Throwing Out Your Furniture, Forest School, Gooey Bones, Why Weight Training Counts As Cardio & Much More With Biomechanist Katy Bowman.

Hello, ladies and germs. I like to talk like I'm out of the 1940s or 50s or 60s or whenever they said germs. And I'm displaying my intense lack of knowledge about all things historical and geographical. Really. This is Ben Greenfield, but I do know about fitness, and I do know about why you should consider throwing out your furniture. I'm serious. My guest does, too. We talk about, like, throwing out your furniture. We talk about forest school. How cool is that? Gooey bones. Why weight training counts as cardio, and a whole lot more. It's my friend, and I think she's been on the podcast now four times. She's that popular biomechanist, Katie Bowman. In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

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Foreign.

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And my guest today a few years ago taught us how to look like a million bucks from head to toe in the podcast episode Making Biomechanics Fun, how to fix your body, align your posture, and look like a million bucks from head to toe. And then she taught us why Kegel exercises suck and why most ab exercises are completely useless. In the podcast episode why you shouldn't suck in your stomach, why standing all day is bad for you, and how Kegels are killing your core. Well, today I have invited her back to talk about her new book called Movement Matters, Essays on movement science, movement ecology, and the nature of movement. And her name, if you haven't guessed it yet, because she is relatively famous in the world of biomechanics, specifically ancestral biomechanics, is Katie Bowman. And Katie is not only a biomechanist and a science author, and a self described full time mover. But she spends her time educating hundreds of thousands of people from around the world via not only her huge collections of books, the number of which I've actually lost track of because she's got a ton. From like Move youe DNA to this book. Movement Matters to Foot Pain Relief to Whole Body Barefoot to Alignment Matters to Every Woman's Guide to Foot Pain Relief. The list goes on and on. But she also does live classes online. She has a fantastic website that I'll link to over in the show notes for this episode, which you'll find@BenGreenfieldFitness.com MovementMatters but she also lives right across the state from me where the sun does not shine quite as much as it does on my side of the state. Ha ha.

Katie.

Na na na na na. But she has a very interesting life over there. We'll talk a little bit about the fact that her kids go to nature school and she threw out all her furniture and she does a lot of cool wild plant foraging adventures and all sorts of interesting things. We're also going to take a deep dive into science because she has some really interesting ideas about muscle and about bone that really don't get talked about a lot in I guess like stereotypical biomechanical chatter or cocktail chatter about muscle and bone if you go to those kind of cocktail parties. So, Katie, welcome to the show.

Hi. I would love to go into one.

Of those cocktail parties I know, seriously, where we could just talk about biomechanics all day and how bone is goo and muscles really aren't the way that we think they are. Everything that you talk about in this fantastic book that I'm holding in my hands right now. You know, the funny thing is I read your books and wind up just destroying them because I fold over so many pages. I don't talk about this too much on the show, but my undergraduate degrees in biomechanics, so I have this special place in my heart for a biomechanic talk and some of the geeky stuff that you delve into in your book. So whenever you mail me a new book that you've written, my face lights up and I take out the red pen and get to work figuring out what I want to talk to you about when I have you on the show.

There's not a lot of fun books about biomechanics. They're all technical or they're research articles. So for me, someone who loves biomechanics and geeks out about it, I think to have something that kind of makes you laugh as you're kind of going, oh, yes, of course. You know, academically, it's a nice. It's a nice mashup, I guess, right?

Yeah, it totally is. And you've got a really, really cool way of talking about biomechanics and in kind of like a layman's or a lay woman's perspective that I. That I truly appreciate. Including the. Do you actually draw the images in your book or do you have someone do those for you?

I have someone professionally draw my crappy drawings. So for me, really beautiful anatomy textbooks, what's often lost is the actual mechanics of what's going on. They're not able to really communicate well, leverage. And so I have always found that really simple diagrams with arrows that don't. That totally shatter any artistic. I don't want you to pull any art from my diagrams. I want you to see in and out and up and expansion and this direction and that direction. So I'm actually not that bad of a drawer, but I draw really crappy stick figure drawings on purpose so that the communication I need these drawings to make, which is not how beautiful is this come through. So I do have someone, though, professionally recreate my crappy drawings. She is a professional illustrator who can do beautiful things, but she just does crappy line drawings for me all the time.

Yeah, that's the way my. My wife and I work writing a fiction book right now called the Forest. And I'll get through a chapter and I'll write out again my own crappy line drawing of what I would imagine it'd look like as the protagonists in the story, which are my two twin boys come wandering out of the woods, out into the ocean. And I've got the rocks or little circles, and the trees are sticks and the ocean is the stereotypical wavy lines. And then she turns it into an actual epic fantasy painting. So. So yeah, we've got that relationship going. Actually, the first question I wanted to ask you, Katie, was you got rid of all your furniture. I think we talked about this a little bit in the last podcast, but we didn't really take much of a dive into it. How's that going for you, not having furniture?

