Movement Matters

  • Author: Katy Bowman
  • Full Title: Movement Matters
  • Tags: #Inbox #books

Highlights

  • Stasis and convenience are a prison cell where your body rots as your consciousness is captive for the length of your chosen sentence. (Location 131)

INTRODUCTION

  • Your movement matters to the forests and bees in your local area, and our culturally approved (and possibly demanded) sedentarism is responsible for much of the deforestation of the planet as well as slavery in other places. (Location 188)
  • Movement ecology, then, is concerned with how an animal, in this case a human, moves, relative to other humans, relative to other species, and relative to their physical surroundings or environment or habitat. (Location 195)
  • what are the influences of a sedentary culture on science, and how do the findings of research set up by a sedentary culture keep us sedentary? (Location 255)
  • you need to move more than you do right now. (Location 263)
  • You not only need to move more, you must also move better. You not only need to move more and better, you must also move with other people, and move through, around, and over some natural terrain. (Location 263)
  • when we say or think “convenience,” it’s not as much about saving time as it is about reducing movement. (Location 278)
  • More subtle still—and what I’m asking you to do now—is to see how the choice to move is presented to you every moment of the day, but how most often we select the most sedentary choice without even realizing it. (Location 281)
  • To avoid the simplest movements, you have—without realizing it—required other humans somewhere else in the world to labor endlessly, destroy ecosystems, and wage war…for your convenience. (Location 288)

SCIENCE moves

  • “In graduate school, you get the same historical perspective as in elementary school, except with footnotes.” (Location 352)
  • YOU’RE MORE THAN (TWO OF) YOUR PARTS (Location 373)
    • Note: .h2

PROOF

  • The thing is, I can’t explain why running on a treadmill is “no good.” (Location 430)
  • I don’t believe running on a treadmill is no good, only that it is not equivalent to overground walking. (Location 430)
  • If you’re looking for headlines in the evidence to help you know for sure that something in the modern world is hurting your body, it will be difficult to find. (Location 488)
  • When striving for an evidence-based life, consider that your most relevant evidence is your body. If your body works and feels great, no worries; what you’re doing is apparently working for you. If you’re experiencing an issue, expand the evidence you’ve considered, keeping in mind you’re not going to find a headline, but a rabbit hole. (Location 492)

PUTTING ALL YOUR EGGS IN ONE COMMENT BASKET

  • Anyhow, my point is, because science (all information, really) is constantly In Progress, the quick (and/or rude) dismissal of something new isn’t really the most scientific course of action. (Location 522)

DON’T BE A STUPID

  • This attitude, that those who are doing the “right” thing are somehow smarter or better than those who aren’t, doesn’t appear to contribute to our health or happiness. (Location 544)

SOMETIMES SCIENCE IS SEDENTARY

NATURE moves

ANALOGOUS

THIGMOMORPHOGENESIS

  • Writing “Tree climbing is unsafe” when you mean “Please stay off the trees because we don’t have money to pay for the injuries of inexperienced climbers” or “This is a nature reserve/park and the human-to-tree interaction is higher than it would be in nature—please climb trees in the wilderness or on your property” is lazy. (Location 725)
  • Implying that climbing is dangerous is lazy. (Location 727)
  • What if we posted signs stating, “Your body is too weak and unskilled to move through nature safely” and “Forests were cut down so you could live in more comfort and do less movement, and therefore your body has become weak and there are hardly any trees left, so it’s best to not climb these”? (Location 733)

SHAPED BY THE TREES

FIRST HIKE

  • why don’t more kids catch on and walk in a way that would help out their tribe, i.e., forward, and more efficiently? (Location 771)
  • when given a wide-open, asphalted space, my son was less apt to move forward steadily. And when presented with a more narrow, complex trail, he not only moved forward steadily, he did so screaming with joy. Or maybe that was me. (Location 786)

TREE BONES

  • Early bone has a reflexive tendency to grow. Meaning your bones, like trees, will grow because they contain an internal program to do so. But the shape a bone takes is not only reflexive, it is also dependent on what your body is doing while it is growing longer (or bigger or thicker or whatever). (Location 811)
  • it appears that the shape of our bones, like trees, is affected by the quantities and qualities of movement we have done to date. (Location 814)
  • Perhaps closing ourselves off in our houses and cars and malls and schools has shaped not only our bodies but also our perception that we fall outside of the natural laws governing everything—especially those natural processes modeling and remodeling physical structures. (Location 826)
  • Staying indoors may impact the way we think, but not how we function: we are shaped by the forces we experience. We’ve removed the wind and, likewise, the strength to withstand it. (Location 828)

