Mark Bell's Power Project - How THESE Lifestyle Changes Will HEAL Your Body - Katy Bowman || MBPP Ep. 1101
Episode Date: September 11, 2024In Episode 1101, Katy Bowman, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about a proper Movement Diet. Katy talks to us about how to implement daily habits and lifestyle changes to eliminate pa...in. Follow Katy on IG: https://www.instagram.com/nutritiousmovement/ Official Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw Special perks for our listeners below! 🥜 Protect Your Nuts With Organic Underwear 🥜 ➢https://nadsunder.com/ Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 15% off your order! 🍆 Natural Sexual Performance Booster 🍆 ➢https://usejoymode.com/discount/POWERPROJECT Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order! 🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎 ➢https://emr-tek.com/ Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order! 👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶 ➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject 🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription! 🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel, and use code POWERPROJECT for 10% off any lab! Sleep Better and TAPE YOUR MOUTH (Comfortable Mouth Tape) 🤐 ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night! 🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!! Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements! ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel! Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Become a Stronger Human - https://thestrongerhuman.store ➢ UNTAPPED Program - https://shor.by/JoinUNTAPPED ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en Follow Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Podcast Courses and Free Guides: https://pursuepodcasting.com/iamandrewz ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz/ ➢ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject
Transcript
Discussion (0)
How should we walk?
Can our feet point out?
Do they point in?
You want to walk in a way that distributes
your locomoting forces evenly over your body.
What should people be thinking about from walking to running
when it comes to the heel strike?
It has a lot to do with terrain.
Are there any good macros to kind of follow
to have a healthy movement diet?
Using a variety of active rest, walking three to five
miles a day.
Carrying is the next one above that.
Do you like sandbags?
I like walking like a mile and a half to the grocery store
and then having two big bags full of groceries.
You talked about your house being exercise rich.
We always have a hanging station.
It's so crazy, because I remember as a kid,
we used to just play on monkey bars all the time.
And then you just go on the medicine adult,
you're like, wait, what?
What are you not going to be able to do going forward?
Not just in fitness, but in life.
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All right, Katie, I think we should just dive right
into a bunch of really cool stuff.
One thing I'm super interested in is how
in the world should we sleep?
I hear a lot of stuff about all these little hacks that we can do for sleep and I think those things are great. Getting rid of the phone, trying to get rid of distractions, maybe wear blue light
blocking glasses and all these little things to help us get to sleep. But I think everyone can
relate that they probably woke up one day and something they did in their sleep
somehow catastrophically broke their back.
Or people are just waking up sometimes
with a lot of tightness or strain or stress
in their lower back.
I remember one time waking up
and my wrist was really jacked up.
I remember waking up another time,
my ankle was really messed up.
So I don't know what's going on with my sleep.
But do you have any
position on this? What are your thoughts? Well, yeah, the sleep environment is maybe one of the biggest environments that you spend your time in. I mean, it depends on, I guess, how long your work
day is. But in general, if you're sleeping that eight hours, that's like a third. I think of
our day, our life as separated into domains,
sleep, leisure, occupation, transportation, and health,
sloth, if you will, which is a model used to
discuss movement and the movements people are
or are not getting.
I might be able to handle that.
I might be able to move like a sloth.
Yeah, well, but sleep is a big one.
And there's not a lot of physical activity you can get
in sleep because the lot of physical activity you can get in sleep because
the definition of physical activity sort of precludes itself from being possible when you're
sleeping, but you are still creating a shape. So you're always moving. You know, I think that's
the tricky thing as a biomechanist. That's the piece I like to get across is you are always
That's the piece I like to get across is you are always moving. You're always oriented to gravity and you're against some surface and then there's what
ensues when those two things line up.
And yes, I think most people can relate to sleeping in a funky way and then now they
can't turn their neck in the morning or if you've ever gone camping or you've ever stayed in a guest
bed of someone else's place and you're like, man, I am all jacked up from-
The futon.
Yeah, exactly. That's right.
Futon kills you.
That's right. And so we are heavily dependent on our sleep setup. It's like your chair. There's
like an ergonomics or there's a repetitive positioning that we're used to, but you can only do what you're used to for a certain period of time before it starts to affect
you a little bit.
So if you think of yourself as having a movement diet, there's not really a right way to sleep.
But if you think about your total movement
throughout the course of a day or a week or a year,
how you sleep is a set of positions
that might look quite similar to the way you spend
or shape or position your body throughout the rest of time.
So if you sleep, if you sit in a chair a lot,
you drive a car to get to work,
maybe you're sitting in a chair for work,
maybe your fitness activity is also seated,
maybe you love riding a bike,
and then you go into bed and you get curled up
in that same hip flexion position,
then it's just a heavy dose of vitamin hip flexion.
And then maybe you are really, really exhausted
and you happen to move your leg in a
particular way. And that puts you out of your comfort zone, but you're asleep and you're not
really aware of what's going on. Then that ends up being a seven or eight hour load that is a straw
that breaks the camel's back. It tweaks your back a little bit. So before we talk about what would
be the best way to sleep, it would probably be, how can I use my sleep to balance out
the rest of the movements that I'm doing all the time?
Because that answer is not going to be the same
for every person.
And what are your symptoms and so on?
Yeah, and what are your goals?
Not only what are you trying to move away from,
but what are you trying to move towards?
Because it could be opposite recommendations
for one person versus another almost, right?
Yeah, and yeah, your stage of life, really,
you know, like I sleep on the ground.
I sleep on the floor, very firm surface,
also a lot of movement to get down and get back up.
I like that.
I think there might be a clip you show in your house,
maybe, Andrew, you can search for that.
I saw you showing like your kitchen table
and the bed and stuff,
and I'm sure maybe that was old video,
so maybe things have changed,
but what, like, I guess what would lead someone
to start to investigate sleeping on the floor?
Well, for me, it started with when I was pregnant,
I was given all these stretches that I should do
to prepare my hips and my lower back.
And I was like, like many people,
how am I to fit this new prescription of movement
that someone's giving me in my life
that doesn't have a space for it?
I have to clean something else out.
I have to clear something else out in order to do it,
which is always what happens
when you're given something that you need to do.
There's only a fixed amount of time.
You gotta move something else around.
And I'm very busy like everyone else.
And I thought, well, these stretches just,
I mean, they're just like sitting on the ground,
sit with your legs crossed, like in one way,
then flip that around, then open your legs up
and straddle stretch a little bit.
And I said, well, I don't really have time
to do this as an exercise, but what I'm gonna do
is I'm just not gonna sit in the couch right now
and I'm gonna give up my Netflix watching on the couch
and I'm gonna do it sitting on the floor instead. And so just doing that allowed me to fit that
in and then I started to think more and more about like, how am I positioning my body all
the time in a way that might not be lining up for what's working for me? And the pillow
was actually the first thing to go for me. I always had a headaches and sort of stiff
neck and then I realized all these stretches that I'm being given to do, you know, in PT,
I'm sort of undoing by putting a pillow
behind my head every night.
So I said, I'm just gonna slowly transition
to not having a pillow
because it's pushing my head forward all night long.
And I just, over time I got rid of it
and then I found I didn't need it.
My parts had become more mobile,
more used to sleeping in different positions
and I was more adaptable. Instead of needing a very fixed, rigid sleep environment to feel
okay, I got strong enough to move in different sleep environments.
So was it just during your pregnant that you were sleeping on your back or was that something
you were doing before too? No, I always sleep on my back. I always even sleeping on your back or was that something you were doing before too?
I know I always sleep on my back
I was even sleep on my back or sleep on the ground sleep on your bed because you mentioned that the pillow was pushing your
Neck for it's why I assume you're on your back or yeah
I was on my back there
But also goes for the side and I had read this paper about sleep positions around the world. I'm heavily informed by
Anthropological and in evolutionary
by anthropological and evolutionary studies in that way.
Yeah, what do people do that maybe don't have the same technology as us or same resources,
same types of beds?
Yeah, beds and pillows are very new.
And I was like, how could it be?
And I was looking at my dog and like, okay,
my dog is really comfortable folding up
in different positions.
So even when I'm on my side,
the side pillow keeps your neck from doing this
where you would imagine sleeping like this,
especially if you went from sleeping supported
to sleeping with your head tilted for eight hours,
that's too big of a load.
That's too big of a change to take my stiff neck
that, you know, basically just does this all day
and then does this on its side at night
to give it the equivalent to running a marathon
in a day or in a night.
I found that when I took the pillow out
when I was on my back, I would still end up on my side,
but I would kind of wake up a little bit
and then maybe put like a shirt or something
a little bit less height.
And then over time I got comfortable enough
being able to sleep with my neck bent to one side too.
And I'm, you know, I have fairly broad shoulders.
It's not like I'm super narrow.
So I mean, there's still quite of a bend,
but it's just like taking that flexibility
that you're working on for those minutes
in your exercise routine
and filling the environment of sleep with more movements.
I think it's a skillset too,
to be able to fall asleep anywhere.
Some people are like, oh yeah, I get on a plane,
I just fall asleep and five hours later I'm there.
And you're like, holy shit, I wish I could do that.
For me, I end up in like, just, I don't know,
I get stiff and tight,
but a lot of it I think is in reference
to some of what you're talking about.
And I've experimented with sleeping on the ground.
It's probably something I need to revisit a little bit.
I can actually feel like my hips and other things,
just not feeling as good actually being on a mattress,
regardless of the type of mattress.
So it's probably something I need to mess around with.
It almost feels like a little form of some passive,
almost like myofascial release when I get on the ground,
because certain areas are tight enough to where
if I have good enough pressure,
that's kind of what it feels like.
It feels like I'm hitting a pain button.
Yeah, and out of all the movements that we're missing now,
if we compare ourselves to humans over time,
we're certainly low on total volume of movement,
but we're also, we don't have a very big diversity
of movements.
They tend to be sort of quite similar.
And pressure is a category of movement
that we get very little of.
There's certainly now become therapeutic pressure movements.
Like people are working, you know,
they know what myofascia is now.
And they're standing on these mats
and they're giving some pressure for our feet.
Right, right, so we're introducing texture.
Even a foam roller has texture to it,
even if it's not lumpy, but there's textured rollers.
And it's this idea that if you are out of the zoo of our,
or the greenhouse of our infrastructure,
and if you're out growing more in the wild,
you're gonna be sitting on lumpy, bumpy things.
And your body gets more able to handle those movements. You're more fit for those types
of environments. But right now we're fit for very cushy, soft environments. And that's what we're
often feeling when we go camping. Or if maybe someone's bed is a little firmer than yours or
is a little curved compared to yours
and it's like, it's more than we can handle.
But it's not just because of the shape.
I think it's because of the volume of time
that we spend in the sleep environment.
Again, you just did something for eight hours.
If you did any other exercise for eight hours
and we're like, man, I'm so cramped up and achy.
It's like, yeah, you just did that for eight hours.
It was a lot.
So I'm definitely more on up and achy. It's like, yeah, you just did that for eight hours. It was a lot.
So I'm definitely more on the side of having the capacity
to fall asleep wherever and, you know,
fall asleep without a pillow and not waking up feeling
like you got ran over by a truck.
But there are some people that spent a lot of money
on these like ergonomic pillows that align your spine
and, you know, they give a lot of promises.
And let's just assume that they delivered on those promises
and these people are now experiencing like,
wow, I actually slept through the whole night
and my neck's no longer hurting.
Why would that be maybe not the best route to go in?
Whereas being able to have the capacity
to sleep in any position would be.
Well, I don't know that it's not the best route to go in.
I mean, at the end, your number one goal is what?
Rest.
So I think you wouldn't necessarily want to tinker with your sleep environment if you
don't have any problems.
Or let's say you're going to experiment.
Maybe you're going to go towards the sleep environment with more infrastructure.
You're going to try to solve with more infrastructure and you can see how that pans out. And then maybe you can also explore sleep environments with less infrastructure because
we're all just experimenting and then we're all changing the whole time.
You're going to be in a different age and stage of life.
You can go through an injured stage and your body has different priorities of what it's
doing, healing, perhaps. Maybe you're in a time of life where it's requiring a lot of focus, it's kind of draining
of your attention and you don't want to have to deal with monitoring yourself throughout
the night, which happens when you become more of a ground sleeper.
You have to give more attention to your physicality and maybe you don't have the bandwidth to
do that.
So again, I like to not always talk about domains
on their own, because I think it's within the context
of everything that's going on.
Yeah, I remember hearing you
and Kelly Sturet talking about,
and Sturet was mentioning basically sleeping overextended.
People are, their kind of ribs are up
and their butt is kind of popped out.
And they might not even realize,
but even when you're on your side,
you can definitely end up in that position quite a bit.
So these are things, I think it's just,
when you guys mentioned that a few years back,
I haven't been able to get that out of my head.
When I sleep and I get on my side, I'm like, okay,
kind of tuck your pelvis underneath
because my butt tends to want to like
stick out a little bit more.
And that's been really helpful.
Like I wake up and my back's not nearly as tight
as it used to be.
Yeah, and I think people will often support with pillows.
You know, in that conversation,
and if I recall, it's a while ago,
a lot of times when there's something with your alignment
or your physicality and that eight hours
is creating a set of loads
that is straining a particular tissue,
it makes sense to prop it better, you know, to add support.
It's just about how much attention
you wanna give a particular issue.
Sometimes we're looking for the quickest fix
and then we do something and then it doesn't work
for as long as we had hoped like an orthotic in a shoe.
You know, you can wear an orthotic in a shoe
and it'll help prop up your ankle or your knee or hip issue.
