I encountered a seal (sea lion?) carcass on a backpacking trip this weekend and wanted to share a photo of the wrist bones of its front flipper. (Zoom in to see the ligaments between each bone before they dry up and out!)

If your hand has ever been crushed by someone’s firm handshake, your phalanges and these carpal bones are what’s being squished. P.S. We have matching chiclet-shaped bones in our feet (the tarsals) also tightly bound with tiny ligaments between each bone. When you have a hard time taking your bare feet over a rocky path, it’s often stiff tarsal joints keeping your feet from relaxing over what’s underfoot. When you roll your feet out on a ball or roller, you’re giving these parts a dose of “vitamin texture.”

One of the coolest things about skeletal anatomy is that once you know which shape each bone is, you can apply the knowledge to most of the vertebrates in the animal kingdom. Horse, whale, bird, dinosaur, human—a pelvis is pelvis-shaped, ribs are easily identified, and yep, that’s a femur. Knowledge of the skeleton is easily transferred from animal to animal, which saves time when it comes to figuring things out about each individual animal. The lung-location isn’t such a mystery. “Where does the baby come out?” doesn’t need to be deduced every time.

Though not as tangible as the hardened minerals that comprise skeletal bone, there is a framework of nutrients or nutrient-esque essentials (all of the inputs that support us physically) that could be generalized as necessary to a wide variety of animals. Not that all animals require identical inputs (nor skeletons, for that matter). Bats have different dietary needs from whales, and some animals live in groups while others spend their adult lives in isolation. Still, the shape of a general nutrient framework—the well-researched facts demonstrating that there are essential habitats, diets, and social structures necessary to each animal—is sufficient to save us time when it comes to figuring out all that human animals require.

Nutrients are something our bodies need that our bodies either cannot manufacture at all or cannot manufacture in sufficient quantities. They cause our physiology to be altered when they are introduced to our bodies. When nutrients are missing or insufficient in a human body, the result is a disease or malfunction; thus, nutrients can only be identified once we understand that the symptoms we are have is coming from a missing input. This is a super-important point (Is it weird to write “super-important” in your own article? Probably, but I really want you to get what I’m saying.): Nutrients are identified through hindsight, and this means we must pay close attention and document changes in groups of humans living in particular ways.

So, we have a current list of human nutrient needs. On the most general level, we say that humans need food and water and shelter, but this is overly simplified. We don’t need just food but nutrient-dense food. Our need for shelter is really how we meet our needs for warmth (or a stable temperature) and protection, and thus adequate rest. We also need to move (and to be moved), and what about sleep? Humans need gravity (our space studies show), and a flourishing microbiome, and natural light. And if we use our framework of animal needs and our understanding of how humans have succeeded historically, we find that humans need close contact with other humans.

Until very recently, the social structure of human animals has been organized by the same efficiency principles that organize everything in nature. We lived in small groups (and perhaps groups within groups), where necessary work was shared, in a way very different to how work is shared in society today. Unlike the honeybees, in mainstream Western culture individuals struggle daily to execute all tasks necessary for a collective to survive. Each person is responsible for getting their own groceries, making their own meals, cleaning their own house, minding their own kids. We have one person we expect to handle all our daily debriefings (and also to help us through every crisis, know what we want for our birthday, motivate us to change, find us mysterious and interesting, while loving us for who we are). On the contrary, our natural social structure used to be—and still is, in a few very discrete places—more like that of the trees. In nature the structure of society is stacked so that individuals work together, in a cooperative fashion, to regularly use their personal strengths to provide something to the group as they are also provided for.

Our traditional use of community is hypothesized to be all about food and kids. Human animals have a long juvenile period. It takes a long time to learn how to eat from the wild. The adult humans in modern-day hunter-gatherer communities we can research aren’t ever providing just childcare; children are always—even in their play— being exposed to skills that will parlay into food acquisition. Moving with adults who are gathering and processing food is also education for children on gathering and processing food, and it’s healthcare for all. But it isn’t only parents providing education and healthcare to their children. In a tribe, juvenile care (and thus education, movement, and touch) is provided by parents and also alloparents—grandparents, childless peers, other children. This arrangement is efficient in that it increases the child’s chance for survival; gives purpose and contribution to elder tribal members and allows essential information to pass between generations; provides not-yet-parents the opportunity to be with children; and saves the primary parent from burnout. The parents of young children in a tribe, despite their status, are still required to go out and work for their food, much like we all have to in non-tribal societies. And did I mention the movement? At the heart of everything a tribe offers, is a day rich in movement for everyone.

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Elements of Community

A tribe is efficiently organized in that it utilizes local resources of people to directly meet the needs of all members of the group. A tribe is a stacked community. For most of us today, our relationship with “others” is sort of like all of our relationships with all other things from the natural world—we’ve separated it into parts. Isolated and found at separate locations are many of the elements a community offers: food, childcare, education, spiritual guidance, art, music, medicine, touch therapy, eldercare, exercise. We’ve kept all these things because they are necessary elements of human society, but they are unstacked from the way human groups initially organized. I propose that the inefficiency of modern societies might be hindering our ability to be fully nourished, either because of TIME (i.e., there’s no possible way to get everything we need when it’s all separated), or because there’s something more to the “whole” of an intact community, greater than the sum of its parts, that we don’t yet understand.

When we outsourced our physical movement to machines, robots, and people outside our local community, we decreased the role for immediate community. And as we stopped moving on behalf of ourselves and community, our sheer ability to move decreased, as did what we could physically contribute to a community. So now we’re at the place where it’s necessary for a sedentary society to get all the essential elements of community in separate parts. To continue to operate our current society this way is to perpetuate a society that requires we stay sedentary.

In addition to feeling under-moved, there are other feelings so many of us can relate to right now: feeling too busy, feeling too tired, feeling stretched in too many directions. Feeling as though there’s something missing from our lives; spending money on things we don’t need to try to fill the space left by the something that’s missing. We’re a large group of people all experiencing these troubling feelings. Depression, addiction, anxiety, loneliness, pain, and chronic illness are common in our culture, which is why I’m going to repeat my super-duper important point: Nutrients are identified through hindsight, and this means we must pay close attention and document changes in groups of humans living in particular ways.

Discovering a Nutrient

The discovery of vitamin C was made possible by those who figured out that citrus fruits worked for treating scurvy symptoms before they knew why:

The pioneering controlled clinical trial of the various therapies recommended for the disease of scurvy… was carried out in 1746 by James Lind on sailors at sea…. He took 12 sailors, all with a similar severity of the disease, divided them into pairs and, for 2 [weeks], gave each pair one of the many treatments that had been recommended for the condition.… The pair receiving lemons and oranges were almost recovered after only 6 d[ays], whereas those receiving either dilute sulfuric acid or vinegar had shown no improvement after 2 [weeks]. The importance of Lind’s trial has often been described as showing that citrus fruit was a cure, or preventive, for scurvy. This had, in fact, been known already for some 200 y[ears] but could not always be made use of.

To recognize deeper human-to-human interaction as a nutrient, we must be able to identify the symptoms of a lack of it. Doesn’t the list of troubling feelings above read like a list of symptoms? The next step in discovering a nutrient is to see if community, or elements found in a community, has proven to be successful as a therapy.

Elements of community—belonging to something and to have something to contribute to; our need for touch, communication, support—are successful in treatments of addiction and depression, and as we find touch therapy and movement to be effective in reducing the symptoms of chronic pain and other ailments. We must then ask ourselves: Do we frame community as medicine or community as a nutrient? Which makes it easier to get your needs met?

At first, we might need a therapeutic approach. If you have no “others,” you can schedule in the elements of community, like using protein powder or vitamin and mineral supplements when a food diet falls short. Eventually though, it’s possible to restructure areas our lives (in the same way we learn to eat in a more nutritious way) where community is built into our daily fabric—so that the symptoms of “low community” stop manifesting in the first place. Maybe before you find your others, you have to get with yourself first. I can hear some of you saying “Katy, I’d really love a dose of community but I just can’t, with people.” For that, I’ll point you to Dan Harris’ recent article with tips from Nedra Glover Tewwab: “For When Other People are Being a Pain in the Ass.”

Many have learned the value of and skill set to eating a nutritious diet, and likewise, it’s possible transition to make new choices, and organizing our time and community members in a way that nourishes everyone more fully.

Seventeen of us, including two toddlers, did an overnight backpacking trip this weekend. Group camping is a simple way to create a low-key village experience: shared work of setting up camp, making meals, caring for kids, and making space for play. The hike in was 4.5 miles, which sounded short until we added 20–35 pound packs and crossed a couple of miles of sand. The round trip was closer to eight hours of strength work. I’ve trained with a weighted vest and done plenty of rucking. But getting the “whole-food” version of exercise—where the movement isn’t separated from all the other parts of living—is what nourishes my soul most.

