Move Your DNA

First, let’s talk about your cells.

You may recall from science class that every cell has a nucleus with your DNA in it to help with cellular replication (which, in itself, is amazing).

Question: Do you know how many cells are in your body?

* Insert Jeopardy music *

1 million? 10 million? 100 million? A trillion?

Answer: Over 1 TRILLION. (Estimates range from 15 trillion to 70 trillion. :0)

That’s 1,000,000,000,000+ cells in your body.

And… Nearly every.single.one of them has specialized equipment to detect your movement.

This is one of the reasons why NASA scientist Joan Vernikos tells us that an astronaut’s health PLUMMETS when they leave Earth—as the force of gravity, one of the things usually *always* moving against their cells, is stripped away. Hence, Sitting Kills, Moving Heals.

Katy’s main thesis of the book is that most scientists studying epigenetics (the effect of our environment on the expression of our genes) are missing the most important variable.

Yes, nutrition, stress, and other environmental factors are super important.

But… WE NEED TO MOVE OUR DNA if we want to optimize our well-being!!!

She likens our current state of non-movement to being a zoo animal. Specifically, she shares the example of an orca (or “killer whale”) in captivity. Have you ever noticed that these whales have a nearly collapsed dorsal fin?

That basically *never* happens when they’re in the wild, but if you keep them in a tiny enclosure—never allowing them to plunge into the breadth and depth of the ocean they’ve evolved to swim in, this fin collapses. Super weird.

Well, hate to break the news to you but we’re kinda like that orca and other zoo animals in captivity—living in tiny, artificial enclosures and suffering the inevitable consequences of such an unnatural environment.

Solution: MOVE your TRILLION+ CELLS! :)

Exercise vs. Movement.

Katy draws some super helpful circles to help us understand the difference.

Draw a circle in your mind that represents EXERCISE. It may include things like going to the gym, hiking, rowing, strength training, running on a treadmill, stuff like that/whatever you do.

Now, draw another, *much* bigger circle around that little exercise circle representing MOVEMENT.

Key point: Movement transcends and includes our exercise. It includes things like getting up from our desk, doing some jumping jacks, stretching, walking to the store (or the bank or wherever), changing our posture, and a ton of other little things.

Remember: Tiny movements count.

And, remember: We can be active AND sedentary.

If we dutifully hit the gym for an hour in the morning and then sit for the rest of the day, our DNA suffers. Although exercise is awesome (and super important!), we need to MOVE more. Like, a lot more.

How much more? Well, get this: Although we’re pretty proud of ourselves if we crank out 300 minutes of exercise per week, back in the day, our hunter-gatherer ancestors would move up to 8 hours a day or 3,000 (!!!) minutes per week.

300 minutes vs. 3,000 minutes. ← That’s 10 TIMES more movement.

Remember the orca in captivity with the floppy fin? That’s us. :0

Now, Katy tells us that we don’t need to sell our stuff and go head to a cave so we can move all day. What’s exciting is that TINY little changes in our daily choices have huge impacts on our health and vitality.

Let’s look at a few now…

Before we go any further: Stop. And walk!!!

Seriously. Get out and move—even if it’s just a 5 minute walk around your office! :)

When I read that passage yesterday morning, I (kinda reluctantly then excitedly) put the book down and went for a walk around the block with our little dog Zeus (hehe)—stopping to bang out 10 pull-ups on the way. And, I just went for another little walk with Mr. Z a moment ago.

Couple things to note here.

First: Walking is the secret sauce.

Katy provides a ton of exercises to help us improve our alignment and sell us on the power of walking. For now, recall this wisdom from John Durant in The Paleo Manifesto: “If there is a single form of movement that defines humanity, it is traveling upright on two feet. Bipedalism is over four million years old and long predates stone tools, fire, and large brains.

