movement Nourish your body through
Want to stay strong, flexible and pain-free? Biomechanist Katy Bowman discovered the secret lies in the incidental movements we all make each day. Here she explains why.
If I was going to feel better, I needed to nourish my body throughout the day – not with a single workout “meal” but with whole body movements that used to be key for
our survival.
All through my teens and early twenties, I was an intense exerciser. For at least 60 minutes a day, I either ran, swam or strength-trained, or taught some form of aerobics. But I couldn’t escape the nagging truth that I didn’t feel healthy. I was capable of amazing cardiovascular feats but my body felt, well, old. I had chronic lower-back pain, my hips were achy and tight, and I had to wear a knee brace to exercise. I was only 30 years old!
The more I worked with my personal training clients, the more I realised I wasn’t the only “fit” person living in a body sounding alarms in the form of pain or illness.
It wasn’t until I studied biomechanics at university that I had a life-changing realisation: the reason I was in pain was because I’d been thinking of activity too generally and hadn’t been moving in the way my body needed. I’d spent a lifetime believing that as long as I did some form of exercise for at least 30 minutes a day,
I’d be healthy. I was surprised to discover that movement is far more nuanced. In fact, the
specific movements we feed our bodies can be as vital as the specific foods we eat for better health – and the general feeling of being “too old to move” is fuelled not just by lack of movement but by lack of “nutritious” movement: the kind that includes all the bends and squishes our cells demand in order to function optimally. My movement diet was the equivalent of eating nothing but apples (the same workout I did day in and day out) and lollies (the time I spent sitting).
Active couch potato
When I applied this new view to my own exercise habits, I realised that, like many of us, I was severely movement malnourished. My 60 minutes of exercise a day had felt sufficient until I stacked it up against the other 1380 minutes I spent commuting, working, lounging, sleeping, or doing some other form of sedentary behaviour. It was humbling to admit, but I was nothing more than an active couch potato (or, to use the more scientific term, “actively sedentary”). And when I did move, I wasn’t moving enough of my parts.
Human movement diets weren’t always so limited. Before the age of convenience, a wide variety of movements were necessary for sustaining life. Finding, capturing and collecting food and water required all-day effort that used all the muscles and joints in many different ways. Today, a moment on the phone can secure food, delivered right to our door, and instead of squatting to rest from a day of hunting and foraging, we plop onto our couch after hours of sitting at a desk. The more I compared my “active couch potato” life with the life of a hunter/gatherer, the more I realised that convenience was slowly debilitating me.
I decided that if I was going to feel better, I needed to nourish my body throughout the day – not with a single workout “meal” but with whole body movements that used to be key for our survival but have gone missing from our modern environments. These include squatting, walking (both short and long distances) and walking over varying terrain, getting down to and up from the ground, climbing and carrying. Done regularly, these movements act like oil to our Tin Man bodies, strengthening and remobilising the hands, wrists, elbows, shoulders, core, spine, hips, knees, ankles and feet. I began to think of these movements as movement macronutrients.
I decided to incorporate the squat first – but found that I couldn’t do it. A lack of full knee and hip use had left me with sore knees and tight hips, and stiff calves that wouldn’t allow it. Likewise, when I wanted to hang from the monkey bars at the park, I kept falling off. And my arms, with their ninja-like keyboard skills, couldn’t carry two bags of groceries the kilometre home from the supermarket without tiring. I quickly realised that to give my body (and my clients’ bodies) the macronutrients they needed, I had to break large movements into smaller ones to mobilise and strengthen certain weak areas. To do this, I developed corrective exercises that I refer to as movement micronutrients – components of a macro-move that are easier to swallow, like taking a few vitamins versus consuming an entire meal.
Doing these stretches and strength builders addressed those body parts that, in our culture, are most likely to be sedentary: tight hamstring and calf muscles, adapted to shorter lengths as a result of sitting and wearing high-heeled shoes; hips that don’t extend fully so limit how much the gluteus muscles work when we walk; feet stiff from years of wearing shoes; and shoulders, immobile and achy from doing almost nothing. Within a couple of months, I began noticing positive changes in my body. Soon, I reintroduced the macro-moves and found I was able to squat deeper without knee pain. With more work, I was able to cross the monkey bars, first once and then back and forth multiple times. I gave these daily movement vitamins to clients and saw again and again the positive impact they made on their bodies and quality of life.
‘Nutritious’ movements
Eventually, the entire way I viewed activity changed. I no longer saw exercise and movement as identical, and I started encouraging my clients and then thousands of others through my Nutritious Movements website and blog to do the same. While very few of us have the luxury or desire to devote a large part of our day to exercise, we are capable of moving and repositioning our bodies in small but powerful ways 100 per cent of our waking hours.
Breaking the sedentary habit isn’t easy, but when I started thinking of “convenience” as
“takes less movement”, I began choosing the less convenient path – sometimes literally, walking on the bumpy, unpaved path instead of the smooth concrete more often. The more I did it, the more I understood that the “convenient” option is not more convenient for my health. As a result, my physical activity became more nutrient-rich and I began to feel better.
Happier, stronger body
Over the years, my commitment to a lifestyle that’s movement-based has deepened. As my family responsibilities increased and life became busier, I had to find ways to make nutritious movement an even more integral part of my day. At first, I made simple changes, like reorganising my cupboards to force me to reach and bend for the items I used most often, or walking instead of driving to the supermarket to grab a few items and carry them home. I swapped high-intensity workouts for one long walk in the morning and shorter walking breaks throughout the day.
I got my family involved too. We donated our sofa and replaced it with low cushions and bolsters to encourage us to get up from and down to the floor more often. We did away with chairs and even sawed the legs off our dining room table so that we could enjoy our meals sitting cross-legged. I also added a rover-rock entry inside our front door so my feet and ankles would be challenged by varying terrain every time I walked through the door. Each change added more movement back into our lives and left my body feeling happier, younger and stronger than it had been the year before.
Today, our home is almost furniture-free.
We sit on the floor whenever we can to keep our hips and knees flexible, and we have indoor and outdoor monkey bars to boost our upper-body strength. Our living space may appear unusual, but there’s no denying the healthful side effects. They’ve allowed me, at age 40, to inhabit a body that looks and feels better than ever.