Bestselling author, speaker, and a leader in the Movement movement, biomechanist Katy Bowman is changing the way we move and think about our need for movement. Bowman teaches movement globally and speaks about sedentarism and movement ecology to academic and scientific audiences. Her work has been featured in diverse media including The Today Show, CBC Radio One, The Seattle Times, and Good Housekeeping.
One of Maria Shriver’s “Architects of Change” and an America Walks “Woman of the Walking Movement,” Bowman has worked with companies like Patagonia, Nike and Google as well as a wide range of non-profits and other communities, sharing her “move more, move more body parts, move more for what you need” message. Her movement education company, Nutritious Movement, is based in Washington State, where she lives with her family.
Her book, the bestselling Move Your DNA, highlighted the importance of distinguishing between movement and exercise and has revolutionized the way movement is now being discussed. This book along with her others—Movement Matters, Dynamic Aging, Grow Wild, Simple Steps to Foot Pain Relief, Diastasis Recti, Don’t Just Sit There, Whole Body Barefoot, and Alignment Matters—has been critically acclaimed and translated worldwide.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Katy Bowman about the importance of moving correctly.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How there is a difference between exercise, physical activity, and movement, and why those must be delineated well.
– Why people should learn how to carry their weight correctly throughout their body.
– How coming from an exercise-centric understanding of movement can be limiting.
– Why moving with other people keeps you committed to your movement journey.
– How most people are not being taught to see their own shape when they are moving and why that is problematic.
Connect with Katy:
Guest Contact Info
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facebook.com/NutritiousMovement
Links Mentioned:
nutritiousmovement.com
Connect with Steven:
Website
Xeroshoes.com
Twitter
@XeroShoes
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@xeroshoes
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facebook.com/xeroshoes
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
Walking is one of the most fundamental things that human beings do. Walking on two legs is what makes us human beings. What if we’re all doing it wrong? That’s right, the simplest thing, walking, we’re doing it wrong. Well, we’re going to find out about that and much, much more on today’s episode of the MOVEMENT Movement podcast, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting feet first, usually, because those things are your foundation.
We’re going to break down the propaganda, the mythology, sometimes, the outright lies that you’ve been told that what it takes to run or walk or hike or play or do yoga or CrossFit, whatever it is that you’d like to do to do that enjoyably, effectively, efficiently. Did I mention enjoyably? Because if you’re not having fun, do something different until you are. It’s one of the messages here. The other message is spread the word.
Because we call this the MOVEMENT Movement because we’re creating a movement that involves you about natural movement. We’re basically trying to help people rediscover that natural movement is the obvious better, healthy choice, the way natural food is. And that involves the you. So, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. You can find all the previous episodes. You can find different ways of interacting with us on YouTube, on Facebook, on et cetera, et cetera.
And of course, then you can share and like and do all those things that are part of passing the message out and spreading the word. In short, if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. And so, let’s jump in. I am thrilled to have our current guest on the show. This is someone who I’ve known since really the beginning, starting zero shoes. And we’ve crossed paths a number of times, but I’m glad that we have this time to chat. So, Katy Bowman.
Katy Bowman:
Hello, how the heck are you?
Steven Sashen:
I’m crazily busy. I could use a nap and a clone and an assistant for my clone and a clone of my assistant. How about you?
Katy Bowman:
I could use a nap. I mean, I don’t know if I really want to try to ramp up what I’m doing to match the frenetic. I’m going the opposite way. I’m going to slow way down and see if things fall off my plate.
Steven Sashen:
That would be dreamy. I like the idea of having less to do but it seems like that isn’t happening for us at this point. But let’s back up a half a step. Katy, do you want to tell people who the hell you are and what your connection to this whole natural movement thing is. Just a little taste because I know that’s what we’re going to be diving into for the whole of this conversation, but just give them a little something.
Katy Bowman:
Well, I think most folks might know me as a biomechanist. So, biomechanics is a science that looks at the Newtonian physics, the forces, the loads, the pressures of living systems, not limited to humans. But in this case, I write mostly about humans. And then, my book, Move Your DNA was probably where-
Steven Sashen:
The beginning.
Katy Bowman:
Well, it was the beginning of I would say that concise thesis that I was putting forward, which is there’s a mechanical environment. And the mechanical environment is not really being considered. And I talked about moving in a slightly different way, the difference of exercise and physical activity and movement and why those need to be delineated well. More for the academic or scientific purposes.
But ultimately, for all of us trying to make decisions based on the information that’s coming down to us. So, that’s what I do. And I do that through the internet like most people, through writing books, and through live engagement.
Steven Sashen:
I mean, I’ve got like all of your books. We have a bookshelf sitting right out there. And I have all of your books there. I was going to bring them in here and show them off one at a time but I was not smart enough to have done that before I hit record. So, do you want to tell people what the other books are that might jug some people’s thoughts and have them already starting to search?
Katy Bowman:
Well, my first book was Simple Steps to Foot Pain Relief. So, I actually started in feet as far as writing things out. Whole Body Barefoot is another book. Move Your DNA, like I already said. Alignment Matters, Movement Matters, Don’t Just Sit There, and Diastasis Recti, which is a condition of the abdominals. So, those are all the titles so far.
Steven Sashen:
Love it. So, it sounds like you’re just moving up the chain. Eventually, you can have something for ears and eyes and something in there. Before we actually jump in. And you know I’m going to do this. There’s all these cool things, if people are watching, that you have in the background I want to tour. Because I’m like, “Don’t do it yet,” because I’m teasing my curiosity. I’m a fitness gadget geek like there’s no tomorrow.