Read more essays in Movement Matters: Essays on Movement Science, Movement Ecology, and the Nature of Movement

The 10th anniversary edition of Diastasis Recti (clever title, right?) just came out with a new cover. Please ogle it below.

Of course, anatomy is part of the DR story, but the main character here is FORCE. And before you say “forces are boring,” let me remind you that Star Wars is a story starring The Force and it was awesome. (That last line I’m quoting from the book, which I’ll admit is pretty jokey for a non-fiction book about a musculoskeletal issue. I bring the funny in my books because laughing is the best core exercise.)

The book is broken up in to THINK and MOVE sections, and the biggest takeaway from THINK is that tissues don’t behave in isolation—they respond to forces. The tissue that seams up the muscles at the front of your abdomen, called the linea alba, isn’t failing or “broken.” It’s doing exactly what it’s programmed to do: adapt to its environment. It’s a compliant, shape-changing part of the abdominal wall. When it’s behaving in a particular way the question is, what forces are acting on it, and how can you change them?

Once you start thinking about diastasis recti (or other pressure-affected issues like hernias, certain pelvic floor issues and general weakness) through the lens of force management, the way our anatomy is acting doesn’t seem so mysterious.

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Below is a short bit of a longer interview with therapist Cait Van Damm. I use a zipper to demonstrate why considering forces makes all the difference when it comes to effective exercises for DR. For those of you who’ve been reading me for over a decade, you know I simply adore a mechanical model that costs $0.99 and can be found in your grandmother’s crafting closet.

In the full video, we cover:

• Why the rectus abdominis needs our attention just as much (if not MORE) than does the transverse abdominis (TrA).

• What’s pulling/pushing on the linea alba: abdominal obliques, rib cage and pelvic movements, intra-abdominal “stuffs”—i.e. pregnancy or intra-abdominal fat.

• Yes, do the big “sexy” core exercises, but it’s the low-intensity, high-volume movement habits that unload the linea alba and help build sustainable support.

Through July 25th, get a free book with my 2.5 hour Diastasis Recti Masterclass with fascia expert Jill Miller (paperback + shipping if in the U.S.; or e-book to any address).

This is a recording of a live workshop where Jill and I teach exercises and self-massage techniques for the upper, lower, and middle body. Also, you’ll learn how to “bolster as you build strength”, and proprioception exercises—to help you manage your body parts throughout the day.

At the end of last week’s “learn to row” program, I heard the coach said this to the newbies:

“Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.”

Setting the ridiculous idea of perfection aside, you could rephrase this (if you’re not into the whole brevity thing) to something like: “Repetition reinforces whatever pattern you use when you practice—good, bad, efficient, or compensatory—so be mindful of your form.” Or (third time’s a charm): “When you’re learning a new way of moving, especially when the technicality of the movement matters, how you practice is equally important to logging practice time.”

While I have spent a lot of time on the water this year, hell-bent on learning to row as well as I can, I’ve spent way more time (30 years!) helping folks move better on land, and walking is one of the movements I focus on most.

Walking sits (ha! get it?) at the base of my “movement nutrition pyramid” because it is that important to the body and should ideally make up a significant portion of how you move most days.

Walking, like rowing, is technical; there’s a ton of moving parts and they’re all doing something unique to contribute to a net effect of forward movement. Also like rowing, an efficient gait pattern allows our body-boat to move more smoothly.

Almost all of us have been walking for decades. We’ve got the practice part down, so it’s time to get nit-picky. And while I wouldn’t call these “mistakes” (even though this Time article I was interviewed for did), some common gait patterns correlate with spot-specific skeletal stress, compensation, and inefficient movement over time.

One of the reasons you want to “practice perfectly” when you’re learning any movement is to avoid strengthening inefficient movement patterns.

Our “learn to walk” sessions are informal moments, mostly modeling the people around us when we were young; so, sorry, Charlie—our gait is (sort of) stuck in our bodies and minds. But you’re in luck, Chuck: our bodies are more malleable than you realize, and we respond well to exercise—especially when we’re mindful and pay continuous attention to form.

I’ll list some things you can start paying attention to, but here’s one more bit of wisdom gleaned from my time spent rowing: You can’t focus on adjusting thirty things all at once. Instead try a “Mental Ten.”

In rowing, a Mental Ten is a set of ten strokes dedicated to just one thing you want to work on. There aren’t strokes in walking, so pick your way to measure a mindful session: a number of minutes, number of steps, or pay attention to one thing for the entire walk.

Here’s a list of questions you can ask yourself that will give you insight into your walking form.

Upper Body Awareness

• Am I stacked upright or is my torso arriving before my lower body? Picture the classic forward lean, when you’re leading with the head or chest. This position messes with loads into the low back, hips, knees, and neck. Stand with your head, shoulders, and hips against a wall to feel what stacked feels like, and then take the feeling with you on your walk. Your Mental Ten mantra: Keep my head and shoulders back over my hips and feet.

• Are my arms swinging front to back or side to side? Is only one arm moving? Reciprocal arm swing isn’t a decoration, it’s a working part of the gait cycle. The back-to-front motion of the arm balances out the front-to-back motion of the leg, which contributes to balance, stability and forward motion. Tight shoulders (or occupied hands) can change the direction of the swing, if not eliminate it all together. Your Mental Ten mantra: Shoulders relaxed, arms swinging front to back.

• Am I using the handrail for balance, or to pull myself up the stairs? Moving your body away from the earth is hard. Not only do we tend to lean forward to make it easier on the legs (see bullet 1!), we start using the handrail to pull ourselves uphill. To build leg strength, we have to work our legs. Your Mental Ten mantra: Use this handrail to help stay upright and balanced, not for pulling.

Lower Body Awareness

• Am I picking up or shuffling my feet? There are different reasons you might not be picking up your feet: tight ankles, weak hips, a fear of falling, to name a few. Here’s a Calf Stretch and my “Pelvic List” hip-strengthening exercise that improves balance and the hip strength necessary to create enough space for the foot leave the ground. Once you’ve addressed some of these tensions, use this Mental Ten mantra: I feel my foot rolling heel to toes.

• Am I falling forward or putting my walk behind me (glute push-off)? Each step should finish behind the body. Think about paddling a boat and how you move the boat forward by pushing the water behind you. Walking is like paddling, but in order to accomplish this efficient movement, your hips have to be mobile. Hips that don’t extend prevent you from pushing off with the glutes, and your stride becomes quad-dominant and abbreviated. So, work on hip extension first, then use this Mental Ten mantra: Row, row, row your butt, gently down the street…

Situational Awareness

• Am I walking the same route, the same way, or can I mix things up? The body adapts to sameness. Different terrain, inclines, surfaces, and environments each use your body differently. For this one, your mantra comes before you start walking—I can make a different path—and let this guide you, if not by straight-up picking a different route or walking the other way through the park or neighborhood, then at minimum by balancing on curbs or walking on the sidewalk lines for a new way of moving along the same route.

• Do I carry in the same way (or never carrying anything)? Humans are built to carry. Light, asymmetrical loads challenge balance, coordination, core engagement, and foot mechanics in useful ways. Choose the hand basket at the grocery store over the cart. Mix up the bags you use to challenge different movement patterns, and mix up how you use them; i.e., hang your pack on the opposite shoulder. Play a walk-and-carry game with your baby/toddler. Your Mental Ten mantra: Vary my carry.
  

Work On Your Walk With Me

I know a lot of folks hate the feeling of being corrected, but I love being coached. I understand how hard it is to assesses oneself objectively. Coaches provide tailored, honest feedback (they’re not here to help you with your self-esteem; as an adult, that’s your job), and they see your potential. They can inspire greatness in you by challenging your beliefs about your limits and ability to grow.

Sometimes you have to be your own coach. Hopefully I can help you via this written page. Again, these are a lot to think about all at once, and you’re not going to change your gait pattern in a single walk. Don’t get bogged down or frustrated as you work on making change, and watch the self-talk. No judgements, it’s just geometry!

Yours with love,

the Oaracle

Keep Moving
I have an entire video course on walking mechanics and corrective exercise, Walking Well: A Stepwise Approach to an Everyday Movement.

Just about every medical and health professional recommends walking for basic healthcare. But what happens when walking hurts? Or starts to feel unbalanced or unsafe walking on natural terrain? Can’t seem to make progress when it comes to walking longer or farther? We break movement down into six modules to work on the alignments that optimize your lever systems for better force production and balance:

1. WAKING UP YOUR FEET

2. STRONG & SUPPLE ANKLES

3. THE SUPPORTIVE LEG STANCE

4. THE SWING LEG

5. STRONG ON THE STAIRS

6. STABLE CORE & SHOULDERS

Check Out Walking Well

When I say that our society is becoming more sedentary, I don’t mean we’re exercising less. I mean that we’re using more and more technologies that reduce the number of purposeful human movements.