It really gets better every day. Getting rid of furniture is really my way of modifying my environment. So the environment facilitates movement versus me having to drum up some sort of artificial willpower or to have to think myself to. I should be moving, you know, like our environment, our habitats have gotten rid of the need for a lot of Movement. So we're having to artificially manifest that, okay, I'm going to get up and bend my hips and my knees to these particular degrees at this particular frequency. That's one particular way of relating and taking science and kind of helping you create behaviors. But it's very exhausting. And then we have this whole issue of frequency. It becomes very difficult to move at a particular frequency because I have to be thinking all the time, like, I need to move this much. I need to move this way in addition to also. And I need to eat this much of this thing and in this way. And it just became so overwhelming that I thought, much easier for me is to strip out the elements of the habitat that I'm constantly having to rally against. And so that's what I've done is gotten rid of, you know, chairs and things that it's so easy to plop or outsource my body's work, too. So I got rid of things with backs and, you know, classic chairs. And then we've started to play with temperature, right? Getting rid of warmth from our house. It's still able to be warmed, but just. We don't build a fire the first thing on a cold morning. We're like, oh, if we leave it cold, guess what? We're a lot more likely to head outside and warm our own bodies because we're not thwarted by this cozy environment. And so we. By doing that, getting rid of warmth a portion of the day, I found that we are all moving so much more and going outside so much more. So I've just been. I've been playing with. There's a lot of research coming out where this is a cool biomechanics thing where the shape of your environment shapes the animal and the behavior of the animal within that environment. You know, ants and lots of other colony animals, bees and whatnot, their. Their behavior and body shapes, they're in a relationship with their habitat structure. And we know this about animals, but we just continue to create more and more environments that facilitate less of the behaviors that we really know we need. And then we're constantly rewarded with that shaping towards comfort with a body that's more suited for comfort and less for taking action in various ways. So I was like, oh, okay. And once I understood that, then it becomes very easy for me to choose which elements I'm ready to let go and to what degree. So that's all. Like, getting rid of my furniture was the first step of that acknowledgement that my. My environment is influencing me tremendously. And I'm just going to go ahead and do the work on the environmental.

End from a biomechanical standpoint, too. Just this simple act of knowing how to get down and get up is more challenging than I think a lot of people realize. For example, I teach these special movement classes when I'll go to a conference or, you know, not just a health and fitness event, but I'll go speak at these different business events. And sometimes they'll have me do, like, morning movement sessions. And one of the things that I'll have people do is just sit down and stand up, typically 20 to 30 times. Just literally sit down and stand up, and it completely gases. And even many, many people are destroyed and sore the next day from sitting down and standing up 30 times. And this idea of. And by the way, I have retained all the furniture in my home, despite my respect for you having gotten rid of yours. I just. I still have my couches and my futons and my beds and everything like that. But just this concept of being able to get down on the floor and get back up is something that so many people have lost the skill of being able to do. Now, granted, I understand that a lot of people that listen to my show, they're. They're able to sit down and stand up. But I think even more importantly, what you said about temperature fluctuation is important in that, you know, not just this idea of minimalism, but also this idea of embracing some amount of discomfort in our lives is important not just from a stress and resilience standpoint, but also a biomechanical standpoint, right? Like sometimes sleeping on hard surfaces, sometimes eating on the floor instead of eating at a table, sometimes figuring out something to do other than sit in a chair, right? Like kneel or lunge or stand or embrace something other than furniture. It's important. And I love that section in your book where you get into how you got rid of the furniture and kind of went minimalist and swapped your 24 inches of box spring and mattress for 3 inches of futon. And I think it's something that a lot of people, especially people are trying to reinvent their bodies, could certainly benefit from.

Well, it has a lot to do with time, too. Movement Matters is really about time, which is you and I are constantly informing people of, you needed this and did you know your body needs this. And there's many other people in many other fields that are continuously layering on these human needs. And because they are what I use the term, parse, like, they're, like they've been pulled, they've been extracted. They're extractions from usually ancestral behaviors or, you know, human behaviors that have been around for a very long period of time. They're elements of these. But if you just keep adding elements every day, you're going to be missing a large portion because you can only get to like, how many times do I get up and down off the floor? How many times do I have to run out and expose myself to a certain amount of minutes of sunlight? And how many minutes do I have to spend with my kids? You know, it all becomes. When you pull out the parts, the parts themselves, like, end up summing up larger than what the thing taken in its entirety would have been. So the idea of, like, sitting on the floor, it's not only the fact that you have to use your knees and your hips and your ankles, that you're mobilizing the joint and you're using those muscles to carry you towards the floor. Now you are. Your body is being deformed by the floor. It's pressure. We don't consider, like, the other types of movement that fall outside of our fitness variables. So exposure to pressure is something that our body needs, and we currently take it in the form of, you know, foam rolling or putting our body on some tool. I'm going to put my knee on this tool in this way, and then I'm going to roll out my hips and I'm going to roll out my quads. And like, we're doing it all separately. But these are motions, these relationships with pressure at various angles of my body are something now that just happen because I have to sit on the floor, because I got rid of other options to not sit on the floor. So it's to get even more movement in than those joint kinematics that we're so used to talking about when we talk about biomechanics that we forget about the other movements that we need and. And how easy it is to get them within a lifestyle versus outside of one.