But then there's also this other school of thoughts like,
well, actually, if you go to more minimal,
you develop the strength yourself
for these supporting pieces.
So those are both attempting to solve a particular issue.
They're just approaching it from a different place.
And so it's, I wrote an article
a long time ago, your pillow is an orthotic. It's sort of the same thing. You know, we're,
sometimes we need that quick prop, that quick fix, because we have to get through our daily
life and we have many other more immediate needs in our physicality. That's why it tends
to get on the bottom of the list for so many people. But if you do that long enough, then your body starts alerting you and then it goes
higher and higher up on the priority list.
And now you've got an issue.
Now you've got pain.
Now you've got injury or disease.
And then now you're starting to make more long-term changes.
You're investing in changing maybe your philosophy around it, certainly your infrastructure or
at least the time that you're willing to dedicate towards it.
There's just some things you just don't ever think about,
but even as we're going over this,
I'm thinking like a bed frame is like a scam.
You know, a bed frame is keeping me from my mobility.
Like the bed should be on the ground
so that there's some sort of like,
okay, it's not a huge challenge to get up off
of a mattress on the ground,
but it's more of a challenge than getting on off of something elevated.
Yeah. I mean, I frame all of these discussions,
starting with what is exercise, you know,
because what we're trying to do is we're taking an environment for which most of
our physical movement has been removed, our lifestyle, so to speak,
and then our structured
environments.
And then we're trying to figure out how to pick which key movements to reintroduce in
the movement environment or an environment dedicated to just movement.
So everything's sort of out of context.
And yes, the bed frame, just like shoe, I love the shoes.
I mean, we're in a kind of a minimally shod awareness.
I would say you guys all are
and probably many of your listeners.
Why did we have such thick shoes?
I mean, there's a lot of detritus out in the world.
It was something protective.
What's that word?
Detritus.
Just manmade, or it doesn't, I don't know
if it has to be manmade.
It's just broken down bits that are all around.
So there's just broken down bits, there's glass and there's screws and nails and fecal
matter like there's all kinds of stuff everywhere and it's like, oh, it makes sense to put a
barrier but then that barrier became something that got thicker and then more styled.
And then now we've got the cultural component of like, I want it to look a certain way.
And then it just over time gets a larger
and larger footprint, so to speak.
And then I think the same as for our sleep environments.
You know, we started in what's the akin to a moccasin.
You know, I sleep on sheep skins on the floor.
That's pretty similar.
You're looking at very natural material
thrown out on the ground.
When I go camping, I take that too.
And then it got a little higher.
Now I'm in the Pacific Northwest
and it actually took me a while sleeping on the floor
to realize that I was building up mold
because I wasn't picking it up every day.
That's another piece with ground sleeping
is the movement that goes into picking it back up, which in Japan,
many cultures, maybe more cultures ground sleep.
Mold's probably kind of good for you though in some ways, right?
Yeah.
Sleeping on a bunch of it, not as much.
But yeah, so this idea that, okay, well maybe the bed started to be lifted off the ground
for mold, for bugs, for spiders, because different environments.
I lived in Central America a couple of years ago.
And so you have, there are reasons people sleep in hammocks.
Like there are reasons for why things are shaped
the way they are, but then culturally we get involved
and then you don't think about the origins
of a lot of stuff.
You were mentioning the barefoot shoe aspect of things
and over the time, like you've probably been doing that for a really long time.
Has your mind not changed, but have you come to any new ideas
when it comes to people trying to transition to that?
Because there seems to be another wave of it these past few years.
And some people seem to be getting hurt.
Yeah. Yeah.
So I wrote a book transitioning well to minimal footwear
because...
Yeah, so I wrote a book transitioning well to minimal footwear because it's not just like
going from your plush bed set up to sleeping camping and being like, why don't I feel better now? Everyone said these barefoot shoes are going to make me feel great.
It's like, well, there's tissues I need to grow. There are structures I need to develop skill and strength. And so I do encourage people to recognize that their physiology and their anatomy needs
progressive loading over time.
And then I think also the way that I think about it now is people are very focused on
the shoe part.
And again, I like the whole context, which is where is your body right now?
What are your goals with doing it?
There's the shoes, obviously.
And then there's your movement.
What are the terrains that you're walking on?
Terrains and textures, because different shoe features might be more necessary,
depending on what that is.
And then also, what is the movements that you're doing in them?
Are you going out in the world? Are you on slippery things? And so you have to think about all of those pieces.
I went through a foot fracture myself, being minimally shot, very strong feet, but I just
hit a perfect storm of, this is when I was living in Central America, to go from winter
here. So I'd already transitioned, always wear minimal, but I live in Washington
state so I wouldn't wear, you know, like earth runner sandals, like a minimal sandal. I
wouldn't wear those exclusively. Sometimes I've got minimal boots on and those will limit
the mobility and strength over your feet through the winter. And then you come out in the spring
and you got to strengthen them up a little bit. So I went from that environment to a coastal environment
wearing only sandals or being completely,
completely unshod, walking five to eight miles a day
on sand or dirt.
And unshod is barefoot?
Totally barefoot, yeah.
And then also all the houses there are cement.
So then, so I was on cement unshod,
walking for all the things I needed loaded, right?
So not only was I walking five to 10 miles a day,
I was usually carrying 10 or 15 pounds while I was doing it,
because we were running just like people do there,
all your travel is really on foot and you're carrying it.
Backpack or something.
That's right.
And my feet, as strong as they were in my environments,
were not prepared for that set of loads.
It was probably the cement floors that put me over the top.
And you think about it from an environmental perspective,
the people that grow up there,
their body weight's gonna increase
as they get used to the surfaces.
And so they don't even think about it.
No, they've loaded progressively perfectly
for their environment.
And so I was dropping into a brand new environment.
So I like to bring that holistic thinking to everything.
It's like, let's think through, you know,
people will be like, I'm trying to do minimal,
but I work in a hospital.
I work at Costco and I'm in these minimal,
I'm in this super thin shoe,
but I'm on these very hard and unnatural surfaces.
I'm like, right, so if you're gonna do it,
this is the natural way of doing it.
You have to consider gait, the actual patterns with which you're walking, because maybe there
are things about your gait that create higher points of pressure that don't need to be there.
And then again, maybe you need a minimal shoe with a little more cushion for when you're
standing for seven, eight or eight hours a day.
You could still have some minimal characteristics.
So to answer your question, I believe it would be most summed up
is I think of minimal shoes as a set of characteristics
that you can dial up or dial down
depending on that more complex context.
And if you're really uncomfortable
and you're in a lot of pain, you're-
Change something.
Yeah, yeah, something's off
and there may be appropriate times for people.
There's some people that like to sprint
or our buddy, Brad Kern, he does high jump.
I mean, on a track,
you're gonna have to probably wear certain things.
Like there's no reason to go all crazy
on just trying to be barefoot all the time.
Yeah, I mean, you just, again, what are you going for? I think that there's a dearth of
movement-wise. There's a lot of information about what you're supposed to be doing. In
every realm of your life, there's never been more experts telling you what absolutely needs
to be done. And in order to wade through it,
I think you need to have a compass
and your values are your compass.
And so what is your movement?
Why, what are you going for?
And then once you have that sort of North Star,
you can start wading the things that you hear to be like,
okay, yes, I think that this would be something
that I would wanna have,
and then maybe I'll leave this other one behind.
Are there any brands that are favorites of yours
when it comes to footwear?
Because there's a couple brands that seem to offer
really nice options, like they have a wide toe box,
but then they also have other features,
like maybe they are putting a little bit more millimeters
underneath your feet for protection and so on.
I mean, I have the brands that I love best for my body
and that took a while to figure it out
based on I'm a long-distance walker,
so I'm gonna walk 20 to 30 miles in a day.
And that's hours, it's different than running.
It's a lot of time on your feet.
Is that broken up throughout the day type of deal?
No, it's pretty much just when,
if I'm gonna get it done, it's pretty much a straight.
What's that, how long does that take?
I can, 20 miles takes me about six hours.
And then if I go up a little bit longer,
it starts to, I think, slow down.
And I'm usually walking in more natural terrain,
so there can be hills or mountains that I'm going around.
And of course, that's gonna slow things down.
But if I'm just on flat level, six hours.
Yeah, that's my sport, long distance walking.
So I like those shoes that work. And then again, so much of shoes is like, again,
Pacific Northwest are shoes that I love when I'm in California, but I can't really wear them
up in the Pacific Northwest because they are not made for wet environments. And then once they get
wet and they are soaked through and you get that friction when you're walking,
it's not good for me.
So-
What are some good shoes for getting wet?
Cause I've never really seen much.
I know.
It's a sparse, you know?
It's really, it's really tricky.
So for me, if I'm in dry environments,
the sandals that I like best are earth runners
because I like, they have a thicker sole
with a lot of tread.
And again, I'm usually, I can be in slate,
I can be in a more wilderness.
They're also great for stream crossing.
They have a great footbed that can get wet
and then I don't slip around in it a lot.
So they're like hiking, they're like strappy hiking boots.
I'll backpack.
Like I just got back from doing eight miles up, you know, 2,500 feet over eight miles with a 45 pound pack.
And I'll wear those,
but I feel like I've got my four wheel drive on
when I wear those.
And I've been wearing them for years.
Almost 10 years.
And for people that like grounding,
my understanding is EarthRounders,
some of them have copper in them.
So for people that are into that, that might serve them well.
Yeah, and then sometimes I like boots.
Like if I'm gonna be in, so that's warm wet.
But if it's cold wet, I'm gonna need, you know,
I will socks on and then there's actually kind of a stylish
boot that Zero makes that I like
because it's really flexible.
And I'm going to hike Hadrian's Wall.
I'm gonna walk across England next month. And that's what I'm trying to figure out right now Wall. I'm going to walk across England next month
and that's what I'm trying to figure out right now is what shoes do I take to walk in an environment
that I've never been through. What a horrible feeling it is when you brought the wrong shoe.
I can't bring that you can't bring the wrong shoe like that's it that's all I'm doing so I feel like
you're halfway through a trip and you're like these shoes suck. Yeah I had Andrew pull these
up because I'll sometimes take runs in these and these are like a water shoe that you can like get
submerged in water and then once you get out of shoe that you can like get submerged in water.
And then once you get out of water, the water just drains out of the shoe.
They have a few of these, they have a boot version of these too.
So if someone's looking for shoes that they can get wet,
like a swim run athlete or someone who wants to run through stuff,
they have a good amount of...
Like they're still flat, but they have a good amount of tread on the bottom.
So it has like a boot tread, but it can get wet easily and dries out easily.
Are these pretty wide?
Because this, from this picture,
looks a little bit more narrow than other Vivo's.
Oh no, my foot's wide as fuck.
Yeah, okay.
It works, it's great.
Yeah, that's a Vivo, they're pretty wide.
Yeah, very cool.
And then for the bed stuff, like,
I know you have, I guess, some of the things that you like,
so what are those?
What's the bed type of thing you're sleeping on?
You're literally just sleeping on the ground.
I sleep in sheepskins.
So the sheepskins, we just roll them out
and then I just dress it like the rest of the bed.
Throw it on a sheet, bottom sheet, throw up a top sheet
and then throw up a duvet or something on top
and then I pick it all up and hang it up when I'm done.
So it's pretty, pretty sparse.
I like it because it gives me a whole extra room.
I mean, think about if you have a house,
how much of your room is dedicated
to this sleep environment?
And it's like kind of stuffed to the gills.
So I have an open room as soon as I'm done sleeping,
which I really like.
You know, it just works out for,
I got, you know, kids running around.
So it's nice to take a little pressure out
by taking the volume out.
And why the sheepskin?
Just curious.
Because it's got cushion.
It's easy to keep clean and it's warm.
So again, where I live, having that little bit of heat,
it's like if you've ever gone backpacking,
you take a thermal rest or something that keeps you warm.
Just the air that gets trapped in there is nice and warm.
They work good for camping, not backpacking.
They're too heavy for backpacking, but for camping, yeah.
How should we walk?
Oh, how long to show?
You read my mind.
Yeah, can our feet point out?
Do they point in?
Like, what the hell are we supposed to do?
Yeah, well, again, you've got a lot of ways
your hinges can be, which is great.
Humans are, we're generalists as a species, which means we're highly adaptable
to a lot of different situations. And if you think about the environment, like not your exercise
environment, because it's probably manmade, but if you think about doing what you would do out in
something more natural, think about all the different angles your ankles would need to operate
on, right?
Your ankles are sort of like gyroscopes.
You can be on something slanted and still run straight ahead.
Your knees can accommodate not just straight forward and back,
but they've got some ability to, the lower leg can twist out.
So we've got all this adaptability because our locomoting surfaces are so varied. But then you take this anatomy and you put it on
mostly flat and level and firm surfaces. And then you combine it with other habits like long bouts
of sitting, often when we're developing, right? So maybe we
don't sit a lot now, but many of us spent a lot of years sort of growing up in a chair,
so to speak. And the way our calves work is when you have your knees bent a lot, then
they create a certain tension and that can create different rotations. So we're all bringing
all of these adaptations
and sort of a, I think of your gate punter as an accent.
There was how the people moved around you.
You're informed by that.
If you've ever saw people in the same family,
you can kind of recognize like, wow,
they walk a very same way.
There's a lot of hereditary just from mimicry in our gate.
So taking all of that, how should you walk?
You wanna walk in a way that distributes
your locomoting forces evenly over your body
as best as possible, or maybe not always evenly,
because sometimes you're doing something
where you wanna go faster or slower,
and that wouldn't be even, right?