So, when you have things that I’ve never seen before, it makes me very excited. Because we call this the MOVEMENT Movement podcast, we’d like to start with a movement. Do you have anything that you can think of? I know you can think of a million things. Something to share off the top of your head that people can do just to do something new with their body that might help them discover something or feel something that you like.
Katy Bowman:
Well, one of my favorite moves so that people can wrap their… I believe that we all need to experiment the things that we hear about, and I’m going to be talking a lot about alignment today, probably. And so, what is alignment, it’s the idea that you can have a movement that happens in a number of different ways. So, we’re going to talk about the calf raise, because I imagine that most people have heard of calf raise.
So, in its simplest term, you’re going to be standing, and you’re going to have your feet flat on the ground, and then you’re going to lift your heels away from the ground, which is going to elevate you up. Now, if I were to go into an anatomy book to say which part of my body is doing that calf raise, oh, the calf is right there in the front, I use my calves. But the way that I talk about alignment is to say we’re really off.
We are so far off in how our bodies are moving, that we’re not even using the parts that we think. So, I’m going to have everyone do the calf raise now. You can do it you too.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, I’m going to stand up. Hold on. Okay, I’m in.
Katy Bowman:
And you’re going to look down at your ankles as you do. And this is a move from Whole Body Barefoot, calf elevator. So, elevators, as go straight up and straight down. But I want you to look down at your ankles, and I want you to do a few calf raises. And I want you to notice if you stood in front of a mirror, or if you can see when you’re bending over, if your ankles indeed go straight up and down, if maybe one is twisting to the right or to the left as you go up and down, or if they’re dropping away from the midline or towards the midline.
So, if your calf raises are not calf elevators, then you’re not actually using your calves. And that pattern that you see right there you’re going to see every time you do a plantar flexion motion in a walk or a run. So, if you see something that’s moving to the right or to the left or rotating interiorly or externally medially or laterally, then your walk
Steven Sashen:
For normal humans, that would be clockwise, counterclockwise.
Katy Bowman:
Well, clockwise and counterclockwise, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work in this way.
Steven Sashen:
If we’re looking down, for people, if they’re not watching this, they don’t know medial versus lateral.
Katy Bowman:
Don’t even worry about if they’re twisting, don’t let them twist at all. So now, I want you to hold them in place, and stabilize so that you are making calf elevators, not just calf raises. And you will be using a lot more of your body part.
Steven Sashen:
Love it. That’s a good one. Yeah, it was also interesting, here, I’m going to move the camera back down. So, by doing that, I noticed my right leg was just totally straight up and down. And my left ankle did a tiny little twist just the very beginning, then recentered itself. So, it’s trying to find the way and then came back. And of course, what I really loved is by about the third or fourth one, everything was all up and down. It figured its way out.
And I’d never looked at that before. Love it. So, most people who are biomechanist, how do I want to put this, I mean, I’m curious how you just found yourself interested in this and then following this to begin with. But then also, the practical application is the part that I find really intriguing. Can you tell me more about how that evolved for you?
Katy Bowman:
Well, I mean, biomechanics, I mean, the program was closing behind me. A lot of the movement science are closing or dying off.
Steven Sashen:
Like?
Katy Bowman:
I think like UCLA had a biomechanics and Exercise Science Program. It’s just slowly reducing. I’m not exactly sure why. I have my ideas of why movement is being lost across a culture. You’re seeing newspapers take out their fitness columns because it’s not important. We’ve got much more important things to be talking about.
Because it’s always had a stigma of exercises for those who care about their body and everything else is for those who care about their minds. There’s definitely this-
Steven Sashen:
Dichotomy.
Katy Bowman:
Dichotomy. But anyway, so I was just really good in math. And I went to school, thinking I would study physics. So, I started there. I started in math. And then, I was good at it, but it was really boring. You talked about the fun factor. The fun factor was really low. And then, at the same time, I was emerging exerciser. So, I was very sedentary as a bookworm. I was a very nerdish immobile kid. I thankfully was bolstered by the fact that kids just moved a lot more.
I grew up on a farm so I grew up being moved. My environment, there was no computers, there was no smartphones. There was just bicycles and a cowbell and the rule that you couldn’t come back in until it was time for dinner. So, that kept me moving. But that was really the amount of it. The rest of time, I’d be sitting and still. So, around 18 or 19, I discovered walking, I discovered exercise, I was on the swim team.
And it was a physical transformation, but I think more really opened my mind. I just started being more of a person and that my experiences were greater than simply having read about so many of my experiences. I would say that the bulk of my experiences were coming through what I was reading. So, to be so experiential in my body was very liberating to me. And I came from a pretty a sedentary family. Half of them was sedentary. The other half was more active.
So, I started tuning into activity. And I met college and like, “This is boring, but I’m good at it.” So then, I switched to physics because they’re like, “Well, if you’re bored with math, you might enjoy the more real-world problems of physics.” And now, I’m just dealing with lines and balls and point masses. And I was like, “I don’t know if this is fun for you. But it’s not fun for me.” And I think it’s because simultaneously, I was really being physical for the first time.
And so, I used to hate running the mile, for example, as a middle school high schooler. But when I was 18 and 19, I was like, “Wow, I can get better at this.” And I was learning how to run. And I was getting to the point where I could run a seven-minute mile, just training myself on a treadmill in a gym. And then, I found I have been at college for too many years to not enjoy what I’m doing here. And I found this program called biomechanics.
And I realized that I had already done almost all of the work for it inadvertently. And all I was missing was some physiology, and a whole bunch of movement classes, which I wanted to take anyway. So, that was where I first found what that was. And like I said, they’d already closed the program, but they had to hold it open for anyone who came in during that catalog year. And so, I graduated with that, the whole love of movement and training. I was a runner at that point.
