any other obviously spending some more time barefoot?
Yes, we can utilize some five digit shoes, but are there anything?
Are there any other things for us to do as far as like, rehabilitating our feet, helping to get that information super highway a little bit healthier, a little bit more online?
I like real simple stretches for the feet that aren't necessarily separate exercises.
It might be just the way, like if you're going to come in After an exercise session, or maybe it's just after a long work day and you take your shoes off and you're going to watch Netflix or just zone out for a little bit before you plop down in the chair, get down on the ground and sit on folded feet.
Just tuck your toes under and really.
So just to describe it would be if you tucked your feet underneath you and sat all the way down with your butt on your heels, so your knees are folded all the way.
And if your knees don't bend all the way, you can put something underneath your hips to to lift you.
But the point is, your toes are now really pointed and And your ankles are what we call plantar flex.
So it's like you know, if you really pointed your toe, how the ankle and the shin sort of make a straight 180 degree line, you're doing that with your body weight sitting on top of it.
And what that's going to do is just stretch everything out.
You've been up on your feet.
They've been at 90 degrees for a lot of the day.
You're going to take the time to.
It's not just your feet, but it's your feet, lower leg and upper, and your quadriceps a little bit.
A little stretch, and then tuck your toes under and try to sit like that for a little bit as well.
And I'm talking about give yourself 20 second or 30 second periods of time to sit like that.
And it just helps you without needing to learn a big exercise regime.
It helps you make sure that this area of your body doesn't get really stiff, because you know you're talking about this information highway, and mobility is a big part of a smoother signal.
You know, not such a clumpy signal, so you're going to just in that easy way, just varying for those couple of different sitting positions, give your toes a little bit of attention within just your entertainment time.
You know, it doesn't have to be something that you do at a gym.
It could just be inside your house.
I love that.
Getting that input when you're doing something you're going to do anyways.
What I tend to do and I, of course, like this is the thing about if you're sitting on the ground, which you were the first person to illuminate my awareness of sitting on the ground all those years ago.
And you know, of course, Kelly Starrett and Juliette helping to like Put more into the now 90 of the time.
That's where I'm sitting.
And your body's gonna give you feedback about when you need to move around, right?
It really helps you to get more movement inputs in.
And so one of the common movements that I'll find myself in are kind of seated positions is, instead of being on both knees, kind of sitting on the back of my ankles, I'll have one behind me and the other one up by my chest.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
And so I'm sitting on the back of one of my legs and the other one is at my chest.
Maybe we can put this up for everybody to see afterwards.
But essentially that allows me to like move around on that front leg and kind of like stretch around like the calf, the Achilles as well, while the other leg is getting that other input from the front of the leg, getting that stretch.
Right.
And just get those movement inputs.
And it just I find it very comfortable and very pleasant to sit in that position.
Yeah.
And it's just, you know, you're talking about hanging out with your kid and watching YouTube.
Just take that down to the floor.
This does not need to involve any extra time.
But the idea of you know taking those moments.
Maybe you're reading, you're playing a game with your family, or you're just chilling out and scrolling together or whatever.
Move it down to the floor level now.
And then recognize that you know you're in a relationship with your body and your body's asking you to move a lot more, and you're not really paying attention to the signals.
We're not necessarily refined to understand what or to interpret what asks for movement feel like.
You know, if your kid wants your attention, they have words that they use that you've tuned into, but your body has those and we're not really as tuned into them.
So once you get down there, You know, let yourself fidget.
You know, fidgeting is a sign that you need to move around a little bit.
So just roll around on the ground.
Try one leg.
If you're like I can't get in this position because of my knee, then it doesn't mean that you don't need to get on the ground.
It means that you need to find a different position on the ground that you can adapt to.
So just keep exploring.
And guess what?
That exploring is itself movement.
Even if you don't land anywhere, the fact that you are down there moving around is That's the, that's movement too.
You know, you're not trying to get anywhere.
You're just actually trying to stay in motion.
You said it.
Yeah.
Can you talk a little bit about?
Because obviously, especially in our culture, movement can change dramatically throughout the different stages of our lives.
Right.
The average kid will just say, you know, two to ten to two to eight.