“Purposeful movement meets needs beyond increasing individual physical fitness or health.” – My Perfect Movement Plan, Chapter 5: Purposeful, Meaningful, and Functional Movement

I have written a lot about the abundant and varied “hunter-gatherer movements” human bodies were shaped by, and the dearth of movement found in modern living, but I don’t have to look farther back than my own lifespan to witness further decline. Who else remembers the movements that used to go into driving a car?

Twisting to look over our shoulders. The thigh work of a manual transmission. The shoulder work of opening and shutting a hatchback or yanking open a sliding van door. The wrist action of turning a key in the door, turning a key in the ignition. The core and leg work to slide the chair forward or back. Turning the knobs. Rolling the window down, which we still say today, even though we’re usually just toggling a switch. The heave-ho of manually opening up the top of a convertible?

My dad and his driving goggles

One of my earliest memories is of my great-grandmother and me, sitting in the front of her sparkly blue Plymouth as she’s backing up out of the carport. I’m only three or four years old at the time (if the car didn’t give it away, this was 1978 or so), wondering why Nana is suddenly twisting vigorously to the right, then to the left.

I can still remember assessing Nana’s body movement; one of her hips lifted up off the seat as she turned (Turns out I’ve always been me.) I must have asked her why she was moving like that, because I remember her telling me she was turning to see behind the car so she didn’t run into anything.

Younger folks won’t know what I’m talking about, but if you grew up in a less sedentary time, then you might recognize the movements lost in newer cars with screens, sensors, and back-up cameras. Previous “car moves” have been reduced to mostly button-pressing moves. I can’t believe it, but here I am, being that old timer telling the kids, “Back in my day, we used our head, neck, and spine to back up the car. Uphill. Both ways. In the snow.” While the back-up-the-car spinal twist isn’t entirely extinct, it’s on the endangered list. Rotating your spine to look behind you while driving is now vintage.

While our technologies don’t require us to move, our wild-formed bodies still do. Regularly rotating your spine is what the spine needs to be able to rotate. All that car technologies did was eliminate the spinal twist from driving; they didn’t remove the need to spinal twist from your spine. So, like any missing nutrient, we must supplement.

In this case, we can supplement with exercise vitamin “spinal twist” (which of course didn’t start with the car, but it was our last everyday necessary performance of it) with a literally domesticated version of the Spinal Twist. Do them on the floor of your living room while watching your shows. Take a yoga class. It’s also worth pointing out that, even if back-up cameras steal our reflexive impulse to take in our surroundings via moving a variety of body parts, they don’t physically block us from twisting when backing up. Check what’s behind you by staring ahead at the screen as you like, and then check it with your own eyeballs and spine.

A glance through my movement-colored glasses shows me that I could have written this article back in the 1970s, focusing on how my great-grandmother’s car, and yours too, blocks the “walking movements”—of your legs, arms, and core. Of your heart and lungs, joints, and bones. Purposeful walking, walking for transportation, has been on the endangered list for a while. Another look ahead through these lenses reveals that I can probably rewrite this article in the not-so-distant future, about how self-driving cars further restrict meaningful physical engagement—hands, eyes, feet, brain—with the movement of our human body from place to place. Disembodied transportation.

Dad, age 20, in 1947

Junk food can get us fed, but still leave us undernourished. Disembodied transportation is the same. All the movement nutrients are gone, despite getting where you wanted to go. I think about this all the time: What does disembodied transportation mean to a species whose upright locomotion carved its distinction from all other living things? When walking upright to get places is literally part of what defines the human species, what, exactly, is the outcome we are expecting here?

Personally, I don’t have a huge bone to pick with cars, this is just one example from one domain of our lives. The loss of our dynamic habitat is happening in every domain: Sleep, Leisure, Occupation, Transportation, and Home. The list of endangered everyday purposeful movements is growing, one button/toggle/switch at a time.

At the root of a sedentary culture is the promise that time-saving, movement-saving, attention-saving technologies will free us up. I beg to differ. In order get the amount of movement our body needs to stay well, movement (and attention!) muscles need to be regularly flexed in the context of daily living, in addition to supplemental exercise. I’m all for helpful technologies, but check in with your own body. How is it feeling? Which movements have you outsourced to buttons, robots, or other people that, if you reclaimed them, would increase the nutrient-density of your daily experience?

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If you like this article, you’ll enjoy Movement Matters (sedentary culture), Move Your DNA (ancestral movement patterns) and My Perfect Movement Plan (movement as nutrition).

As a way of balancing the frenetic energy of the last few years, I have strived to orient myself toward physically active, analog activities and solutions that, at the same time, provide a dose of community. Bonus points if they’re also outside. And so I decided to teach my first outdoor cooking class at a local nature school.

For most of the human timeline, food—and the movements it takes to secure and prepare it—have been the axis of human culture. It was hunted, foraged, cultivated, processed, and cooked outside…together. I wanted my class to not be only about meals, but about collecting, practicing, and preserving these behaviors—gathering, moving, cooking, sharing—to help them make it to the next generation. A different kind of “seed saving.”

I’m often asked about the “stack your life” concept: how to meet multiple needs with one activity and thus increase the nutrient-density of your time. A group cooking with fire (almost all areas have intentional, public set-ups for this) is one example of stacking the needs we humans have for outdoor time, movement, community, food, and learning into a single activity. And I was hoping to pass it on to others via this class.

One participant told me she signed up because without booking things to do ahead of time, she defaults to spending the day inside on a computer, doing things that didn’t really need to be done and thus not really meeting any of her needs at all. Then there was the couple that left excited to take their grandson—who hasn’t had much exposure to nature—out to cook together this summer.

If you’re feeling stuck inside, stuck in a single position, stuck in a family routine that isn’t nourishing you the ways you’d like, change something. Maybe that’s how these food and nature-movements survive: not as grand traditions, but as small, person-to-person invitations to step outside and do something physical—and essential—together.

(Find a video of what we made below!)

And here’s some fire-free ideas as we move into drier weather, that are also easy to do with kids!

Pack for a “nature tea:” a thermos of hot water, mugs, honey, a spoon, and cookies. Head outside to your yard, neighborhood, local trail, or park to gather. Pour hot water over edible plant-parts, steep, strain, and drink.

Gathering movements required: walking, squatting, bending, reaching, and picking. Common and safe plant-parts include mint, lemon balm, spruce tips, wild chamomile (pineapple weed), and rose petals. Mix and match to create a signature blend.

Plan a “forager(ish) picnic” and pack things that will pair nicely with food you will go outside to gather, such as: berries: nut butter on celery (add a line of berries), a container of plain yogurt (mash in fruit and make your own flavor), a small salad to add to, and a sandwich that would taste good with “trailside jam” (more mashed-up berries).

For whipped cream, just add muscle. Fill a jar partway with heavy cream and take turns shaking it vigorously. (I did this in my cooking class, to go with our glazed and grilled pineapple. I’m always surprised how many folks have never made whipped cream by hand!) Add shortcake biscuits for some quick and dirty dessert. You can also go savory: pack tortillas, avocado and hot sauce to pair with wild greens. Make dandelion-and-miner’s-lettuce tacos.

This is just a friendly (yummy) reminder that the convenient, more indoors, less active version of life isn’t always the one worth choosing. Activities that ask something of our bodies are almost always giving us something back in return.

More on “stack your life,” and “Vitamin Community” in these books:

• Movement Matters: Essays on Movement Science, Movement Ecology, and the Nature of Movement

• Grow Wild: The Whole-Child, Whole-Family, Nature-Rich Guide for Moving More

Last year I learned how to scull (two-oar rowing). Picture five people in the boat—one coxswain to steer, two newbies and two experienced rowers that model what to do—and a coach on a motorized boat within yelling-at-you distance. Every day for a week I spent two glorious early-morning hours on the bay…struggling. I was prepared for rowing to be challenging effort-wise. What I found difficult was learning and coordinating all the new movements.

In rowing, the following parts are each doing their own thing: legs, torso, right arm, left arm, hands, and head. When I focused on one, I forgot the others. And on top of all that, when I inevitably messed something up, I screwed up the boat for the other three rowers. The feeling that ensues is what the kids call cringe.

I’d love to hate the learning process, but I don’t. I relish pushing on the walls of my comfort zone. It’s fun to witness the self-talk in my head: the negative (“gawd, you are so un-athletic”) and the seemingly positive (“I’m pretty sure I’m a savant at this part, and the coach can’t believe I’ve never done this before”).

Self-talk of both types is distracting, and messes up what my body is trying to do. So, I practice ignoring all judgmental thoughts and instead focus on improving my form, no judgments.