I started becoming exercise teacher. So, I got used to breaking down movement. But I was also a nerd by DNA. And so, I loved making anything technical. So, I was really helping people who weren’t movers naturally, figure out why and how to move. I help that group of people really figure out why and how to move.
Steven Sashen:
So, in that first group, what were you doing with them?
Katy Bowman:
Well, so I got a job at a gym. I was mostly teaching in fitness. I was doing some sports coaching, because when you were in that department, you work in human performance lab. So, you have access to athletes and different people. But for that other group, they were mostly injured. So, when people who have any preexisting condition that precludes them from this general exercise, such as any cardiovascular risk factor or episode, or if you had surgery or PT, when you go to a gym to get a free assessment, they’ll put you with the trainer.
Well, I had a degree in biomechanics and exercise science. And so, I would get all of those people and they’re like, “Listen, I hate to move. But I know I’m supposed to.” Everyone was extrinsically motivated. They were doing it because their doctor said they needed to, their family said they needed to, they needed data about themselves to look different. There was no joy or belief that there would be joy in moving on the other side.
Because it had always been such a chore and such a coming from someone else that you needed to do it. So, I was able, mechanically, to say, “Oh, well, I know that you’ve had this foot fracture that is always coming up. Or maybe you had your medial meniscus or your ACL repaired, or you have a hip replacement. Let me show you what it is about the way that you’re moving that contributed to that stress riser in the first place.
Stress riser being an engineering term for repetitive use in a particular area to the point of failure. Like, “I thought my knees were just old.” That’s what they said. And I was like, “Well, you only had a problem with one knee. And both of your weight knees are the same age.” So, you just take that simple trope and put it aside. That’s just such an easy way to allow yourself to continue to not move. So, I just did that. And then all of a sudden, there was more transformation.
And then, people were like, “I love this.” And I was like, “Okay. Well, what do you want to do with your body that’s not just exercise that you can’t?” “Oh, I want to be able to, I’ve always wanted to climb a tree or go across the monkey bars or play with my kids or do this 40-mile walk for this fundraiser.” I was like, “Let’s train for that.” To train for general fitness, to come in three times a week for these minutes, it’s joyless, and it’s not nutrient dense.
It’s not going to be sustainable for you. You’re not going to have the conversion to being intrinsically motivated. So, that was that group. And then, I went to graduate school. Because if you get for four or five years, all the people who have been injured or whatever, you start to see so many patterns. And people would walk in, I could see him in a minute, “Oh, yeah, you have osteoporosis in the left hip.” He’ll be like, “How could you tell?”
And I was like, “Because I can tell where your weight distribution is. And so, I know how bone works. So, let me show you what a centered stance would be and how that puts more weight on the hip atrophying because you’re not putting weight on it instead of letting you stand with all your weight not on that hip. And then have you do 500 reps of an exercise. Why don’t you just learn how to carry your own weight better so that every minute is getting you more towards this more robust structure.” So, that’s how I came to be.
Steven Sashen:
I hear an interesting pattern. And this is something that I discovered as an undergraduate as well actually, I’ll tell the story. I got to a certain point when I was in college, I was a pre-med, and everything was intersecting. So, what I was doing in physics and in math and in chemistry and biology were all intersecting. And I came up to the head of the chemistry department at that time. And I said, “This is so interesting because you need the physics to understand the biology. I mean, all of them interrelate.”
I said, “If you taught it that way, it will be so much more interesting because it’s in many ways, real world that you’re then dissecting to find out how things work. That would be totally fascinating.” And he looked at me and I swear to God, he said this, he goes, “Then how would we weed out the pre-meds?” And it was the saddest thing I ever heard. But what I heard from you, and actually, variation of this, I remember the hardest class I’ve ever taken was psych stats.
Just all and figuring out how to how they were doing statistical analysis in psychology was just super hard until I started doing primary psychological research. I did research on cognitive aspects of motor skill acquisition, a couple of things about rhythm, a bunch of things. To figure out if my research had any meaning, I needed to do the statistical analysis. And then, when it was practical, it was super interesting.
So, I heard for you that getting out of the bookish part into the practical part into biomechanics is what made the difference. And interestingly, with the clients that you first started talking to you, it was the same thing, getting out of the linear thing and into the more practical application was the thing that was making a difference. I think that’s really intriguing. Some people say you need to have a why.
And most people, their why is not as clever as what you help them come up with. It’s, “Oh, I want to make this pain go away.” Not, “Oh, I want to be able to enjoy playing with my kids, to run a marathon, to hike a mountain, to be able to walk to the grocery store without pain,” and whatever it might be. But just the practical side is what’s often grossly missing.
Katy Bowman:
Yeah. I think of it as in terms of density. There’s not a lot of density when you are approaching it for only one external purpose. I mean, it certainly relates to you, but it’s just not… I mean, you have the psychological background or a background in psychology is probably a better way to say it. You have a background in psychology.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. We keep it both ways.
Katy Bowman:
With that background, the motivation and exercise adherence and adherence to even following the things that you yourself want to do but can’t seem to make happen, that’s a big one. It’s not really relevant to you. You haven’t made it relevant.
Steven Sashen:
It’s funny. So, I was a gymnast since way back when. And when I was 32, I was just warming up. And I landed and twisted at the same time and heard that noise come out of my knee. And that’s the end of my gymnastics career. And I spent the next 10 years trying to find something that I enjoy doing that was just intrinsically wonderful. And I found a bunch of things that I liked. I got really into circus arts. I was doing Chinese pole and all these crazy aerial things that I really enjoyed, but there was no application.