You've got parts that can accelerate you
and then parts that slow you down a little bit.
So if we think about the walking diet,
like your whole scope of walking,
you wanna be walking in a way that doesn't
wear out parts of you before other parts.
It's the same reason that you check the alignment
on your car.
Like, why do we care about our alignment on our car?
Because you end up wearing out certain parts and then you
have to replace them sooner than later.
That's why you would work on your gate as well.
So in general, it means that you're efficiently able to leverage the forces of your calves
and your hamstrings and your glutes.
That's moving forward flat that you're, your walking diet includes some hills,
not just stairs, which are not hills,
so that you're able to train,
get more quadriceps in there.
There's not a lot of quadriceps,
as much as there are like posterior muscles
in just flat over ground walking.
But if you're on treadmill,
you might get more quads than hamstrings,
because that's sort of a reverse gait on a treadmill.
So yeah, that's as easy as I can say it right now,
is you want to work in a way that distributes the work load of walking
over all of your parts, including your arms and shoulders.
There's a lot of people who don't move their arms at all when they're walking.
And a quarter of your walking is coming from reciprocal arm swing,
but if those shoulders are stiff, it's not.
And then your back's got to start doing a lot more. a quarter of your walking is coming from reciprocal arm swing, but if those shoulders are stiff, it's not.
And then your back's gotta start doing a lot more.
Do you notice anything, because you've probably been around
a lot of cultures that maybe they don't sit as much,
or maybe you've seen things being a biomechanist
for so many years, right?
So what have you noticed from people who haven't been
affected by the modern lifestyle as much?
Do you notice a certain trend in the way that they strike,
in the way that they walk? What do you notice there?
Well, I have been to many places, but there's not that many places
that haven't been touched by some aspects of modern living.
It was really interesting being in Central America with people who were fishers, and
so everyone's walking, most of the places that they're going if they're not riding
a horse.
I could still see some joint range of motion limitation, but it looked more maybe dietary or other stresses.
So what I can see is people who move a much greater volume.
I don't really see difference in the characteristics.
Like I can still see,
I can still see what registers to me
as like range of motion limitations.
Certainly if you're more,
and I haven't really spent very much time in Asia,
I have spent more time in certain countries of Africa.
And I mean, squats are something that you can just see
a lot more of a lot of the world is squats
so much more easily.
But in places that use, that don't have squatting,
like there's not as much squatting in Central America,
and I could still see like, oh, there's some stiffness
in limitations in the ankles, but not to the point
where it would keep people from still walking
seven or eight or nine miles that day.
So the volume of movement is still intact.
Where here we have those limitations,
and I think it sort of stops the movement.
Of course, many people don't have to move.
And in those places, moving is not an option.
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To kind of add onto that,
and another question on top of that,
would be the idea of like,
we've had someone that came onto the show
and he was mentioning, when running,
it's okay to heel strike when running.
And when you see other people,
other types of runners run,
there doesn't seem to be that.
There seems to be more of a outside to forefoot type of pattern of strike,
not heel, right?
So, what are your thoughts when it comes to walking and running?
Because I've noticed with myself over the years that I, even when I'm walking,
I don't hit my heels like I used to.
It's been a bunch of changes.
Like, the shoes I used to wear would allow me to heel strike that way.
When I transitioned to barefoot, couldn't.
And then it kind of transitions now,
I'm kind of hitting kind of that outer part of the edge of my heel,
then coming in and it's very different, it's much lighter.
It doesn't feel as heavy as it was.
And I noticed that with some other people,
but I'm wondering, what should people be thinking about
from walking to running when it comes to the heel strike?
I know it's not everybody, of course.
I know it's not everybody,
and I think it has a lot to do with terrain.
Like there was a lot of,
I think there was a big push in no heel striking,
like running and landing on the toes,
because that was like the natural way to run.
But if you look at a lot of video of people and children, you can kind of see a range.
Like, I don't even know if there's one optimal way.
It's hard to tell what's hitting first, too. You're like, oh, yeah, yeah.
Kind of like the whole foot almost.
Yeah, yeah, right, right. You need sensors on all, you know, that's why we do stuff in laboratories, right?
So you could actually put sensors and see which sensor is being hit first, but you don't
do that out, you know, collecting data in other places is impossible to do.
So I think that the way you walk has a lot, like the pattern of, let's say your heel strike,
is going to be affected by what's happening in your leg.
I mean, your whole body, yes,
but more like what's happening in your lower leg
and even your hamstrings can create sort of a point,
a slightly pointed toe.
So you just tend to catch that first.
And if you were wearing a heeled shoe,
then you would have felt the heel of the shoe
because it would have added mass beneath your heel.
So it wasn't that you were heel striking
as much as the couple inches of foam beneath your heel
was hitting the ground just because of the shape of the shoe.
And then I noticed I changed my gait
depending on the substrate or where I am.
Like the more, if I know that it's just miles of asphalt,
then I'm not really monitoring what my feet are doing as much.
But if I'm moving on a trail, I'm much more mindful because you're not aware of what's
coming up behind you.
And I think a lot of our gait is informed by, again, a large amount of unnaturally clear
human surfaces.
And then if you took yourself out into an environment
that was really new to you and textured,
you would probably find that your legs and feet
would be behaving differently than when you were just in a,
you know, your regular run.
Yeah.
Yeah, you think about even just the way you would like
orient your arms if you were walking through a parking lot
full of gravel, you know, your hands probably be out,
unless you're like totally used to that terrain.
Yeah, or ice or snow is a real great place
if when you drop into those environments to be like,
whoa, like my knees are slightly flexed.
I've widened my feet, I've turned my feet out.
I mean, a lot of things that we do in our gait
are indicators of other parts of our bodies.
So when people start to have less balance, they might widen their feet.
They're creating a bigger base of support.
They might turn their feet out more.
Maybe they have a hard time engaging their lateral hip muscles, which would hold you
up if you were on a single foot.
But if you don't have that strength, you can get by because you're such a, we're so adaptable,
but I'm just going to slightly turn my foot out.
I don't need that lateral hip strength.
I can create a whole different lever that balances that tip to the side by turning my
foot out.
Where I would, if I saw someone with that and I, they would also be coming probably
because maybe they've noticed changes in their bone density of their hip or their balance.
I'm going to show them, I want you to start walking with your foot more forward.
Why?
Because it's gonna actually make every step you take,
get you more of the loads that you would have to be going
and getting separate exercise for as well,
or it's a way to support those other exercises
you're doing in physical therapy.
So instead of like working your lateral hip,
doing your balance exercises,
and then going back to gait
that promotes neither one of those things, we're gonna incorporate the same form
that you learned for that exercise to target those pieces,
we're gonna put it into your walking.
Also, if we're walking for exercise
or walking for like a workout,
why not walk a bunch of different ways?
Why not walk with high knees?
Why not walk kicking your heels back?
Why not walk with your feet out? Why not walk with your feet out?
Why not walk with them in, walk on your toes?
Yeah.
You know, because it's a movement diet, right?
Yeah.
And you're trying to pick up your vegetables,
your fruit, your meat, your dairy, all of it, right?
Yeah, and you know, walk on the curbs.
You know, walk with one foot higher than the other.
If you don't have very complex environments,
you're gonna have to create them.
And that's what exercises are doing. They're trying to mimic what would happen if you were have very complex environments, you're gonna have to create them. And that's what exercises are doing.
They're trying to mimic what would happen
if you were in more complex environments.
You can also just try to put yourself
in more complex environments sometimes too.
Because then it's more reflexive.
Right.
And it's my understanding that walking can be great for us,
but I also just observe that people are having
a hard time walking, they maybe have some dysfunction.
As a result, they have some symptoms.
That's where I'm like, I don't know how great it is
for this person to walk all the time
because they're in a lot of pain.
I do think that walking can help you get out of pain,
but I think that you're gonna need to adopt
a better walking pattern somehow,
but you might not be able to
because you might be stuck in pain.
Yeah.
So pain's a big, tricky beast.
There's been data showing when people feel like
they're in too much pain to walk,
and that's just a general pain,
that becoming more physically active
can actually decrease the pain that you have.
But then there are pains that are coming
from the way that you're walking.
You know, like if you've ever had plantar fasciitis,
you know, if you have osteoarthritis in your knee
or your hip, those are pains that are created
because of the mechanical load in the situation.
And in that case, you're not going to walk your way out of it.
A lot of what I spend my time doing though is helping people who are like,
I cannot walk because of this sore spot on my foot,
this sore spot on my hip or my knee,
is show that you actually have a lot of options
when it comes to the shape in which you're walking.
So maybe just go out and walking for exercise is not the right prescription for someone
with that musculoskeletal pain, but work on adjusting some of the orientations of your
parts, your alignment, so to speak, to see if when you're walking you can take the load
off the places that are not working or that are maybe overworking and then
give some of the work to other parts of the body. So for me, a good example of this is a lot of
people have a hard time going downhill because of knee pain. They have no problem, their fitness
level is fine. They can haul up as high as they want, but when it comes time to going down,
there's such severe knee pain going down
that it takes really that whole hike off of the table.
Or stairs, there'll be people who can't go downstairs.
They have to kind of go sideways.
They're really carrying a lot of weight on their arms
because their knees can't tolerate that downhill force.
So I'll do a downhill clinic and I'll be like,
okay, imagine you're walking behind a horse.
And if you've ever been behind a horse going downhill,
what you'll see is their haunches are really,
they're slaloming.
Just like if you're a downhill skier,
you don't bomb straight down
because you get too fast going that way.
Going wide.
Yeah, and you have to sort of zigzag.
You are bleeding off that downhill attraction to you to the bottom of the hill by going
back and forth.
And a horse, same thing.
Imagine they've got their front legs and they have all their weight behind them.
They sort of push their hips to the right and left as they're going downhill because
they're slaloming that weight.
Our hips do that.
Again, this is with the lateral hips.
But when people go downhill, they lock their hips into one position and they make their knees,
they make their quadriceps basically belay them down.
And I'll be like, let me show you what your hips can do.
So you wanna push to the side that you're going.
Yes.
If you're on your right,
you gotta step down on your right knee
and that right knee is gonna bitch as soon as you do.
You just let your right hip drop out to the side.
And then you're taking the weight off of the knee,
but you're still able with your geometry
to get yourself down.
So we don't really use our lateral hips.
These are like weaker parts in so many people,
but they're essential for gait.
So, you know, back to your earlier question of like,
what do we do when we're walking?
You need to discover the lateral hip
because the lateral hip is so primary
when it comes to going downhill.
And our knees are sort of doing everything.
They're the one person showing up again and again
while everything else is like, yeah,
taking a vacation.
Yeah, like the real way to go downstairs
is backwards probably.
I mean, if you want to try to eliminate knee pain
completely, but then you run into other.
Now you're walking backwards and that is not efficient.
And you could totally wipe out.
Yeah, yeah, like, yeah, definitely you can get by
in a lot of different ways, but you do.
It's really tricky to say, what is a gate issue?
And I would say if you have to walk backwards, you've got one.
Yeah.
I think trying to manage stairs or trying to go downhill, I see runners all the time.
And when I see a runner go flying past me, I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool.
That guy's out having a good run.
But when I see them running downhill fast,
I'm like, that person's really strong.
They must be feeling amazing.
Yeah, and running downhill is easier than walking downhill
because you're not, there's no eccentric lowering down.
You're basically just hopping down.
So all you have to do is be a rigid structure and catch it.
So yeah, definitely going down fast
can be another way people deal with knee issues,
but then you just have to make sure
your ankles are strong enough to take that load
and that your substrates not gonna give up.
And some of these people that are maybe
having some issues with walking,
maybe they should concentrate more on like better walking
rather than like more walking or further walking,
better walking, maybe shorter bouts at further walking, you know, better walking,
maybe shorter bouts at first,
and then as they start to maybe feel better
then they can kind of go back to doing miles
and miles perhaps.
Yeah, I do think that if you, if something's bothering,
just like lifting a weight or walking,
if something's clicking, if something is, you know,
you have to slowly accommodate in some way
to be able to get the move done.
Your body's telling you that move isn't working for me.
Part of you is bowing out of that move.
You can only do that for so long before the adaptation ruptures or if you have created
a stress riser or you either injure it or you just create another state of pain. So same goes for walking.
I would have people focus on working on their walk,
their walking parts and breaking it down.
I mean, I'm a nerd and that's what I love, walking.
And you have a series on this,
like I think on your YouTube channel,
and then do you have courses and stuff like that
you can direct people to as well so they can get,
so if people wanna really dive into it.
Yeah, if you want to nerd out on walking,
I have a walking well program,
which is half corrective exercise
and breaking down the mechanics of walking.
And then also with Jill Miller, who has tuna fitness
and myofascial work with the ball.
So it's kind of nice because you rarely see
those things together to be like, okay,
you're going to roll out specifically the parts involved in this exercise and then we're gonna go do
this exercise.
And it's putting, I mean, everything.
Where can people find it?
Let's just plug it.
Uh, tune up fitness.
Jill's got the best balls.
Jill has got the best balls.
And seriously, cause like, you know, it makes me curious and don't forget what you were
about to say there, but when it comes to those, I like that they have some give, but what is your opinion on
those versus like the harder lacrosse ball type stuff?
Because some people love those more.
Is it just different sensation or?
Yeah, I mean, it's different.
So when you're working with fascia, right, there's, if you're getting, I know you guys
talked to Gil about this a lot, right?