I encourage all of you to keep this in mind as you practice better form when moving, whether it’s standing, sitting, walking, or working on corrective exercises: don’t confuse assessment with judgment. To be an efficient rower, I need to be able to see clearly when my shoulders are scrunching up and rounding forward (yes; put them down), if I’m pulling with my upper body instead of pushing with my legs (yes; stop that), etc. What I don’t have to do is pair my assessment of position with a judgement, e.g. “My shoulders are up, geez I can’t remember anything, I can’t do anything right”…blah blah blah.

Refraining from judgement doesn’t mean ignoring feelings of discomfort. Sometimes new positions feel weird, or we fatigue faster when we’re working on underutilized muscles. It doesn’t all have to feel great. Still, there’s no benefit to being a jerk to yourself.

My rowing coach gave this advice that I’ll pass on to you: when you notice a great stroke (or shot, rep, etc.), FEAST on it. When you mess up (there were at least one hundred rows where my right oar was, ahem, out of the water), FORGET it. Which isn’t to say IGNORE it. Don’t skip the step of assessing and correcting. Simply take note, adjust, and move on.

One year later I’m back in the beginner’s boat, this time modeling how to row. The people learning are working hard to coordinate thirty different things. I can see the steam coming out of their ears. Coach gave a similar talk this morning on “feast and forget” and added something I found helpful about figuratively (and literally) moving forward: there’s always another stroke coming up.

If you have a “my ship has sailed” attitude when it comes to learning new things— especially physical things that are challenging—here’s a reframe: “your ship” is actually on a continuous loop of leaving every few minutes. If you missed that last one, there’s another ship you can catch. There’s always another stroke coming up, so get ready.

Lines from the poem The Awful Rowing Towards God by Anne Sexton kept popping into my head when I was learning to row, and this morning I heard them again in my mind, along with the continuous, hypnotic thumping of the oars turning in the oarlocks: "This story ends with me still rowing."

If your mind is getting in the way of moving your muscles, check out I Know I Should Exercise, But…: 44 Reasons We Don’t Move and How to Get Over Them.

So, I’m going to write about frailty in this article. I don’t want to be one more alarmist, shrill, doomsday voice in your day, but this is an important topic and there are ways of addressing frailty that can shut off some of these taxing alarm bells. Please read on relaxedly. And first, meet my Gram.

My Gram, age 93

I just flew to spend the weekend with my grandma, for her ninety-third birthday. We celebrated with a barbecue in her yard, watched Cabaret on DVD, and spent the next day thrifting.

Other than water aerobics in her (not the) sixties and seventies, she has never exercised in the way many of us do now. She’s never lifted weights, and (don’t tell her I told you this) gossiping isn’t cardio. Still, her jobs as a pharmacy clerk and then as a middle school lunch lady, kept her on her feet for most decades. She doesn’t have a smartphone or a computer, and her hobbies—cooking, sewing, and decorating—regularly get her up and out of the chair. She’s been physically active in terms of her activities of daily living.

Her feet have been a bother to her all her adult life (I wrote this book to her), which has affected how her knees and hips work and feel too. A handful of her joints have been operated on.

At 93 years, Gram’s lifespan, her total number of years lived, is great. Her healthspan, the portion of those years spent in good physical and mental health, is also pretty good. Joint issues aside, she still lives on her own, drives herself to meet friends for cards and lunches, runs her errands, cleans her house, can’t pass up a garage sale, and works in her now small but beautiful flower garden. She and I have a two-person book club (some of our reads are listed below). She’s living her life the way she wants to, which is very important to aging well.

Her joyspan—the number of years you enjoy living (coined by gerontologist Dr. Kerry Burnight in her book by the same name)—is also good. She’s social and busy. While her healthspan has been challenged with joint issues, her joyspan has helped keep her alive and content.

Sounds pretty great, right? So what does it mean that my Gram also qualifies as frail?

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Frailty and pre-frailty

First, let’s define frailty. It’s essentially the opposite of resiliency, or how well your body responds to stress. Let’s say your body is stressed by an infection or an injury. A resilient body deals with the stressor and returns to baseline quickly. A frail one will experience a disproportionate decline, and recover slowly or incompletely.

Frailty is often framed as an inevitable and dangerous companion of aging. When I worked in the gerontology lab as an undergrad, determining frailty was important because it predicted risk for things like falls and disability—lifespan stuff. As more researchers become interested in aging (or, let’s be real: anti-aging), there are now studies show that for many, frailty starts in middle age. About 40 percent of adults may be pre-frail in their 40s.

Address any frailty

Research shows that working on strength, balance, and boosting daily physical activity can meaningfully reduce some of these hallmarks of frailty. Exercise and physical activity are factors we have some control over, and the role our personal habits play in our individual aging process are worth paying attention to. Not because you’re scared of what will happen if you don’t, but because becoming more physically resilient means you can continue to do the things that bring you joy, even when facing stressors. Because there will always be stressors, and you can always use joy!

I think this often, especially when it comes to prioritizing my own movement plan. While we all have different “Movement Whys” (reasons staying active is relevant to our personal values), there are certain strengths and mobilities that are foundational for the day-to-day living experiences we have in common: grip strength; upright balance (including balance while walking and carrying) which affect walking speed; reaching your feet with your hands; getting to and from the floor; and up and down stairs (all the stuff I put into my book Dynamic Aging). If I were to give Gram anything to balance out her movement diet, it would be a big handful of mobility exercises, especially for her feet and hips. (I did show her some when she was eighty, and she has a photo of me teaching an exercise in Prevention magazine hanging on the inside of her medicine cabinet, but I don’t think she ever did any…)

If you’re frail now, do I think you should work on it? Absolutely. Especially if you’re frail in middle age. Is there a single pathway to get there? No. Plenty of people don’t follow some Instagram fitness path and yet still age remarkably well. This is why there’s no use in panicking, just planning.

Gram didn’t exercise in a structured way. Yes, she’s frail, and more frail now than she was ten years ago, but her quality of life tells a more nuanced story. It’s smart to understand frailty and take practical steps where you can—but it’s just as important not to turn that awareness into worry.

Worry can exhaust you. Instead, let the worried feeling highlight that “OH YEAH, BEING RESILIENT IS IMPORTANT TO ME!” and choose something to work on a little bit each day.

Books My Grandma and I Have Read:

I usually see my grandma twice a year, but we stay regularly connected through books. We read and we talk about them, repeat, repeat, repeat. I pick books with themes I hope she’ll explore via stories in time periods she’s familiar with. P.S. I do our book debriefs on foot, so I don’t feel hurried to get off the phone. We can both ramble along and she gets attention that means a lot to her.

My grandma will pretty much read whatever I suggest, and also whatever she can find at the library in general. She doesn’t like books that jump back in forth in time or place (All The Light We Cannot See got a thumbs down for being too confusing). Also out are books that are too heavy to hold. Yes, you will see my at the library judging a book by how I think it will make her wrists feel.

She once told me her approach to finding a good book is the same as for finding a good mate: “You have to kiss a lot of frogs.”

The Wives of Los Alamos
Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness
The Four Winds
How to Cook a Coyote
Lessons in Chemistry

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Keep Reading
Dynamic Aging — for simple exercises and lifestyle adjustments to reduce frailty markers
I Know I Should Exercise, But… — when you need motivation and a new perspective on exercise
My Perfect Movement Plan — a workbook to help you uncover your Movement Whys

Work on Your Walk with Me
Walking Well: A Stepwise Approach to an Everyday Movement

Listen—Move Your DNA Podcast Episodes
Ep. 203 Determining if Your Frail (or Pre-Frail) and What to Do About It

Ep. 204 Beyond Lifespan and Healthspan: The Case for Joyspan

We only get one chance to set our adult skeleton. Peak bone mass—that is our “bone bank account”—is achieved in our youth. There aren’t any do-overs. This is why physical activity is so important, especially for kids.

About 50% of the global population will experience amenorrhea (the loss of a menstrual period) as they transition into middle age, but sometimes it happens earlier, for other reasons. Most commonly, Functional Hypothalamic Amenorrhea occurs when one’s level of physical training is not supported by the right food intake.* The body, in its state of low energy, suppresses menstruation—an ancient survival technique we have stored in our genes.

A while back, I skimmed a Substack article that went whizzing by, about how a stress fracture the writer was experiencing as an adult, related to time in their youth as an under-fueled athlete with amenorrhea. The article stuck with me because the tone of the piece was kind of pissed. Not at the injury as much as pissed at the coaches or doctors that didn’t inform them back in the day, that their lack of menstruation could create future health issues.

I was surprised at the irritation, mostly because I assumed this was common knowledge. Studying kinesiology, doing my graduate work on pelvic floor disorders and having worked in the undergraduate and graduate human performance labs while at university, we were all trained in and regularly discussed what was then called the Female Athlete Triad:

And, it’s not only that under-fueled athletes can have poorer bone than appropriately-fueled athletes; despite the high level of physical activity, their bones can be weaker than those of well-fueled non-athletes.

