Katy Bowman is a body movement specialist who has written several books, including the bestseller, Move Your DNA. For decades, Katy has studied the science behind how our bodies react to living a sedentary life. All of her research has led her to some revolutionary ideas about how to stay a bit more active in almost any situation.
Whether we’re hiking a favorite trail or mountain biking for the first time, one of the benefits of adventuring outside is that we get to move our bodies. Katy Bowman is a body movement specialist who has written several books, including the bestseller, Move Your DNA. For decades, Katy has studied the science behind how our bodies react to living a sedentary life. All of her research has led her to some revolutionary ideas about how to stay a bit more active in almost any situation.
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Shelby Stanger:
Whether we're hiking a favorite trail or mountain biking for the first time, one of the benefits of adventuring outside is that we get to move our bodies. But we don't have to run marathons or climb mountains to incorporate some physical activity into our day.
When we're eating, sleeping, or hunched in front of our computers, there are still opportunities to move. This idea is at the heart of Katy Bowman's work. She's a biomechanist, a body movement specialist. Katy has written several books including the bestseller Move Your DNA, and she's been named one of Maria Shriver's Architects of Change.
For decades, Katy has studied the science behind how our bodies react to living a sedentary life. All of her research has led her to some revolutionary ideas about how to stay a bit more active in almost any situation. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI co-op Studio's production.
Katy Bowman, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Katy Bowman:
Thank you for having me. I'm so excited.
Shelby Stanger:
We're excited to have you. Right now a lot of people say movement is medicine, and you're like, no, movement is essential for just living.
Katy Bowman:
Yeah, it's tough. I mean, movement is medicine. That idea is like you could fix yourself, make yourself well, through movement. And so, yes, it can be used medicinally, but it's more like food. Medicine is something that you take when there is a problem that's arising, which is different than just not having enough basic nutrition in the first place. I'm trying to put movement back into the nutrition category, less the medicine category.
Shelby Stanger:
So, on this podcast, we speak to a lot of diehard adventures. So movement is rock climbing and jumping off things and surfing big waves and hiking long distances. I'm really curious to hear what your definition of movement is.
Katy Bowman:
Right. Well, it's huge. Right? So, all those things that you listed, those big adventures, are also movement. Right? So, movement is anything that requires that your body change position. So, exercise is a particular type of movement. Physical adventure is a type of movement. Sitting in your chair is a type of movement. Sitting on the ground in a yoga class is a type of movement. There's not really good movements and bad movements. There's just a movement diet, and you have to figure out...
Because if we talk about adventures, adventure is movement. But one of the things I do like to bring up is a lot of... And this came up maybe 10 years ago was the idea of even people up there who are getting regular exercise were almost sedentary all of the other time. We might get more movement than people who don't exercise at all. But there's a lot of non adventure part of life that if it was done in more of that wilderness setting, fake or real, requires more of those mundane movements.
If you've ever gone camping, not adventure camping, but car camping, just that is more movement. Right? You have to set up your house. You have to go wash your dishes instead of just turning and washing them at the sink. You got to go haul some water. And I do think that a lot of people enjoy the wilderness and that time out without maybe realizing that it's because it adds this movement pressure that gets them moving without having to willpower it for something like exercise.
Shelby Stanger:
For years, Katy has researched and written about how movement influences our health and our longevity. Over time she's developed a model called SLOTH. It's an acronym that stands for sleep, leisure, occupation, transportation, and home. We're pretty much always in one of these places, and Katy has come up with ways for us to move and to stay limber in each setting. Most people don't think about how they can incorporate movement into their sleep, but according to Katy, it can be done.
Katy Bowman:
It's like how do you exercise in your sleep? We're not going to be able to rest. So, this is why that broader definition of movement is so important. If you think about what the body is used to from like an evolutionary perspective, taking rest is really using your full body to get all the way to the ground and all the way back up again. Right? Even just simply to get to the place that you take rest, whether it's sleeping or just sitting, has always been taking you all the way down to the ground.
Now this doesn't seem like such a big deal except that a lot of people have a hard time getting to and from the ground. That's something that people will get physical therapy for. Right? Like their hinges of their knees and their hips and their ankles don't fold that way because we've gotten rid of really traveling any distance beyond chair height. We've gotten rid of that in our environments. Right? Your chair heights are all going to be just at 90 degrees of the knees and the hips. Our bedding is at 90 degrees or less as beds get taller And so, we lose the ability to carry our body weight, squat it to the ground and back up again.
