Movement Matters
Essays on Movement Science, Movement Ecology, and the Nature of Movement
This book is an adaptation of a series of essays Katy created over the last five years in which she unpacks her evolving views on what she calls “movement ecology.” It’s not your typical “do X, Y, and Z” optimal living guidebook. It’s a thoughtful and thought-provoking look at why—as you can guess by the title—Movement Matters and a challenging look at how our individual and cultural decisions have created a sedentary culture and a significant nature debt that few of us ever stop to think about. Big Ideas: Stacking your life, minimalism vs. maximalism, the tree of your life, and redefining success.
Big Ideas
- MovementIt’s outsourced!
- Stacking Your Lifevs. Multitasking.
- Minimalism + Maximalism+ Optimization.
- Mission StatementGot one for your family?
- The Tree of Your LifeKnowledge + wisdom + ...
- Choosing to Try= Nailing it!
“Movement Matters. Not just movement—your movement. Not only to your physiology, but to those in your family and your community. Your movement matters, not only to those you see on a daily and a yearly basis, but to humans elsewhere, that you’ve never met. Your movement matters to the forests and bees in your local area, and our culturally approved (and possibly demanded) sedentarianism is responsible for much of the deforestation of the planet as well as slavery in other places.
You have a role in the ecosystem, and it’s not a static position at the top of the food chain as you were taught. Your role is a dynamic one, critical to all the other living things on this planet.
I haven’t always understood movement this way. This book is a result of me, a biomechanist—someone trained in the application of mechanical laws to the movement and structure of living things—starting to think like an ecologist, and recognizing how movement is a part, a component, of our personal health, our communities and our planet.”
~ Katy Bowman from Movement Matters
This is our third Note on Katy Bowman’s work. Check out our Notes on Move Your DNA + Don’t Just Sit There plus our Interviews for more.
(And check out our Movement 101 class in which we chat about her Ideas as well. And, while you’re at it, make sure you check out our Notes on Joan Vernikos’s Sitting Kills, Moving Heals +Michelle Segar’s No Sweat + John Ratey’s Spark for more on the science of/benefits of movement.)
Katy Bowman is, in her words, “part biomechanist, part science communicator, and full-time mover” who has inspired and “educated hundreds of thousands of people on the role movement plays in the body and in the world” via her website NutritiousMovement.com and podcast called Katy Says.
She’s also an incredible embodiment of her passion and ideals—which is my favorite quality of hers.
This book is an adaptation of a series of essays Katy created over the last five years in which she unpacks her evolving views on what she calls “movement ecology.” It’s not your typical “do X, Y, and Z” optimal living guidebook. It’s a thoughtful and thought-provoking look at why—as you can guess by the title—Movement Matters and a challenging look at how our individual and cultural decisions have created a sedentary culture and a significant nature debt that few of us ever stop to think about. (Get the book here.)
It’s packed with Big Ideas and I’m excited to share some of my favorites so let’s jump straight in!
Download MP3
Download PDFWhen we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything in the Universe.
Get the BookOutsourcing Our Movement
“These items—an electronic car unlocker and a tea bag—are convenient. But what I’ve realized is, when we say or think ‘convenience,’ it’s not so much about saving time as it is about reducing movement. We can grasp sedentary behavior as it relates to exercise because it’s easy to see the difference between exercising one hour a day and not exercising one hour a day. My work, in the past, has been about challenging people to also be able to see the difference between exercising one hour a day and not exercising the other twenty-three. More subtle still—and what I’m asking you to do now—is to see how the choice to move is presented to you every moment of the day, but how often we select the most sedentary choice without even realizing it.
Our daily life is composed of a lot of seemingly innocuous ways we’ve outsourced our body’s work. One of the reasons I’ve begun focusing just as much on non-exercisey movements as I do exercise-type movement is that I feel that the ten-thousand outsourcings a day during the 23/24ths of your time hold the most potential for radical change. Be on the lookout for them.”
That’s from the Introduction in which we’re shown a picture of a tea bag and an electronic car unlocker and introduced to “Movement: Outsourced.”
All those little, mundane, “convenient” things that we take for granted stack up to create a shockingly sedentary culture.
Obviously, we’re no longer out there hunting and gathering, logging our 8 hours a day/3,000 minutes per week of movement in the process. These days, we drive to the grocery store, walk a few steps and come back with everything we need for the week.
No need to chop wood and start a fire. Just push a button a couple times to get yourself all nice and toasty. Wash dishes? Nah. Throw them in the dishwasher. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. infinite etc.
These may seem innocuous, but they add up—not just in your personal physiology but in the health and welfare of the planet.
The book is a manifesto on “movement activism”—encouraging us to open our eyes and see all the tiny opportunities to move.