Right, Right. Yeah, completely. And on a related note, thinking of kind of going outside the box, you also have your kids, if I understand correctly, from what you go into in the book, in forest school or nature school. Can you tell me about what a typical day at nature school or forest school looks like? And also just something to think about as you explain this to us. I know a lot of people don't have the ability to put their kids in nature school. Like, I've even looked into this in Spokane. There's not really, really much of, like, A formal nature school. Nature school in Spokane. Even though I replicate that for my kids every day when they get home from their. Their regular school, you know, we're out in nature even right now. I can see them outside the big picture window of my office. They're barefoot, standing right now out in the forest. I have no clue what they're talking about, but they're both looking at each other, talking about something. And I send them out to do sit spots and meditation. And every day they need to go find one new wild plant to forage and identify and learn a new use for. And then we even have foraging Fridays where they can only eat, at least up until dinner, things that they've found outside. They're allowed to use the kitchen, to come back in and use olive oil or whatever to prepare what they found. But the main staple of what they eat needs to come from the outdoors. And so there are. There are ways that we figured out how to kind of. Kind of get the kids a little bit of schooling outdoors. But I'm curious, like, what does an actual, like a formal nature school or a forest school actually look like? Like. Like, what do your kids do when they. When they head out to school?

Well, they dress well, they dress appropriately. That's a big thing. So, like, you're already learning how to, like, what you need to be comfortable and safe within particular environments. They. They switch between three different landscapes throughout the year and sometimes throughout the week. Throughout the year. We had a very cold winter here in Washington, and that was different than the last two years. And so there was a lot of fire building elements to the class because they actually had to be able to be close to a fire, so they had to switch to a landscape.

And how old are they?

Four and a half and six.

Okay.

They're in two separate programs, but one is for slightly younger kids, 3 to 6, and the other one's in a slightly older program, 5 to 10. So they do mix the ages, which is really important. So nature school has elements of, you know, that it kind of looks like a regular school in that, you know, they get together the first thing, and they're usually playing some sort of game. They know. Like, we would go to school and play recess in the morning beforehand. But the games are like, they would have freeze tag. Right. Every kid plays freeze tag at some point, but the freeze tag is you. When you're tagging someone, maybe you tag bee sting. And so when you tag them, they have to be. They have to stop and freeze because they have a bee sting and in order to unfreeze, the other kids have to go get the plant. That is a good remedy for bee stings, actually. Go find it, pick it, bring it, and touch the kid with that plant to unfreeze it. And you can only use each plant one time. And so the teacher is constantly changing, you know, the issue. So in that way they get a little bit of plant identification and then plant purpose. They do projects, kind of project based learning, which there's lots of project based learning schools that don't happen solely in nature, but there's a lot of science kind of built in, but in a more practical level. So my son worked on a unit where he made a spear or an arrow. So he was. And they have knife skills, right? So they start knife skills when they're five and they are full size knives and they learn knife safety. And so he's, he's whittling this shaft of the arrow and he's bringing it back to me and he's, I've asked him, you know, why are you. What's the point of removing the bark? Is it too heavy with the bark or whatever? Because I don't know, right. I've never made an arrow. And he says, well, he said if you look at a stick, you know, he picks a stick up to the eye, you'll see that it's actually, even though it seems straight, if you look up close, it's bumpy. And so when the air passes down, as it's going through the air, it makes the air bumpy. Kind of like when we're on an airplane, mom, you know, like turbulence and then it can't fly straight, so we have to remove all of the bumps. So from this biomechanics mother, you know, like, he's explaining aerodynamics to me. He's. He understands laminar flow and turbulent flow and that the wind. Not like that. That the wind can displace something, but it's not really wind that just by moving through the air it can create displacement. And then the objective of that arrow, which is to hit what you've shot, is unattainable until you get rid of these other forces. And I was like, wow. So nature school, you could say, like, oh, look, they're making arrows that they'll never really need. And, and in the modern world, but it's really a much more fun way of learning aerodynamics. And he's six. And so it's just a lot of those types of things, a lot of, a lot of physical play. But, you know, they can look at ice, you know, they spend a lot of time going out and trekking and then they find this amazing thing. And all the teachers are very well versed in wilderness safety and wilderness studies and in just different tribal studies. And they can explain, you know, when you see the ice and it looks like this, this is an indication of how the temperature is fluctuated through the night, that there was like a partial melting and, and so so many little things like that where they're learning observation, identification. They added letters to our school. So there was a traditional element of they're going through the Alphabet and every day would be a different letter, but then they would identify all the nature things that start with that sound. So even when they're doing things like language arts, they still require that you observe what's going around you. And they don't have a chalkboard, but they have dry erase boards that they'll bring in. And they have the kids recap various things and they have journals. They sit and journal. They make notes or drawings of various animals. Sometimes they do things like they found a dead bald eagle and a dead owl this year and they were able to be with it. They were actually able to move its wings and learn that the height of an owl's ears are staggered. And then why, why that is. And again now you're back to.

You weren't afraid they were going to get some horrible avian virus and you didn't rush to rescue them from the dead bald eagle or the dead owl. Oh no, you're a horrible parent.

I know. Well, definitely risk taking.

What's the, what's the actual name of this school? Well, actually, you know, I should ask you if you even want to say because I don't want, you know, people going and like stalking your kids. But I'm just curious like, like, is there a name for this type of school or the, the school that the.

Children go to if you wanted to go see an example of it? Olympic Nature Experience is the non profit. Is it a company? I don't know. It's a school. But they have various schools. So they, and you know, for those people who are listening going, there's no way my kids can go to a, you know, a nature school. A lot of nature organizations offer summer programs, after school programs.

Yeah.

