Sitting with Snake, Kiki Smith

Mountain Crest, The Alps (1933), Marsden Hartley 

Mural Murals, 1981 documentary film by Agnes Varda.

Ann-Marie Rayney, Silkscreen

Lyn Marshall

Giacometti

Dave Hardy

Grand Canyon

Eventide fan - sheila hicks

Mostly inspired by yellow things, eavesdropping on the Ocean, 'your body is your soul' with Jaap van der Val and this....

"The validity of an answer often depends on perspective. Looking at things up close often reduces the number of components you're considering. When you perform cost/benefit analysis, or figure the efficiency of something, scale matters tremendously. What's the impact of your choices on the world?" --Katy Bowman

"Skeletons are a sort of "living story" you are continuously writing. bone robusticity is a result not only of genetic data, but of data created via behavior. It is through your choices of movement and the cellular loads these choices create that your body becomes your autobiography."

 -- Katy Bowman: Move your DNA.

the skin show

Is it cold where you are? yes? good! get outside to challenge those arrector pili muscles (or goose bumps to you and me) and don't just take my word for it, click the link below to listen to this expert...

Episode 29- The Skin Show

 "You squat, you hang, you climb, and you threw your couch to the curb—all for the sake of more natural movement. But are your arrector pili getting their movement nutrients? Wait, what ARE your arrector pili? Katy scratches the surface of that oft-neglected but serious player in your whole body health—your skin! Of course, this vast subject needs more than one episode, but this is a good start on a fascinating topic."

week 4

SIT DOWN STAND UP.
What is your position in life?

I'm going to copy and paste directly from Katy Bowmans blog Nutritious Movement (go there immediately after this and read EVERYTHING) for this weeks 'become an opportunistic mover' task because she says so brilliantly..

"So, we’ve got a situation where sitting constantly is creating disease and standing constantly is creating disease. Do you see the theme? Although the research and media are going to probably miss the boat on this one, the problem isn’t the sitting (or the standing, for that matter), but the constant and continuous use of a single position.

...As many anthropologists know, the way we move is mostly a result of our cultural inheritances and has very little to go with genetics. Clothing, terrain, temperature, gender, class, and fear are only a few of the many factors that affect how we adjust our joints when sitting and standing. Gordon W. Hewes reported on about 100 resting postures of the world, and I have posted this image from the study so you can see, perhaps, why our Western joint health and metabolism (which is dependent on muscle length) is the poorest in the world.

So, we need to think bigger. There is more than just sitting and standing. Create ten different options of each! If you have a standing work station, stand a few different ways every hour. When you sit, sit a few different ways every hour. Open your mind and open your joints! When you get home, stay out of your chairs and try out a lot of these Worldly Options. (Note: If you don’t have a spear, a broom may work…) Circle the ones you can’t maintain for longer than five minutes and make a note to practice that posture at the beginning and the end of an exercise session. And, parents, don’t insist that kids sit in the same fashion as us stiffer folks and allow them to explore other options. And, join them! They can teach you something about natural movement.

Also, if you do spend a yoga/stretching class cycling through10 or so of these postures, know that while this cycle is a good thing, getting back into the sitting position the other 6-10 hours of the day reduces your health just the same. Adjust the way you sit, as often as possible for a real, deep, and cellular change."

Bravo Katy. I concur!

week 3

Your eyes are full of language.

A little bit of eyeball movement for this week prompted by my joining Instagram. I don't need more excuses to stare at my various screens so I'm a little annoyed with myself...

Overtime I will be giving you a few simple exercises for your eyes, but for now lets keep it simple and ask yourself this; What was the last horizon you set your sights on?

The muscles in your eyes will change shape in response to focusing on what’s in front of them. A computer screen, for example, will prompt the reflexive behavior of the eye to hold the position of your lens. Now those lensballs were made for seeing near and far and if you don't use them you loose them so...

1. LOOK AWAY FROM YOUR SCREEN, I'm presuming so do forgive me if you are gazing at something else, to something as far of in the distance as you can as many times as you remember throughout the day.

2. If remembering is not your thing then add this nifty little programme, Time Out, to your computer to remind you to take eye breaks

3. Send me a picture of the next horizon you see.I like pictures.

With thanks Katy Bowman and Ruth White for enabling me to see a little better with all your advice.

hard skin

“The optimal way for getting super-regenerating skin would be to allow our foot to interact with natural surfaces outside of the shoe over a lifetime, prompting a slow adaptation in foot skin thickness over that lifetime, giving us a much better ability to cope with the sensations caused by walking barefoot.”

– Katy Bowman, Every Woman’s Guide to Foot Pain Relief.

Want to know more about building a good skin foundation for upper body strength and barefoot living the READ THIS from Katy Bowman.

up and down are relative

Here is an 'Upside-Down' world map and The Peters Projection (an equal area projection of the world) and a Red Hair Map of Europe, just because I wish I had Auburn locks. At first glance nothing what-so-ever to do with the world of human movement and my art practice musings that is the main reason for this blog, but consider this....