A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE

  • Trees are shaped by the wind, but here’s the thing: the wind is also shaped by the trees. (Location 835)

WET BONES

MYOPIC

  • you’re not moving—and your physiology has to deal with the consequences of maintaining a dynamic system in which many parts have ground to a halt? It’s likely that “the problem with sitting” is all of these, yet the takeaway “solution” has seemed to be simply “stand more.” (This, in my opinion, is the predictable outcome of a sedentary culture looking at the problem of sitting—identifying the problem as the wrong type of stillness, and not as stillness itself.) (Location 879)
  • using the full range of motion of your eye requires that you look over all the distances. (Location 906)
  • Discovering that spending more time outdoors reduces the risk of the onset of myopia represents a major advance in our understanding of refractive error. (Location 912)

YOU SPEAK HOW YOU ARE

OUTDOOR SCHOOL

  • My husband and I felt, deeply, that there was a value in learning to be comfortable without comforts, to be comfortable in nature. (Location 1043)
  • I can definitely see how a lot of people going off-path in a nature preserve would result in the destruction of a small area. It’s definitely a capacity issue, but is it too many people or is it that we have such a small area allotted for human/nature interactions? (Location 1103)

FOOD moves

  • The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think. (Location 1151)
  • Hunger is nature’s personal trainer and a relentless one at that. When animals live in nature, hunger gets them up and moving throughout the day, looking for food. (Location 1153)
  • For we human animals who have altered our environment so that food and water appear with ease, the move/eat signal is easily squelched. This leaves us with bodies rich in nutritional input and malnourished in mechanical loads—a situation where disease springs forth with ease. (Location 1156)

MUST WORK FOR FOOD

  • In the natural world, food and movement are organically related; how you eat is based on your ability to get and prepare your food. (Location 1166)
  • By seeking only a portion of all the movements available to us, we’re undernourished in movement. Put another way, we’re full up on movement steak but missing all the movement leaves, fruits, seeds, and roots. (Location 1185)

THOSE OTHER NUTRIENTS

  • Our understanding of how food works is really in its infancy; we are still in the process of isolating and describing all the parts included in the phenomenon we call food. (Location 1190)
  • when you move the food with your tongue and teeth and jaw and skull bones and muscles—your tongue and teeth and jaw and skull bones and muscles are being moved right back. (Location 1192)
  • When it comes to eating, there are mechanical nutrients involved as well as dietary ones. (Location 1195)
  • Unfortunately for us, it’s become easier and easier to outsource our chewing— (Location 1196)
  • With the invention of the mill (and likely before), we began outsourcing our personal chewing work to other people who moved (in non-chewing ways) to build and operate the mills. (Location 1203)
  • It turns out that if you give a group of the same animal different diets, the jaw (and other face bones) will grow differently, their bone shapes reflecting their diet. If your diet is more challenging to chew, you’ll grow a more robust structure to chew with. (Location 1215)

MAMMALS SUCK

  • Imagine if the work necessary to breastfeed—the work of the child and the mother—was viewed as a calculated investment toward saving time and work in the future? (Location 1295)