Gil Headley.
So there's the idea of like massage or pressure being pushed into you. And so pressure is created by what you bring and what the,
what the texture or the material of the ball is.
So a lacrosse ball doesn't give and a rubber ball does give.
Sometimes that hard push into you is to signal you to relax a little bit, to soften.
But lacrosse balls don't have the texture or the grip.
And a lot of, you know, I'm speaking on behalf of Jill,
I'm not 100% sure, but from what I understand with fascia,
a lot of times you're trying to create a traction.
There's a planar movement that you wanna have,
not just pushing so you create like a length or stretch,
but a pull.
And so the rubber allows you to press into it
and then you can twist and grip.
So the-
Like with us, Tourette's butt plug.
Kelly Stratt has that butt plug thing, that blue thing.
I don't, I don't.
What's it called?
Gemini.
Gemini.
But you can twist with it.
Okay.
Yeah.
Have you seen his Gemini?
I haven't seen his butt plug or his Gemini.
Yeah. So it's the same thing, right?
To- It grabs the skin. Yeah. It's grabbing. Yeah, so it's the same thing, right? It grabs the skin.
Yeah, it's grabbing. Yeah, it's grabbing.
There you go.
There it is.
I didn't make that design. He did.
Yeah, he's like, oh, it's supposed to be for your neck. Like, okay.
Maybe, maybe not.
Et cetera.
Where can they find the Walking Well course too though?
It's on Jill's website.
It's a collaborative product.
You can get it there.
You can probably search Walking Well.
What do you think walking and running does?
I think movement is obviously very critical for us, but what's it doing to the brain?
I've kind of heard some people describe it as it's sort of ringing out the body,
ringing out the stresses and things like that.
What, I mean, all the walking you're doing,
nearly 30 miles a day, what do you feel it's doing for you?
And what has it done for your clients?
Well, I mean, there's so many levels
that you could answer that question on.
So walking is, again, from that more ancestral perspective,
it's transportation.
So what it does is it can functionally take care
of some other element of your life,
which not a lot of exercises can do
while you're doing them, right?
What's a big hallmark of the definition of exercise
is you're really stepping away
from all other aspects of your life
to just work on your physical fitness or your body.
That alone, I hypothesize,
is why people are doing it less and less over time.
I think that the definition of it has become a big barrier
because as our lives have become fuller and fuller time-wise
with other things, how do you fit in something
that only ticks one box just for you?
And if people wanna have broader relationships,
families, that just keeps exponentially increasing
what you have to do.
And so-
20 minute drive there, 20 minute drive back from the gym,
hour of training, and you gotta do it four or five days
a week to get the great results.
But we're looking at it, we're starting to look at it
differently.
Yeah, we're starting to recognize like, oh,
and so how do you get it, how do you take all the same
things that you're already doing?
You don't have to touch your exercise time.
I think you just have to expand the thoughts and concept
of exercise to all other domains in your life.
So for me, walking around the world,
it is, you know, if we had a food pyramid of,
I use Hadza, the modern hunter gatherer populations
that have really good health,
as far as lifestyle is concerned,
their bottom of their food pyramid
and what is the food pyramid,
the movement food pyramid that I think we should have as well is
it's actually active rest positioning. It's not even movement. They don't really
sit much less than we do. They sit a great deal, but it's in the squats. It's where they're
sitting cross-legged. They're standing. We're doing an active rest positioning right now.
We're in place. We're doing something, but we're also using a lot of parts of our body.
And then just above that is walking.
Walking is the base.
And we can argue what's in our food pyramid, but what's not arguable is the shape is telling
you what's at the bottom is what you need a lot of and what's at the top is what you
just need a trace of as far as movement nutrition goes.
So it meets a lot of needs.
Our body is really set up for it.
It's a movement that heavily informs, that has heavily informed our structure and a lot
of the functions in our body sort of depend on it.
What it does, like one of the things that I really like that it does is when your gait
is really working and you've got that glute working while you're walking, you've got your
posterior push off really working, is it creates a good resting tension in your glutes, which is a
big part of what balances out what's going on in your pelvic floor.
And so, you know, you've always got something on your pelvic floor and the musculature that's
running between your sacrum and your pelvis, you know, the more you give a weight to something,
the more it tenses and tenses and shortens,
there's no opposition to that force.
So it's like if you were just always
giving something in your bicep
and you would always sit with it like this,
eventually there's gonna be a problem here.
You have some hypertonicity,
your arm doesn't go down as easily any longer,
so your glutes are that natural balance
to that pelvic floor action,
and that stride is just walking, it just can show up.
So it's really good for pelvic floor health
when you're doing it in a way that works
that posterior chain mentally, creatively.
Absolutely.
Clearing your mind, bringing down the rage just a little bit,
connecting with your neighbors.
Checking your eyebrows. Checking your eyebrows.
Checking your eyebrows.
Checking your eyebrows.
Dude, we weren't recording during that time.
I think I've heard some people talking about
maybe some philosophers, I forget which one it was,
but it was some of the extent of like,
if you're mad at somebody, go on a walk.
And when you come back, if you're still mad,
go on another walk.
Yeah, yeah.
And I would be like, wow, everyone was sort of an asshole before I went on a walk.
And then when I came back, I'm like, would you guys all change your behavior or something? But
it's just me. You know, I can- Working through your own stuff.
You do. Yeah. And so it's just, it's a nice way to get a big dose of sunlight. It's good for,
again, shoulder spine mobility. There's things that are happening in the spine.
There's stuff that's happening in your brain.
Your brain, part of the mechanism of that upward brain support is coming through impact.
So that regular rhythmic impact is part of what's moving the blood up too.
So like if you swam, you would be missing that.
Like you could still be fit.
You could still hit a lot of other things, but that's why I think of movement as nutrition.
Like there are some movements that have certain nutrients
that other movements do not have.
For years on this podcast, we've been talking about the benefit of barefoot shoes.
And these are the shoes I used to use back in like 2017, 2018, my old Metcons.
They are flat, but they're not very wide, and they're very stiff and they don't move.
That's why we've been partnering with and we've been using Vivo barefoot shoes.
These are the Modus Strength shoe, because not only are they wide, stiff and they don't move. That's why we've been partnering with and we've been using Vivo Barefoot shoes.
These are the Modest Strength shoe
because not only are they wide,
I have wide ass feet and so do we here on the podcast,
especially as our feet have gotten stronger,
but they're flexible.
So when you're doing certain movements,
like let's say you're doing jumping
or you're doing split squats
or you're doing movements where your toes
need to flex and move,
your feet are able to do that and perform in this shoe,
allowing them to get stronger over time.
And obviously they're flexible.
So your foot's allowed to be a foot.
And when you're doing all types of exercise,
your feet will get stronger,
improving your ability to move.
Andrew, how can they get the hands on these?
Yes, head to vivobarefoot.com slash power project
and enter the code that you see on screen
to save 20% off your entire order.
Again, that's at vivobarefoot.com slash power project links in the description as well as
the podcast show notes in the like traditional diet space.
It's going to vary for everybody, of course, but there are some things that we can say
like, Oh, if you're 200 pounds strive for 200 grams of protein, somewhere around 80
grams of fat and then let the carbs land where they may. For a movement diet, are there any good macros to follow to have a healthy
movement diet?
Yeah. And so the macros, I would say in fitness space, maybe the macros people are thinking
about are cardio flexibility and strength. I actually, as a biomechanist, think that the shapes that you're in are probably more
important than a tissue by tissue approach.
So that cardio strength and flexibility is really looking at taking care of joints and
muscle fascia, taking care of your heart and lungs, taking care of your overall muscle
mass and bone.
I think that that model, which has gotten us to this place and has a lot of value in
terms of recognizing the idea of cross-training, has a lot of holes in it because there are
a lot of very fit people who have sort of that, they meet and exceed volume guidelines
for movement and they have a good balance. But what's going to throw them under the bus
is gonna be some part, right?
When you have an issue in your body, it's a part.
It's like a couple inches in your body.
And so that's why I think the shape model is really helpful
because there's, the way I stack shape
is just like the HUDs of food pyramid.
So it'd be like active rest positioning,
using a variety of active rest,
walking three to five miles a day.
Caring is the next one above that.
And that's, there's a lot of ways to,
you're nourished, ultimately when you move,
you're trying to affect the cells in your body.
That movement that you're doing
is being put into certain cells. So movement is systemic. The benefits that we think of and the
measures that we use for movement are often systemic, which are VO2 max, you know, like that
kind of stuff. But it really is only working on the cellular level. So carrying is gonna get you in that heart and lung space
because you're adding weight,
but then also the way that you carry,
you don't wanna, rucking is like big right now,
throwing away on your body and work your heart and lungs
more, but if you always carried in exactly the same way,
you gotta vary your carry because carrying something
on the right side is gonna create a whole other way
of using muscles than if you just always put it
on your back. So carrying something right, you know, right side,
left side on the front of your body,
on the top of your head, like the world...
What do you like? What kind of carrying?
Like, do you like sandbags? Do you like other things?
Or what do you like?
I like my movement purposeful,
which means it's got to sit outside the exercise space for me.
Okay.
So I like walking to the grocery store, walking like a mile and a half to the grocery store,
walking like a mile and a half to the grocery store,
and then having two big bags full of groceries.
And I like to put them on my shoulders.
I like to work on my grip strength.
I never use a shopping cart.
No.
I always just like load up my thing,
and I always have way too much shit in there,
but I just walk around with those.
You don't shop at Costco.
Well, I would probably still try the same thing.
It's like, load up two of them.
Yeah.
Yeah, like those types of things, backpacking is, I like that.
I carried my kids and I really miss, like I am definitely weaker right now
because I didn't, we didn't have any strollers.
We only carried.
So like to go all the way up to having toddlers and hiking and like nursing toddlers while I was carrying
them and they also got really strong
because they were holding on.
So, you know, there's that movement ecology thing,
their grip and their strength.
Like even now my kids are taller than me now,
but they'll still be like,
let's see how far you can carry me, you know,
and hop on my back and then I'll say,
make yourself long across my back and then I'll, you know,
walk and do that kind of stuff.
So I like those, there are a lot of play.
You're probably carrying a lot of practical stuff with you
walking 30 miles a day.
You got your water and you probably have some stuff.
I'm a minimalist, but yeah.
And then when I do have a backpack,
you might pass me, I might be wearing on the front.
And then I might just be holding onto it,
dangling by the side.
So I definitely look for bags
that have a couple of different handle variations,
because I don't like, you can feel it.
You know, if you're in, again, walking with a backpack is one movement and like,
you're not going to usually go to the gym and just do one movement for 90 minutes
or for like, oh, there's something four hours.
You're just not going to, you need to have some,
something's gotta change, whether the train.
Something I actually wanted to add
into what you're saying there.
It's a habit that I've added in
for like the past five months now,
because I started working with sandbags a while ago.
So like, we talk about microdosing things.
So there's this actually training sandbag
that's maybe around 90 pounds,
and I'll just put it on my shoulder
and then I'll take a walk around the block, right? Because like because like it would be I don't necessarily look at it as a workout I
look at it as a way to get a walk in but I shift it's I put it on this shoulder this shoulder I put
it over my back I'll carry it in front of me and I'll just like walk for a while take it back home
and that's the way that I can I'm micro dose carrying because I've found like that that extra
load it's doing something which is why I keep going towards it.
It's like when it's on your back, you can't hunch over,
you kind of have to get tall,
you have to get your spine tall
so that you're able to handle that load
while walking through space.
So I've just found that to be really beneficial,
a way to microdose that habit.
Yeah, and I love the sandbag nature
because it's shape shifting.
And what we were asking before is like,
you could walk, you could walk with high knees,
you can do all those things,
but there's nothing like getting into
the reflexive brain space,
like rather than creating a list of contrived movements
that you're going to practice,
it's just like, hey, you're running on this walk
with this 90 pounds, deal with it.
And you're naturally going to start shifting
when something gets fatigued,
you're not gonna be inefficient,
you're actually gonna discover efficiency because you're not going to be inefficient. You're actually going to discover efficiency
because you're a mile away from your house.
Like you're going to discover efficiency
and you're going to develop creativity.
And that same thing goes for sleeping.
To go back to your first question,
once you have created an environment
where you're in bed for the long haul,
you're going to start using a lot more positions because you're
not setting yourself up to just do one thing and one alignment for eight hours.
You've created an environment where you won't even necessarily be aware that you're waking
up.
Maybe you are a little bit, but you're just like, oh, I'm going to shift over to something
else.
And now you have increased the volume of movement without having, it's not contrived.
It's very kind of intuitive.
You know, it's intuitive movement.
I wanna encourage people,
and no one's gonna listen to this, but fuck it.
Go on a walk without your phone.
Oh, for sure.
And if, you know, sometimes if your hands are occupied
and you do have a sandbag or something,
maybe that'll encourage you to not have the phone with you.
But just try, just a 10 minute walk
doesn't have to be a long one.
You don't have to go for 30 miles.
But I think that we don't get away from that stuff enough.
Bring a ball with you, bring a football with you,
bring a baseball with you,
chuck it around with somebody as you're going
or a basketball.
It'll make the time go way faster.
Med ball's not bad,
because you'd explosively just chuck it here and there.
There's so many different options.
And I think in SEMA had this like kind of that bag,
what's that like Russian bag thing that you have?
Oh yeah, I forgot what it's called.
That thing's kind of neat.
It like can go over your like neck
and then it has like handles on it and stuff.
It's a Bulgarian bag.
There you go, yeah.