The earth is round. The challenge of any world map is to represent a round earth on a flat surface. There are literally thousands of map projections. Each has certain strengths and corresponding weaknesses. Choosing among them is an exercise in values clarification: you have to decide what's important to you. That is generally determined by the way you intend to use the map.

The implications of any projection are enormous. Images we see shape our perceptions of the world. It's enriching to see a variety of points-of-view. Like the 'Upside-Down' map, whoever said that North must be "up"? We are literally on a moving ball in space and, as my hero Katy Bowman suggests, "UP and DOWN are relative and the maps we've come to memorize have shaped our brain to one particular perspective. This "south is up" map is just a reminder that what we've come to understand as right and wrong often depends on how you've set up the problem."

Now bare with me if I'm stating the obvious, but this was of looking at the world can be used with the small universe that is your own body too. Maps/diets/exercise routines/fitness fads/ancient movement practices/meditations techniques are based on a variety of assumptions, most of which are subliminal and below our threshold of consciousness. We can all benefit from challenging implicit assumptions and deciding for ourselves what 'maps of the world' are valid and useful for us.
In short, keep researching, try different things, gain different perspectives, challenge what you think to be 'true', include lots of variation and KEEP MOVING.

Amen.

if you walked in a circle...

Where we are with movement is where we were with nutrition 40 years ago. We say, “Just move more!” if a whale in captivity were to just swim more, it would make the flopped fin worse. Moving more might bring about even more of the forces that brought about the disease of mechanotransduction- in this case the flopped fin. It might make things worse.

At the end of the day swimming more wasn’t really the problem. If you walked in a circle everyday, you would notice that your body became shaped to that.
Then you walk fast in that circle, it will highlight those diseases even faster.
When we say we need to move well or differently, often we say [in this example], “Walk in the circle in the other direction.” You would offset some of the adaptations with that correction, but it’s still treating the symptom.

Corrective exercise is spot-treating these nutrient deficits by creating something novel instead of pulling back and asking what is the actual problem here? What are my actual movement requirements and how can I actually meet those instead of taking the vitamin or pill equivalent?

-- Katy Bowman for Liberated Body

getting shorter with age

"So, “everyone” gets shorter with age and this phenomenon is usually chalked up to compression over time. It is said that your height decreases because either the discs between your vertebrae have flattened out or, your bone density decreases with age, creating weak bones that can no longer stay upright so they curl forward. This seems to be the general understanding of why we get shorter as we get older. However, things are not always as they appear.

What I’m about to explain here is how someone can measure as shorter without any change in their mass — only in how their mass is oriented. I’ve failed, many times, to get this point across to large crowds of clinicians and they always end up looking at me like I’m insane. How can someone possibly be shorter if some body part hasn’t changed in length?

Let me show you...."

Katy Bowman making sense of shrinking. Head over to her blog to read the rest.

body road map

Viewing ancestral-health data through modern eyes can skew our conclusions with what to do with this information. Because we come from a movement-free culture, our relationship to moving tends to boil down to exercise. Only, exercise science, like nutritive science, has attempted to isolate the variables it perceives as most beneficial to the human. Despite the fact that we now know the quality of food varies with its freshness, the way it was fed and or grown, and even the way it was treated (or not), food is still most often evaluated by caloric quantity and percentage of fat, sugar and protein. This, despite the fact that these are not the most important variables when it comes to eating for health, they are still our culturally-selected variables.

In this same way, human movement has been reduced to variables that those evaluating science-data have determined to be most influential in health. Things like heart rate, or intensity of exercise and for how many minutes. The amount of pounds or kilograms to be lifted and the number of times before resting. The length of resting before repeating the loads again. Like nutritive science, exercise science has come a long way in the last 30 years, but also like nutrition, our relationship with exercise is deeply-tinged, culturally speaking with variables that have little to do with actual, sustainable health

-- Katy Bowman on deciphering modern 'optimal human movement' maps. 

your pillow is an orthotic

We tend to think of human movement only in terms of exercising, but every movement or position you get yourself into is fed into your body’s “adapt to this” file. Your tissues respond to environment whether the environment is “sleeping on this mattress” or “running 17 miles.” The process is exactly the same. The reason NOT sleeping on your pillow or mattress hurts is the same reason running 4 miles beyond your regular running distance hurts. You’re just exceeding the boundaries of your tissue strength and created a load greater than what you body is used to...

Katy Bowman on sleeping without a pillow.
Click here to read on.

hard skin

“The optimal way for getting super-regenerating skin would be to allow our foot to interact with natural surfaces outside of the shoe over a lifetime, prompting a slow adaptation in foot skin thickness over that lifetime, giving us a much better ability to cope with the sensations caused by walking barefoot.”

– Katy Bowman, Every Woman’s Guide to Foot Pain Relief.

Want to know more about building a good skin foundation for upper body strength and barefoot living the READ THIS from Katy Bowman.

Snowflakes

Loads Are Like Snowflakes- Every load experienced by the body, whether the distortion is created by our activity (or lack thereof), the position of that activity, the impact of that activity, or the receptiveness of that activity (or lack thereof), is its own “nutrient”.