So, just resting on the ground, sleeping on the ground. I roll my bed out every day, and it's very plush. It's got sheepskin in it, and it's got sheets and a nice cushion. I'm not an ascetic here, but I do opt for lots of pressure. It's a luxurious bed, it's just on the ground. And I have to physically set it up and I have to physically put it away just a lot of parts of the world do every day. I know it's sort of radical here, but it's not unlike the bedding that you set up when you're camping.
It's just like you make a bed roll, a luxurious bed roll as I said. And then you're on the ground and your body is being moved. The pressure of the ground, like being pushed on. If I lay on the floor, that's going to press on my muscles in my body. It's much more like a massage therapist that you want versus getting on a soft plushy bed where there's very little pressure.
It's sort of like someone barely touching you in a massage. The floor is not so accommodating. The movement has to come from me. When you're on a big thick mattress, the movement comes from the mattress. The mattress changes shape and yields to accommodate you not moving. Now I have to move to accommodate the floor.
And so for me, again, I use an evolutionary perspective. When I look at the body, this is sort of a very normal set of movements for the body to endure for hours every single day for your entire life. And I did it therapeutically. I was waking up with a headache and a stiff neck again and again and again for years. And then I was like enough of this.
The stretches that I was given for my neck, I was like this looks like what my head would be doing if I didn't have this big thick pillow underneath it. Why am I having to stretch it out every day? Okay, I'm going to get rid of the pillow. I slowly went into a lower pillow over time. So, I didn't chuck it out, but it took me 18 months to slowly reduce. And my shoulders just became more supple and strong, my upper back became more supple and strong. So, I did this long transition over years to the point where I can sleep on pretty much anything.
Shelby Stanger:
I'm not much of a camper, but I know plenty of people sleep incredibly well under the stars. Something about setting up a tent, rolling out the bed, the fresh night air, it can be very satisfying to sleep on the ground. Katy has taken some of the most fun parts of camping and applied it to her daily life. Now obviously we each need to do what feels best for us, but her SLOTH acronym reminds us that there are options to incorporate more movement, pressure, and flexibility into our everyday lives.
Let's talk about the L, the favorite letter of SLOTH, the leisure. So, life is kind of leisure for you, but what is your leisure?
Katy Bowman:
Well, leisure is really specifically the time that you're not working. It's the time that you're not doing other things that need to be done. I feel like my leisure time is smaller, but I mean, I certainly have an hour or two of leisure a day. If you're watching TV, that's what you're doing with your leisure time. If you're on YouTube, unless you're doing some research or something, that's your leisure time. And I just really keep my leisure time physical. Leisure time is exercise.
So, for me, I'm a long distance walker. I like to do 20 to 40 miles in a day. So, I do a lot of walking during my leisure time. That's when your favorite exercise session or classes are going to fit in during that time. And then also that's my friend time. So of course, I am always planning celebrations. I'm a huge celebrator. I believe that life should be mostly celebration.
We do a lot of labor parties in our community. Someone needs a task done, and we show up and it's like, okay, we're replacing this garden today for these people. And all the kids are playing together, and we're just hanging out together, and there's a bonfire, and someone's made some food to share for everyone. And this task that needs to get done is getting done.
And so, I try to even make our leisure always dynamic. You'll almost never find us sitting inside doing something alone. We're almost always moving outside with others.
Shelby Stanger:
I just listened to this podcast about making friends as an adult and just getting outside post COVID, and it's hard for a lot of people to recruit friends, get outside, and make something like a labor party happen. It takes a lot of conscious effort to gather people and say, "Hey, we're going to move together. We're going to do this project together." How do you do it?
Katy Bowman:
Well, the thing I recommend first is, yes, having another to move with is so key. And it's a good antidote to the isolation that so many people are dealing with right now. I used Facebook when I did this so many years ago, and I was like I need a walking buddy. Here's the times that I can walk. I had little kids, and I was just emerging from that cocoon. I had to go to work, and I knew my walking time was 5:30 to 6:30 in the morning.
And so, I just put it out there. You can also text all your friends and just say, "This is what I need. Is anyone interested in doing this?" And man, I only got one response, and that person is still my walking body 10 years later. We're in it. Right? We walked this morning. It's snowing, and we're like are we doing this, and it's yes. Because she was also looking for it. You're not going to convince people who don't want to move to move with you. What you're looking for is a person who also wanted to do it and just didn't know how to connect.