FORAGE

  • Every day, in addition to the tasks required for work, are those must-dos on my list: spend time with my family, educate my children, source wholesome ingredients, feed my family, move my body, move my kids’ bodies, and expose our bodies to nature (sunlight, the sounds of nature, temperature variations, etc.). Other to-dos vary day by day, but these are the ones that sit at the front of my mind all the time. (Location 1307)
  • Instead of breaking up my obligations and allotting time to each fractured component (i.e., twenty minutes to get food, forty-five minutes for some exercise, an hour to spend with my kids, four hours to produce something work-related), I organized my life essentials so that the same portion of time fulfills multiple obligations. I call this way of relating time to essential tasks “stacking your life.” (Location 1321)
  • Permaculture enthusiasts have long been stacking agricultural functions in a way that lets nature do its efficient work. What I propose here is that we need to think of movement in the same way. To keep our movement functions sustainable—ensuring that we and other humans are able to move both now and in the future—we need to adopt a practice of movement permaculture. (Location 1348)
  • KITCHEN MOVEMENT (Location 1353)
  • Movement is a renewable resource, but unlike other commodities, it renews through use; your future movement is made possible by movements you’re doing today. (Location 1357)
  • The privilege of being able to outsource essential movements for preferred ones creates a burden on others and on the planet. (Location 1364)
  • We’ve been told we can vote with our dollars to support more ethical business practices, but what if we also performed simple movements to consume less overall? (Location 1365)
  • Where once we spent hours each day exchanging the movements involved in walking, running, bending, squatting, carrying, pounding, rubbing, lifting, digging, and mashing for a day’s worth of calories, we spend almost no movement (and lots of money on fuel) to drive to a store and wander the aisles to buy overly packaged food—foraged, planted, picked, dug, processed, and flown or driven there by other people. (Location 1388)
  • You have an eating requirement, you have a movement requirement, and you have a requirement not to place copious work on others in your tribe if you want that tribe to succeed—after all, their success is also yours. You have a need, one could say, to pull your own weight when it comes to food. I’m (Location 1392)
  • Swap out one electrical device for an old-fashioned equivalent where no electricity is needed! Not because you’re a Luddite, but because you’ve listed “move more” and “consume less fossil fuel” as goals. (Location 1398)
  • Lay your own eggs. Just kidding about the eggs. (Location 1403)

A SEDENTARY CULTURE EATS

  • This is why I find it increasingly relevant to consider movement from an ecological perspective. Without framing our movement habits relative to the world, it’s easy to miss the cost of outsourcing work necessary to meet our own biological needs. Our children are too weak to eat whole apples; they were not provided with an environment necessary to develop strong chewing skills; and now other humans and the planet are burdened by their unnecessary weakness. This is a matter of movement and is also why movement matters. (Location 1416)

MOVEMENT AS A COMMODITY

  • You could likely make significant headway reducing the outsourced movement of your life simply by buying foods grown close to where you live. (Location 1459)
  • And one more stacking note: If you have a place to eat outside, you’re also stacking your life by reducing need for heating/air conditioning/lighting as well as getting doses of movement in the form of regulating your body temperature, looking to a distance, and letting natural noise bend the sensors in your ears—all at the same time as you picnic. If you do it with friends, you’re building community too. Stack away! (Location 1471)
  • If you can get in a headspace that allows you to see the bulk of what you do for (Location 1482)
  • work doesn’t have to be done sitting at your desk or inside an office, I believe you’ll find abundant time and space just sitting there that could be used to nourish your body better while you continue to be productive (Location 1482)

just move

  • All exercise is movement, of course, but not all movement is exercise. (Location 1522)
  • the clinical definition of exercise (physical activity that is planned, structured, and repetitive and that has a final or an intermediate objective to improve or maintain physical fitness), (Location 1523)
  • Yes, many will need to eat more once they start moving more, but because movement is also a necessity, the increase in caloric consumption can be thought of as an investment that, in the future, reduces your need for technologies like medicine and surgical interventions used to treat issues stemming from local or whole-body sedentarism. (Location 1546)

PART-MINDED

  • Our desire to understand nature scientifically came at the point when, from a lack of exposure, we no longer understood it through experience. (Location 1605)

STACK YOUR LIFE

  • My father, now eighty-nine years old, once told me the secret to life: don’t multitask. I didn’t get it. I was busy as a worker bee. And frankly, as a full-time self-employed mother of two, barely fitting in 48 percent of my “must-do-daily” tasks by doing two to four things at a time, the idea of no longer multitasking was paralyzing. (Location 1636)
  • Your current categories of obligation are likely similar to mine. You probably have to work, attend to your family, nurture a partnership and/or friendships, move, eat, drink, and be merry. (Location 1643)
  • In either case, any lifestyle in which your biological needs are not all being met isn’t working for you and the solution might be simpler than you think. (Location 1650)
  • Multitasking involves trying to accomplish many discrete tasks at once. Stacking your life involves the search for fewer tasks that meet multiple needs, which often requires that you’re clear on what your needs actually are. (Location 1654)
  • It’s the slow reverse-engineering of a modern world back to nature; it’s recognizing that work is natural, but jobs are not. (Location 1666)
  • MAXIMALISM (Location 1681)
    • Note: .h2
  • After taking a look at what needs I had regarding my home, I found that warmth and coziness and protection from the elements are essential for me, but that the items (most of my furniture) preventing my knees, hips, and ankles from articulating fully were working against me—especially given I also had “do things to improve the mobility of my knees, hips, and ankles” on my daily to-do list. (Location 1690)
  • I got rid of the bulk of my furniture—the couches and chairs in the living room, the chairs in the dining room (we still have a dining table; it just sits very low to the ground), and our conventional beds (I swapped twenty-four inches of box spring and mattress for three inches of futon). (Location 1693)
  • We’ve mistaken getting more stuff for getting more out of life. Once we can fully see how often our possessions present a physical barrier to getting the essentials we require, taking action to change our lifestyle only makes taking action with our body that much easier. (Location 1707)