From a super-simple practical perspective, Michelle Segar echoes this in No Sweat: “Finding opportunities to move (my clients abbreviate this as OTMs, so I will too) throughout the day is surprisingly fun. You’ll be amazed at how soon you begin to become aware of the free spaces in the day that present themselves and the surprising places that are conducive to movement. You may think that your day is crammed so full that you can’t fit in one more thing, but believe me: It’s not true. If you’ve got one minute, you’ve got time.”
As Katy says, “You were born into a sedentary culture, so 99.9 percent of your sedentary behaviors are flying under your radar. Start paying attention. What do you see?”
Let’s see new ways to move.
P.S. This whole chat about convenience reminds me of ultramarathoner Dean Karnazes and this great line from The Road to Sparta: “Somewhere along humanity’s cultural progression we seem to have confused comfort with contentment, but I now realized that contentment doesn’t come from comfort; contentment comes from living through great discomfort.”
Of course, Dean was chatting about that in the context of running 100+ miles, but the same basic idea of not letting “convenience”/being comfortable get in the way of optimizing.
Stacking Your Life
“I used to think of my obligations in series. Each holding their own area, in seemingly unrelated rows, were all the categories of obligation I had to attend to: work (i.e., making money), parenting, relationships, household, work, community, movement, and work again.
Nature is a good teacher, and I have learned quite a bit about efficiency from observing it. In nature, functions aren’t plotted side by side, each holding their own personal space in time. Nature accomplishes many tasks at the same time. With this in mind, I changed the way I thought about and scheduled my own life. Instead of breaking up my obligations and allotting time to each fractured component (i.e., twenty minutes to get food, forty-five minutes for some exercise, an hour to spend with my kids, four hours to produce something work-related), I organized my life essentials so that the same portion of time fulfills multiple obligations. I call this way of relating time to essential tasks ‘stacking your life.’”
Stacking your life.
This is a key theme of the book Katy comes back to a number of times.
First, let’s make a distinction between multi-tasking (not good) and stacking (good!).
Multi-tasking is when you’re trying to do a bunch of things at once and not doing any of them particularly well.
Stacking your life, on the other hand, is when you’ve identified what’s important to you and you’ve found ways to achieve multiple desired outcomes in the same block of time.
For example, one of Katy’s big things is foraging for food with her kids. This simple, 30-minute activity allows her to achieve a ton of things she’s decided are important: she gets to spend time with her family, she’s outside moving, she’s taking care of basic household tasks (procuring food), and she’s doing all that while engaging with her community as they pick for and get assistance from others.
Well stacked!
Here’s my new favorite stacked activity: A sunrise hike/workout. One <90-minute activity that gives me a ton of goodness: I’m spending time outdoors while enjoying two of my favorite things (the mountains + sunrises) while getting a forest bath, movement + exercise and quiet time by myself to reflect on all that’s awesome and think about all that will be awesome. MAGIC.
Other little things I do: I love spending time with Emerson every morning (giving us time together and mom bonus time for her fundies) and, after eating breakfast together, we’ll head out, get some movement in walking to the park and, rather than sitting there watching him (like I used to), now I’m all about it—playing on the monkey bars and the rings, following up the little climbing wall, chasing him, etc. With my son. Outside. Moving. Having fun. While supporting my Wife. Me likes.
How about YOU?
How can you stack a little love in your life?
Minimalism + Maximalism (+ Optimization)
“Just as people clean out their cupboards of junk food when they’re ready to eat in a more nutritious way, I cleaned out my house when I was ready to move in a more nutritious way.
‘Going minimal’ in terms of furtniture was a simple way to restructure my habitat. But to be clear, ‘going minimal’ isn’t my objective. Quite the opposite: My goal is to go maximal.
Perspective is everything, and we are often led by what’s visible. And so we call a reduction—in furniture or the stiffness of conventional footwear or the amount of spending we do each month—minimalism. There’s less stuff, or we’ve spent less, so it must be minimalism. There’s less manufacturing needed, less material, less energy. Minimalism.
But what if we framed and named this reduction for what it can yield—in many cases, more movement, more awareness, more nature, more time with family and friends, more time in nature with family and friends. What if we reframed minimalism of stuff to be maximalism of our natural structure—a robust body within a robust community within a less-taxed environment?”
Minimalism.
It’s really maximalism.
Which is really optimization.
… What can you minimize so you can maximize/optimize?!
For Katy that was removing her furniture so she and her family could rest and move more naturally. Minimalism = maximalism. (Alexandra has removed a ton of our furniture already as well. :)
For me, that’s removing as much technology as I can. No iPhone. No email. No digital news/essentially no online time. A lot of reading/writing/thinking. Minimalism = maximalism.
You?
Minimalize. Maximize. Optimize.
Mission Statements... How’s Yours? (+ Your fams?)
“My family, my body, and the great outdoors. These are the things I treasure and prioritize over everything else—but that wouldn’t always have been clear had you witnessed the day-to-day activities I used to choose to do.