I was never going to end up Cirque du Soleil. And this stuff was hard and was painful too. I mean, some of these things look really wonderful, but they hurt to get them. And it was until I discovered Masters Track & Field that it all put itself together. Because it was hard, it was challenging, but to have the end goal of competition, and of trying to continuously improve because you can never get it right. The thing with sprinting in particular is there’s always something that you do wrong like in every race.
At the end of the race, someone will say, “How’d you do?” And my answer now is. “Do you just want the number or can I give you the excuses first?” But to have that reason to do it is one of the things that drives me. Even now during COVID without any competition, I’m still basically training as if there’s going to be a meet at some point in the near future. And just that little complete fake thought, if you will, is enough to get me out of bed and work harder than any human being has a right to. There’s no sponsorship money at the end of it.
I’m not going to win valuable prizes. No one cares about the medals. But it’s just really fun. And I’m curious about your thought about this. The other thing that makes it work for me, it was funny, I was on the track yesterday with my training partner, we realized that we’ve been training together for 11 years, 12 years. And just the social component is huge. I’m wondering if you’ve noticed anything about the social component in the work you’ve done with people.
Katy Bowman:
Well, so a specialization that I had more in my undergrad, although I guess a little bit, I did a little bit of work in graduate school was in the term gerontology is so bad, I swap it for goldener. But it is really looking at what are the reasons that do get people to come to movement. And community is definitely one of them. And one of the ways that I’ve tried to expand the understanding of natural movement.
Meaning, there’s a range of movement and a range of movement types that we need that our cells and all the different types of our body tissues require. And each one of those, slightly different. But I try to expand it to say like, movement, we come from a very exercise-centric understanding of movement. And that’s very limiting. But you don’t have to go very far. You have to step out of your own culture. But when you across culture, you realize that movement has always been ubiquitous.
And movement has always run parallel to really most other human experiences that we would put under things that humans require. So, others is something that humans require. But moving together was one of those things. And so, when you could provide not only exercise for… especially groups of people that tend to have fewer people in their homes, so older adults, for example, in this culture, tend to be much more isolated.
So, if you’re going to design an exercise class for goldeners, knowing that what they’re coming for is probably more the camaraderie or the community than the movement itself. So, knowing those things as you’re developing these programs. So, I really try to put for children, for families, to understand that movement is a lot easier to get when you can figure out how to layer it or increase the nutrient density of that movement with being with other people.
And that it’s probably going to be the moving with other people that keeps you committed. Because another part of the theory that I have, this body human body use theory, is that humans naturally, all living systems really tend to conserve energy. So, it’ll always be easier for you to not exercise, but it will be harder for you to not do the other things. Because we don’t have a people shedding tendency to our personality. We want to be with other people. We’re not going to necessarily do that. We have a learning tendency.
So, when you can add movement to be less the same movement over and over again, you have much more adherence. Now, the difficulty is that people talking about, the people doing the podcast, and the people leading the movement, moving in the exercise movement are probably the, archetype is not the right word, they’re the constitution of people for whom movement was the thing that they came to express. Right? So, you have the natural movers, leading the movement, and are missing the point.
So, I think it’s my rare exception that I was a non-mover who got to it through not the constitution of moving that gives me a much different perspective. Because I could see it, by the way, maybe 90% of the population actually view it rather than the people already who could get up every day, and who are going to do it no matter what. Trying to tell everyone, just do it. It’s not landing for everyone.
Steven Sashen:
No, no. The first time I heard about the whole 10,000-hour theory for becoming an expert, my initial thought was, well, that’s bullshit. And the subplot was, speaking as a sprinter and a gymnast, there’s no sprinter or gymnast who’s ever put in 10,000 hours because you literally can’t for what it takes to train for either of those things. But the other thought that I had is, the person who wants to put in 10,000 hours is a different person. You can’t just force yourself to do it, to force yourself to expertise doesn’t work.
That whatever that intrinsic motivation thing is interesting. And I’m curious, because it’s definitely different group of people. And the other thing with, let’s call them natural movers, are people who just gravitate towards that is many of them, how do I want to put this, they don’t have the ability to look more carefully at what they’re doing to understand what the common factors are, or what the causal factors often are.
Or to pull out some of the mythology from what they’ve done to find something more essential that they could share with other people independent of their own experience. I mean, we all tend to teach our own experience rather than figure out what the thing underneath that is that might be more universal. And again, that’s for the same reason you mentioned, I mean, human beings were wired to do as little as we can get away with.
And so, if you know how to do it, you tend to stop right there. Or one of my favorite examples, I was working with a friend slash sprinting coach. We’re doing this one drill and while basically, it’s a jumping drill, if you will, and he says, “You need to get have your hips in…” how do you say it? “Because when you’re in the air there, you need to get your hips over your feet more. I said, “Dude, I’m in the middle of the air. I can’t rearrange my body that way.”
“What you’re really saying is that I didn’t take off in a way that put my hips over my feet in the way that you want.” And he’s like, “Oh, yeah, I guess so.” So, he was just a natural mover. And someone had told him this line, get your hips over your feet. And he was just regurgitating that because it worked for him, because he didn’t need anything more than that. But it doesn’t work for most human beings. So, that movement to a human translation is a skill that a lot of natural movers don’t have.
Katy Bowman:
And maybe anyone trying to teach. They’re teaching and coaching and being able to break down the thing that you do and see when a person isn’t getting it and to be able to create 10 steps below that, to me, that’s what teaching is. Is to not be able to depend on any language that really anyone gave you before, but to see it thoroughly for yourself. And it comes from a lot of time being exposed to it. But it also could come from simply moving through it.