NUTRIENT DENSE

  • vitamin Ab Workout, vitamin Upper-Body Day (which we are careful to balance with vitamin Lower-Body Day) off our master list, and using them like supplements. (Location 1797)
  • Or we pick a single category of movement nutrient, like cardio, and consume that category of movement exclusively. This way of moving is not only poor in terms of nutrition, it’s also inefficient. (Location 1798)
  • Nutrient-dense food and nutrient-dense movement are packaged elegantly in nature. (Location 1799)

GEESE, OR MOVEMENT ECOLOGY

  • Does moving through nature as a group change how you do it, and does moving this way improve the biological success of the human as a species? (Location 1847)
  • Similarly, I can spend a lot more time moving outside if someone will carry my baby for me for a while so I can expend less energy while moving, and as my kids grow older, I can reciprocate by carrying another’s child, thus allowing all of us—of all ages and strengths—to get more movement throughout the day. (Location 1855)

NATURAL MOVEMENT IS EFFICIENT

  • It’s not only that you need to move more often than you do right now; you also need to move more of you more often than you do right now. (Location 1892)
  • The problem is, perhaps without realizing it, we’ve been using movement in the same way we’ve used dietary supplements. (Location 1898)
  • Natural-movements-for-exercise use many more parts of the body than isolated exercises do—making them a more efficient way of reaching the greatest number of parts. Yes, these movements were sort of archaic in the modern world, but they were of great design—definitely superior to any exercise I could craft on the gym floor. Archaic, but efficient. (Location 1920)
  • Exercise is unstacked movement. Not only are we trying to make our bodies better part by part, but also we’re using movement to improve only one part of our lives—our physical structure and health. (Location 1931)

NATURAL MOVEMENT IS JOYFUL

  • There are also experiences that only natural movements in nature can afford. For example, squatting can do more than open your hips; the ability to squat opens up how you see the world. A squat puts a different part of the world in front of your face and reveals more of it—stuff you can’t see and interact with unless you get down to the ground and look closely. (Location 1941)

MOVEMENT IS COUNTER-CULTURE

  • a clinician could better predict cardiovascular and all-cause mortality by grip strength than by blood pressure. (Location 1978)
  • those with the strongest hands tend to move their entire bodies more. (Location 1982)
  • It requires a widely held perception that it’s irresponsible to suggest the essentialness of any behavior that falls outside the norms of the culture in which we currently operate. (Location 2016)

MOVEMENT IS NOT MEDICINE

  • it’s essential to consider that the tendency of a sedentary culture might be to parlay scientific facts into amazing therapeutic practices that allow it to stay sedentary, rather than to assemble that same data in a way that clearly demonstrates the tremendous amounts of therapy it takes for us to function. (Location 2051)
  • Medicine is what you need when a rare issue arises in your life, not what you need to compensate for your lifestyle. Movement and food (and community and a community of bacteria and likely a host of other things) are essentials. Essentials are not medicine, they are not spot treatments; they are regularly required inputs. (Location 2076)
  • Movement is not medicine. Movement is essential. (Location 2082)

