Habits and Hustle - Episode 358: Sitting Like Our Ancestors: The Key to Musculoskeletal Well-Being

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

Have you ever considered the benefits of sitting on the floor instead of in a chair? In my Fitness Friday episode of The Habits and Hustle podcast, I explore this fascinating topic with my guest, Aaron Alexander, an expert on functional movement and health. Spending time on the ground, as many healthy cultures around the world do, can have a profound impact on your musculoskeletal well-being, digestion, and circulation. Aaron explains that sitting on the floor helps to heal the joints, bring new fluids to the joints, circulate lymphatic fluid, and improve digestion by keeping your legs closer to your vital organs. You'll also discover the concept of "neat" (non-exercise activity thermogenesis) and how incorporating more movement into your daily life can lead to significant health improvements. Aaron Alexander is a Movement Coach, Creator of the Align Method, Author, and Podcast Host.  What we discuss:  The benefits of sitting on the floor compared to sitting in a chair Low incidence of osteoarthritis in cultures that spend more time on the ground  Improved digestion when sitting on the floor Better circulation and lymphatic fluid movement when sitting on the ground The concept of NEAT and its importance for health The dangers of outsourcing mechanical efficiency to devices like chairs  The importance of wiggling and moving while sitting, whether on the floor or in a chair The ideal position for the spine and hips when sitting on the ground  Thank you to our sponsor: Therasage: Head over to therasage.com and use code Be Bold for 15% off Sleep Me: use code sleepbetter at www.sleep.me/habitsandhustle  To learn more about Aaron Alexander:  Aaron's Podcast - https://www.alignpodcast.com/ Aaron's Instagram -  @aaronalexander  Find more from Jen: Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/ Instagram: @therealjencohen Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagements Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it! Hey friends, you're listening to Fitness Friday on the Habits and Hustle podcast where myself and my friends share quick and very actionable advice for you becoming your healthiest self. So stay tuned and let me know how you leveled up. Before we dive into today's episode, I first want to thank our sponsor, Therisage. Their tri-light panel has become my favorite biohacking thing for healing my body. It's a portable red light panel that I simply cannot live without. I literally bring it with me everywhere I go and I personally use their red light therapy to help reduce inflammations in places in my body where honestly I have pain. You can use it on a sore

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deeper. It also helps reduce your stress, helps with your immune system and your overall daily activity and productivity. Imagine turning your mattress into a cool comfortable sanctuary and with Chili Pad by SleepMe you actually can. The Chili Pad bed cooling system customizes your sleep environment to your optimal temperature from 55 to 115 degrees. It works with your existing mattress and is designed for one or two sleepers so it's perfect for you and your partner if you guys prefer different temperatures like me and my husband. Since I started using ChiliPad my sleep has improved dramatically. It's a new mattress, it's an enhancement that cools my bed and boosts my sleep quality.

Visit www.sleep.me slash habits and hustle and save up to three hundred and fifteen dollars with the code SLE. This exclusive offer for Habits and Hustle listeners includes free shipping and a 30 day trial. So if you don't love it, return it for free. Invest in better sleep and create a better life. Go to www.sleep.me slash habits and hustle and save up to $315 with the code sleep better. You're sitting on the floor as we do this podcast.

Yeah, I'm sitting on the floor, which isn't, I don't think is very strange. It's like welcome to the whole world. Like, that's true. Most of the world slash before just complete transition to becoming a chair-based culture, spending time on the ground is very, very normal. Spending time on the ground actually is the normal thing. So as I'm on the ground, and normal's a dumb word, it's a subjective word, but as far as like,

my definition of normal would be like most conducive for cellular health, you know, like musculoskeletal well-being, I said skeletal like a British person. So if that, if we were just, we were just to put normal as something that's like, okay, like just what makes your cells function best? We'll just call that normal just for lack of you know for just to find a definition and

So that's very normal like our body. There's there's there's actually a book Called muscles and meridians by Philip Beach. That's been quite impactful for me and in that book here first to Spending time on the ground, which again, most all healthy cultures around the world do that. Cultures that have minimal incidence of osteoarthritis in the hips and the knees have minimal issues around incontinence, pelvic floor issues, just like spine pathologies, things of the sort. Just going through those ranges of motion, it heals the joints, it brings new fluids to the joints.