And then as far as the gatherings, let's say a work party's a little bit more technical. One of the celebrations that we start doing now as we go into winter when we tend to... In summer, you're meeting up with your friends, it's nice out, there's so many events going on, you run into your friends. It's the wintertime that's more challenging. So, we started a soup and sports night because our kids didn't have as much time with their friends because you're just in the slog of school and work, and then it's dark at 5:00.
And so, we meet at the park every Wednesday. Everyone takes turns bringing a massive pot of soup. No one else has to bring anything except your mess kit. And then we get together and we're outside in the cold. Again, camping. It's almost like camping. We have a cook stove out there, a camp stove, keep the soup hot. And we just play for two hours. Frisbee, soccer, playing around on the jungle gym in the dark, it doesn't really matter. And it's just like 30 people. 30 people.
Shelby Stanger:
Whether it's in a park or in a local campground, Katy gathers her community and finds creative ways to move together. If you talk to the people in your life, you might be surprised by who wants to work on outdoor projects, play sports, or go camping with you. After the break, Katy goes through the rest of the letters in SLOTH, and gives us some advice on how to stick with our New Year's resolutions.
Biomechanist Katy Bowman is one of the most prominent thought leaders in the movement movement. Her decades of research suggests that we feel better and can live longer by shaking up our physical habits. Katy has a unique strategy to incorporate more movement into her life. She breaks down her day with a model called SLOTH.
So far, we've talked about the S and the L, sleep and leisure. But the next category is a huge obstacle for a lot of people, occupation. How do you get moving when you're hunched over a computer or stuck in a driver's seat? So, when it comes to working at an office or sitting or standing, what are some things that we can do to mitigate the effects of being stationary?
Katy Bowman:
Yeah. So, I mean, the big thing is to look at the position. When I think of bodies, I'm a biomechanist, so I think in terms of points and lines and the structure of your body and how it's oriented relative to gravity. What does your work position look like? Right? And it doesn't even have to be an office. It could be someone who drives. Right? Or it could even be someone who stands all day, a bartender. It's the idea of looking at your job and be like what is the shape of my body in my job? And then knowing, okay, think of it as a food. This is a food that I am eating almost exclusively. I am eating this chair shaped food or this standing or in my car food for eight hours a day. Right?
So, the idea is, okay, well, there's only so many nutrients that you can find in that particular food, and you don't need nine hours worth of them. Certainly, there's nothing wrong with sitting. It's just that as far as your physiology is concerned and your anatomy, the systems of the body depend on movement to work. And so, you have given yourself this repetitive positioning situation. So, can you change it? If you sit in a chair in a particular position, can you just sit in that chair in a different position? Could you cross one leg over or the other leg or both legs?
And then could you just stand more frequently throughout the day without leaving your desk, without leaving your phone or your computer screen? If you're reading something on a screen for 40 minutes at a time, your eyeballs will still work if you stand up and bend over and shift your hips and stretch a little bit. It's the idea of being able to separate the difference between my attention needs to be in this one particular place, my eyes need to be on my screen, and my body can be in a different position even though my eyes are here.
If you're a driver, a little bit different because you don't have as much freedom with your physical position because you still have to keep your feet on the pedals and your hand on the wheel. But then there's even more subtle adjustments. There are movements that you could be doing with your head that would align your upper spine a little bit better. Could you tilt your pelvis a little bit front to back or right to left?
So, it's the idea of ergonomics that I think we're used to pursuing, which is just tell me the best position for being still, which there is none. There's no single position that's going to make sitting in that best position for eight hours feel great to your body. Your body's always going to prefer to move.
And so, it's just this idea of diversifying your position as much as possible, and then making sure you're optimizing the times that you don't have to be in the chair. Because I do think that's the challenge for a lot of people is they're like, "I have to sit down for eight hours a day." And it's like, really? Taking a real critical look at the time that you actually have to be sitting and see what what's malleable in those areas is very helpful for sneaking in...
Take the minutes. My other advice is take the minutes. People really discount... Exercise comes in 30 minutes, 45 minutes, and 60 minute beneficial packages. I say no. I would say if you can do something for two minutes or four minutes, a walk for seven minutes or 10 minutes, these are where you're going to find value, and you're going to find them pop up throughout the days. Hours are just made up of minutes.