VITAMIN COMMUNITY

  • But it isn’t only parents providing education and healthcare to their children. In a tribe, juvenile care (and thus education, movement, and touch) is provided by parents and also alloparents—grandparents, childless peers, other children. (Location 2115)
  • This arrangement is efficient in that it increases the child’s chance for survival; gives purpose and contribution to elder tribal members and allows essential information to pass between generations; provides not-yet-parents the opportunity to be with children; and (I might be biased in my phrasing here, as a mother of two kids under the age of five) saves the primary parent from burnout. (Location 2117)
  • I propose that the inefficiency of our modern situation might be hindering our ability to be fully nourished, either due to the time issue (i.e., there’s no possible way to get everything we need when it’s all separated), or because there’s something more to the “whole” of an intact community, greater than the sum of its parts, that we don’t yet understand. (Location 2128)
  • Clearly we are in a state where activism of all types is necessary, especially to gain attention for those beings and those issues currently ignored. Please, keep up or begin activism of all shapes and forms. (Location 2167)
  • At the heart of our unstacked society is money standing in for movement. (Location 2176)
  • Money cannot stand in equally for the work performed by another, because there is energy lost in the exchange. (Location 2180)
  • So shunting money instead of your own labor, directly, to your community is really just super-inefficient from a biological standpoint. (Location 2181)
  • Neither you nor the person you are trying to assist is getting the full spectrum of the nutrients you both need. (Location 2182)

PERSONAL MISSION STATEMENT

  • My family, my body, and the great outdoors. These are the things I treasure and prioritize over everything else—but that wouldn’t always have been clear had you witnessed the day-to-day activities I used to choose to do. (Location 2197)
  • To begin, take out a piece of paper (sure, the computer will work, but writing things on paper just feels more important and permanent, doesn’t it?) and create a list of keywords that sum you up, or at least that sum up your truest interests. (Location 2203)

ELDERBERRY

  • I think we keep focusing on the traditional family unit as the only way to stack (you’ll be stacked once your family looks “normal”), but the real traditional unit is a group of people of multiple generations, (Location 2328)
  • some with children and some without. (Location 2330)
  • Start by turning your car key instead of using a battery-powered clicker to open your car doors, and forgo teabags in favor of loose tea; walk instead of driving; buy local food; source raw ingredients and process them yourself; process some of them manually; learn (Location 2352)
  • some local wild foods or grow a few plants in your yard; buy handmade items from those making them for a wage and under a set of conditions you deem acceptable; take care of your body by choosing exercises designed to improve and maintain your whole-body function over time; volunteer some of your exercise time and spend it at a local farm, squatting to weed or harvest; take a class or find a mentor that will help you develop nature competency so you can make going outside in nature a hobby; eat outside; eat inside, but on the floor; start a community soup night; move with others who are less able and need assistance; start a walking book group; start paying attention to how (Location 2354)
  • you move, how much you move, and especially how much you don’t. (Location 2359)
  • Just so you know, this book was printed in the United States on recycled paper, and it was written, edited, designed, edited again, and again, and again, and marketed, all by individuals who made personal choices to leave their traditional office jobs in publishing houses and media to freelance from home to better meet their personal needs and the needs of their personal ecosystems. (Location 2360)

AFTERWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  • But as I read through all of them again, there it was—that common idea buried within almost everything I’d written over the last few years: we move how we think. (Location 2447)

APPENDIX 1: NATURE IN EDUCATION

  • Nature-scape your backyard. Consider opening up your backyard to your community or neighborhood so that children (Location 2519)
  • know they can come by and play whenever they want, or at certain hours. Find tips at: modernparentsmessykids.com/2012/05/how-to-set-up-natural-play-spaces-in.html. (Location 2519)
  • Coyote’s Guide to Connecting with Nature by Jon Young, Evan McGown, and Ellen (Location 2552)

APPENDIX 2: FORAGING

  • If you’re new to foraging, here are two sound pieces of advice: Start your foraging in the easy zone (e.g., local fruit trees, abandoned or overgrown gardens) and forage responsibly. Responsible foraging, as taught by the nature school in my area, follows the one-third rule: harvest one-third of a plant’s offerings for yourself, leaving one-third for other animals and the other third for the plants. (Location 2558)
  • There are also many “gleaning” organizations that list unpicked food going to waste and ask for volunteers to pick that food for local food banks. (Location 2576)
  • Search “gleaning” and the name of your local area to see how you can participate. (Location 2577)
  • I send the kids out for something for every meal even if I don’t really need it. (Location 2580)
  • Sam Thayer is my foraging guru and my favorite guide is his book Forager’s Harvest. (Location 2589)

APPENDIX 3: BREASTFEEDING