-- Katy Bowman

looking at head carrying this week...

Home Play

Movement is something that happens while you are getting something else accomplished...

These images made me giggle at first, but then they bought to mind a little something Katy Bowman had to say in this podcast for Liberated Body and now I think these vintage ladies were on to something....

"Remember you are an animal walking around in a zoo. Reflexively your body is always trying to conserve energy. The decision to shuck convenience has to be a choice. You are going to have to choose to get out of your couch and sit on the floor. You’re not really in a cage, you’ve put yourself in- there’s no lock, it’s habit. You can go outside whenever you want.

Movement is way easier to get in your life than exercise. Exercise takes time away from your family living. It takes a drive, a shower, a special outfit, equipment. It’s not as easy as. “I’m making breakfast anyway, I can make it on the floor? I’m walking on this path anyway, why don’t I just walk on the grass just 6 inches to the left? I’m going to the bathroom anyway, why not put my feet up on this squat platform?”

Because movement is not exercise, you have the potential to move all day long. I have no more time, I’m doing this podcast now so I could be sitting in front of my computer, or I could be standing and doing a calf stretch, and squatting a bit. Once you start thinking that way you can really move all day long even if you can’t go anywhere....

...The real difference between exercise and movement would be anytime you are doing movement for the purpose of reaping a health benefit, that’s exercise. While movement is something that happens while you are getting something else accomplished."

--Katy Bowman via Liberated Body.

Skin

"Playing with surfaces is probably where my brain is as well as my own body. Looking at the difference between a set of monkey bars, which would never occur in nature, and then looking at trees. Not just their angles, but also the textures of the bark. All the things you would touch would not have been smooth, they would bite into your skin and require that your skin strengthen.

Our skin is a big limitation to our health. The muscles of the entire body has to pass through either the hand or the feet if you’re doing something with body weight, and yet the skin has never been exposed to anything natural. Even if you are barefoot the nutrient you consume the most is a flat man-made surface.

I’m observing how everything is flat and smooth in my whole life. Nothing has asked the skin to the party. Nothing has asked the skin to participate in your body’s way of moving. Walking on different surfaces just for the sake of the skin. Playing with grip, diameter, and how that changes muscle recruitment."

--Katy Bowman via Liberated Bodies

Katy Bowman

This woman is brilliant.
Go directly to her blog to read everything she has to say, or listen to the many inspiring podcasts she is firing out, or better yet add Move Your DNA to your online bookbuying wish-list.
It is a must read if you move (i.e. if you are human). I cannot recommend it highly enough. In it Katy forms a brilliantly written, scientifically based alternative way of thinking about movement and exercise, which maybe, just maybe, will change the way you see the whole damn universe. Revolutionary and a truly beautiful thing.

 

However, there's no point in starting a revolution if you're hungry. So why not add this mighty fine cook book to your (NOT AMAZON) basket while you are at it.

sit down, stand up

Can you get up and down off the floor without “touching” anything?

" My oldest client ever was a woman named Myrle. She was 89 when she started seeing me and we worked together for 5 years. When we first met, I asked her to get down on the floor and back up. I wanted to get a sense of her functional strength. It took her about 2 minutes to get down (with the use of a chair) and it took her 72 minutes, 4 pieces of furniture, and every one of MY muscles to get her back up again.
She was mortified and told me how the exercise brought up memories of her mother. She had cared for her mother in the end stages of her life, and when she watched her mother struggle to get off the floor, she swore “I will NEVER be like that.” Of course, most physical goals require some sort of physical practice beyond grand declarations. Myrle, like most people, didn’t get down on the floor regularly the last 20 (or 40) years and so the muscle strength necessary to do so silently slipped away..."

Read the rest of this brilliant blog post from Katy Bowman here.

Pumkin Eyes (and pelvic floors)

READ THIS
by Katy Bowman.

Gordon Hewes

There are minimal health benefits to sitting (repeatedly) in a chair, and yet, as Katy Bowman describes in her new book Move Your DNA, the typical childhood is spent making chair sitting a fine art. 

“after a couple of years, sitting still in your chair would be your most-practiced skill, trumping time spent reading, writing, playing games, and physical education in school. Like a ninja of sitting, you practiced sitting still in a chair more than any other activity, with hours and hours in training, with no other learned activity even coming close in time spent practicing.”

--Katy Bowman in "Move Your DNA"

It’s time to start thinking outside the chair and practicing new positions. In her work, Katy cites physical anthropology professor Gordon W. Hewes study, World Distribution of Certain PosturalHabits. Hewes examined 100 different resting postures from all around the world.  As fate would have it, most of these positions don’t involve chairs.
Inspiration!

Alternatives to sitting in a chair. From Hewes "World Distribution of Certain Postural Habits"
Notice how nobody's at a standing desk. (Here is what Katy says about that...)


But before you get rid of all your sofas, make sure you are working within your actual joint range. Work with progressions and load your new found freedom slowly by using bolsters/blankets/cushions to help make your new floor office comfortable.