Before school programs, camps. You know, there's a lot of different ways to get into or even weekend workshops like our, our school or this organization. They offer adult foraging classes, family foraging classes that are just a Saturday afternoon. So I list that in the back of movement matters which is like, if you're going, oh my gosh, I would love to do this, it's not feasible. There are so many ways to get various elements or aspects of it. So Richard Louvre wrote a book, Last Child in the woods, and they have a huge Children in Nature network where if you go to that website, you can find various programs near you.

Yeah, I see that in, in your book. It's called children in nature.org here in, in Spokane, Washington. It's Twin Eagles Wilderness Adventures where, where my kids go in the summers. They go do wilderness school there and they even have like a father son immersion experience where we just all go out into the wilderness for several days. And, and it's really cool because they're like the, the fathers get together and we do, for example, traditional Native American ceremonies, like, you know, like, like the sweat lodge inside the teepee. And we do different scouting adventures with the kids. And it all culminates with us needing to go on almost like it, like a nighttime vision quest with our kids where they just send us off into the forest and we got to go out and survive and build our own shelter and we don't have any food. They just send us out with a knife and a bow, you know, fire making kit. And we, we go and we bond with our children by surviving out in the forest for the evening. And it's, it's, you know, for those of you listening in who haven't kind of looked in your local area for this type of adventure for you to do with your children or this kind of, you know, even if it's a summer school for the kids, it's amazing. And just about every place has some kind of a way to get started with this. So, yeah, in the back of your book, Katie, you've got all sorts of resources on it. But yeah, I mean, like the takeaway thing for me really when looking at your kids going to nature school is not that every kid needs to go to nature school, but every parent should at least look into resources in their community that allow their kids to get these kind of outdoor education or immersive experiences in nature just because a child can learn so much. And like you mentioned, I mean, your kids fricking like making an arrow and learning about laminar flow and how an airplane could fly at the same time. So there's not a disconnect from technology when they're in these type of scenarios at all. And so. No, go ahead.

Well, and I think, you know, Richard Louvre, he's argued pretty extensively that nature is Actually its own vitamin. So it's like, you know, if you're looking at like how do I feed my kids nutritiously and move them nutritiously, that this is another element of they might very well indeed need abundant exposure to nature. And it can be through these structured programs. And it could also be that when they have a birthday party, you do a nature theme out in a park, or that you take some of your breakfasts or some of your meals, you just put a blanket in your backyard and you eat outside. Or when the Audubon center has a bird spot that you participate. Like it doesn't require some of these larger things that we're talking about that it's very accessible in, in smaller ways. But slowly what you are doing is introducing a skill in being exposed to and adapted to and comfortable in an outside environment. Or else you're destined to have to be inside a lot of times, or your feet inside shoes or your whole body encased in smart wool all the time, which your experiences are limited in that you, you have to have the environment just so for you to be able to function, which is, it's a limit of your freedoms in a way.

How can people tie this into food? Because I know that you do a lot of foraging with your kids too and you talk about how you've worked foraging into your guys lifestyle. Can you tell me a little bit about the foraging scenarios that you create for yourself and for your family in the foraging section of the book?

Sure. And it can be again small as, I mean, if you have nothing edible growing in your landscape and I live, you know, near the Olympics in Washington, if you live in an apartment, this could be something as growing an herb or two in a pot on a patio or on a right.

Or even just like, like a vertical gardening system which is simple to buy off Amazon.

Exactly. Or even if you have no money, you can go to a community garden, you know, or buy some seeds in a window. It can be very inexpensive. But what you're doing is you're teaching this relationship of where food comes from that someone has got to go get it. So your foraging experience in this case would be very small. Could someone go to the back, back lot of our apartment and, and bring me three leaves of basil or cut two onions or something like that, something that's really easy to grow. Then it could be something a little bit larger, which is identify if you do have community or if you have some wilderness or park around you where you know the quality of the plants, meaning they're not Sprayed and you want to make sure that your identification skills are on par. So I, I do request that if people are going to start to forage, that they make sure someone who is a local expert has helped them identify things. Obviously, most of us can identify apples on an old apple tree or the general fruits that we're aware of. You start with those, you start with abandoned fruit trees and you figure out like, oh, can we walk to that old abandoned apple tree that's always lousy with apples and grab some or are there neighbors in your area? I've lived in California for a very long time and in Washington now here for six years. And the number of fruit rich plants that go unpicked is startling, like totally startling to me. I'm talking about oranges and tangerines and avocados and then here, apples and pears. You can usually find something like that where you can, you know, walk to it or walk part way or even if you drive, you know, you're moving a ladder around and you're maybe climbing trees or helping people, your kids, or even if it's just you move to kind of get some of these foods or gleam, you know, to pull off and either use for yourself. There's always a couple herbs usually that are around. So many people have rosemary bushes, like things in their yards that they didn't even know were edible. They kind of knew that they were an herb, but they don't cook any recipes that use it. Look through your area that's easily accessible on foot, see what's there and then go home and see if you can find a couple simple recipes. And then you're going to go out and as you said, you guys give your kids permission to use a kitchen, which is amazing. And if you have smaller kids, maybe it's just going out and you know, like I'll give my kids, when they were very little, I would give them, you know, branches of herbs and have them simply pull them apart or tear lettuce up, you know, that they've maybe picked around where we are. So you're just, you're just, you're getting them moving, right? The movement is important, but you're showing how movement and food are connected because it's only very recently that all of the movement of the foods that we eat has been completely outsourced. So it's nice to kind of reclaim that a little bit. And kids especially, they will eat more nutritiously if they played with their food in a way, right? If their food was outside of this thing on a plate that you put in front of them. It was, it was a walk. It was good times. It was wow. I've never seen an artichoke grow on a plant before, you know, or if something's popped up that they themselves have planted, even better.