Decisions can be overwhelming, especially when we don’t always have the luxury of time to make an extensive cost/benefit analysis. I once heard that every organization, whether a company, a non-profit, or a family, should have a mission statement. And that when it comes time to make a decision, you should evaluate the decision against the mission statement in order to keep your organization true to its purpose.
As a lover of alignment of the body and the mind, I was instantly smitten with the idea. An external way to check if my behavior was matching up with my intentions sounded like it could make life easier, and in fact it has.”
A mission statement for our family. I like that.
I’ve got one for my life and we have one for our biz.
Need to create one for the fam and make those implicit values explicit!
Join me?
P.S. Katy started by identifying her family’s keywords: “nature, strength, nourishment, clean, sustainable, service, community, efficacy, fun, laughter, experimentation, discovery, play, challenge, wonder.”
For curious souls: My personal favorite + our business’s core virtues are: Purpose-driven, Hopeful + Optimistic, Hardworking + Gritty, Energized + Enthusiastic, Kind + Generous, Noble + Virtuous. (I have those written on a note card which serves as my bookmark for handy all-day reference.) Will be fun to come up with our family’s!
P.P.S. I love Katy’s three things: “My family, my body, and the great outdoors.” When I journal every morning, I write down my three things: Energy + Family + Service.
It all starts with optimizing my energy and making sure my connection to the Divine is as strong as it can be (via eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, focusing, etc.) such that I can be an exemplary husband + father while serving as profoundly as possible.
You?
The Tree of (Your) Life
“I’ve always felt rich in knowledge, but what I didn’t understand before, what wasn’t made clear to me throughout my training, is that knowledge isn’t wisdom. Knowledge is an awareness of fact, nothing more; just knowing something doesn’t tell you how to apply these facts to your life, or how these facts relate to all other facts, or to life. I currently live in a happy place between regularly using the scientific process for knowledge while understanding how knowledge relates to wisdom; the final decision on how to behave lies with each of us alone, and science does not have an opinion on the matter. For me, insights are the roots, wisdom is the tree, and knowledge is the air, water and sunlight. The seeds of a tree are the mechanism of sharing—easily distributed parts that can grow, for each person, into a unique shape that depends on the individual doing the growing.”
I love that distinction between knowledge and wisdom.
—> Knowledge = An awareness of facts.
—> Wisdom = Integrating and applying that knowledge to live optimally.
I also love that image of our tree.
—> Insights = Roots that ground us in our own truth.
—> Wisdom = Trunk through which our embodied power flows.
—> Knowledge = The air + water + sunlight of Ideas that nourish us.
—> Seeds of a tree = Our mechanism for sharing. <— That’s my favorite part.
May the fruit of our lives be nourishing to our families, communities and world. (At the end of the day, that’s the only reason we do all of this optimizing and actualizing right?)
Choosing to Try = Nailing It!
“This is only my second year growing a garden. The first year, I grew eleven toothpick-sized carrots; this year I got one baking dish full of medium-sized carrots. I’m transitioning to becoming someone who grows things, friends. It’s going to take a long, long time for my yields to match my passion, but I don’t feel like I’m failing until I nail it. I figure I started nailing it when I chose to try.”
Those are the last words of the book and I just love it for several reasons.
First, Katy writes that in response to a reader who felt overwhelmed by all the information she was reading and was feeling a bit freaked out. Katy tells her she can choose to feel bad about all the ways her behavior may not be leading to the outcomes she’d like to see or she can get excited about all the little changes she can make that will have positive ripples in the world.
Same thing goes with our work together, of course.
We can get overwhelmed with all the things we *could* be doing to optimize our lives. Or, we can rub our hands together and get excited about all the fun ways we can get just a little bit better today and then choose the next most exciting little thing we can start playing with.
—> “It’s going to take a long, long, time for my yields to match my passion…”
That’s such a great line. Me, too for nearly everything in my life. You? :)
The attitude to have while we evolve and become all that we’re capable of being? No need to wait till we “nail it.” Let’s figure we’ve nailed it the moment we decide to try!
Which reminds me of this gem from The Confidence Gap in which Russ Harris tells us: “If we live our lives by this definition of success, we are doomed to stress and misery (punctuated by brief moments of joy when we achieve a goal). So I invite you to consider a radically different definition. True success is living by your values.
This definition makes our lives ever so much easier. Why? Because in any moment, we can act on our values—yes, even if we’ve neglected them for years. Presto, instant success! …
When living by our values becomes the definition of success, it means we can be successful right now. All we need to do is act on our values. From this perspective, the mother who gives up her career to act on her values around nurturing and supporting her children is far more successful than the CEO who earns millions but completely neglects his values around being there for his kids. Albert Einstein put it this way: ‘Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.’ And Helen Keller put it like this: ‘I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.’ So next time your mind is beating you up for not being successful enough, try saying, ‘Thanks, mind!’ And then ask yourself, ‘What tiny thing can I do right now that’s consistent with my values?’ then do it: instant success!”
About the author