And then Rogue also makes,
they basically make almost like med balls
that have like a handle.
I don't know if you've ever seen those.
Those are pretty cool.
Those are kind of like sandbags.
But it's like a sandbag with a handle.
And just, you know, just gives you other options.
But I want to encourage people to-
You walk with a rope too.
Ditch that phone.
Yeah, I'll stick the rope around the back of my neck
and then I'll just use it whenever I want.
Put it, you know, put it back away whenever. And then more recently,
I've just been wearing like a lot of weighted vests, but I've had that in mind too of like,
Oh, it's just like, you know, sitting here. So let me just put the weighted vest, you
know, just in the crooks of my elbow. Like I'm walking like a Zurcher squat or something
like that. So I've been doing a lot of different movements
and stick. I have these bamboo sticks from doing a little bit of martial arts stuff,
and I'll just do my twirling stuff, you know,
and I just-
Your wrist and shoulders.
And also just, you know, shoulder stuff
where you're passing it back and forth and overhead.
You've got the bow stuff.
Bow stuff.
Yeah, B-O stuff.
It's kind of like what you're talking about.
Yeah, and a frisbee.
You know, if you, I mean, it's-
How much fun?
It's fun, and also, if you're having a hard time
working on agility, games are so great for agility.
So if you go out with a frisbee and you're in a space
and you're on a walk, you know,
just someone's gonna do a little bit of sprint,
little run ahead, you got a little side step
when you're walking and, you know, people-
Gamify it.
You're gamifying it, yeah, yeah.
And you're also cross-draining.
How do we make, I saw, you know, that,
the shot of your house I think was amazing because you talked about your house
being exercise rich.
And that's what I've done.
I know and SEMA has like every gadget you can think of.
We got stuff like, I have a bunch of stuff
that's within hands reach that's near the TV.
And I just find myself always
My goodness, oh snap
When did this start for you? When did you start embedding exercise
into your day-to-day
and having your home environment exercised out?
Yeah, well, it's to that time during my pregnancy
when I was like, I gotta get rid of my couch.
If sitting is undoing all the things
that I'm supposed to do for an easier birth,
why are they here? Throw it away.
Yeah. It's kind of like, it's just the same way I feel about food that I don't want to eat in my
house. You know, I don't, I like, I want to create an environment that allows me to reflexively
express myself. I don't want to manifest willpower all of the time.
You know, I just wanna,
I wanna be in a space that supports me
in what I wanna do.
And so I started getting rid of so much seat.
Like I tell people,
we go calculate your chair to butt ratio of your house.
You're gonna find that a lot of what's in your house
are seats and not a variety of seats.
It's pretty, not a lot of what's in your house are seats. And not a variety of seats.
It's pretty, not a variety of seat shape.
It's all the same, 90 degrees at the hip,
90 degrees at the knees, maybe different degrees
of reclining or leaning back, but.
So maybe like a beanbag chair.
Yeah, exactly. Or just like different stuff.
An ottoman, you know, a puff, these like kind of lower things.
So we have replaced all of that over,
my kids are 12 and 13 now. So we've got a lot of lower things. So we have replaced all of that over, my kids are 12 and 13 now.
So we've got a lot of flexible seating. There's balls, there's puffs and things where, you know, you can certainly build something to lounge on. It's not to say there's anything
wrong with lounging, but if you don't want to only lounge, you got to give yourself options.
And sometimes the couch and the floor is not enough
options. So ways to make it the middle of the road, a little comfortable, but being a little bit more
active in terms of what the body is doing when it's taking rest. Like I said, ground sleeping is
something that we all do and we all prefer. I stayed in a hotel last night and I'm like,
like just the softness of it all.
I couldn't really support myself.
I felt myself sort of disengaging from my body.
So that's, I should probably practice sleeping
on a cushiony surface more often.
And then we always have something to hang on.
We always have a hanging station in our house.
So a hundred percent of the time.
So we've lived in different places.
And I think on the videos you can see online,
when our kids were younger, we had these brachiation ladders, like full on monkey bars that
collapsed. And it was so great because, you know, kids come with all of their movement programs
running at high speed. And it's now gotten to the place where, unless you're going to facilitate it,
they're not going to get it. And you're sort of missing that developmental window for them. So we just put them in our house and like
you get, they get up in the morning and they just be on them and playing around. And we
always change them around. Like sometimes they have rings, sometimes they have a bar.
We've had Ariel silks sometimes, um, we lived in a tiny house for a year and we just had
rock holds across the top and, And all the kids would just come over
just to play on the rock holds.
Like it was just hanging from their fingertips.
But you just-
It's a challenge.
It's a challenge, but-
Wait, let me see if I can do that.
It's playing.
You know, when you're a kid, it's playing.
And eventually you get them to the point where you're like,
I just feel better.
I feel more joyful doing it too.
What you're the break- brachiating thing though
with the monkey bars, it's so crazy.
Cause I remember as a kid,
we used to just play on monkey bars all the time.
And then you just go on them as an adult,
you're like, wait, what?
I can't, you know what I mean?
Things are packed in around there a little bit.
But your shoulders, like if they're healthy,
they hold that ability to do what you're doing right there.
Yeah, yeah, definitely part of the movement.
Di, this is back to you.
Evil eye over there.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
After whole carrying, climbing and clamoring is a macro
that we need to make sure we have.
And so there's a lot of things that can fit into that category.
It's essentially using your arms,
like the way you use your legs,
to carry your weight and to sort of create the locomotive.
Breakeation is what you see, you know,
going across monkey bars,
but even like going up a ladder at an angle,
crawling under the house to like fix something,
moving on your hands and legs,
like that's something we need to be able to do
for the sake of our wrists and our elbows
and our shoulders and our upper spine.
And then making movements is another big part.
Making movements are like, there's a lot of talk about grip strength.
Making movements is another thing you see in human cultures that are these repetitive,
high volume, low intensity movements that really utilize the hands and the arms.
So they're usually associated with food production,
but also essential production.
Like our modern equivalent would be chopping wood,
stacking wood, kneading dough, pounding things,
rolling things out.
And as people go towards the liquid, powder, pre-chopped diet,
I mean, we're losing our chewing ability.
You know, like that's another big muscle and that's another big part of what gets blood to the brain.
Chewing, you got to get some jerky in there every now and then and masticate
because this is an important muscle.
It's important later on for cognitive function.
Yeah, you don't wanna not pay attention to that.
Yeah, making movements, climbing and clambering.
And then you have at the peak,
the peak movements are actually a lot of stuff
that makes up fitness.
You know, like you need to get your heart rate up
and you need to do something that is,
got some agility to it, you know, like running,
but that would be on a Hadza movement diet,
it'd be the peak, very small compared
to this other volume of movement.
So like, I don't even know if we
under do those intense things,
it's just that we're not doing the base.
I wanna mention this because it's funny,
you know, that making movements thing that you mentioned,
again, my substitute for that is I have a big old bucket of rice right in front of my TV.
Like it's huge.
And I sit on my, I have this stool,
it's called a hunker and stool.
So I sit low on it and for like maybe 20 or 30 minutes,
I'll just be doing all these different movements in there.
And what I've noticed as a grappler is that, you know,
I used to have all this pain in my hands
because jujitsu has you grabbing, right?
But this building that skill actually alleviated the wrist pain I was having where jujitsu has you grabbing, right? But this building that skill
actually alleviated the wrist pain I was having where I couldn't do push-ups. All these things
that I was like, what's going on? Just putting my hand in rice and working those small muscles in
that way while watching something or whatever. It's gotten rid of all those issues. Yeah. You're
diversifying how you're using your hands, right? So like phone holders, you could be strong and that's the challenge with fitness.
Like you can hit strength, but it's too specialized.
It's, you know, like any dietary nutrient on its own
will make you a disease.
The dietary nutrients are only good in the right balance
to all the other ones.
And the same goes for movement.
You can't just take like one movement and do it a ton
and not expect to be sick,
just like if you only ate broccoli.
Yeah, like magnesium is healthy,
but if you have way too much, end up a lot of problems.
Yeah, yeah.
Like you just, you have, there's a balance.
There's a dose here.
And I taught a wheat retreat,
again, with, I love purposeful movement
and took people out to a wheat field and we hand harvested a quarter acre.
So like sickle carving and then brought it in.
And then we did the winnow and chaffing, pounding it and separating.
And then, you know, we had these big bowls of grains and then we hand ground it and then
we kneaded it.
And it's like, this is bread movement.
And then you're like, we're not going eat any carbs. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
It's like, oh man, we always work for nothing.
Yeah, so our grandmas used to do all that.
Grandmas used to do that, no problem.
And now it'd be like, it's not only a loss of skill,
it's a loss of like all of the movement,
the full movement diet.
Like we've just kind of kept some of the peak stuff.
Look at pasta grannies on YouTube guys, if you wanna see some of them. Oh no. Look at pasta grannies on YouTube, guys, if you want to see some of them.
You know pasta grannies?
No, I never heard of it, but just you saying it, I feel like I need to know.
Yeah, it's just like these old Italian and from other countries,
you see these women working with like, they have these thick forearms
and wrists and hands, and they're in their 90s still, just like...
Yeah. The best, I used to work at a biomechanical, you know, lab and we do the hand dynamometer
testing.
And so you people come in all the time and you're always testing general grip strength.
The person who pegged it, who got the highest reading I've ever seen was a cake decorator
just because of, you know, like that was her workout was just nothing but squeezing cake
frosting in a tube.
Yeah, look at that.
Olympics right there, new Olympic sport.
You mentioned the face, right?
So along with jerky, what do you do any,
is everything just like passive things
where you eat jerky, you do these things
that just naturally are helping the muscles of your face
or do you do anything deliberately too?
No, I mean, I'm actually choosing what I eat deliberately.
But yeah, so, but I would say chewing sticks,
a big part of like, again,
a lot of cultures chew on chewing sticks all the time.
A big part of what keeps your teeth so clean, right?
To like, it's not just about the muscle,
it's about the ecology of what did movement used to do
on our body for things outside of
what we would call fitness variables right now.
So you can get, you can buy chew sticks now.
I mean, there's plenty of plants that you might have around.
You can look up, they're just antiseptic plants
where you can take a branch off and, you know,
cultures are using them to clean their teeth.
But you can go to the health food store
and buy tea tree oil or cinnamon sticks
and you just chew, you just masticate. A lot of people do that in Nigeria. I totally forgot until you mentioned that.
That's right. That's a big thing.
This lady's 93 by the way.
Oh, shit. You also can eat with your hands.
You know, eat some steak with your hands, eat some chicken with your hands,
and you have to like bite and pull.
Tear.
And there's like, that's a whole thing that no one ever, you know,
it's rare for people to do that, I guess maybe with a rotisserie chicken, you might do that.
And not in a restaurant.
Right, right.
Yeah.
Yeah, like a chicken drum,
that's the only time you're gonna see,
or maybe a wing, right?
Or a dehydrated mango.
Like why not do it with a steak?
Just pick it up, it's easier.
You don't need a knife, no fork.
Our teeth were tools,
like that's kind of on our original tools.
And now it's like, don't do anything,
don't do anything with your mouth or your teeth,
but yeah, really encouraging biting whole carrots.
I just, when I packed my kids lunch,
in my backpack right now, like I was on the airplane,
I got pulled over by TSA and it's like, what is it?
I'm like, he's like, oh, they're carrots.
Like, yeah, they're carrots
because chewing is also a big emotional regulator.
That's why people nervously chew gum all the time.
So I was talking about how chewing and the brain work together.
So if that's an issue for you, you might look at what your jaw exercise program is.
Is my jaw under moved?
And am I gnashing my teeth?
Is that like restless legs?
Like just move something, anything, you know?
So radishes, whole, I got pictures of my kids, this whole vegetable, whole fennel bulbs,
you know, and they just tearing into whole apples.
There's been research where kids no longer, that the work to eat a whole apple deters
them.
They did this in school lunches.
They were throwing away all the apples
and they were trying to figure out what was going on.
And it's like, it's too much work
to open your mouth that far.
Put your teeth down and rip.
And so they're like, if they served them cut up,
they would eat them.
So parents out there, start your kids on whole vegetables,
whole, literally whole fruits so that they, yeah.
This guy's got his kidney and full...
Yeah.
Yeah, he eats a lot.
I mean, I will say the apple, that's more of a helicopter parent issue where we're afraid
he's going to bite too much and choke on it or something, so we will cut it up for him.
But outside of that, we are trying to portion size his bites, right?
Because we, like I just said, admittingly, we're watching everything and if he starts
to cough up or something, we all freak out.
Yeah. But, no, he chows down on apples, like, big chunks of steak, and he's been
like that since day one. Yeah. I mean, we come out as Zeters, you know, that's a,
it's a major movement, that skill that you want to develop very quickly, you
know, in breastfeeding, as like the first exercise program you're on, you're developing, you know, you're, you're developing texture and ability to cough things up and, you know, coughing is another skill you got to develop right away, you know, to survive.
Yeah, I think, you know, when it comes to comes to movement, I think a lot of times people are just thinking about like fitness, they're just thinking about like lifting.
For sure.
Where does lifting sort of rank on your dietary movements?
You know what I left off?
I left off probably the one that's most relevant.
So right after carrying, so we've got active,
breast positioning, walking, carrying,
we have big body work.
So big body work is snow shoveling. You know, again, sorry, I put chopping wood into making, chopping wood is in big body work is snow shoveling.
You know, again, sorry, I put chopping wood into making,
chopping wood is in big body work.