There might be a knowledge or an understanding of going from point A to point B yourself that allows you to have a different experience of the experience. And someone going, “Now that you’re at point B, tell me everything that you did between point A and B.” You couldn’t possibly do it.
Steven Sashen:
I think that one of the things that you bring to the table that’s so interesting and unique, though, is that analytical methodological mindset that’s required for math and required for physics. And to apply that is a whole different story. And that’s an unusual piece as well. And there’s also just the thing, I don’t know, I refer to this as just having good eyes. And a lot of people don’t have good eyes.
In other words, again, my favorite example of this as bad eyes is you go to any high school track meet, and you listen to the parents yelling at their sprinter kids, “Get your knees up.” And people think that knees up is an actual cue. But having your knees be up is the side effect of applying force into the ground in the right direction at the right time. And I see coaches doing the same thing. Because they’re looking at the end result, and not what is either the cause or potentially the cause and then tweaking that.
So, having whatever combination of skills that would be, and I don’t know what it is, maybe you have better insight, leads to be able to see well. And then, having that curiosity to examine and figure out if your theory may be right, if your intervention might be right. That’s the thing that I appreciate about what you do is that you’re bringing that vision to the table. And again, that’s a very unusual thing in my experience.
Katy Bowman:
Well, that’s a biomechanist, right? Biomechanist understands not only what it looks like, but how it’s made. So, there’s kinetics, and then there’s kinematics, right? So, you see knees up, that’s the easy thing to pick up. The harder thing is the invisible thing to know that knees up could be made in one way that’s helpful and a way that’s hindering your performance. And then, to be able to communicate to that person. It’s like, “All right, you’re going to bring your knees up this way. Now, you’re going to bring your knees up that way.”
And then now, the person has experienced and then they have that knowledge. So, for me, the way that I’ve become a movement teacher in the world is to teach people how to have, as your language, good eyes for themselves. I don’t want you to depend on me to see what I see. I want you to learn how to objectively look at your position in the world. So, calf raise. Calf raise, get your heels up, heels up higher, heels up higher, right? So, heels up higher.
If you have someone who’s really rotating, they just did extreme pronation. That’s the exercise that you just had them practice, which now is going to that was the thing that you wanted them to undo during the time of offsetting that. So, to say, “Well, there’s something more than heels up, there’s heals up in malleolar or ankle bones in this direction. All right, now we’re going to do it.” I mean, if we’re inherently energy conservers, we’re also inherently observers of natural phenomenon. I mean, that’s our bag.
And so, to be able to finally receive some instruction and how to see yourself move, that’s what’s missing. Or just giving the dogma of exercise is do this for this many minutes and this and this. No one’s really being taught how to see their own shape. And so, I like to do that. Because once you own how to see your shape, then you have the power to adjust it in the direction that you want. But you can’t really do that if you don’t know how to see yourself yet.
Steven Sashen:
What’s your experience in working with people who may come in, I mean, we’ll stretch this metaphor till its breaking point, who are let’s say that their body blind in developing that ability to see themselves. I have a whole theory about cognitive aspects of how people adapt to new movement patterns that I’m not going to bore you with at the moment. But I’m curious what you see as how people progress or if there’s some people who have difficulty progressing.
And if so, what do you do with them? And again, without giving it away, I’d say that some people are just better wired form moving through that process than others. But I’d love to know how you move them through it. And then, what happens if you see people who hit a sticking point or limitation or the edge of what they’re able to do that might not be as far as you can imagine?
Katy Bowman:
Well, I do think that learning how to observe yourself is challenging no matter what you’re talking about. So, I would say that self-observation, no matter what field or context in which you’re talking about is tough, it’s really hard to see our own behavior, and how it relates to things. It’s hard to see the choices that you make and the assumptions that you’re making all the time, the biases that you hold.
So, I think when we’re talking about physicality or physical bodies, there’s a lot of things that have happened to people, humans along the way that have made them ashamed of looking at themselves. To look at yourself in observe yourself is to be in a very vulnerable position. So, in that case, groups might not be the best place. There’s a lot of coaching, right, that’s gone until like, we’re going to publicly yell at you in front of everyone else.
So, everyone can see that you’re doing wrong, to get you to really… right? So, coaching hasn’t had the best track record, if you will, of helping people get to that spot. Because we’re not really that informed in other experiences outside of ours. So, my graduate work was in female pelvic floor disorder. So, the alignments that I was helping people work through were really of the pelvic and the spine, much more intimate of an area in your body.
So, I always done it through using a mirror. And then also noticing. If it’s hard for you to look right now, then you’re just going to look at this place. Giving options. 10 steps, it’s the same thing. If you can’t jump up onto a 24-inch box, I’m going to drop it to 22 inches, or 11 inches or three inches. I’m going to set you up to be successful. And I do the same thing with observation. I’m going to ask you to do this looking at yourself.
And if you can’t, I’m going to give you a smaller area to look at. If you can’t, I’m going to send you home with a task to look at it when nobody’s looking. It’s stepwise, it’s simply stepwise.
Steven Sashen:
One of the things that I’ve always been intrigued by is how we hold certain beliefs, especially beliefs about things that you can’t prove or disprove, as in the same way we hold our sense of who we are, that literally our beliefs are locked in with our identity. And it seems that there’s a similar thing with movement. I mean, learning new movement patterns is of course, neurologically challenging to begin with. You have to lay down new neural pathways. You have to let others fade away.
But I think there’s a big chunk of that that is very tightly tied in with our identity in ways that we don’t really even have a language for. We don’t really talk about how movement patterns or lack thereof, which is another movement pattern, really relate to how we see ourselves. It’s always fascinating to be watching kids who move just like their parents. And I’m so curious how much of that is genetic, and how much of that is a learned behavior to try to fit in this mirroring behavior, and it becomes an identity.