And it's just, it's good for them. Circulates lymphatic fluid, better for digestion because your legs are closer to your viscera, your heart, your organs, you don't have all this blood pooling up in your lower compartments. Think like cankles when you're on a plane, it's gross. Doesn't look good, doesn't feel good. Makes you feel drained.

Standing in a museum for too long, you're just plane, it's gross, doesn't look good, doesn't feel good, makes you feel drained. Standing in a museum for too long, you're just like, ah. So sitting on the floor, is there a position that we should be sitting in or just our legs crossed or what's the ideal position to be sitting on the floor? There's no best position. So this, I mean, I have a whole chapter in the Align Method book about just spending time on the ground. I mean, it feels so stupid to talk about. It feels like dumb, because it's childish.

But it actually is not, because I think that people, it's the most basic things in life I feel and find that we don't think about, right? And we just forget. And now what's our normal, quote unquote, is sitting in a chair like I am. But you're saying that there's so many more extra, there's so many benefits to actually being on the ground, which is why I want to get to like, I want you to talk about like you have been. What are the

like, what are the benefits of sitting on the ground versus being in a chair like where I'm sitting right now in a chair, you're saying, it's not great for my back, my hips, it helps with it. Like, you know, like if I just sat on the floor, let's just put it this way, if I sat on the floor versus sitting in a chair, what would the benefits be?

What would I kind of get from that? Or not just me, but everybody. So bunch. So, all right, so a few things. One, there's been various different research around this, studying different cultures that happen to spend more time on the ground. So like Northern Africa, Southeastern Asia, Eastern Mediterranean, these places. There's also other things, you know, at least Northern Africa and Eastern Mediterranean, they tend to drink like, you know,

eat pretty good, eat a lot of olive oil, which is also good for the joints. But very low incidence of osteoarthritis in the hips and the knees. And a part of their culture is they're just taking their hips and their knees through a full range of motion. It's very simple. That would be one thing that's pretty interesting. Another thing is, like I had already mentioned, digestion.

So if you're eating and you're, in order for you to be able to digest food, you're gonna pull, like why you get sleepy when you're eating food is you're pulling a bunch of blood from your periphery and it's going into your viscera and your organs and your stomach to break that stuff down and then recirculate it and carry those nutrients for the rest of the body.

So when your legs are closer to your heart, think if you ever injured your ankle, if you ever sprained an ankle, everybody sprained an ankle at some point in their lives, your physical therapist, first thing they're gonna say, compression and elevation. It used to be rice, rest, ice, compression, elevation. Then Merkin, the doctor fellow that created that

in like the late 70s, he recently recalled that, I think in the early 2000s. So they're just like, oh, my bad, ice is actually a bummer. You don't wanna slow down the inflammatory response and stop that action. You wanna actually support it, you just wanna keep it circulating. So actually warmth, elevation, movement, stay out of pain,

but elevation and compression. That's essentially what you're doing when you're sitting in any of those childish positions when you're on the ground. So if you're laying on your back, that'd be obviously it's gonna be more advantageous for better circulation. The way that you circulate lymphatic fluid

is through muscular contraction. If you were just sitting on a sofa just kind of pulling your fluids, it's not bad. It's not like a moralistic thing. It's just disadvantageous for the circulation of the vital fluids throughout your body. So if you are sitting on the ground like any kid would do or person in a culture that does this,

you'll just naturally kind of move your body around like that's a healthy body a body that just kind of wiggles a little bit and you know that's there's a there's a fancy term for those wiggles called NEET it's it's what is it called non exercise activity thermogenesis is the unnecessary definition of the acronym. And so what that is is non-exercise. So it's not like the idea of exercise I think is cute. Like you think you're going to work yourself out

into some new form. It's like, what about like that's one hour, three or four days a week. Like what are you even talking about? That is, it's like so minuscule. Yeah, yeah, yes. So it's like the rest of the day, like that's the align method.