They're getting so many diverse inputs.
It is just mind boggling, right?
As far as movement is concerned.
And then it's more desk sitting, more school time, more all the things, more video games.
And then from there we just set into this decline of the movement inputs that we're giving ourselves to the degree you just mentioned, the vestibular system just being like people having to get therapy for that because they can't even turn around quick if somebody calls them like what's who.
And then they dizzy.
And they fall over.
Right.
Apple bottoms, right?
So they're just, nevermind.
So with this being said, this is something for us to be aware of and start to remind our bodies.
And I think, and so my question is this can you talk about movement through the different stages of our lives?
And also, hopefully you can remind us that for me, I think, there's a big use it or lose it factor here, you know, and being able to, to the best of our ability, like you already said, Find a spot.
If it's not comfortable, find a spot, something similar, something adjacent to getting ourselves into these movement patterns, these positions.
That would be more childlike.
And the unfortunate thing is that in our cultures, childlike to sit on the floor, right?
For cultures all over the world, throughout our evolution, that was just normal.
All right.
But now we got the lazy boy and they telling you the name, they named it lazy boy.
And no one even flinched.
They're like, yes, give me a lazy boy.
Give me that.
I need that.
So please talk about movement throughout these different stages of our lives.
Well, and I'll start with, in our society right now, the idea is, you know, humans are born, they're really hyper, they need a lot of movement and then it sort of tempers down.
And then by the time you get, you know, 50 or 60 and older, you no longer can move because you're too old now to move.
And that's just biology.
But if you look at hunter-gatherer populations, what you'll see is kids move a ton and But that's really as a training and preparation for how much is needed to be moved as a I'll just say responsible, the responsibilities, whether it's job or tending or tending children.
It's this idea that you're producing.
You're producing something.
We produce a lot of documents and things now, but there's still a lot of physical things that need to be produced.
And in the hunter gatherer tribes, you're very active in middle age or outside of juvenile period.
The most active are really in hunter-gatherer populations, post-menopausal women, right?
So like this idea of it's supposed to be this decline.
It's like really, once you're an elder, you're really, really active, which really goes against the way our society looks right now, where it's almost an opposite graph, opposite on the graph.
Now, the thing that's really – so I'll go back to kids.
We are setting our adult bodies during the juvenile period of our lives.
So things like bone density it can never get any higher than how you set the cap of your bank account.
So you want children to be very robust, moving a ton, because that's almost like your capacity going forward is set by that period of time.
When you get into middle age –
I think people tend to push really, they're pushing hard in their lives in general, right?
This is the time where you're probably most productive at work building a family building.
You're just in a building period of life.
So we see that decline go off because so many of our activities no longer have that aspect of movement any longer.
So during middle age, this is when I would really work on trying to bring back some labor and into your life.
You know like, if you're like oh, should i outsource this labor or should i do it, it's like no, this is actually a good time to do it because you're actually in this builder type of life, so Your mind's going but your body isn't having to go as hard to keep up.
So it's nice to balance out the mental heft that we lift every day, the informational weights that we lift every day, with some straight up, just physical activity.
So like rake those leaves, stack that wood clean, vigorously volunteer to set stuff up even though you feel like you don't have the time.
If it gives you a chance to be with other people or participating in these other structures, look at it as a movement opportunity.
Look at it as a training session where you get to also tick off some other boxes that are of service to some other aspects of your life.
Once you get into that older adult period of time, societally we definitely feel this decline of you're not hitting the same – you're doing oftentimes the same thing that you were doing.
You know, as you begin to age, you're like, I've always done that.
This has always been my routine.
This has always been the volume that's kept me primed.
The thing to know is as we get older, we get less sensitive to all the same mechanical input.
So when you're a teenager, you do a workout and just, you know, like that's it.
You're just – swole from that little bit of input because you get a one input to one response.
It's like 100% goes across.
But as you get older, you put that same 100% in and the effort is the same.
The exercise volume is the same, but the cells are different.
So they do not receive that full 100%.
You put 100 in, you get 80 out.
And that continues as you get older.
So when we get older, as we get older, you have to work more harder and more volume to be able to maintain where you were.