And you have people move out of that. And sometimes, it’s liberating sometimes it’s terrifying. What’s been your experience, if any? I mean, this just popped into my head with this whole relationship between movement and identity.
Katy Bowman:
Well, I think that everything exists within your identity or within your culture, right? Everything’s an element of it. Movement is off of our radar. We don’t necessarily see it, but as you pointed out, us not moving is also a movement choice. We’re making movement choices. We’re responding to movement. So, when I try to explain movement, I try to use non-movement examples.
If I want to talk about human movements, I try to use non-human animals to make examples so that you’re not so feeling overwhelmed that I’m talking about you, right? If you can get the principle in a way that doesn’t threaten your identity, then the principle can come in and do the work itself. And so, I talked about language. One thing is about gait, the way that we walk. The way that you walk, it’s like a fingerprint, it’s so unique to you.
Steven Sashen:
You could spot people from 100 yards away from their walk. It’s like, “That’s Bill.
Katy Bowman:
And they use satellite recognition. They use that as a way of, if they’re trying to find somebody, they will use gate because you can have face surgery and you can change your language but you can’t really change your walk because we don’t have that technique going in yet. Right? And so, part of who you are. But you can also see family members walk side by side and you just see what’s going on. But you’ve inherited, you’ve been bequeathed is probably a better word, so much more, right? You dress in the same way. You sit at the same frequency.
You walk the same distances. You carry the same loads. You share more physically. So, I explain it like language. If you and your family have an accent, humans are just like many other mammals, we learn through modeling. And so, you get so many of those same pieces. And I have a friend whose father was in a motorcycle accident who lost a limb and had a particular gait. She had that gait by the time she was two.
So, there’s a whole biological thread that’s going along here. This is how mammals are in certain ways. And there’s so much to that tied up in our movement. You asked before, how do I desensitize it, there’s not judgment. And I really work hard to not have judgment and use words like good, bad, and things like that. Because I don’t think that helps in this particular cases. It’s not judgment, it’s just geometry.
So, I can explain, you’re not a lesser person because you stand and like, “Look at what I do. I do this all the time. I don’t feel badly for doing it. I recognize where it comes from. And I recognize the work to go a different way. And I recognize that there’s bumps along the way. And I realize the hierarchy of importance of it is constantly shifting.” And to hold the complexity of it. We’re not really great at holding nuance and complexity right now.
And that is the skill that will keep you, I think, out of how easy it is to feel overwhelmed or ashamed of certain things. Just hold the complexity, hold the complexity. It’s a lot of work, but I’m willing to do a lot of the work for you. I try to create a space for that company.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. I mean, you’ve worked around the world, have you noticed different cultural effects?
Katy Bowman:
Well, I think when I came to graduate school, it was the first day in a seminar of just general biomechanics. And the question to the group was like, “What do you want to talk about?” And I want to talk about cross cultural data. Because even our anatomy books are really written around a European-centric perspective about what the body is supposed to do. And that’s heavily informed by Western thought, Western movement experience, which is extremely low.
And so, here, you have the whole science being shaped by sedentarism, which is what I write about in Movement Matters. In Movement Matters, I’m trying to explain why we say that this is what the ankles do is because these are the ankles that we’re looking at. And these are what the ankles that we’re looking at have done. So, let’s expand a cross cultural data in that particular way certainly working with different bodies in different parts of the world.
And then, also just pulling from data that is examining many more bodies that I could ever see and pulling out those. I definitely utilize cross cultural data quite a bit. Because movement culture is so different. We have a very outlying movement culture, not necessarily worldwide. I mean, we do right now. I don’t have seats in my house. I don’t have furniture like chairs and couches. And it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, how could you ever be?” And the ability to perceive like, why would you do something?
How could you even be a human in that situation? And to realize like, this is the thing that I do is what the bulk of the world. You’re the outlier, your behavior is the outline behavior. So, trying to reframe that of going, it’s really hard to see outside of your own culture. And also, just your personal culture, your family culture, your community culture, and then your greater culture. I’m fascinated by it, especially the movement thread that’s working through all of it.
Steven Sashen:
There’s a thing that I’ve noticed lately that I find really interesting. And I am not sure what television shows were the influential factor in causing this new movement pattern. But I’m seeing more and more people including myself, either part time or full time holding their fork the way they do in Europe, or the way they do in Britain. So, point curved down instead of curved up like a scoop. And I’m seeing more and more of this lately.
And I’m curious, I haven’t really looked into it. But I’m just so fascinated that that’s something that started happening somewhat organically. People are experimenting with this other movement pattern. And what I like about it is that both of them suck. So, when you’re doing with the curved part down, you can’t really scoop things onto your fork well, unless you have stuff that sticks to the back of the fork.
And the other way around, if you have the tines pointed this way, it’s not as good for poking things. So, they’re both bad in certain contexts. So, that makes it even more fun for me because I like switching it up as necessary. But I watch people who they’re locked into one of those where it’s clearly not working. But the fact that it’s moving at all without anyone having discussed, “You should really hold your fork this way.”
And getting in an argument about proper fork handling technique. I just love that one. Do you find your teaching changes when you’re dealing with people from different cultures? How you have to do things or even what you’re doing?
Katy Bowman:
I mean, at this point I teach on the-
Steven Sashen:
Sorry for that.
Katy Bowman:
Is that your jet? Jets just taking off and landing in the back.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, that’s what it is. Yeah, it’s my jet. It’s actually the office next to us. They’re apparently drilling into the walls, which is very exciting.
Katy Bowman:
Pretty subtle to see someone poke through, like, “What are you doing today, Steven?”