So, as always in support of more folks understanding how their body works, I dedicated an entire Move Your DNA podcast episode to this phenomenon, updated to Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) in the early 2000s—a more holistic model encompassing many aspects of health and wellbeing.

RED-S is more complete because it turns out that future bone issues like osteoporosis or fractures aren’t the only things affected by not fueling well-enough for sport. Those with RED-S can have also have cardiovascular, digestive, immunity, and psychological issues, as well as other injuries and decrease in overall performance right now.

Take note, athletes, coaches, parents and alloparents; the right now is important when dealing with young adults. The state of future bones—the state of future anything—is not always part of a teen or twenty-something’s decision tree. This reframe of RED-S, as something with immediate consequences that an athlete might find meaningful, is key.

Also, the solution is fairly simple (with a terrible acronym): FUEL—Food and
nUtrition for Endurance athletes-Learning program. In short, learning more about how to fuel athleticism, including which foods to eat more of, how to better distribute food around training and then following that protocol, can help to reverse this issue.

I know that I take a particularly nuanced look at movement, physical activity, and exercise. For some, that’s probably annoying. Why over-complicate something so simple? Just do it already! But for others, who may be already be “doing it”, but experiencing confusing symptoms, this nuance is what helps them solve the mystery of what’s going on in their body. For me, nuanced takes are my way and I’m comfortable with myself :)

Thanks for reading.

*Chronic stress is also a thing to consider here. Listen to the full episode for more information.

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My podcast co-host, biologist Dr. Jeannette Loram, and I explore the science of the absence of menstruation, with a focus on Functional Hypothalamic Amenorrhea linked to energy deficiency in athletes, in the the latest episode of Move Your DNA. The conversation expands into evolutionary perspectives, comparing Western menstrual experiences—from menarche to menopause—with those of hunter-gatherer populations like the Hadza, and questioning what “normal” really means. Ultimately, this episode reframes intense athletics as a nuanced practice that must be supported by adequate nutrition and recovery. Have a listen to the full episode below or wherever you get your podcasts.

In that spirit, I met Mary Van Geffen—author of Parenting a Spicy One—to talk about the body’s basic needs that, when unmet, can fuel tantrums. Before jumping in with your big voice to lay down the law, consider that your child might not be in full control—or even able to take in your stern feedback—when their brain is dealing with unmet physiological needs that are draining their energy.

The acronym H.A.L.T. (Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired), has been used by parents since the ’80s as a simple stop-and-check tool for more peaceful parenting. But I thought it needed an update as there’s a key need missing from that checklist: physical activity. Children’s behavior has shifted dramatically since the 1980s, and widespread sedentary lifestyles weren’t the norm back then the way they are now. It’s no wonder “too much stillness” didn’t make the list—but it’s time to update it. Add an S for Stillness (Sedentarism or Sitting, mostly) and you get H.A.L.T.S.

Before reacting, STOP (halt, get it?) and use the acronym to assess the situation. P.S. Stop and assess yourself, too. Are you having super-strong reactions because you need a walk? Are you the tiger that just needs a sandwich?

Listen above for more.

Curious about how to layer movement into your child’s life? Join me for a free Book Club Workshop for Therapists & Parents of Neurodiverse Kids - April 16th

Using Grow Wild: A Whole-Child, Whole-Family, Nature-Rich Guide to Moving More for context, we’ll be discussing barriers and solutions when it comes to physical activity. Hosted by Outdoor Kids OT, this evening offers a chance to feel less alone, more supported, and better equipped to help neurodiverse kids stay active in ways that work for them and for you!

Discounted Book/Register

Books mentioned in our conversation:

• Grow Wild: The Whole-Child, Whole-Family, Nature-Rich Guide to Moving More

• Parenting a Spicy One: A Compassionate Guide to Raising a Deep-Feeling and Wonderfully Strong-Willed Kid
  

KEEP LISTENING: I’ve talked to Mary Van Geffen twice about movement for spicy kids and their parents on my podcast, Move Your DNA: once about movement as regulation for spicy kids and once about “dynamic regulation” for their parents.

• Ep. 157 Movement as Regulation for Spicy Kids

  
  Independent, non-conformist, neurodivergent and sensitive kids can be particularly thrown off kilter by social and movement restrictions. We discuss the need for these kids to express their feelings in a physical way, focusing particularly on outdoor play, big-body movement, combative play and controlled destruction, all of which can defuse the intensity of feeling and foster a sense of autonomy.

• Ep. 192 Parenting a Spicy Child? How to Use Movement to Find Calm and Connection

  
  We unpack what it’s like to parent strong-willed, big-feeling kids (and stay sane while doing it) and how movement can support self-regulation and co-regulation, helping both parent and child navigate intensity with compassion and humor. We also look at the role of movement before, during, and after heated moments—as well as the art of knowing when to walk away. This episode offers practical wisdom for growing your “calm muscle” and showing up as the safest person in the room.

A few bits of wisdom for you all, no foolin’.

Bit 1: If you come to my house, you will see lots of exercise-y stuff built in to the decor. Rings hanging between the kitchen and living room. Low tables and cushions of various shapes for flexible seating. A basket of straps and blocks within arm’s reach. I like my habitat to be one that signals, rather than discourages, movement. I don’t want the extra friction of having to track down a mat or a pair of dumbbells when I (or anyone in my family) is inspired to movement-snack. I call this a dynamic living space.

Bit 2, that I swiped from an email I got from my friend who makes dynamic furniture, on why aesthetic matters:

Why does most wellness equipment end up buried in a closet within a few months of someone buying it I honestly think the answer isn’t willpower… it’s that the design doesn’t belong in the room.

Most ergonomic gear and exercise equipment is built to look clinical or gymnasium-esque, and when you bring it into a home you actually care about, it sticks out in a way that makes you want to hide it, and the moment it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind, which means it’s doing nothing for you.

If a piece of furniture is going to encourage you to move, bend, and shift positions throughout your day, it has to actually live in your space - not in a storage unit three rooms away. Which means it has to be something you genuinely want to look at.

- Tyler Benner, creator of the Air Chair

Bit 3: One of my favorite wellness tips came years ago from my friend Diana, who is also a psychologist. She said, when you need to take a mental health day, even if that means mostly staying in bed to sleep or recover from burn out, find one task—one long-overdue “to-do” on the list—that stresses you out every time you remember it needs to be done, and take care of it on your mental health day.

Revolutionary. Our minds are exhausted, which makes us feel like our bodies are exhausted too, which makes it feel impossible to unburden the mind because so much of living requires some amount of physical action. But if we can just do one small, probably physical thing (write the letter, make the call, pay the bill, put away that thing that’s been sitting out in the yard, ship the parcel, etc.), it frees up the mental energy you’ve been using to track it.

For me, this has been a big cardboard box filled with Venn Design Air Chairs: covers, balls, and pumps that have been in my living room since finishing my exercise advent at the end of last year.

I don’t need any more stuff, but I’m too mentally exhausted to deal with this non-essential task so there it all sits, for me to look at every day and think about how I need to deal with it. Every day for the last three months.

So what I’m doing for my mental health is boxing up each of these balls and sending them to three people I pick from the comments below (see giveaway rules below) to clear out my mind and my house at the same time.

Thanks to everyone who commented on and thanked me for the exercises, and for those wanting all 24 ball exercises to balance tech stress in one place, you can find them here.

Giveaway Rules — CONTEST CLOSED, WINNERS HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED IN THE COMMENTS BELOW!

Eligibility: U.S. residents only, 18+

How to Enter: One entry per person

• Leave a comment below

• (Optional but appreciated) Sign up for Venn’s newsletter

Entry Period: Comments close April 5 at 10 PM Pacific, winners announced April 6 by noon Pacific.

Prizes & Winner Selection

• Three winners will be chosen at random using a random number generator.

• Each winner receives one Advent-used ball—prizes are “as is.” I’ve cleaned them, but may have some wear and/or dog hair.

Notification: Winners will be contacted via Substack/email and must respond in time to claim.

Shipping: to U.S. addresses only. Not responsible for lost or damaged mail.

Other: No substitutions or cash value, not affiliated with Substack.

Loves, I know you’re tired and overwhelmed. I am too. My heart hurts because I thought there were answers, but it turns out there aren’t. There is just the work and the pleasure of a relative bit of rest in the trough between waves.

Given all this, I’ve been wondering how I can motivate you to help your heart by moving your body more—because it will help with everything—without making it feel like one more task you have to struggle to fit in, without it being another place to feel like you’re failing.

Let’s try “low demand,” and work on going super short (while finding a little fun), because nine minutes of getting your heart pumping vigorously each day can do more for your mood, sleep, and hot flashes than you might realize.