So this is why it's really nice to be able to broaden your, your perception of what exercise is, because if you're containing to that one hour like, how do you get more of that hour?
Like you could just go harder or faster, and you get a little bit more susceptible to injury as you get older.
So sometimes going harder or faster isn't necessarily the best solution.
You need to go maybe broader volume, more times throughout the day, more times throughout the week.
And if all of your eggs are in the exercise basket, it's really hard to balance other activities that are in your life because you still have this.
You have whatever you built in the middle age, right?
Whether it's a family, whether it's a business or whether it's a community, a robust community.
So finding ways that keep us vigorously active as we get older, in the context of checking other boxes in our life beyond just physical wellbeing, will actually improve our physical wellbeing.
That part right there, that part that's, it's it, it It's so.
Some some of the times when you talk and you say certain things, it's just like that's so obvious.
But I just never bring it to the front of my mind.
And so I'm so grateful for you because you've got this incredible gift and ability to be able to communicate these things to make us think differently about our position.
That's another one of your great books, by the way.
But to think differently about our movement and our association with our environment.
Changes to our environment can make dramatic changes on our physiology.
And one of the big takeaways today is of the many, number one, apples, all right?
But number two is understanding that and this was just from the very beginning that all the different Apple parts is not the same as the Apple.
Right.
And so we can isolate, we could try to mimic and train and all this stuff.
We can use VR.
We can do that, but we've got to understand there.
It's not, it's not like the doing the real thing.
Right.
And that's the real thing is the thing.
And not to say that the VR thing isn't something that we're going to Adapt and mutate and become X-Men 2 and have secret powers and all that kind of stuff.
Who knows where we're going?
Who knows?
But as of now we know that we're going to be deficient in all kinds of those parts that make up the whole experience of picking that apple if we're not picking the damn apple.
All right.
So let's make this a mandate to be more proactive and being more human than we've ever been.
That is my advocation.
That is my big overarching message moving forward for the time being, because AI is here heavy.
Right now to this recording.
Hi, AI.
AI is listening and learning.
And taking notes.
And taking notes.
And your best opportunity, since AI is going to be doing stuff for you, is to use that time being more human.
Do not allow that time to get filled with more consumption.
Right.
Right.
And so I know that you've got a cake to take care of.
And you've been so gracious with your time.
And if people only knew.
Just you stepping up for me and having my back and just again adding so much value for all of us is just really special.
And I appreciate you.
I appreciate you.
You do such good work in the world.
I know everyone listening loves you.
I love you too.
Thank you.
I love you back.
Can you let everybody know where they can follow you?
Six, seven?
Six.
You can follow me at nutritiousmovement.com.
My podcast is Move Your DNA, and a new sub stack coming out, Movement Colored Glasses, where I'm talking about movement outside of exercise.
But these broader concepts of yeah, using movement to tap into these aspects of humanity that enrich our lives physically and beyond.
Love it already.
Be on the lookout for that new sub stack coming.
The one and only Katie Bowman.
Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today.
I hope that you got a lot of value out of this.
My question for you is how are you going to move differently today?
What new movement input are you going to give yourself to add to that overall nutritious movement menu?
All right.
Because again, Knowledge is not power.
Knowledge applied is power.
So take something from today, add it in, whether it is getting yourself some paloovas and starting to rehabilitate those amazing feet of yours, whether this is making the decision to spend more time on the ground and being able to again explore.
I love that she used the word explore different positions.
And it's so much easier to do when you're sitting on the ground versus a quote, lazy boy position.
All right.
Or are you inspired, like I was, to find a local apple orchard or a place to go and pick some fruit, to gather some food?
Take the family on an adventure and go and pick something off the tree or the bush, harvest something ourselves and have that whole movement, rich experience, and also have the benefit of some deliciousness thereafter.
So many great tips and insights.
This was so rich and I'm so grateful to Katie.
If you appreciated Katie as well, please share your voice with her.
Take a screenshot of this episode and share it on Instagram.
She's at Nutritious Movement on Instagram.
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So tag me as well.
I know that she would love to see the love.
We got some epic masterclasses and world-class guests coming your way very, very soon.
So make sure to stay tuned.
Take care.
Have an amazing day.
And I'll talk with you soon.
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