Steven Sashen:
Too far.
Katy Bowman:
Always. Mostly what I teach now, I’m not really gathering groups of people together so much anymore. I’m writing books for the world. And there is a world audience. And so, everyone is coming to the single bit of work that I have put out. So, I’m always working hard as I’m writing and creating something to be making sure that the language that I’m using is as inclusive to any of that particular audiences that would hear it.
So, the idea of there being like a right or wrong way to hold a fork, that’s up for discussion. The idea of which direction of the foot would need to happen to get the maximum amount of rotation out of your ankle is less open for discussion. But where it starts going to discussion is, well, it starts go into discussion into the place of like, well, what’s the terrain that you’re on? Or what’s the speed that you’re going? Or what is on your feet?
Or what’s the purpose of what you’re doing? So, there is still nuance there. And you can’t write truth in that way because it’s so nuanced, it’s a quantum physics problem. And so, not everyone understands that. But at least if I do when I’m writing my own body of work to say that there’s a level of nuance here that we can’t possibly get into 300 pages. And here’s how you would adjust it to yourself if you can’t, or your situation, I just try to keep that in.
And I find that that meets most needs. But of course, the people coming to me, you’re probably not going to have outlying if a culture isn’t on social media, or looking for exercise and alignment, these concepts are already cultural in that particular way.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, that’s a good point. So, there are a couple things that I want to dive into. But I want to take a couple of detours. The first one, something that I alluded to at the beginning, as I mentioned, massive gadget key over here, and you have some very cool things in the background. Can you give me a tour of what cool stuff there is back there?
Katy Bowman:
Can you see those floating stairs?
Steven Sashen:
Those are stairs with chains holding the stair part up. And wait, oh, and they totally float. So, this is like it’s the stair version of a big floating, what’s the word I’m looking for, a bridge. You see this on any given competition show, there will be somebody walking across some big bridge that’s really unstable, or things are about to break. This is like the stick version of that is what it looks like.
Katy Bowman:
This is the insurance approved version of that. So, I saw this at a playground in Scotland when I was teaching a class there. And I thought this is what I need. Because if you’re trying to teach someone, it’s not teaching, if you’re trying to set up in an environment to allow someone to have the experience to see that they don’t have the ability to stand on a leg for more than 15 seconds, like a stand on one foot. So, the first thing is, that’s often what an exercise class is.
It’s like, I’m holding the space for you to have a physical experience because you don’t have any space in that for your life. And the good thing is just by simply going through the experience, you are moved and receive like nutrients for going through it. But that’s all you’re ever doing is really going, I’m going to pass in this physical experience, see what it was. And if I keep doing that physical experience by nature, my body is going to make going through that particular experience easier and easier and easier on me.
Until one time if it happens to be, if it’s going to require an adaptation that isn’t let’s say how can I say like suitable for the entire body, then that will be an injury. But you sit so much, not you, Steven, but we sit so much. As a culture, sitting is our most practiced athletic skill. Our body has completely adapted to make that, which we do the most volume of the day, easiest on our physiology. But there becomes a point in which the other parts of our physiology, the ones that are sitting but everything else is dying off.
Steven Sashen:
I heard a commercial on the radio when I was driving home the other day about an ergonomic chair with 15 different adjustments. And I was thinking this is so funny. It’s like you have to build all these different adjustments in because the fundamental way we’re sitting is so not natural. That if all we were doing was either standing or squatting, you don’t need a whole bunch of ergonomic adjustments.
And no one knows how to take 15 different things and turn that into whatever comfortable sitting would look like to begin with. But that’s neither here nor there. So, people on those stairs, the thing that’s so obvious is that if you’re moving from stair to stair and you’re not moving your center of mass properly, if you’re not getting your weight over your foot in a way that’s balanced before taking that next step, you can go flying and many other things. What do people learn on these floating stairs, which I totally want to play with?
Katy Bowman:
I know. Well, it’s even more nuanced. So, as a biomechanist, if you went to PT, physical therapy, you might have had rehab, those listening or watching, for the ankle or the knee or the hip. So, they put you on something that’s unstable, right? So, they put you on a BOSU or something that allows you to tip right, tip left. Because they want to see how your body can react to that experience. Because our brains and our nervous system works in conjunction with all of our tissues to make moving over the planet, not detrimental to us.
We’re at the point where moving has become detrimental, which is really far away from how it started, right? So, as a biomechanist, the problem that I was having is, there are parts that stabilize you right to left. But what’s missing is the transverse destabilization. Meaning, I can see how you might be not able to stabilize yourself sliding right to left or front to back, rotating clockwise or counterclockwise as you regular people like to say. So, this is a plane.
You can be totally balanced in a BOSU master or all these other instabilities. But it’s on this thing that you see that every time you step, that part of your stepping up includes a push off to the right. Or that when you hit the stairs, if you’re wondering why the balls of your feet or your socks are always wearing out faster, I would see when you step on this, that you don’t actually step down, you’re actually hi-yah, you’re kicking every single step.
If I gave you a list of like, “Here’s what I found on your computer program, you step too far forward on your left foot and your right foot twist out. And here’s your corrective exercises you’re going to do. So many rotations in the other direction that you’re weak,” we’ve got this really take the problem and just balance it out on the other side. It’s like a symptom of too much algebra as a kid, I don’t know.
Is I’m saying the reason that you’re having an experience, the reason you’re not able to stabilize a transverse plane is your whole world has had a fixed transverse plane. And that’s an unnatural environment for you to be moving in. You have no movement experience. So, I’m going to create this. And I can take someone with the greatest fall risk, I mean, they’re up there safely, but they’re not comfortable. So, first, you have to get over the fear, right?