Normally I’d write why the vigorous part of the moderate-to-vigorous exercise recommendation is important and how it works, but maybe you don’t have time to read all that before moving your body. Maybe you are taking in way more information these days and want to pare down. So, I’m going to put the “how to” first, and the “why to” after, which you don’t even have to read if you don’t want to. The exercise will work regardless.

What counts as vigorous? Find your vigorous heart rate.

One way to determine if you’re working at a vigorous level is the talk test. You might be able to talk a little, but there would need to be pauses for breathing between words. And, you tend to sweat after a few minutes of vigorous activity.

You can also measure your heart rate. Your maximum heart rate (HRmax) is 220 minus your age. I’m fifty years old, so my maximum heart rate is 220–50: 170 beats per minute (bpm).

You’re moving “vigorously” when you reach 70-85% of your maximum heart rate. Multiplying 0.7 and 0.85 with 170 gives me my personal vigorous range: 119-145bpm. Personally, I don’t perceive much exertion until I’m closer to 140 bpm, so this is where I count those nine minutes.

Feeling like working this hard for nine minutes is too long? You don’t have to do your nine minutes of vigorous movement all at once; working in 2-3 minute sections counts, my darlings.

I’ve made a list of nine ways to move your body vigorously (nine for nine minutes—cute, right?), hoping that there’s something for you here, that fits into what you’re able and interested in doing. Read them (or watch/listen) below. This is all about your perfect movement plan! Let me know which you’re willing to consider, or if you have other ideas!

• Stairs. Whenever you see them, treat them as a quick opportunity for a burst of movement. Climb them at a faster pace than usual. Try taking them two at a time. If you have access to stairs at home or work, move briskly up and down a few times in a row
  

• Dance party. Dancing is exercise in disguise. It’s zucchini hidden in brownie batter. Elevate your heart rate and your mood at the same time by turning on music with higher beats-per-minute and keep time.
  

• Get a little sporty. Casual sports are a great way to get short bursts of intense movement because of the quick sprints, and changes in direction. Play a little pick-up basketball or use the driveway hoop with enthusiasm. Hit a tennis ball against a wall, or dribble a soccer ball in the yard (or living room).
  

• Chores with intensity. Turn household work into a mini workout by doing it against the clock. Scrub floors, clean the bathtub or shower, shake out rugs, or vacuum quickly with purpose. Outside, heavier yard work like digging, chopping wood, raking, or moving soil can raise your heart rate while getting useful tasks done.
  

• Jumping activities. Jumping movements are excellent for quick bursts of energy. Try fast jumping on a living room rebounder or backyard trampoline. Keep a jump rope, or set of elastics handy and sneak in a few minutes every hour. Simple vertical/box jumps or jumping jacks get your heart rate up fast.
  

• Burpees(ish). Burpees combine a squat, plank, and jump into one movement that works the whole body. If the full version is not in your wheelhouse, simply go from standing to lying down (on your stomach or your back), and quickly back to standing ten times in a row and your heart rate will be up!
  

• Play tag. Games like tag are surprisingly intense because they combine sprinting with agility and quick reactions, and they can slot easily into dog time, childcare or connection with friends. Chasing or dodging someone forces you to accelerate, stop, and change direction rapidly, which makes it both fun and physically demanding.
  

• Weights and power moves. Short circuits of lifting heavier weights can provide quick bursts of effort. Do a couple of sets of squats, presses, or deadlifts with challenging weight. Keep a medicine ball in the living room for a few minutes of tossing it back and forth.
  

• Add short sprints to moderate exercise you’re already doing, like cycling, walking running, swimming, or rowing. For example, pedal or run as fast as you can for 10–20 seconds, then return to your normal pace. These bursts of speed increase intensity without requiring a workout dedicated to vigorous movement.

Why we need vigorous movement

The hearts and lungs, like our hip and shoulder joints, need to be regularly taken through their ranges of motion. This is accomplished by getting your heart rate up to different levels: light, moderate, vigorous, and high.

Moderate-to-vigorous exercise is a standard exercise guideline because we need these mechanical nutrients. Because many people never get their heart rate up, guidelines typically put moderate (50-70% HRmax) and vigorous (70-85%HRmax) into a single category, but you can think of them separately: Vitamin Moderate* and Vitamin Vigorous physical activity.

When we look at data from the Hadza, a hunter-gathering tribe in Tanzania with no heart disease, their total moderate and vigorous activity is close to three hours a day, but the vigorous portion is much smaller, 9 to 19 minutes a day. I’m focusing on the smallest average and setting that as a focus in these times of easy overwhelm. Nine minutes.

My hearts, I know it feels like whichever way we turn, the path is psychologically uphill. But riding out life is what we humans do—and the better our physical body can tolerate things, the easier it can be on the emotional heart and mind.

*If you’re currently not doing any movement at all, start with nine moderate minutes of movement!

Read more about “mechanical nutrients” in My Perfect Movement Plan.

My podcast co-host, biologist Dr. Jeannette Loram, and I explore “Vitamin Vigorous Activity” in greater depth on the latest episode of Move Your DNA. Have a listen below or wherever you get your podcasts.

We explain how just nine minutes of vigorous activity can make a measurable difference for your cardiovascular health and break down what counts as vigorous exercise, how to gauge it “old school” without complicated gadgets, and how much is needed based on the movement patterns of the heart-healthy Hadza. Plus, they share nine practical ways to fit short bursts of higher-intensity movement into your day. We also explore a personal experience related to the menopause transition, including the onset of salt sensitivity, water retention, and hypertension AND the link between estrogen and salt management, explaining why the loss of estrogen can make women more susceptible to salt-induced high blood pressure—and what lifestyle shifts can help protect heart health.

Here are some top takeaways of the book Move Your DNA1, “A landmark in explaining biomechanics.” —Dr. Joan Vernikos, Former Director of NASA’s life science division and author of Sitting Kills, Moving Heals):

• All exercise is movement, but not all movement is not exercise

• Your body is responding to movement inputs 24/7 (reframe: many of us so well-practiced in sitting—we are adapted to it. We are the ninjas of sitting!)

• Physical activity is beneficial on both the systemic and local level

• Movement changes our DNA via actually, literally, physically moving parts of it around

Here’s a metaphor for you book lovers:

The body’s cells are always baking. And so they are always reaching for the recipe books in their DNA library. Cells that are physically active (loaded through movement) reach for the books that contain recipes for things like blood vessel development, taking up blood sugar, and muscle contraction. When they don’t move, they reach for the recipe books that contain formulas for processes like inflammation, muscle atrophy, and other things that break a body down vs. build it up.

Cells that are regularly physically active need those "build up my body" recipes more often, so just like a librarian will put the HOT BOOK PICKS up front for easy reaching, these preferred recipe books are moved “up front” in the DNA. When cells don’t move regularly, the books with the best recipes are put into the DNA’s equivalent of a library’s basement archives—those rarely checked-out books that get dusty and full of cobwebs. You wanted to bake something delicious? Sorry, you’re going to need to fill out this slip of paper and come back next Wednesday to pick it up.

This is all about saving energy. What your cells do most often determines what’s easiest for your them to keep doing, even when what they’re doing is breaking the body down. It’s all about inertia, baby, and I think this is why starting an exercise habit is so hard at first. Once you get going, though, those easily-reached recipes are moved right up front, which helps keep you in motion.

On the Move Your DNA podcast, Biologist Dr. Jeannette Loram and I dive into the question: can movement really change your DNA? Using clear analogies—like libraries, recipes, and sticky notes—we unpack what DNA is, how gene expression works, and what we really mean by epigenetics.

We explore how exercise can turn the “volume up or down” on metabolic genes, pro-inflammatory markers, and stress protein genes, and how many of these changes involve altering the arrangement and access to DNA within your cells.

Using another accessible analogy of spider webs, they explore how forces on cells (through mechanotransduction—more on that in the book) act as a powerful, non-chemical “nutrient” that can literally move your DNA and alter epigenetics and gene expression. This is why exercise and everyday movement not only have systemic benefits but also site-specific effects—and why the distribution of movement throughout your body matters just as much as how much you move.

Listen above or watch a full episode:

I, who notoriously begin answers to movement questions with, “It depends,” am today offering you an actual set of rules.

Note that these are not the “movement rules” psychologist Diana Hill and I outline in the fitness psychology book we wrote, I Know I Should Exercise, But… Those unhelpful rules—“Exercise has to be 45 minutes to count,” “There’s a single way or mode of exercise that’s correct,” “I’m too old to learn a new sport,” etc.—are barriers created in our own mind that hinder our ability to get the physical activity our body depends on.

On the other hand, these movement rules for 2026 and beyond are in the same spirit as Michael Pollan’s Food Rules—“Eat [real] food, not too much, mostly plants.” These rules are the pithy takeaways from the hours of in-depth exercise science I’ve covered in my books and on the Move Your DNA podcast, so you can make the best-for-you choices around movement going forward.