So it's, you're basically not,
you're not locomoting from point A to point B,
but you're using your body in a big way
to deal with a load in some way, you know,
even like pushing a push lawnmower, you know,
like yes, there's some steps there,
but you're, you're asking.
Wheelbarrow type thing.
Yeah, that's right.
You're, you're, you're lifting, trying to cut down a tree, you know, like you're just
doing something and you're, again, you're changing the shape of your heart and lungs.
You're changing their range of motion.
But then you're also using muscles and then you're also using flexibility.
Like when you're doing something, when you're doing a practical task, you know, you're also using muscles, and then you're also using flexibility. Like when you're doing something,
when you're doing a practical task,
you know, you're bending over, you're twisted,
you're dragging a load.
It looks a lot more like some of this weightlifting
with thoughts of facial care are starting to look like
where it's a multi-planar compound movements.
That's what big body work is.
So that's right above walking and carrying.
That's a big one.
And weightlifting is how we meet that need.
And then now we're trying to expand it to be like,
how do I not?
So with big body work, there's that practical task.
And then there's, you're dealing with your heart
and your muscles and your flexibility all at the same time
with the more intact labor practice.
And then what we've pulled out is strength training.
But sometimes those other things,
usually you'll still have heart and lung movement,
but maybe it's very linear, you know,
and you're stuck in the same set of patterns.
Or if you look at your whole big body movement diet,
it's not distributed well throughout your whole entire body.
I would say maybe an advantage for some of the things
that might be linear or you might be like in one pattern
is the controllable variables can sometimes be great,
such as like on a treadmill.
Somebody wants to do 40 minutes of activity.
I mean, I would love for them to go outside
and walk outside and find some hills.
But for some people knocking out that 40 minutes
might be their only kind of starting relationship
with exercise and therefore it can be great.
And again, the controllables,
the variables are so easy to control.
When it comes to lifting,
somebody may want to target their biceps,
they might want to target their glutes
or particular body parts,
and you get to just like literally just dial up
that one area.
If you don't want other areas to grow,
you just don't hypertrophy them,
you don't lift for those particular parts.
So I think that that's a great thing
when it comes to training,
but I love all this other stuff
that you're talking about
because you also wanna be trained for other stuff.
If we're in great shape or if you're like,
hey, let's go on a hike and I go six miles with you
and it's been pretty uphill and I'm like,
I don't know, something going on with my knee or whatever.
What's the point in looking like you're in shape
if you can't handle it?
Yeah, and I mean, I think of,
I mean, to your first point,
I think of not just fitness,
but like the places that we go for fitness,
the practices of fitness is very similar to a grocery store.
You know, you're not growing any food,
you're not hunting and gathering anything,
you gotta go to the place and you wanna dial in,
you know what you want and you know
what you feel like eating.
So there's a psychological component too,
but there's also a physiological,
like you know what you need physiologically
and there's what you prefer and you go pick it out.
And it's the way this society works.
The other point though, to what you're saying is yes,
I think what happens is we're so good at isolating
what we need for brevity,
for convenience, that sometimes we forget
the law of specificity.
And if you don't have that goal,
if you don't have your movement, why?
You know, if you're picking out the muscle parts
that you wanna work, you know, it could be aesthetic.
Like that can be your movement, why?
That's a perfectly valid movement, why? But if you also thought about it and said, well, I also want to be
able to do this big trip. I want to be able to take care of my kids or take care of my
parents or maybe I feel like someday I'm going to want to be able to do this, then you have
a broader perspective and maybe you want to diversify, not even in the sense of changing
what you're already doing, but by expanding it, to make sure you're covering the basis
for all of your movement.
Why?
That you're not getting so specialized to the one type of movement that you can't do
other types of movement.
Movement is really the undercurrent of life and physical experiences.
Not to say that if you have extreme disabilities
or you find yourself in a situation
where you can't move at all,
that you can't have a high quality life.
But for most people and what they're selecting to do,
they have a physical backbone.
You gotta make sure that you're nourishing those parts
so that you're able to live the life
that you deem worthy.
You know, you've done, again, you've done so many practices
that we've talked about over the years.
And what have you found to be for yourself
as when you started doing myofascial release work
versus now and how often you do that work,
what you found if it's made a difference for you,
why would it or do you think it might not be beneficial
for some people?
Myofascial work?
Yes.
I think that I probably have started to do more
myofascial work now as I'm older.
Really?
And in perimenopause, yeah.
Like I'm in a new stage of life now, I'm almost 50.
And so like my regular program really took care of me
where I felt pretty good.
And then I, you know, I'm fully representing
all the estrogen here on the show right now, I got it.
I got you everybody out there with estrogen.
Once that starts to wane, like physiologically,
you're different, you're different in the same way
as you were prepubescent.
You know, so like before you went through puberty,
then you went through puberty.
You remember that phase,
that turbulent water that you go through
and like the way that you responded to movement
was very much dictated by the hormones
that you did and didn't have.
I'm going through that in reverse right now.
Women are going through that in reverse.
And so what I used to do that elicited a certain response
no longer elicits the same response.
Why don't you just ignore it?
I'm kidding.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's what guys do.
I feel like you kind of ignore it.
Stop it down.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This isn't happening to me.
Yeah.
You could, I think that you might ignore it
because you don't even know
it's happening, you know, in the same way
you didn't even know puberty was coming on.
It's really only in hindsight that you look back,
you're like, holy shit, that was crazy.
And really, I don't even think you can see it in hindsight.
I think you see it once you're an adult
and seeing other kids go through it,
whether they're your kids or just kids that you know,
going, oh, we know, we've all been there and I forgot.
But yeah, so yeah, I'm in this space now.
And now, like the way estrogen and pain work
and estrogen and fascial stiffness work,
I have to shift my movement plan of yesteryear
is not my movement plan of now.
I'm prioritizing things that help deal with pain
because your brain's remodeling.
Like my brain is remodeling.
And just like there's a lot of shit going on in puberty,
it's the same.
I'm remodeling again.
My brain is becoming leaner and meaner,
but I'm letting some things go.
And so now I care about it more.
I think now I care about it more because I feel,
well, there's a couple of things. When,
I guess when you're younger and you have a lot more, I mean, for me, it's kids and I'm not,
everyone doesn't have a kid situation, but they keep you a little bit more active when they're
younger, right? You're doing more complex type things and then that sort of fades.
And then I got to figure out like how to put that in my life. If I was in a more
figure out like how to put that in my life if I was in a more intact ancestral space, I would still be interacting with multi-generational people, but I don't have that like everyone
else probably listening doesn't have that.
So myofascia to care for myself through movement, letting myself rest.
I mean, we live in an arcade right now.
This arcade is noisy and our primal brains are not cool with it. And so I have
started to log more what I call active rest. So like, I think people are exhausted. Again,
one of the reasons people don't move is they're like, too fucking tired to move. And we have
to separate the difference between attentional fatigue and physical fatigue.
Because we're fatigued from like never ending processing
of stuff coming on.
And unfortunately, attentional fatigue
creates a lot of symptoms of physical physicality.
You know, like I just feel like I don't have the energy
to muster.
I can't imagine in this space, this is not me talking,
but I think when you're attentionally fatigued,
you can't imagine that going for the workout
will actually revive you, because you're so exhausted.
But of course it does when you're attentionally fatigued.
So finding things that are rhythmic in nature,
they can be, you know, it could be running,
it could be something hard and fast.
A lot of people find mental relaxation from doing something vigorous.
Other people might need to stretch and slow down.
You know, maybe you want to go swim a bunch of laps or maybe you want to roll, you know,
do some fascial work in there.
And that's physical, it's active rest.
You are still moving, you're still working on towards your physical prowess, but you're
doing it in a way that also meets other parts of your needs.
And in this case, it would be my mind, you know, needing the break.
And that's why you take, don't take your phone.
Right.
That's why you don't take your phone.
So you get some attentional rest on that 10 or 15 minute walk.
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because it's important.
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This is true, you can touch them right now,
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I think movement donates energy to your body.
It can, yeah.
Obviously, tons and tons of movement
and not enough macronutrients.
You could end up in a compromised place
if you have blood sugar issues and so on.
But for the most part, a walk or most of these things
are gonna probably encourage your body
to liberate and release some fatty acids, some sugars,
and you're probably gonna burn them.
You probably feel better.
Probably feel good.
I think that what you see at like a coffee shop so often
is someone will have a coffee cup
that's like 30 ounces or something sitting in front of them
and it has a shot of espresso in it.
And then they're just sitting there and they're like,
just, you know, like that's, you're using the coffee,
using the caffeine, which is a powerful drug for not really doing much
of anything.
I understand you're working, but it's like,
you're not doing anything physical.
You're not doing anything that's really that hard.
And I see the same thing with people matching up their food
with what they do or don't do.
And sometimes we're eating all these foods.
Some of these foods are slowing us down,
making us not feel amazing.
And then of course, when it comes to exercise,
I think that gets pushed off.
How do you eat and what does your, do you push your food?
Like I push my food off until later in the day.
That's just been super convenient for me.
How are you managing it?
Well, again, so I'm figuring out my new physiology that I've only had for like a year or so.
So I am one of the people who, I need to eat first thing in the morning.
Like I'm a naturally early riser.
I'm a 430 to 5 AM riser.
And I'm usually awake, I think, because my blood sugar is so low.
It's kind of something that runs in my family.
But I don't really need to eat after four or five o'clock.
Like I don't, I'm not an evening eater.
And then also one of the things that happens
with your hormones going kind of crazy is
you don't sleep very well.
And so I've just really found that if I can stop eating,
you know, by like the if I can stop eating, you know, by like the earlier
I can stop eating, the more I will sleep all the way throughout the night, you know, and
really anything, I don't, I don't drink caffeine and I don't drink alcohol.
And I'm not a tea toller for that.
Are those newer things for you?
No, I mean, I stopped drinking caffeine about five years ago when it, I could tell him like,
I feel sick when I drink this.
And so I just stopped.
And then with alcohol,
I've never really been an alcohol drinker.
I mean, I certainly can have a drink.
I don't have any aversion to it.
It's almost like I have an alcohol allergy.
I'm so sensitive to really any sort of input.
And if I do have a drink, again, I will not sleep for the whole night.
Like it's so sensitive, the hormones and same thing, no sugar bombs, no, like nothing really
sweet will just send you off. So mostly that. And then as far as what I eat, it's mostly
like I live in a very rural place and I tend to like again, a lot of like more protein and vegetables
is just kind of primarily I don't do a lot of bread. I kind of stopped all that earlier
on when I had a kid with a sensitivity to it and it just works well for me. I don't
like starches that much. I don't even like potatoes that much.
Not a big carby person, maybe some fruits or something like that.
I love fruit. Yeah,, fruit, like definitely fruits
would be my carbs and vegetables.
I mean, there's plenty of carbohydrates,
starch and vegetables, but yeah, not normally.
As we talked about earlier in the show,
we're talking about walking and this kind of specifics of it.
And sometimes it's just hard to like really nail down.
I love that you're not dogmatic.
I'm not dogmatic. It's really easy to study stuff and then. I love that you're not dogmatic. I'm not dogmatic at all.
It's really easy to study stuff and then to be like,
this is the right way.
And then you sell this program and whatever.
And I love that you're like, well, I don't know.
Some people walk with their feet out.
Some people walk with their feet in.
And if you don't have symptoms,
symptoms are kind of the main thing where,
if you don't have a problem with your sleep,
I love that you said that earlier too.
If you don't have a problem with your sleep,
then why are you trying to flip your mattress around
and do all these crazy things?
Maybe you should just keep sleeping great
the way that you're sleeping.
But something I've noticed in observing people
over the years and just observing movement
is that I see a lot of people when they're walking,
it's almost as if they're walking
in several different directions at the same time.
And if you really start to pay attention,
it's really odd, but you'll see like,
someone's like shins are like pointed
in a completely different direction
than their aim of where they're walking.
I'm not trying to like make fun of
or cut on anybody or anything like that.
I got my own issues with my own gait,
but it's interesting because like the knee
or the, I think you refer to them as knee pits,
that would be interesting to mention some of that.
But like the torque or the torsion of each person's hip
is just so vastly different.
And yeah, watching people walk over the ears
and just observing movement,
just kind of sitting there puzzled being like,
it looks like that guy that's walking straight down
the street right now,
it looks like he wants to walk that way.
But his body for some reason is carrying him straight.
Yeah, now you know how I see the world.
I mean, that's really all I see are people's shit.
Now, so there are lots of different ways to walk.
We've covered that in different situations, you would have different gait patterns.
But there is still dis have different gait patterns.
But there is still disordered gait.
So there are still things that you would want to see, and body parts more or less moving
in the same direction is one of them.
The question is, why do we develop all these other ways of walking?
So a couple of things.
One, we're highly malleable. Our most malleable
phase is our juvenile period, which is why whatever's going on right now as far as kids
and movement is so heartbreaking to see is because you set your adult body during your
juvenile period. Especially bone. you will never have higher bone.
You're setting your peak bone mass
before you get to like 16.
There's no going back.
That's your bank account forever.
And so the way that you move really ends up,
so some people will be like,
I have twists and turns in my body.
There are some twists and turns that you can be born with,
but a lot of people introduce twists and turns
into their body based on their mechanical environment
over time.
That's essentially like the shapes that they use
and the volume in which they use those shapes.
One thing I see a lot, this would be something easy.
I'm trying to find an easy example
that people can spot after.
Our arms, like you're moving forward,
you're walking forward.