Because fear itself is actually a risk factor for falling for a particular group. So, you have to get over the fear. And then, you go up a couple times. And it’s merely the exposure to the load that allows your body in its wisdom and it’s amazing computer system to fix it for you. You don’t need a bunch of corrective exercises to balance. You just need to engage in an unstable… yes, you need the experience of what moving in a transverse plane feels like.
I didn’t have to teach my kids how to walk and say like, “You’re going to lift your hips up eight degrees each side.” You’re not going to do that. We just give them the experience. And then, you’ll learn.
Steven Sashen:
Well, the example that you gave about if you’re wearing out the ball of the foot or your sock, it’s telling you that you’re applying excessive horizontal force, and that’s causing that friction which causes that wear, et cetera. But what I love about these floating stairs is exactly what you just said. It’s giving people a direct experience of that in real time rather than the after effect. And the reason that this is so interesting to me, not surprisingly it was zero shoes, will have some people say, “Hey, look…” this is my favorite story.
Someone emailed me and said, “There’s something wrong with the rubber in your shoes. I’ve worn out the heel.” I said, “Well, you’re overstriding and heel striking to do that, because that’s what causes that force that would allow that to occur.” And we can’t disobey the laws of physics, friction is friction. So, that’s the way it is. And he’s, “Yeah, but I don’t do that.” I go, “Well, that’s the only way you can apply force there that would allow that effect.”
“That wearing out the ball of your foot and your sock.” And I said, “Why don’t you send me a video so I can take a look. And maybe I’m wrong. I’m open to that.” So, he sends me a video and not only was he overstriding and heel striking but it was screamingly obvious. And it took me 20 minutes going through frame by frame until he finally went, “Oh yeah, I guess I am overstriding and heel striking.” And then, his next line was the most amazing thing I ever heard.
He said, “But I don’t do that.” I said, “But there’s a video of you that you made of you that you sent to me of you. It’s you.” Well, anyway, one of the problems is a lot of the feedback that people get is so removed from when they’re doing whatever that movement is that it’s very hard to make the correction in real time in a way that trains your brain and your body what to do.
But that’s what I love about these, it is clearly immediately giving you information that you have to adapt to, that is telling you something that you didn’t know before, which is super fun.
Katy Bowman:
Well, and it’s the difference between someone telling you and you experiencing it. Some-
Steven Sashen:
But even with your own experience, my point is that if your own experience can tell you, you have to be able. But if you’re dealing with it out of real time, that makes it challenging. For me, my second barefoot run, the initial experience was sheer pain because I had a gaping hole on the bottom of my left foot from a blister from my first barefoot run. And it was only in getting that immediate feedback of this hurts this dozen that my brain figured out how to move in a way that didn’t hurt.
And therefore, wasn’t causing that friction that caused that giant blister to begin with. But for many people, they’re either not getting that feedback in real time, or they’re not sensitive to that feedback in real time. Or they’re not necessarily skilled at generating new movement patterns to find other ways around that. Or they think no pain, no gain, and that the pain is actually a good sign when it’s 99.9% of the time not. So, again, that’s why I’m in love with these stairs, I want them. What else you have?
Katy Bowman:
I mean, there’s just a bunch of-
Steven Sashen:
Bands and things and a big space and BOSU balls. Oh man, I just want to have that big open space. That would make me happy. So, you said something before, there’s two things, we opened up this conversation by saying maybe you walk all wrong. So, why do we talk about people walking and their wrong walking.
Katy Bowman:
Now, I just said that we weren’t going to be polarizing or judgmental. But yeah. I know, I know. So yes, how is your walking experience working for you, I guess is the question. So, you had this idea that if something hurts that the experience of moving with something hurting is what allows you to adjust and move around it. I think to a certain extent, that is helpful, because it shows that you can constantly adjust your alignment, right?
So, the alignment is the orientation of parts and the forces that you are creating as you’re moving. In this case, let’s say we’re walking from point A to point B, I don’t think one that everyone knows that they have the ability to change the loads that they are experiencing while they’re walking. I think that that’s huge. So, let’s say that the first way of walking wrong is that you might not have as many options available to you. That your ability to adjust is very narrow. And that part of that adjustment is one, you just don’t think about it.
You’re just like, “Every time I walk, my low back hurts.” And so, you just stop walking rather than think, maybe I can hold my torso differently. But I do think that people naturally are moving around their pain and that that’s actually what gets them further down the pain or injury road. You’re leaning to one side when you see people moving but their movements are like their torso is going from side to side.
Or they’re leaning or their hips are flexing, what they’re doing is trying to move forward. They’re trying to walk, trying to emulate locomote despite what… or not despite, or they’re doing it the best they can. They’re doing it-
Steven Sashen:
Do you know what prolotherapy is?
Katy Bowman:
Prolotherapy, those are injections for restoring ligaments, yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, that’s good, most people don’t. I mean, the underlying thing, before you would get a painful injection into your ligament to try to lay down new muscle tissue and make things work better is this basic idea that when you’re injured, what your brain slash body is going to try and do is figure out how to get around that as quickly as possible until you’re able to do what you need to do, not optimally, just to do it.
And you will most likely have developed some non-optimal movement pattern in order to do that. Because there was no evolutionary advantage for getting back to perfect. There’s just an advantage to getting back to being able to run away from that thing that thinks you’re lunch. And so yeah, I mean, what you just said is one of the things that I find most interesting is that people, we move without thinking about how we’re doing because we just habituate to it.
And many people don’t have that whatever it is, I’m not sure if it’s curiosity, or just a paying attention to certain kinds of feedback and cues, to be able to try different things, especially after they�
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