Share Movement-Colored Glasses by Katy Bowman, M.S.

#1: Movement works locally—not just systemically: distribute, distribute, distribute.

Exercise makes many “whole body” health tests better, but it also works on a part-by-part basis. Because movement affects our DNA on the cellular level, the body parts that create the movement reap more reward from the movement than the non-moving parts do. Thus, your movement diet needs to distribute movement throughout the body by utilizing myriad shapes. You also have many body parts; to hit them all requires more time spent movement. A single period of time dedicated to moving can’t get it all done, so use movement “snacks” distributed throughout the day to boost the number of areas activated. And think outside the exercise box—select dynamic versions of normal daily activities. We need to distribute movement outside of leisure time, because many of us don’t have leisure time to begin with.

Search for the perfect one-hour workout no more. For best results, water all of your many body parts with movement, throughout the day, and in all domains of your life: Sleep, Leisure, Occupation, Transportation, and Home. (Use the acronym SLOTH to keep it dynamic, peeps.)

Glimpse at this Micronutrient Tracker (from My Perfect Movement Plan) to see which columns you’re missing.

Which movement micros am I missing? Which Movement macros?

#2: Get the five S’s of aging: Strong, Steady, Straight, Supple and Swift

Aging is for every body. At some point, this fact hits you in the face (and/or: feet, knees, lower back, and skeleton). Instead of doing the same exercise routine you’ve been doing year after year, decade after decade, and lamenting that your body doesn’t work anymore, look to movement nutrients you are missing.

• Strong - Regularly challenge muscles beyond their current capacity

• Steady - Work on balance, set up unstable environments to keep up your skills

• Straight - Deal with alignment issues, especially excessive upper back curvature

• Supple - Regularly stretch, challenging each joint’s range of motion

• Swift - Add power by boosting speed of exercises or everyday movements
  

If you stopped eating any protein, your body would work differently. If you didn’t eat any carbohydrates, your body would work differently. This goes for movement macronutrients as well. When you’re missing an entire category of movement, your body will work differently. If you were 57 years old and hadn’t eaten any fat since you were thirteen, is the way your body is working and feeling because of your age? No; it’s the time spent in a deficit, finally collecting its debts.

Figure out which “S” categories you are missing and add them.

#3: It’s not the mode, it’s the load: Choose from a wide movement buffet

Unpopular exercise-y opinion: We don’t need to exercise, we just need to squish, bend, and twist our cells in particular ways. Humans have been meeting their physical activity guidelines for eons using the activities of daily living, and there are many activities, exercise and non-exercise, that get the job done.

There’s a difference between saying you need 80 grams of protein per day and you need 80 grams of beef per day. When it’s the former, you have an entire protein buffet to choose from, making it easier to find something you like or have access to. Similarly, saying “You need to load your bones every day” isn’t the same thing as saying “You should be doing 30 box-jumps a day.” What about jump rope, or playing hopscotch the kids?

We can easily get caught up in figuring out a single best mode of exercise and recommending it (see: “heavy weightlifting”) instead of talking about movement in terms of loads. It is true that your muscles need to work against resistance to keep their mass, but there are many ways those loads can be accomplished (talk to anyone who builds things, digs holes, etc.). Why take any way of moving off the table when we so desperately need better-distributed movement (see again: Rule 1)?

What loads does your body need (be specific) and which exercise or non-exercise activities can provide them?

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#4: Make “uphill” choices: Midlife requires more efforted movement

Slower division and more inactive cells make our bodies less responsive to exercise over time. Stuff we’ve always done to stay fit stops working. Said another way, it’s actually the first half of our lives that has us coasting downhill, drafting behind the good graces of our cells. Midlife is when the uphill work of physical activity begins. If you think in pictures, flip the “over the hill” graph. You’re now in the valley, and if you want to keep going, it’s an uphill push from here. More on “uphill movement.”

Where can you add “uphill” movement to places you’re already moving? Where can you add movement to your more sedentary domains?

#5: Do more for your heart than just “cardio”

Cardiovascular tissue that make up the heart, lungs, and blood vessels is all muscle. While cardiac and smooth muscle are different from skeletal muscle, these organs have their own ranges of motion and when they don’t get them, they—like hips stuck too long in a chair—get stiff. There are mechanical concepts of heart health that are underappreciated, like the flexibility of red blood cells, arterial walls, and the heart muscle itself, or how about the vital role skeletal-muscle contraction plays in healthy circulation. In short, beyond cardio, you can support your heart by working on joint mobility, muscular strength work as well as taking regular movement breaks throughout the day.

#6: There will always be a reason not to move. Move anyway.

We’ve all got something—a trick knee, a sticky shoulder, a lower back that requires extra-mindful stabilization. We learn how to navigate physical activity with these body parts that aren’t fully on board by choosing exercises that work best for them, giving them extra-long warm-ups or plunging them into an ice bath afterward to make it up to them.

What happens when it’s our mind that is tricky and sticky? It can talk us out of moving. Breaking up beliefs and habits in a rigid mind is like working the stiffness out of tight shoulders. You start by recognizing your range of motion for what it is. “I can’t move my leg that far.” “I constantly fall into this way of thinking.” From there you move on to small exercises that stretch your comfort zone, then to medium challenges that you know are good for you, building skills along the way.

Our list of ‘parts to exercise’ rarely includes the mind. Yet out of all the body parts, it’s the one with the most power to keep the rest of your parts from moving. Put “mental flexibility around movement” on your to do list, and watch the whole body benefit.

What’s your biggest movement excuse? How can you move anyway?

If I were to take a Michael Pollen-esque stab at a single line to put on the fridge, it would be:

Move each of your parts, a bit harder, faster, and more often than you feel like, increasingly with age, in whatever way gets the job done.

I know, not as catchy. Move anyway.

Keep reading:

I Know I Should Exercise, But… - more on getting your mind out of the way
My Perfect Movement Plan - read up on movement as nutrition + domains
Move Your DNA - the “big idea” book: movement is (way) more than exercise

Podcast episodes for middle age & movement:

Ep. 190 Stay Strong As You Age: Add POWER to What You Already Do
Ep. 187 Diabetes and Exercise: Muscle Movement & Managing Blood Sugar
Ep. 186 Can Exercise Fix Aging Eyes?
Ep. 180 Bone 1: Your Skeleton is Your Autobiography
Ep. 181 Bone 2: It’s Not The Mode, It’s the Load
Ep. 174 Matters of the Heart

Many-a-card would feature a cartoon drawing of a 140-year old man on a broken-down bicycle at the top of a steep hill. The inside said something like “Happy Birthday! It’s all downhill from here!”

On one hand, the idea that aging is downhill makes sense. Our bodies don’t feel as good, some body parts don’t work as well as they used to, and the things we used to do to take care of ourselves stop working.

Cells in younger bodies divide quickly, but the division process slows down as we age. Imagine a printer easily firing off good copies with little issue when it’s new, but getting fewer copies right with time due to an increase printing errors—running out of paper, and low toner, paper jams—the machinery is getting a bit worn. Cells work similarly. As we get older, mitochondria accumulate damage, the DNA in our cells needs to be repaired, etc. Repairs take energy to deal with so there’s less energy available for cellular division.

Cells can also become senescent before they die. Senescent cells are no longer active, but they hang on, emitting an inflammatory signal to scavenger cells saying “I’m now problematic.” All cells either die or eventually become senescent. While this is a normal part of the aging process from birth, there are stresses that hasten a cell to either state, and not feeding your body the movement it requires is one of those stresses.

Slower division and more inactive cells make our bodies less responsive to exercise over time. Stuff we’ve always done to stay fit stops working. Said another way, it’s actually the first half of our lives that has us coasting downhill, drafting behind the good graces of our cells.

Midlife is when the uphill work of physical activity begins. If you think in pictures, flip the “over the hill” graph. You’re now in the valley, and if you want to keep going, it’s an uphill push from here.

Staying strong and healthy on the cellular level means choosing to go uphill on and with purpose. What is “uphill movement?” Some examples:

• Minding your alignment throughout the day

• taking the stairs when you can

• actually doing your physical therapy exercises

• carrying things instead of wheeling them

• actually walking uphill
  

While writing this essay, I took a break and volunteered to haul our heavy trashcans the three minute walk to the street for pick-up tomorrow. My driveway isn’t literally uphill; the “uphill” skill is recognizing the thousand times per days we feel the urge to skip the movement and opt to do it anyway.

My podcast co-host, biologist Dr. Jeannette Loram, and I explore this topic in depth on the latest episode of Move Your DNA. Have a listen below or wherever you get your podcasts.