Yeah, and it's, it's absolutely doable to do this in the city, to do it. I mean, you know, there's that saying that, that there's wilderness in the blade of grass that grows up through the sidewalks and you know, for a child to be able to even do something as simple as walk a long ways to the grocery store and bring a grocery sack full of groceries back, I mean, that's what I, that was my initial foray into quote, foraging, unquote. What is. I would just not go to the grocery store unless I'd walk there or ride my bicycle there. And granted I'd be coming to back with bananas and coconut milk and avocados, you know, flown in by jets using fuel to the grocery store. But it was still like, like some form of foraging. And, and having your children do things like that can be extremely useful in just teaching them about the fact that food doesn't just show up for free and that, that you really do have to figure out a way to go out and find it in a truly ancestral scenario. So your section about foraging in the book is fascinating and I really like what you're doing with your children in that respect as well. But I also don't want to give people the impression that the whole book is just about kids in nature school and foraging and getting rid of your furniture. Because you also of course have biomechanics and muscle and bone in there. And I want to talk about that a little bit too, if you're sure. Okay, cool. So you have a section in the book where you talk about how if you could update your old pop up book on muscle from the 80s, there are some definite changes that you would make, particularly with relation to the way that muscles contract and the things that you've discovered in your own research and reading about, about how muscles move a little bit differently than the way that we've been led to believe. You know, that, that stereotypical sarcomere type of scenario where, you know, the muscles slide on each other and the fibers move and the overall length of the muscle is shortened. But it turns out there's a little bit more to muscle than that. Can you go into this idea of the expanding radial motion of muscle?

Yeah, and I think that, you know, books are so limiting. We learn Anatomy from books. Um, certainly if you study at the university level, the bulk of your exposure is either on, in book pictures or if you do work with cadavers, as we did, they're not living, right? So they're not actually, you're not grasping full moving muscle. So in this picture that I used in that essay, and if you open up any anatomy or physiology textbook, you're likely to find the same picture, which is you are given a two dimensional picture of a sarcomere, right? It's just there's the same picture that's used over and over again and the sarcomere is getting shorter and it's getting longer based on if the muscle is getting shorter or getting longer and that's happening. But the sarcomere itself is a tube and, and shorter and longer isn't only the motions that are happening that when something is getting shorter, it's also getting, it's expanding and radially it's getting, it's getting thicker. And you can experience that yourself if you, you know, wrap your hand around your bicep and then flex it, you'll feel, you know, your muscle pop beneath your finger. So it's clearly not only getting shorter or longer, I mean, we have the experience of it, the observation of it, but it's this idea that the force production is also being affected by this expansion that's, that's kind of the new, the new understanding. Because when you are constantly bombarded with that same two dimensional picture, you tend to start thinking about how muscle worked two dimensionally, right? That the, that the resistance to motion is in this single plane. It's not, it's on this like a line or thread going through a sarcomere rather than it happening in other planes as well. So it was just me saying, you know, for, for. There's a ton of anatomy nerds out there, right? There's a ton of people who study anatomy and study movement. But again, the, the imagery that we're given, this is another shout out for my crappy drawings. You know, when we, when you see that same picture over and, and it doesn't really explain the forces. We've kind of ended up with a force free understanding of movement. Like so much of our movement relates more to chemistry than the mechanics because the physics can be a little bit more challenging and they're very hard to depict two dimensionally. So I just like to throw that in for all the people out there studying movement to go, no, some of the force that's being produced is coming from this radial expression expansion as well. Which of it's a. It's kind of like a. Oh, of course, once you see it. But if no one's ever talked about it before, it's not really in your model of muscular force generation.

And in many cases, you know, for example, when we talk about vasculature and vasodilation of muscle, you know, nitric oxide is one big thing that comes up, right, Like Viagra for your entire body, this gas that causes vasodilation in vessels. And you talk about, when you discuss how it could be biomechanical as well as biochemical, how blood flow to working muscles can be triggered by something aside from just vasoactive substances signaling the arterioles inside the muscle to vasodilate and that instead there could be a mechanical trigger for the actual vasculature to open up. And I think this is fascinating. Basically, the way that you lay it out is that when a muscle contracts and correct me if I'm misunderstanding here, but basically, like the forearm, for example, when you contract your forearm muscles, that the arteries in the forearm get compressed and deformed, and that. That's actually moving blood flow, that's vasodilating and also compressing vasculature and causing blood flow in a way that's. That's very similar to something like nitric oxide. And so it turns out that there's like this biomechanical component of. Of blood flow.

