Katy Bowman Quotes

Watch your habits, for they become your posture. Watch your posture, for it creates your boundaries. Watch your boundaries, for they restrict your growth. Watch your restrictions, for they create immobility. Watch your immobility, for it becomes your illness.

Our current model sets both food and movement as a negative. Eating food (a biological imperative) makes us feel guilty, and we turn movement (also a biological imperative) into punishment. Atonement

We tend to give much less consideration to how we feel. But how you feel is the earliest indicator of your health on a cellular level.

Extreme soreness has become a celebrated experience in our culture, but pain is often an indication that you’ve gone too far, too fast.

Perhaps the only way out of our poor physical state, created by our culture of convenience, is a return to the behaviors of our ancestors.

The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.” —Leonardo da Vinci

The paradox of the modern world is this: Not only do we do less, physically, than ever before, but we also almost never do nothing. Our bodies, deprived of large movements, are inundated with subtle-yet-continuous physical stimulation from noise, light, data, etc. This constant stream of input is a two-fold stressor, as not only is the frequency of certain environmentally induced loads extremely high, the types of input we are experiencing are unnatural.

Science does a great job at reducing variables until they are small enough to be understood, but we aren't doing a great job at reassembling the picture once it has been broken down into a thousand pieces

you have been receiving signals of movement hunger in response to a movement diet that is very low in terms of quantity and poor in terms of quality—meaning you aren’t getting the full spectrum of movement nutrition necessary for human function.

The loads we experience in today’s world differ hugely from the loads people experienced a hundred, a thousand, and ten thousand years ago. Yet we blithely accept that our health issues—which so many of us share—are genetic. Genetic, a term we’ve internally defined as beyond our control. Whether out of convenience or ignorance, we have failed to address the habitat in which our genes dwell, and the impact of the way we move on the state of our health.

Krishnamurti said, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

The way we move direct influences how our bodies are shaped.

Nature isn’t classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it’s a wonderful problem, because it doesn’t look so easy.” RICHARD FEYNMAN

Every single thing our bodies do requires movement—initiated by our musculoskeletal system—to be performed with ease. Digestion, immunity, reproduction—all of these functions require us to move. You can eat the perfect diet, sleep eight hours a night, and use only baking soda and vinegar to clean your house, but without the loads created by natural movement, all of these worthy efforts are thwarted on a cellular level, and your optimal wellness level remains elusive.

One of the arguments I am most known for professionally is that the way the Kegel exercise is prescribed can actually be harmful and not helpful at all. A Kegel is like a starch in the case of kwashiorkor: when done excessively and in the absence of other movement vitamins, it can create a negative outcome—too much pelvic-floor tension. The Kegel (as I’ll expand upon in Chapter 10) is not inherently more “bad” than a sweet potato, but neither is a sweet potato (or Kegel) health-making when consumed in isolation.

qualities (e.g., Am I stepping on something rough or

how each relates to all the others and to our health. I was reading Dancing Skeletons, a book by nutritional anthropologist Katherine Dettwyler about her time working in Africa, when I found a section about kwashiorkor. Kwashiorkor is a severe form of malnutrition common in young children throughout the tropics. The hallmark diet of this disease is high in calories (from sweet potatoes or other starches) but low in protein. In this case, the low protein is not the problem—other children who eat equally low amounts of protein but fewer total calories are not likely to develop the disease. It’s the ratio of the nutrients that contributes to the development of kwashiorkor. KEGEL EXERCISE A contraction of the pelvic floor often prescribed to prevent the leakage of urine when coughing or running. This section of Dettwyler’s book resonated with me because I recognize that the outcomes of an exercise program depend largely on the ratio of all the movements to each other. Exercise (a repetitive intake of an isolated muscle contraction to fill a hole of missing strength) is often prescribed like vitamins (a capsule ingested to decrease a nutritional void). One of the arguments I am most known for professionally is that the way the Kegel exercise is prescribed can actually be harmful and not helpful at all. A Kegel is like a starch in the case of kwashiorkor: when done excessively and in the absence of other movement vitamins, it can create a negative outcome—too much pelvic-floor tension. The Kegel (as I’ll expand upon in Chapter 10) is not inherently more “bad” than a sweet potato, but neither is a sweet potato (or Kegel) health-making when consumed in isolation.

It might be challenging to consider “5 degrees of range of motion” to be a real part, but keep in mind that as mobility is lost, so is the ultimate function of the machinery of the foot—of any machine, really. Would you accept wheels on your car that only rotated 355°?

Straighten your feet • Back your hips up • Align your knee pits • Adjust your pelvis • Drop your ribs • Relax your diaphragm