So, when you work for yourself or you're working from home, the laptop, it goes up on the kitchen counter, it goes down on the floor in the living room, and you're just constantly able to have a much greater variety. But you do have to work on it a little bit more in an office by setting up something a little bit more structured. Usually, a lot of people don't feel comfortable coming down on the ground. In those cases, I really recommend having a discussion with others in your office around movement.
So, if the solution when everyone's like, "Hey, we would like to move more at work. What are we allowed to do?" Or what can we come up with in a brainstorm? Could we put a sign up for me? Do we have another meeting? Can we do a walking meeting? Can we go outside? Can you just say at the beginning, "Feel free to not sit there. Feel free to fidget. I don't think it's rude if you are on Zoom in some meeting and you stand up and start stretching. That's fine with me." We're going to have to make some adjustments and have some conversations around it or else we're just going to keep going in the direction we're currently going which is not the one we want.
Shelby Stanger:
One of my favorite ways to take a break from working is to have a little dance party. If you're not into dancing, you can walk to the kitchen and fill up your water bottle, sit on the floor and read emails from there, hang from a pull-up bar or even do some pull-ups every time you walk through a doorway. I think we're all guilty of getting stuck in a sedentary position for hours at a time, but it doesn't have to be that way.
One of the most notable parts of Katy's lifestyle is that when she's not at work, she lives in a largely furniture free house. Which brings us to the last two letters of the SLOTH acronym, transportation and home. Okay, so transportation you talked about a little bit. Move as much as you can.
Katy Bowman:
Yeah, pretty easy on that one. It's just like choose more active transportation. Don't drive everywhere. Go some places on foot, even if it's only part way. And if you have kids, start teaching them about moving their own body. Especially now, it's so expensive to drive anywhere. Right? It's so much better for everything to just walk to some places. But we've totally gotten out of that habit.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah. I actually think the whole e-bike thing has been pretty cool. I just read an article about a woman who she just did her first 2,000 miles on her e-bike, and she said her life has totally changed. She takes the kids. Everywhere she used to drive, the post office, school, she does on an e-bike. And I was like, okay, an e-bike, you're not totally moving perfectly a hundred percent by yourself, but you're moving. You're outside. You're holding the handlebars.
Katy Bowman:
Sure. You're balancing.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah. That's a fantastic way. Okay, so home. You have a furniture free home.
Katy Bowman:
It ebbs and flows. Yeah, our setup ebbs and flows depending on what's going on.
Shelby Stanger:
Can you just give us... The audience cannot see your home, but can you just describe it to podcast listeners? Walk me through. Give me a home tour of your home.
Katy Bowman:
Yeah, well, so I'll have to go with... So, we've moved a few times, so this is a blend of multiple homes over the last 10 years. But yeah, so I think the thing that's most startling when you first walk in is our house is not full of seats in that traditional way where you're used to seeing couches and chairs. And so, we have a set of taller cushions or puffs that can become seats, but it's flexible. Everything in our house is very flexible. So, again, my kids might want to take that couch and put on the porch. Or that puff on the couch, maybe they want to put it up in their room. Maybe they want to stack two and sit 10 feet off the ground. They do all kinds of crazy.... It's like LEGO, but for seating.
Shelby Stanger:
So, wait. For the audience listening, if you don't know what I'm talking about, think of a large meditation cushion and a bunch of those around.
Katy Bowman:
Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
I have them now, by the way, because I find them so helpful.
Katy Bowman:
Yeah. And this is another sort of flexible seat. Some are low. Some are only one-and-a-half feet high. Some are three feet high. They're all very light, though. More like the height of an ottoman. Our kitchen table is low. So, what other people might use it as a coffee table, we would use it as more like a Japanese style table. So, you can floor sit. And we had stumps around it, and again, or meditation cushions where people could have low seating supported.
But again, you're having to use your joints in a different position than you are every single other chair that you will encounter. That's the big reason. Right? If every chair is 90 degrees, your office, your car, everything in your house, your bed, your hips and knees stopped going beyond that range of motion. That's it. That's all they can do.
And so, I was like, okay, well, I'm going to create seats of different heights so that you're never in the same joint configuration. You're always having to get down a little lower or come up from a little lower. Maybe you want to just flop over on one side and stretch your waist. And we've got balls that have really nice wool covers on them so they look more like furniture, not like a gym in your house. And then those can go at the desk or they can be moved around just if you want to stretch in the middle of the living room. And then we always have some sort of hanging station. So, when our kids were very little, we had indoor monkey bars for them, this little thing that we just built.