The demands of standing, walking, and running have literally shaped the entire human body from head to toe. The human head is stabilized by the nuchal ligament, a ligament in the back of the neck found in species that run long distances (horses, wolves) or have oversized heads (elephants). Since we use our toes for balance and not grasping, they are shorter than those of other primates. Though humans are quite slow sprinters, we are excellent endurance runners—the only primate with that capability—and we can run as far as animals that specialize in endurance running, such as horses and wolves. Under certain conditions we can run even further.

Humans are built to stand, walk, and run. We are not built to sit, however—even though sitting has become humanity’s preferred form of non-movement.”

Second: We want to pay attention to how FREQUENTLY we walk (and otherwise move) throughout the day. This is a really cool way to shift from the “exercise mindset” to the “movement mindset.”

Rather than thinking we need to get all our walking (or hiking or yoga or burpees or whatever) done in one chunk, start thinking about how you can (also) nibble throughout the day.

Then, you don’t need more time to “exercise” (who has that anyway?), you just need more mindfulness to move in little chunks during your day.

Inspired by Joan Vernikos’s wisdom, I’m all about becoming a PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE. ← Currently written in huge letters on the whiteboard. :)

Here are a few things I’m doing now in support of that quest:

• Constantly adjusting my posture + stretching while sitting and typing (getting out of my chair completely while typing is longer-term goal; Katy types while stretching—the ultimate way to “move” during your day!)
• I now have a 20-minute timer on my watch that repeats itself and beckons me out of my chair and into 1-2 minutes of movement (I’ll bang out a set of 10 step-back burpees or do some jumping jacks or stretching or something else simple + fun)
• Reading while stretching on the ground rather than sitting in one.locked.position. Katy shares a bunch of different positions we can use and I’m excited to integrate more
• Going on more walks throughout the day—even if they’re just a quick 5-10 minutes
• Turning my time at the playground with Emerson into movement heaven (Katy LOVES (!) hanging from monkey bars and tells us to turn our mouse hands in monkey arms :)
• I’m FIRED UP about tiny little 1% incremental optimizations aggregated + compounded over time

What can YOU do in pursuit of becoming a perpetual motion machine?

Let’s nourish those cells as we MOVE OUR DNA.

P.S. In addition to walking more frequently, Katy says we need to walk on varied terrains. The ubiquitous near-perfectly flat surfaces are sub-optimal. Get out and hike!

I love this phrase: “Not only do we do less, physically, than ever before, but we also almost never do nothing.” ← What a wonderful mind-twister. :)

So, we move WAY less than our ancestors *yet* we almost never completely turn off.

We may not think it’s a big deal, but the constant sounds and lights and data coming at us is enervating.

For example, Katy tells us that back in the day, a sound that was 75 dB would have signaled an approaching avalanche or earthquake but now that’s just a normal city street or phone ringer.

We have our radios and TVs on CONSTANTLY, never allowing ourselves a chance to just relax. Then we have the unnatural lights and unnatural data streaming that we’re always talking about and we wonder why we’re exhausted.

We do almost nothing physically, but we almost never do nothing. :)

Let’s change that equation around a bit: becoming perpetual motion machines and knowing how to turn off all the external stimuli so we can become fully charged!

P.S. Simple step? Turn off your radio on the way to work. Enjoy a quiet commute. And leave your iPod at home for the next run or hike. R.E.L.A.X. your mind.

Tree bathing. That is officially awesome.

We’ve talked about the power of being in nature many times.

Now we know it’s the phytoncides that are doing the trick. (That, and, no doubt, simply removing ourselves from the negative effects of the constant artificial noise we just talked about while moving our bodies, eh? And, as Daniel Goleman tells us in Focus, we’re also turning off our focused mind and allowing our minds to relax—all of which is super restorative. So much so that they call it attention restoration therapy.)

Taken any good forest-baths lately?

When’s your next one?

We’re transforming (in one way or another!) every single moment of every single day.

Let’s make it all one big game and have fun incrementally optimizing that metamorphosis as we become all that we are destined to be.

And, let’s make sure moving our DNA is an essential part of that process! :)