Well, you know, the, the. That vasodilation was caused by a chemical or vasoactive substance. That was the hypothesis. It's been the hypothesis for a very long time, but it's never been a proven hypothesis. It was just the working hypothesis. And they've then, you know, it's kind of like there's a lot of. There's a lot of lingering in sciences oftentimes because you can't ask all the questions all the time. And it takes a really long time, you know, 30 or 40 years to conduct the number of various experiments. So that's just been. It's what we learned in kinesiology. You know, it's what you learn in fitness is like, here's why arteries vasodilate. But it hasn't really held up to testing very well. And that's because at the onset of exercise, that vasodilation is so quick. It happens faster than it takes to produce or release the vasoactive substance. So thus there's got to be some other trigger that precedes the chemistry that you can then measure at a slightly later time. So that's when you know. And so again, we talked about, we've had force free sciences, anatomical sciences, biological sciences for hundreds of years. Forces are only recently being added back in because you can't see forces. And without any nanotechnology, you can't really see what's going on. All we've been able to do is draw blood, right, and then measure what's in the blood. And so the hypotheses are always chemical in nature or have these chemical aspects because it was the only thing you could measure. But as we're able to see things on smaller and smaller levels, to go, oh, there's cytoskeleton within the cell and oh, that's moving, hey, the whole behavior is changing. This idea of mechanical transduction is emerging. That's like, oh, the behavior of tissue is very much affected by the forces that are at play. And although you can't see the forces, when you see something really close, you can see that things are being deformed and that the anatomy is of a cell is being altered by this deformation. And then now you're starting to see, over the last 20 years, you're starting to see the hypothesis steer more towards the biophysics, right? This is. And now you're starting to see college programs emerge from biophysics. Now we're talking about on podcasts, but that whole process has been 30 years in the making. So yes, it's a little bit hard to explain on a podcast, but we just said so. This is when a muscle contracts, remember, because of just this last thing we talked about. It's not only really being compressed, it's also, you have this radial dilation, right? If a muscle is getting thicker, your muscle activity is actually opening the blood vessels. You're creating space for the blood vessels to open. And so we think of like vasoconstriction and vasodilation. They're not equally active motions in nature. You do the work to contract and vasodilation is often just a relaxation, meaning there's not musculature that opens it, you just stop tensing it. And so when you've removed the walls of the muscle, literally by opening them or pulling them away from the main axis of this tubular thing, it then immediately causes space for the arteries to open. So they're not really, they're not compressed as we think they are, the action of the muscles is actually opening space, which then is going to immediately change the pressures and the mechanical environment of the musculature. So that's, that's the hypotheses that they've been working on. Gosh, over the last. The reference from Movement Matters on it, when they first started testing it, and rats looking at their skeletal muscle, that was. Gosh, it was when I was in.

Graduate school, so it was like 2006 is the reference. Yeah. And. And this is important for people, in my opinion, primarily because there's this idea, for example, that weightlifting is gonna increase your blood pressure or that you need to do cardio and strength, and the two are separate. When it turns out that moving muscles, lifting heavy things, moving weights, turns out to have a pretty significant cardiovascular training effect due to the increase in this peripheral blood pressure followed by the decrease in the peripheral blood pressure. The vasodilation, the vasoconstriction that occurs from something as simple as a muscle contracting around a blood vessel. And for example, Doug McGuff in his book Body by Science, talks quite a bit about this, about how to really put it in as simplistic a term as possible. Weight training counts as cardio. You're getting a pretty significant cardiovascular and vascular training effect just from moving heavy things without any need to go for a run or go for a bike ride. And so it's kind of an interesting concept that there is this mechanical trigger for vasodilation and vasoconstriction, and you actually can get a very significant training effect just from moving your muscle.

And also important to the nature of the work that I do or the problems that I'm interested in working through is that our model of exercise right now are always whole body states. So if I'm gonna measure your blood for a vasoactive substance, it's going to be throughout all of your blood. Which kind of lends us to think that my whole body is benefiting from this bout that I'm doing right. And that's. That's the way that we've been led to think about movement, is that the benefits are on the whole body level. But if, if we talk about mechanical compression, it means that the area that the blood is being pulled into the air, the areas that are vasodilating, they are only the areas that are working. So in. This lines up really well with our experience of when you do do things of like, a more intense nature, your body has to limit. Like, you only have a certain. You don't have blood, enough blood to reach all of your parts. You have a. An amount that's efficient for you to carry and shunt to various working parts. And when you go really intense of things of your arms and your legs, it has to pull it away oftentimes from organs and other places because of a mass issue. You only have so much volume to work with. And so as we look at the idea that exercise has systemic benefits for sure, but there are local influences of flow and which means oxygen delivery, that you are nourishing particular tissues more than other tissues. That's more of interest to me or that's also of interest to me as we work through this idea that using your body, that there is a distribution of use throughout your body. You know, we would call it cross training, but when you look at the number of parts and the number of capillaries that are fed by various arterials and meta arterials, that getting the blood to all of those sites in a well distributed way is not something that happens simply because your intensity level is at a certain point. So it's really starting to delineate between the holistic or systemic benefits of exercise and then breaking it down to say there are also local benefits and there could be within a very fit person areas that are not actually moved at all. Sedentary areas, cellular. Cellular areas that look sedentary simply because the number of body parts that you use isn't well distributed throughout your movement activities. So to me that's, that's why this is so important. Is it because it aligns well with other things about cellular sedentarism that I'm working on now.

Yeah, exactly. And speaking of sedentarism, you have a section in the book that delves into an area that I think is incredibly important. That is this concept of grip strength and the relationship between grip strength and all cause mortality. Why is there such a significant relationship between grip strength and mortality?