You will see arms that go right to left in the opposite direction, like they're swinging
side to side, not reciprocal arm swing is, is front to back.
Is that a Ronaldo that runs that way?
Yeah.
Cristiano Ronaldo.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Soccer players ever.
Yes, but oh, I know, we're a soccer family.
But there's different times when that can help hone you in
on a straight line.
And he usually has a lower center of gravity
when he doesn't.
Yeah, there's things that you're doing
and maybe trying to run a little wider with your legs,
you have to offset a little bit.
There's reasons, that's why I say
there's no real one gate pattern,
depends on what you're doing and why.
He's running on a soccer field and he's gotta stop
and make certain turns and cuts and so on.
And he's gotta be able at any point.
He can't really, you can't fully commit kind of to anything
because you have to be agile enough to change.
So that side to side arm, like that's a reflexive thing.
The fact that when your left leg goes back,
your right arm swings back, that's in your brain.
That's organized.
And that's, it's a little different when you're going uphill, in which case those will be
reversed. But when you're sorry, when you're going downhill, when you're walking flat and
that pushes back, the reason your right arm is going back is your left leg is heavy. If
it's going back behind you, it's got a weight that's going to tend to twist the whole spine
with it. And so you've got this counterbalance on the opposite side, which helps keep your
spine relaxed and moving forward, helps a little bit of that propulsion energy align
itself. But if your shoulders are really tight or you've actually taken your shoulder joints
and put them in a different position, now that reflexive thing that's happening in your
brain is happening in a way that does not contribute to your gait.
So we could talk about efficiency,
but if you're walking slow, it's like,
who cares if I'm not efficient?
I think in the bigger picture,
if that arm doesn't go straight back
when the leg's going back,
then your lower back on that side
now has to do the work of the missing arm swing.
I think it's more important than we give it credit for.
It's, I think it's very important.
I think you're hurting yourself.
You are eventually over time gonna create a problem.
And then also if your arm swings out to the side,
that kind of shows your whole body to the side.
Now you've got the side of your knee having to catch you
being thrown right to left when everything is ideally
coordinated to move you forward
since that's the direction you're going.
What are some of your thoughts on some of the Ben Patrick
stuff, walking backwards with a sled and some of those things?
Is that the knees over toes guy?
Yeah.
I love what he's doing for this reason.
The idea that your knees cannot go past your toes
as sort of like a dogma thing,
was he really capitalized on, everyone's heard that. the idea that your knees cannot go past your toes as sort of like a dogma thing, you know, was,
you know, he really capitalized on everyone's heard that. So, like, I'm going to be the person that's going to tell you like, no, really, your knees need to go in all these other areas. There's
reasons, just like the shoes that we were talking about earlier, like, why did we go to a stiff shoe?
The reason we went to that no knees over toes is for people of a
certain set of movements who then went and heavily loaded their movements, right? Still
most of the time, very stiff parts, no squatting ability to then go load a big weight in this
way that does put your patellar tendon, for example, under lots of tension, too many injuries
will show up in this way.
Same thing with minimal shoes.
You just go right into it.
You don't really understand,
you don't have the physiology or the anatomy yet
or the skill to coordinate that movement.
There's gonna be something that comes up.
And then I have a bunch of people
whose knees can't go past their toes.
And so he was like,
let me show you some ways to tend to your knees,
other than just what you're not going to let them do. Right? Like not letting your body
do something is not a very complete prescription for making yourself better.
Yeah. Gain access to more movement.
You're trying to move more, not move less. I mean, if over time you got rid of anything,
it's like that joke, doc, it hurts when I do this, don't do that.
Like that's where we are,
and eventually what are you gonna move?
We hear it with people in the lifting world all the time.
You know, a lot of times it starts on the bench
and then they can't bench anymore,
but then they can't incline bench anymore.
And it's just like, then they can't overhead press.
And it's like, well, you just,
now your whole shoulder complex is like
not working at all anymore.
And it's okay to work around exercises. I think that at all anymore. And it's okay to work around exercise.
I think that's very normal.
And it's okay to have favorable exercises.
But at the same time, I think in the back of your head,
you should think kind of what caused this?
Where did this start?
Why am I inefficient at that?
And I think the same thing when it comes to walking
or running, you don't need to be crazy about it.
You don't need to be upset about it
or mad at yourself about it.
You just try to work on it the best you can, try to learn as much as you can and try to grow.
Yes, it's the movement diet thing.
Like if you find that you can never get on your hands
and knees because your wrist doesn't extend,
what are you not going to be able to do going forward?
Not just in fitness, but in life.
And a lot of the things that we associate with aging
are really just a long time of
slowly getting rid of movements that you no longer do because you're not, it's not that
you're not doing them because if you can't get on your hands and knees because your wrists
won't allow it, then just forcing it is not the right thing.
But what did you do?
You put your hands in an environment that resists and weights them in different directions
and then you use them in different directions
and you distributed the movement around the area
and lo and behold, by eating a more balanced
wrist movement diet, you don't have that problem any longer.
And so many things are like that.
You don't have to fix everything in every moment.
So it's like, you don't have to make that shoulder
that doesn't move the sole star of your fitness
program, but you should be keeping track of these movements that you can't do and create
a movement program for them as well.
It doesn't have to be the star, but it should show up somewhere in your week.
Especially if it relates to your movement, why?
And hand use and grip strength,
those are very important movements.
When you're younger, you don't really think about it
because you'll just go around it,
but they are very much related to self-efficacy.
We were talking about walking.
So I wanna ask you about breathing
and maybe what people should be thinking about there
because we talked about diaphragmatic breathing
and that stuff on the show, so we can get into that more,
but sometimes people don't realize that they're not breathing.
When they go down and tie their shoe,
they are holding their breath as they do it
and not realizing that when they change levels,
they hold their breath, right?
What are some things that people need to be thinking about
in terms of improving the way that they breathe?
So I always call breathing an alignment point.
So like if you're, you know form, you know,
like if you're looking at a form,
if you're teaching someone to squat,
you're gonna be like,
I want your toes angled out in this way,
making sure your knees are here, you know,
no tip in the pelvis.
You've got a set of alignment points.
Breath has gotta be taught about in that same way.
Like a big part of what I'm doing here
is trying to normalize everything to shape.
We know what form is.
So breathing needs to go,
and you're basically having a place
where the lungs aren't changing position anymore.
Their range of motion stopped.
They have a range of motion
and you need to be using them for this exercise.
And maybe they're at this shape
at this phase of the exercise,
and they're at this shape in this phase of the exercise.
But the more you can talk about it in the same way,
the more you can capitalize on a framework
that people understand. So I always say, you know, just this is for breath holders, make
sure that the breathing is constant. If it needs to be in a certain place, fine. I like
breathing. I tend to work less on the performance side and more on the, I mean, I think of it as performance. It's just physiological performance
in a whole life setting.
Hyperkyphosis, that curvature
that we're seeing more and more of,
your thoracic spine is beginning to encroach
on your breathing space.
You know, like, where is it going?
When you, the rib cage and the front's fairly rigid.
So when your spine is collapsing forward,
it's moving into that space.
And now you don't have that full range of motion
in the lungs.
So I start with that, going,
this is a shape related thing that we're dealing with.
There's diaphragmatic breathing.
I think in general,
like do you guys talk about the three different ways
to breathe?
Is that something that?
Go for it.
Yeah, okay.
So your thoracic cavity is like a room
and the walls of the room are flexible.
And in order to take a breath,
you have to increase the volume of that room.
I start to hyperventilate, by the way,
every time we talk about this stuff.
Why?
Because I start thinking about my breathing more.
You're like in the middle of it?
Yeah, I'm like.
Just.
Yeah.
Maybe we should take a grounding breath here
for a second before we go.
So yeah, you've got to get the room bigger
to pull the breath in.
Like that's what's happening.
You're creating a pressure change.
So the diaphragm, that can drop down.
That's one way to make the room bigger is to push the floor away.
Also the rib cage has muscles in between your intercostals, right?
And that lifts the hinges up and moves the sternum forward.
So you're getting a greater circumference to your rib cage.
And then there's the not preferred,
but still glad that we have it,
accessory way of breathing where you
lift the shoulders away from the floor.
You're sort of like you've ever been to Disneyland
where the bottom drops out, sort of like that.
Like you're lifting the top away from the bottom.
And for a lot of people, that's where they go to breathe.
The shoulders are coming up and down, but it's very reflexive because one, they could
be holding their stomach in so tightly, right, that there's no space for the diaphragm to
go.
It's hitting the abdominal pressure. Or two, in order for
your rib cage to be able to rotate, your vertebrae have to be well aligned and well mobilized.
So the stiffer you are in your upper back, the more that shoulder breathing is your only
option. And you got to take a breath. That's going to be at the top of the tasks that your
body is going to get done. So I like to approach breathing almost more through mobility.
It's mobility and strength, making sure that your upper back specifically is really mobile,
which will help the rib cage.
There's a little skill, how people tie something around their rib cage tight, that's a little
flexible or elastic, like a stretchy band and say, okay, now breathe
and make that band stretch.
And then exhale to the point where it's floppy.
So not just the, do the bottom part,
cause that's for coughing.
That's for making sure you've got enough strength
to clear your lungs, which is something else we see
decline with time.
It seems to be tough for some people to be able to
get a good breath out. Exhaling issues is, I would say, just as prevalent as inhaling issues,
but it's a core strength rib cage.
It's an inner costal function because you've got layers there.
External intercostals open, inner intercostals make it even smaller.
So there's a coordination and a skill that you need to be able to call on to do that.
Yeah, all we have is some words to communicate on this stuff
and it can be difficult.
And then same thing goes with, we can kind of show people,
but you can't always show people,
you can't always like just show people how to breathe
because there's stuff going on on the inside and so on.
I saw a podcast where you were talking about calf races
and you were like, I just like to think about this a little deeper.
Can you explain some of that?
Calf hearts?
Yeah.
So I do think we have a hierarchy in our mind
in fitness and cardiovascular.
I mean, maybe for your audience, muscle is like,
maybe on the top,
but cardiovascular seems to be on the top
as far as function goes.
And rightly so, you know,
it's a big problem that we have in America right now, North America too.
We have this anatomical model where the heart's job, it's just sitting there pumping and distributing
the blood down and back up and that's its job.
Well, you've got a lot of layers of jobs that are supportive in the body. And so the way we
study anatomy is a bit, it's isolated or reduce things separately. It doesn't integrate them and
show systematically how they work together. So for example, your venous return, by the time the
blood gets all the way down to your feet, it's a lot of work to get it back up.
So your veins are all packed within muscle.
So the musculoskeletal pump of you, again, taking a walk or if you standing there doing
calf raises, that compression is part of what walks the blood back up.
It's not just your heart, but our heart is pretty much being given the task of, here,
I'm going to sit here and do nothing and you're going to get this blood around my sedentary
body all of the time.
And that's what we give it to do.
And then it doesn't respond in a way that we would like.
And it's like, well, it's been going alone.
So if you want to work on your cardiovascular system, you want to be making sure that you're
plantar flexing and dorsiflexing. So that could be standing, making sure one that you've got the ankle range of motion to do it. But two, like we said, part of what a walk does is it's helping
for that bit of time. It's easier for the heart to, it takes the load off the heart when you're
walking. So why is exercise so protective for cardiovascular disease?
That's something that people don't necessarily know.
You are supporting your heart.
Like the distribution of your blood,
which is to get oxygen to the cells,
is not really the pure, it's not purely the heart's job,
not just the calves, but,
oxygen's going in through your blood,
kind of like a highway, super highway, 10 lanes.
No oxygen's getting parked into cells when it's there.
It's gotta get into the artery, arterial,
it's gotta get to the capillary level
where it's one cell thick to deliver the oxygen,
but it can only get there if you move those areas.
Moving those areas is how you suck the oxygen
into the parts that are working.
So less moved parts are less nourished in that way.
So yeah, so movement is a big part of heart support.
Would you also say that less touched parts of this
are similar in the vein of like myofascial release
and sensation on certain areas?
Yeah, I do think touch, again, I would put touch
as a, in a movement category of its own.
It goes with pressure, pressure and touch.
These are, we are under, we're under pressured externally.
You know, like some people will develop such a sensitivity
to it and the therapy is often touch therapy.
You know, you're, you are not used to processing that sensation, but yeah, definitely touch
and you know, the way myofascia can restrict maybe the movement of a part and thus the
oxygen that's, oops, sorry, the oxygen that's able to come into it is definitely why I think
it's a big part of why I like to work on myofascia stuff now too.
And mobility in general, my mobility in general,
all the tissues involved including nerve
need to be addressed.
I have a question.
Would you say that like for certain people that,
because certain people are very, very sensitive,
especially like rib cage area and stuff, right?
Would you say that just using your hand
and kind of almost scrubbing that area with your
hand, if you find that you can't actually put pressure on it with an implement, would
be a place to start?
Yeah, just like you can't run, so you start to walk and then you start to walk fast and
then you, you know, it's just the idea is a progression.
Find the level at which you can approximate the ultimate movement that you're going to.
Whatever peak movement that you have, whether it's laying on something hard, that you just
start with standing against a wall, right?
That's going to reduce the pressure or just use a hand or just use a feather duster.
I mean, I think that's what Stuart McGill does with spinal injuries.
A lot of times is, you know, when people, when you get into,
I talked about pain being a beast, you know,
when there can be a disruption in the way
that you're processing pain and the way it's coming in
feels very loud to you, then as I've heard him explain it,
what they try to do is find like the level of stimulation
that does not cause a pain response.
