Katy Bowman

Many super-motivated folks jump right into a new stand-up-all-day desk without considering the best plan to vary the workplace environment and minimize tissue damage.

We are attempting to fool mother nature by making eight hours spent in an office seem, to our bodies, like eight hours spent tracking through the Serengeti—or at least less like eight hours spent in a tiny cage!

The more you can think ‘alignment’ and the more you constantly work your body even while staying at your desk, the better the transition out of your chair will be for you.

What makes a chair good is the frequency with which you choose not to use it. Spend your energy on improving your musculoskeletal health, not on a device that makes your tissue weaknesses less uncomfortable.

Treadmill walking has pros and cons. Best advice is don’t log these miles toward your daily walking. You still have to get out and move over ground for optimal biological function.

Reaping the benefits of‘‘not sitting so much’ requires more than just swapping one static position for another— it requires an entire overhaul of the way you think about and move your body.

Your body is never ‘out of shape’; it is always *in* a shape created by how you have moved up to this very moment.

If you don’t move, your cells don’t get fed. If your cells don’t get fed, they die. So now we have yet another reason movement is not optional: In addition to creating loads and modifying genetic behavior, movement is an essential step in the process of oxygen delivery.

If you want your health to change, you must change the way you move, and the way you think about movement.

If you’re looking to improve your mind-body connection, walking off the beaten track is where it’s at.

In short, make your life less noisy. Take walks—at least sometimes—without the iPod. Drive without the radio. Unplug (or un-battery) any non-essential thing. Invest in some earplugs if you’re right up on a roadway or for when you travel.

Outdoor time, like movement, is not really optional—your body and community truly depend on it.

Our problem with nature is not only that we dwell outside of it, but that we see ourselves as separate from it, even when walking through it.

My hope with Movement Matters is that a more robust model and deeper investigation of movement result in a movement revolution fashioned organically out of many smaller individual restorations of the natural types and frequencies of movement.

Stacking your life and multitasking differ in how you approach meeting your various needs. Multitasking involves trying to accomplish many discreet tasks at once. Stacking your life involves the search for fewer tasks that meet multiple needs, which often requires that you’re clear on what your needs actually are. Once you identify your needs and which tasks best serve you, you can attend to, pay attention to, get involved in, and focus upon a single task at hand that serves multiple obligations. Pretty sweet, right?

Movement, just like the cell wall, the mitochondria, the cytoskeleton, and the nucleus, is a part of every working cell. Cells don’t work without movement, and you aren’t fully operational without all of your cells working well. The movement of a part today is what affords it the ability to move tomorrow.

Proofs (i.e., absolutes) exist in math and in logic. In science there is only evidence to support a theory—making science provisional. The best or most widely accepted theory is only the best explanation among all available alternatives.

Just like we’ve been told we need protein, fat, and carbs, we know we need cardio, strength, and flexibility. We’re told we need to train our upper and lower body and core muscles for the best outcome. As with food, we’re missing wisdom when it comes to movement.