Shelby Stanger:
Indoor monkey bars in your house?
Katy Bowman:
Oh yeah. It was a lifesaver. Because I live in a cooler weather place where there's snow and weather. And when you have little kids, kids really need to brachiate. So do grownups. Brachiate is like to hold yourself from your arms. Imagine going across the monkey bars or just being able to hang from your arms. It stretches everything between your hands, your fingers, and your ribcage, your breathing parts. Right?
Shelby Stanger:
So, you built monkey bars through your house?
Katy Bowman:
Yeah. So, their whole room just had these. And they were on them, and all their friends were on them all of the time. And we had them from the time that they were like one. I've got all this great video of just... I mean, they could hang and pull up when they were one. And it's just something that we come ready to do as part of the software of priming your body for it to be physically robust later on.
And then we had an aerial silk for a while because we had these big beams. So, just different things of holding your hands. We've had always a pull-up bar just in the doorway, just a cheap $20 pull-up bar. And then in our latest move, you can get rock wall holds, rock climbing holds. And we had this beam go across that was just high enough.
It's amazing where a kid will do 80 hangs in a day. I will do 80 hangs in a day, 80 pull ups in a day. Not all at once. Not in a workout. Just walking through the house. I'm going to go to the bathroom. Guess what? I'm going to hang and be here for a minute. And I'll probably pull up my legs and just work on my spine and my core in just a minute. And then I got to... Because I'm not really in workout mindset. Now I got to go to kitchen. I got to go do something else.
So, by putting it in my life, it catches me all the time. Again, it's such a innate desire. If we have kids over, there's just a huge long line up the stairs from littles, from the three-year-olds to the 15-year-olds. They're all on the same page, I want to do that.
Shelby Stanger:
So, going into the new year, how can we use movement to celebrate our lives more?
Katy Bowman:
Well, just add movement into the celebration. Make a list of the things that are important to you, and then figure out how to add movement to them, the more dynamic versions of them.
So, if your resolution is to, I mean, just simply eat better, what about picking the more movement rich version of the foods that you're going to make? Make that amazing thing from scratch? Because convenience is really undermining our pursuits in all of the things. And so, this idea of doing the slower version, which always just means the more physically intense version. You got to chop, you got to grate, you got to clean up afterwards.
We always do the gingerbread hike where we will take kids on... It's like a four-mile total hike. So, this is to your question. And when they get into the forest, they show up. And there's like a fire, and there's some nutritious soup, and then there's just gingerbread cookies and piles of candy for everyone to decorate them, and then they hike back out. So, it's a way of doing more community. It's the more nutrient dense version of a holiday celebration. Right? If you're going to have a cookie, why not have it outside in the woods or near a park?
So, I just think that people could be more creative in adding the movement and the nature into the things that they're already doing. So, this is such a simple thing, but we're doing it. And now we all hiked outside, and it just didn't feel like work. It felt like a party.
Shelby Stanger:
There are so many ways we can get physically active during the holidays. Last year, Katy wrote an article for NPR where she suggested that people forage for holiday decorations, make candles outside, or stretch while wrapping presents. Making these small changes to our day-to-day lives can have a big impact on her health both physically and mentally.
This winter, Katy has also introduced a movement Advent calendar where every day on social media for the month of December, she's teaching us a new movement exercise. Let us know how you like to get outside and move your body this time of year. You can leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, or send us an email to podcast@rei.com.
Katy Bowman, thank you so much for coming on Wild Ideas Worth living. It was fascinating to talk with you. My team wanted to let you know that they've never moved more while producing an episode. If you want to learn more about Katy Bowman, you can check out her website, nutritiousmovement.com. There you can find an incredible amount of information, resources, and ideas on how we can tend to our physical body. You can also follow her on Instagram and check out the advent calendar at Nutritious Movement. Also, before we wrap up, we wanted to give a special thank you to KSQM Community Radio in Sequim, Washington. We really appreciate your recording assistance.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger. I just went shopping around Central Park in New York, which was awesome. This show is written and edited by Annie Fassler, who's moving this week, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Chelsea Davis, and our associate producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we appreciate when you follow this show. Rate it and review it wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.