And then now you've got your foot in the door.
And then you can grow from there.
What you got over there, Andrew?
Curious for, so I trained jiu-jitsu as well.
And my thing is always, man,
I feel like my cardio is like the thing
that holds me back a lot amongst many other I feel like my cardio is like the thing that holds me back
a lot amongst many other things, but it's going to be the thing that just totally makes
me completely literally tap out.
With some of the other techniques you're talking about, would you be able to expand like your
breathe, your lung capacity to be able to up like, let's say you're just endurance,
like over a, you know, a long duration of exerting yourself.
Are you doing training, just like isolated training
for your cardiovascular system,
or is jujitsu like the most cardiovascularly taxing thing
you're doing?
Yeah, one thing that is said often in jujitsu
is the best way to get your mat cardio for jujitsu is to do jujitsu.
But I will do assault bike training and that sort of thing.
But it's definitely something that I still would like
to improve even more.
Yeah, and the thing with, I mean,
so I talked about the three general ways of breathing,
but every time you're in a different shape,
you're kind of using a combination of them.
Like how do you inflate your rib cage
if someone's laying on your ribs, right?
And so you definitely, it's the same as like pilots
at altitude, you need to train to be able to breathe
against the resistance or the different shapes.
So yeah, I don't really,
that's my understanding of what you would need to do.
Practically, how do you get more of it?
It would be interesting if you did breathing exercises in weird positions,
where maybe there was a load on you.
Like, for example, you could be like at home.
You're like, okay, I'm going to lay on my side and I want you to...
We talked about the strap around the rib cage.
I want you to do that, but I want you to do it on your side
while someone's laying on you.
So that you figure out what is the coordination to strap around the rib cage. I want you to do that, but I want you to do it on your side while someone's lying on you.
So that you figure out what is the coordination
of being able to recruit actively
my external intercostals to be able to open
or move my rib cage in this otherwise compromised position.
So you're probably not practicing the skillset
of these strengths in these weirdo know, weirdo shapes and loads
that you're in.
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.
It's almost like, I forgot who it was.
We had somebody that was like, they had me put like a kettlebell like on my stomach and
try to like distend my stomach to breathe into it that way.
I feel like maybe that in conjunction with like a ban, the way you said to like, okay, I can't breathe with my stomach now. I need to breathe up here because this
dude has his knee on my belly or something, right? I don't know. And Seema, what do you
think in regards to like the breathing capacities and learning that sort of thing?
Fighting a sandbag. That's get yourself 100, 150, 200 pound sandbag and start lighter,
right? But I do that stuff a lot. I have a sandbag at home I do it with.
Because first off, you can get in those positions
on the ground where you can literally like roll
with the sandbag.
You can keep it right on top of you and breathe into it.
You can place it here, here, here on your side.
And then you can work on standing up with that pressure.
Because in jiu-jitsu, when you're coming off
from the bottom, you're gonna need to learn how to stand up
with the person in that position, right?
But you can use the pressure of the sandbag
to be like, okay, now I have 150 pounds of pressure
on my torso and I need to breathe
and I need to make sure I'm continuing to breathe.
So how are you gonna disperse that breath
so you can still get full breath while in that position?
Sandbags are perfect for that.
Maybe a little of that mixed with the bike
or mixed with the sled or carrying something.
Cause I know like even for myself, if I just carry something, then it's like all compressed
here and I'm trying to figure out how do I breathe and carry this and be hunched over
all at the same time.
Yeah.
Cause that's the part that the huge missing aspect to all of the training is, okay, yeah,
sure.
I can lay down with a sandbag on top of me, figure out how to breathe, but that's totally
different than scrambling two, three times, being out of breath, and then all of a sudden having that weight on me,
then there's the aspect of panic that I'm exhausted, and I have to try to figure out
how to breathe.
And this is why I think sandbag training is like really beneficial.
You can do sets of things, but think about this.
You're holding a 100 pound sandbag to start off, there's 70 or 150.
You do a few sandbag squats, you get into the bottom of a squat, now you're holding a bag and you're breathing against it,
right?
Then you get onto the floor, you roll with it, you breathe,
you stand back up, you do more squats,
you tie yourself out,
but now you're also tying out your breathing, right?
But you're having to learn how to breathe
while hunched, while on your back.
Literally, there's so many ways that you can work
on better breathing through pressure with that type of object. Because again, there's so many ways that you can work on better breathing through pressure
with that type of object.
Because again, it's like, you're not going to be picking up a barbell.
It's not really picking up a sandbag.
It's very different picking up a barbell and picking up a human.
We have easy access to some of the videos of you doing that.
I've seen you roll around with the bag.
Oh, I'm making more right now.
Maybe you can send one over to Andrew just so we can pull it up at some point.
There's one on my Instagram.
It's, if you go down, you'll see,
there's a sandbag hopping video,
but then there's another one around the mat
doing that with the bag, but like-
This must be fun for you.
Like you end up, you mentioned pilots, you know,
jujitsu athletes, you're probably helping,
communicating with so many different types of people.
I just, movement, I mean, I have movement colored glasses on. Everything we're trying to solve is often related to movement,
so I just like, wow.
Like, that's one where I'm doing some hops with it,
but it's again, just like, sometimes I like to really hang out
in that lower position and just kind of chill there sometimes.
In this video, I don't think I did that, but...
Serious question. Do you ever use it to like smother yourself?
Oh, I mean, when you do a sandbag clean and press,
like the bag is gonna be pretty much onto your face
when you press it up, right?
But I don't like, oh, this is the one I was talking about.
Like, just treat it like play, right?
Like get on the ground, you'll see,
like I move into a few different positions
and this is a 100 pound bag,
but you get on a mat and you just literally
roll around with it, right?
It's just like playing around.
See how your body can handle getting up and getting down,
rolling around, et cetera, and yeah.
But that's a 100, you can get yourself a 75
and start off with that, right?
I'd imagine, so like for me, I can just imagine
my back muscles are probably gonna ignite right away,
just moving around, even with the 50 pound ball
or sandbag, sorry, because I'm not doing movements
like that on a regular basis, even in Jiu-Jitsu, right?
Like there's some days where I might,
other days not so much.
And we have 30 and 40 in the gym.
Yeah, I gotta go play around with that.
So maybe start super light and just play around with that.
But it's that pressure aspect that Kata was talking about
that I find so beneficial about it,
because it's like you're getting better
at handling different forms of pressure
on different parts of your body, right?
And it's like you learn how to adapt
to what position do you need to get into
to move with this in space.
And again, so going back to Jujitsu,
like there's times where if you don't practice
certain angles or certain movements, when you actually get there, you're like, well,
I don't know what to do here.
So with this, it's the exact same thing.
Like I can try to simulate it, but until I actually have that situational like pressure
and situation, then, you know, I can't really do anything until I get there.
So that's actually really, really cool.
And I'm fired up now.
How often do you do Jiu-Jitsu?
About three days a week.
Yeah, and how old's your kid?
He's gonna be four in January.
I mean, you basically have a training partner.
Yeah.
And so what I was gonna actually suggest is,
I have really found that this type of stuff is so great.
Like I can't carry little kids anymore,
but I've got 120 pound teenagers
and all they wanna do is wrestle and hold me and flip me.
And so it's a smaller dose,
but you're gonna be able to fit a lot more
of that type of training in
than you can to step out and go to that type of training.
And it only ends up affecting the ecology
of your whole house.
Like now you've got this other kid who started to learn how to move and deal with breathing
in different shapes relative to you through just parental connection.
So that's my suggestion.
Yeah.
When I'm doing some like fascia release stuff, he'll jump on my back and at first I'm like,
come on, dude, I'm trying to focus here.
And then eventually I'm like, oh, wait a second.
I'm like, no, it's actually adding more pressure to the spot that I'm trying to get to. I'm like, all on, dude, I'm trying to focus here. And then eventually I'm like, oh, wait a second. I'm like, no, it's actually adding more pressure to the, to the spot that
I'm trying to get to. And I'm like, all right, we're good now. And he was like, horsey, you
know, like I used to let my kids for breathing, you know, like the airplane, put the kids
up and you let the knees come all the way down. So you're like at a, you're like at
a leg press, but in the lower position and then try to breathe in that position for like
four minutes, you're going to figure out.
Can we have kids so I can have exercise tools.
Is it exactly right?
Yeah.
Unappreciated guess.
I have every kettlebell known to man.
Let me just make it.
Child bell.
For some of the runners that are listening to this show,
should they just maybe find a different sport?
Yes.
Just walk and relax, slow down a little bit.
Not if it's their. What's your experience. Not if it's their passion or joy.
I spent a lot of time as a runner and never did marathon, but half marathon.
I think that there are people, I mean, I think that you get to pick your movement why, and
there are things that bring us joy for our own individual reasons
that have nothing to do with how they work for us musculoskeletally. Plenty of people
will sacrifice their body for their job, for their country, for their sport. It's a human
fact.
Yeah. If you really enjoy that thing, then go do it with everything you got.
Go do it. But where I step in is, you love that thing?
Would you like to do it longer?
Let's talk about your movement diet.
So I would never tell someone to stop doing the thing that they love.
There's been plenty of people who said, I thought I loved that, but that's really all
I knew.
And then once I found this other stuff, it turns out that I could get to that same state
of love.
And there's people who are like, I will die, you know, running up a mountain.
Fine. state of love and there's people who are like, I will die, you know, running up a mountain. But I do think again, the movement diet comes into play where, where you, so the law of
specificity is tricky, right? Because it's like, if you got something that you want to
do specifically, you have to do specifically that thing. However, there's a dose issue.
If you only do that thing at a certain point for the way the body works, just like a nutrient,
you're going to lose that thing that you only did.
So and it usually happens right around middle age time.
So people like I have to stop the thing that I love.
And it's like, it's only because you have done it in isolation for so many years that
those things are failing
for you.
I would like you to be able to keep doing that thing, but you're no longer going to
be able to do it in the same way.
Or maybe you have to pack stuff around it.
Maybe you have to pull back a little bit for a time and work on addressing healing areas
or whatever, but it's more often that you need to not be swaddling your activity in sedentarism,
which is for a lot of people. Or maybe they're not sedentary at work.
I've got plenty of people who are, you know,
they labor for work and then they run or they bike or they do their thing,
but the rest of their shapes and the skills aren't there, so we have to figure out how to build them in.
Yeah, I think The rest of the shapes and the skills aren't there, so we have to figure out how to build them in.
Yeah, I think what I like to share with people is
if you really loved it, you would do everything.
You know what I mean?
There's a big old pie chart, right?
And recovery is like part of this,
and learning more about your sport is part of it.
Taking care of yourself, knowing when to take days off.
Like if you really love it,
then you would actually take days off
because you'd want to do it longer.
And people are like, no man, I'm hardcore.
It's like, you just sound like you're dumb.
That's what it sounds like to me.
It sounds like you're gonna hurt yourself
and you're not gonna be in a great place.
Well, there's a, I mean, there's treating,
a lot of times you're treating your mind with movement too.
I mean, that's definitely a lot of people treating their,
and that's a tricky space,
because your mind needs movement.
But you can also be dealing with things in your mind
through what movement gets you.
It's like, you can drugify anything.
And movement is an easily thing to drugify.
So you gotta check in with that
and figure out a way to balance it.
I gotta bring it up, Katie.
But have you ever heard about or seen the practice of rope flow?
Yeah, that's just the thing that's...
I was kind of wanting to try it.
I was like...
Oh, yeah, we have some ropes.
We have a lot of ropes.
We have a lot of ropes.
Yeah.
Because when you were saying that you're trying to find other practices that allow you to
get more movement, like just the full body rotation, the figure eight motion of the spine,
wrists, the body's moving together.
It like, for me, what you were describing,
because for me, I love jiu-jitsu, I love grappling,
and I do it competitively,
but I don't only wanna do this in my 30s.
You see most grapplers, like once they hit a certain point,
then they don't do it as much
because they're just in so much pain.
But that practice, along with other practices
that I do like myofascial releases,
allowed me to have something
where I can get into a flow state. I can get into this rhythmic
movement that you talk about. I mean, I could do this for hours and I'm, I feel, I don't
feel beat up afterwards. It makes my body feel better because I'm getting in all this
rotational movement that I would typically always be seeking jujitsu to get into a flow
state. So that's why, you know, runners, I want to get in that flow, I run all the time.
Grapplers, I grapple all the time.
But for me now, I can actually get into that state with this
and it helps my body actually perform better for jiu-jitsu.
It could be a low intensity practice though.
So I think you'd love it every morning.
Yeah, I've been, for some reason,
it's showing up on my Instagram feed.
So there's something about my algorithm
that's like, you know what you need.
But yeah, I think that's why the movement-wise is really helpful.
If you can identify that movement, that the flow is what it is, now you've got a recipe.
It's more like identifying, you might need protein, but there's 40 different ways to
get protein and maybe you hate 20 of them.
That's fine. Maybe you
love one. And so it's just, you're just trying to expand your menu a little bit so you don't
have to deal with the realities of the limitations of the body, which is like,
you've got to distribute the movement. Where can people find you?
I am here right now standing here in this room. And then after I leave here, yeah,
all nutritious movement is my handle pretty much everywhere website. And then after I leave here, yeah,
Nutritious Movement is my handle pretty much everywhere
website.
And I have a podcast, Move Your DNA.
Awesome, thank you so much.
We appreciate it.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Strength is never weakness, weakness is never strength.
Catch you guys later, bye.