Well, I don't know. Is the, is the rightest answer the most right answer? And it's kind of where it stands right now. I think the hypothesis would be that if you happen to have better grip strength, that you had been using your body in a way that challenged it. And so you're very rarely using only your grip strength. Right. You'd be using your arms and your shoulders and your chest more. You would probably be, as you were saying before, moving or pulling on or carrying heavy things that then challenge your cardiovascular system more. Because of course the split between what's cardio and what's strength training is just a. It's on paper like of course.

Right.

Those things get so easily mashed up. So I think in the end it's probably going to take 10 to 20 years to break all that apart. And look at it in pieces. It's going to turn out that those populations are simply moving more of their body more.

They're not just the people who are doing like captains of crush grip strength hand devices or dynamometers. That's not what makes you live longer. What makes you live longer are activities. Just, just being that person who's engaged in enough activities where you naturally have strong hand.

Exactly. Like they weren't sitting there prepping for the test. I mean you could have. I worked once with, I did a lot of hand, probably as you did too at university, like hand dynamics, because it's a basic strength test that we would often use in collecting data in the human performance lab. And I had one time this lady came in and pegged it like better than. And she was probably 65 years old and she pegged that thing better than some of the 20 year old athletes that we had there at the time. And I was, I'm like, I had her do it two or three times because I'm like, is this thing calibrated? What's going on? She was a cake decorator, so she was like grabbing these bags of frosting. She had essentially been training for this test her entire life. Now she didn't, she was very sedentary and she was, she did not pass any of her other physical tests. But if I looked at just her grip strength, it was off the charts. You're always going to find those outliers. And I always think of her of going, sometimes you have trained really well to one fitness test. But it's why we need. You need to pass all of the fitness tests to really come out on the other side.

Yeah. Now granted, my takeaway from the type of research that you discuss in the book when it comes to grip strengthening is this concept that if I'm doing a workout or I'm engaged in some kind of activity, I try to make it challenge my hands. I try and go out of my way to work with my hands. For example, when we go down and we get our alfalfa bales or our hay bales for the goats or for the chickens for the bedding in the barn, when I'm transferring those from the pickup truck down into the barn, I don't use a wheelbarrow. I actually try and make things somewhat biomechanically inefficient just so I get some of the, some of that crossover effect from having worked my body. And I figure out a way to kind of like grab the string in the middle of the bales. And carry them that way rather than push them in the wheelbarrow or rather than just kind of like, like hoist them up onto my shoulders. Or when I am, for example, at the gym and I'm loading up the plates onto the barbell, I try and use a pinch grip on the plates, right? Rather than just like picking up the plates and holding them normally so that I'm figuring out a way to work my grip, to work my hands, and to actually take advantage of some of these relationships between grip strength and all cause mortality. And so for me, it's just a matter of being cognizant of every single day doing something to challenge my grip. And since I started thinking about that, because I discovered this research a couple of years ago, my hands have changed. My fingers are like sausages now. People tell me this, they're like, dude, your hands are huge. And my brother, who's a farmer, his hands make mine look minuscule. And it's amazing how you can actually develop muscles in your frigging fingers. My hands are actually big and thick now. And granted, obstacle course racing has helped out with that quite a bit as well. But it's amazing how you can literally just watch your hand change before your eyes once you begin thinking with this mindset of, okay, how can I challenge my grip and do something every day? And for example, the other thing that I have hanging above the kitchen table in the living room is a yoga trapeze. And so I'll not only go hang upside down from that, but I also do single arm hanging just from the yoga trapeze, where every time I walk under it, I'll just hang myself from my right hand or my left hand for as long as I can. And putting tools and implements in your home that allow you to do these type of things, just like you've removed your furniture, these are all ways that you can take advantage of this idea of just every day doing something for your grip.

You know, I walk to the grocery store, as you do quite often to pick up that's, that's kind of a family foraging is like, let's walk the mile and pick up what we're going to need today. And you know, it's easy to throw. And this is why we can't like all movement. Movement is a category of many different geometries that are affecting your blood flow and your adaptations uniquely. So if I walk to the grocery store, fill my backpack with groceries, put it on, and walk home, my hands could be sedentary through that entire bout of movement right so whole body wise, my fitness measures went up. I loaded all these different parts, but my hands were not involved and hands are not involved in almost all exercise. So you could have these very sedentary hands, very sedentary hand skins. So I started taking a cloth bag and putting my groceries and it's like 30 pounds or 40 pounds of groceries that I'll have. It's a very strong cloth bag and I will just put them in this bag and hold the bag. So the bag is just hanging from one gripped hand and carry that until I'm tired and I put it over to the other hand and walk the mile home. So I'm actively changing the way that I accomplish going to the store to get groceries simply because it's not just using my hands. I'm using my forearms and my biceps and my shoulders differently. Where before I'm throwing it on in the easiest way. You know, putting something in a backpack is the easiest way of holding because it just dispenses that weight over a large part of your body. So that very little of your body has to work more. When you start giving one or two body parts, all of that work, you really up the ante of the same activity, the same amount of time that you are spending doing anyway. So that's my grip strength hack. And it's been. I just got done taking my daughter on a backpack of us and I was carrying a ton. We flew to where we were backpacking and I was carrying a ton of stuff and my hands were so strong, my, my forearms and my biceps could carry a very large amount of weight and her through some of it simply because I had been doing this grocery store training on a smaller scale, but the frequency was pretty high. So those little changes do make a difference.