Like all I care about is like, what are you doing with the rest of it? Like you've so many coaches and magazines and Muscle and Fitness and everything to do the perfect Tae Bo workout or plyometrics or knees over toes or like whatever you do, the rest of the day is all I'm really interested in as far as like working with,

well I like both honestly, because I do enjoy like nerding out about training. But the rest of the daytime, that neat, that non-exercise activity, thermogenesis time, you'd be burning upwards of 2000 extra, in quotations, calories, just from living a little bit more of like a wiggly lifestyle. And if you were to take yourself into,

so you'd say to go like northern Tanzania, where there's been a ton of research, like at Biome stuff, also with movement, researchers from Southern California, from your part of the world, my old part, they went out there in the last few years and they attached these sensory systems, bio something, motor, whatever, to the tribal folks' hips, hips and knees,

to track the range of motion they're going through today. And what they found was that these hunter gatherer, ancestral, like the romanticized people that the whole world is like, oh, whatever they're doing is the right thing. They are in resting positions about as much as industrialized cultures. So on average, it was like the exact number

was 9.82 hours per day, if I remember correctly. And so that's like, OK, they're not just like running all day, or like climbing trees all day, you know, or doing like capoeira dancing and like playing drums. Like they're resting a lot. Like they're trying to preserve energy. So they're resting about as much as we are. Like we, you know, representing like,, we representing industrialized Western culture, whatever. So the difference is, how are they resting?

The way they're resting is they're in kneeling positions, they're in squatting positions, they're in various different floor-sitting positions, like I pretty much outlined in the in the in the book slash you know everywhere right you know and and it's if they're actually they're they're actively engaging in their resting positions it's not just outsourcing all of their mechanical efficiency to you know a device in this case the device being the chair and you outsource what your body would naturally do, then you begin to atrophy.

When you atrophy, you start to become trapped. If you atrophy too much, then you're in a tight spot. Right. That's right, that's right. Does that mean by the way, the wigglies, is it because, are you wiggling because you're uncomfortable on the floor? And so therefore you're trying to get your adjusting yourself constantly to find a comfortable position?

Because like right now I'm going to if you're in an uncomfortable chair you can wiggle a lot you know I'm wiggling a ton right now. That's great. That's how a kid was sitting in a chair until they were until they were advised that they're sick and they like need medication. That's how a healthy kid was sitting in a chair. They'd rock back on the chair. they'd go on the left side, they'd go on the right side,

they're working their whole proprioceptive system. That's neurology, like that's education. So does that mean I'm getting the same benefits in this chair as you are on the floor because I'm like, I'm moving around? There's a little bit on the chair. Chair's just a thing, it doesn't matter. It's just who are you in the chair? Who are you on the floor? Right, but can you sit on a cushion on the chair. Chair's just a thing, it doesn't matter. It's just who are you in the chair?

Who are you on the floor? Right. But can you sit on a cushion on the floor? Yeah. Oh yeah, I'm on a cushion. My whole setup. Okay, let me look at your setup. I'm just curious.

All right, so I'll hold it. So I got this cute little cushion situation about that wine. Okay. My hips are semi-flexible. I would say they're more than semi. They would poop very flexible. So that's, I'm just saying that that cushion is kind of small for a lot of folks. For most people, I'd say make your cushion like at least, I don't know, a foot high, 10 inches high or something like that. The big thing, if you want to have biomechanical efficiency within your sacrum,

you know, just your spine, your hips, you wanna make sure your hips are up above the height of your knees. If your hips are above the height of your knees, that will put your lower back, particularly the L5S1 vertebrae, they are in a bit of a shape of a wedge with the wide angle of the wedge

facing out towards your belly button. And so what that suggests is that you want to have the hips ever so slightly tilting forward. And that is a ready position. So if you roll your hips backward and you sit down on the ground without having your hips up above the height of your knees, then you're going to be in that sad puppy dog

like, eugh,, like rolled forward position. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's just putting a little like undue stress on the discs in your spine and such. So you can really relax into the architecture of your spine when you set your hips up above the height of your knees. That in and of itself, whether you're on a chair or on the floor or whatever, if you just take away that tip, those of you still engaged in this conversation or monologue, if you just take away that one tip, this whole thing was worth it.

You can stop listening. Just do that and it will make a massive difference in your life. Wow. That's amazing.