In middle age, you are not “over the hill”—you are actually at the bottom of a valley, and staying strong and healthy means choosing to go uphill on purpose. Jeannette and I unpack the difference between chronological age and biological aging, why modern life may be speeding up the aging process, and how movement and exercise positively influence the cellular “hallmarks of aging.” We explore why exercise needs to increase with age (even when life gets busier and energy feels lower), and how reframing discomfort can make consistency possible—so you can extend not just your lifespan, but your healthspan, too.

Or, watch it on YouTube!

Book recommendations:

• Dynamic Aging—Includes specific exercises to help if you want to move more, but are feeling too stiff/out of balance

• I Know I Should Exercise, But…—Learn to deal with they psychology of discomfort when it comes to choosing movement

Day 24: “Pelvis Upload/Download”

When your body spends a lot of time sitting (or standing) in the same position over and over again, stiffness can develop in the hips and lumbar spine which can make it hard to use the abdominals in a refined way.

This last move is a subtle one that uses the curve of a ball to help you feel the difference between rolling your pelvis up and down the ball (abdominal work) and lifting it up and down with a pelvic thrust (glute work).

While I love a good challenge, it’s impossible to communicate this movement in still images, so find a video to follow along to below!

This clip is from a 90-minute class I just filmed for my virtual studio (‘20 Exercises To Do On An Exercise Ball’, that takes you through all of the big-ball movements I shared this month. Take the full class by using the free one-week trial and you’ll see just how much work all these moves are when you do them all together!

Don’t have a ball?

• Create a large bedroll of blankets that creates a similar shape as in the ball exercise and practice tilting the pelvis to roll the pelvis up and down the curved surface.

Keep moving

• Day 23 Exercise is a great upper back stretch you can do while reading

Lectio Divina, essentially divine or spiritual reading, is a 1500-year old monastic practice of reading passages from the Bible (lectio), meditating (meditatio), praying/responding to them (oratio) and contemplation (contemplio). My personal version of the process is secular, and focuses on s observing resonant words and phrases (which I think of as glimmers), meditation, and contemplation on these glimmers for personal insight and wisdom.

I pay attention to glimmers all the time, whether I’m reading poems, songs, meaningful books, or John Grisham novels. I’m often working my way through multiple books at the same time—usually a couple non-fiction and one novel (almost always science fiction)—and what tends to happen is my brain highlights seemingly unrelated phrases in different books that tie the themes of these unrelated books together for me as if they’re part of a trilogy. My mind seems to be working on some puzzle I’m not aware of, but I become conscious to it through reading.

A current example: I’m reading The First Astronomers: How Indigenous Elders Read The Stars; Plant Physics (a textbook); and a sci-fi novel—What We Can Know. The first book is about the relationship between modern science and traditional ecological knowledge. Many find these opposing, but they seem complementary to me. I also find the distinction unclear in the same way I find the difference between arts and crafts confusing. My brain holds all confusing things on a long to-reconcile list and is always working on the reconciling. This line in Plant Physics jumps out at me: “Despite parallels in perspective, the physical and biological sciences are not entirely compatible.” A-ha. Here’s a place within modern science where science is also struggling with alignment, so an “us/them” position in science/TEK isn’t necessarily a logical step. Then in the novel: “Not necessary to know anything about the brain to enjoy a sonnet or a sunset.” The experience and knowledge of something doesn’t relate only to the understanding of the elements of it. Three different books, one life I’m working on through them.

Paying attention to the words that jump out at me goes beyond learning the material or story. Reading becomes more like brushing knotted hair. Lectio divina helps my brain untangle knots of thoughts.

A reading position to counter hyperkyphosis (excessive forward-rounding of the spine)

Sure, part of this exercise is about undoing the forward hunch that tends to pair with device-use (or reading, for that matter!) but another part of this is to give you a little push toward reading.

While many folks read as a pastime (that is long enough to pass the time), reading doesn’t have to be a marathon. You can briefly turn to books for a quick inspiration, a reminder, or a short lesson.

Day 23: “Tech Support”

• Prop your ball against a wall or other piece of fixed furniture

• Mold your upper back head to the curve of the ball

• Don’t let your neck overly extend (add a small pillow for folded towel beneath your head as needed)

• Keep the lower ribs down
  

If you don’t have a ball

• Build up something that gently arches your upper back while you recline.

Keep moving

• Day 22 EXERCISE will give computer hands some relief (and fun!)

Computer work doesn’t only keep you limbs fairly stationary, it also casts your hands and eyes.

Day 21: “All-go-rhythm”

While I get a lot of daily physical exercise, I also use the computer on most days. Lately, my favorite computer-work movement snack has become juggling. Not because juggling is great for offsetting muscle loss or regulating blood sugar—it’s not—but because it uses my hands, eyes, and brain in a way that nothing else has ever done before.

A lot of research has been done on people learning to juggle because juggling changes your brain. Brain scans of people before and after learning to juggle (30 minutes a day for six weeks) showed increases in white and gray matter. You don’t even have to nail a bout of perfect juggling, or be a kid. Multiple studies have also confirmed brain changes in “the elderly.” P.S. “The elderly” subjects in this study had the mean age of 60 years old. Any guess on the mean ages of the researchers?

It’s worth noting that this brain adaptation is a “use it or lose it” situation. The changes to the brain that come with juggling go away when you stop.

With both puberty and menopause going on ’round here, everyone in our house is going through some sort of brain transformation these days; and juggling is something we all do during the in-the-house downtime because it makes us feel good. Personally I revel in the inevitable juggling fails because that gets me thirty to forty opportunities to bend over which are great for my legs and back. While juggling may be a hand-eye thing, learning to juggle is a whole-body activity.

So get yourself a couple sets of juggling sets (or make your own with things you’ve got already), set them out on the desk and kitchen counter, and make juggling your new fidget.

P.S. Any soccer player will tell you that you can also juggle with your feet! Kids and adults needing more brain connectivity, don’t forget the hacky sack!

Get inspired to gift movement: A juggling set and hacky sack has been on my Low-Tech, Movement-Rich TOYish Gift Ideas for Kids, Teens, and Adults list for years.

Day 22: “Palm Pilot”

Typing, swiping, and gripping are all repetitive motions for the intrinsic and extrinsic muscles of the hands. For this hand-care move you need a small, flexible ball—e.g. a rubber self-massage/therapy ball or a tennis ball.

My friend Jill will show you how to do this move:

More hand exercises…

• Five Exercises to Sooth Phone-Scrolling Hands

• 24 exercises for fingers, hands and wrists

Keep Moving

• Day 20 EXERCISE for some core and hamstring work

Day 20: “System Balance”

This blends core and hamstring work with a little playful challenge.

• Place a ball on the soles of your feet, and balance it—no gripping!

• Make small pelvis movements: twist the legs to turn the ball, bend and straighten the legs, etc.

• Rest as needed, then repeat!

If your hamstrings are tight…

• Bend your knees as much as you need to

• Elevate your pelvis with a folded/rolled towel

If you don’t have a ball…

• Hold a pillow up on your feet

Day 19: “Tech Neck Troubleshoot”

This thoracic stretch is simple, effective, and you can do it anywhere.

• Placing hands on the ball

• Roll the ball forward, straightening the arms and sinking the chest toward the floor

• Relax your head

Make it harder

• Instead of sitting back as in the photo above, bring the hips forward, stacking them over your knees to increase the shoulder/spine stretch

• Roll the ball farther away

Make it easier

• If you don’t want to get on your knees, try this standing, hands on the back of a chair or counter

• If it feels overwhelming, start on your hands and knees and stretch one arm at a time

• Bring the ball closer

Don’t have a ball?

• Place hands on the seat of a chair or couch

Keep Moving

• Day 18 EXERCISE is a sneaky way to fit some rapid-fire squats

Before getting to the exercise, I want you to make sure you don’t do today’s move while holding scissors and don’t use an old ball that’s been in the back yard the last few months or something similar. Take caution, give yourself a clear area, wear a helmet if you must.

How have the exercises been going so far?

Please leave me a list of your numerous health benefits in the comments below!

xo, K

Day 18: “Soft Bounce”

Sometimes you need a movement break and you can’t leave your desk. This is a simple, subtle move that can get your squat muscles fired up and nobody has to know.

• Start sitting your ball, feet shoulder width apart

• Warm up with small bounces that keep your feet on the ground and butt on the ball

• Every few bounces, hold the “up” position without coming all the way off the ball, just enough to work the thigh muscles but not lift all the way off the ball

Make it harder

• Change your pattern so you’re holding the up position more often (e.g. every two, than try every other bounce, than every bounce)

• Watch that you’re not using your arms to help press you up

• Watch that you’re not leaning overly leaning forward

Don’t have a ball?

• Start standing and get your squat moves by sitting back a bit, then come up quickly and sit back again, repeating smoothly

Keep Moving

• Day 17 EXERCISE is a great hip-flexor stretch you can do at your desk