Yeah, that's something that I do when I'm going through the airport. I'll. I'll get a lot of people asking me why I'm not using like the, like the roller bags. These things that make things more biomechanically efficient. What I do is I wear one backpack and I travel all over the world. I don't check any bags ever, but I wear one backpack. There's this big like high elite bag that carries a bunch of. A bunch of objects, like, like an insane number. It's one of those backpacks like that like expands.

Just put your family in there.

Right, exactly. But the, the other thing that I do is I have a book bag and it's got a lot of books and a lot of computers and all sorts of things in it, but I clutch that. I carry it up against my body. I don't drape it over my shoulder the way that you would a messenger bag. And throughout the entire airport, even if it's, you know, fricking Atlanta or LA or one of these big airports, I alternate between holding that at my side, like, gripping it in my. In my actual grip, clutching it to my chest as I would if I were, say, like, carrying a bucket during a Spartan race or a sandbag or something like that, and then carrying it on the other side. And I'll go through an entire airport and get a grip strengthening workout by just foregoing the temptation to just, like, kind of drape something over a joint. And not only has I gotten rid of, like, shoulder pain and back pain that I get from, you know, wandering through an airport with stuff draped over my body and in a biomechanically unfavorable format, but it's also vastly improved my grip strength. So, yeah, I mean, you just have to kind of think outside the box, you know, like you at the grocery store, things you'd be normally doing anyways. And you just figure out ways to challenge your grip using those methods. So, yeah, it's a matter of making life seems to be kind of the theme of this podcast, slightly uncomfortable to make your body better. One thing I wanted to ask you about, Katie, was this concept of bone. And you talk about the bones being wet, the bones being like goo. Can you go into why you thought that was important to talk about in the book and what you mean by that?

Well, I added it to the book because after these, like, denser bones, which was always confusing to me, because I also knew that supple bones, like you wanted supple bones and also more dense bones, right? Because dry or brittle bones were more likely to fracture. And this also, also alongside this was bones that were more dense were stronger and less likely to fracture. And I couldn't too, because bone minerals, minerals, by definition, are inorganic solids. So it was just, it was an area of biomechanics should line up across the board right there. There shouldn't. There should never really be conflicts within a science. It just means that something isn't dialed in quite as right. So because those two things were in conflict for me and had been for, like, 10 years, I never really quite got what was going on. But then they discovered that a large portion of your bone mineral density is actually goo that we might need another definition of, like that organic solids might not be the best way to describe a mineral because as far as your bone mineral density goes, they're wet minerals. They are minerals that are packaged within goo. And so once that discovery was made, then those two pieces of contradictory information were able to not be in contradiction anymore. So it was just this idea like, okay, so I included it because it's very important, I think, for people to understand how dynamic science is that you know a lot of the things, if you're at that cocktail party and you're like really passionate about this thing and this thing is, someone else is like, well what about this thing? And you're kind of arguing over the thing that sometimes it could be, there's just not one, that there's another piece of data that's not known yet that will make those two things align quite nicely. So there's just a lot of argument in general over a lot of things. So it's my way of going, we probably need less argument and more just discovery over time. And then things will start falling into place. And so just as I wanted people to understand that muscle is also expanding radially and that the onset of vasodilation is, is linked to that radial motion and thus making it easier to understand why it's mechanical in nature. If we talk a lot about bone health, it's nice to recognize that you don't, that you don't want bones to be hard per se. You want them to be dense and also supple. And so it was just a, to me a cool tidbit that I think people who are interested in movement and health, it would be find exciting or maybe it's just me, I just found it super exciting.

No, I think it's interesting because the science that you cite from the University of Cambridge about how they discovered the shock absorbing goo in bone highlights the fact that that bone mineral itself, it's made up of goo. Like the citrate binds like these mineral crystals. And so what you find is that people who probably have a mineral deficient diet, not only would they have lower bone density, but they would have like harder bone. Like the bones would be less, less pliable, the bones would be less, less gooey, even though we don't think of our bones in that way. So like, like one of the ways you could stave off not low bone density, but I, but I guess low amounts of this bone goo of bone pliability, so to speak, would be like, like keeping yourself well hydrated with the mineral rich diet, like, like drinking extremely mineral rich water and going out of your way to like use lots of good rich Salt on your food or using like trace liquid minerals and basically being cognizant of this fact that it's not just about loading the bone to increase bone density, but it's about actually introducing a wide range of minerals. So you maintain this gooeyness.

Yeah, you need all of it. It takes the load to get the goo to the bone. But then if you have the load and none of the building blocks and none of the mineral or the, you know, extra fluid, I imagine. Right. Those have to be manufactured by our body. Like anytime we want to adapt or change, you have to remember that your body has to make a new anatomy part. And so it not only needs an abundance of those foundation, foundational building blocks, it might also take other things that provide the energy to make that fabrication. Right. You're making, you know, quote, something out of nothing, although not really. So you have to really watch all input.

Yeah, yeah.

And.

And it's very similar to. And this was one of the last things that I wanted to kind of dive into with you. This concept from, I believe the book that you cited is the Human Machine by George Bridgman, where you get into this fact that you shouldn't only load your bone and perhaps shoe furniture at some times. But speaking of chewing or chewing, chew your food and not blend, not use meat tenderizers or graters or food processors or blenders or grinders or knives all the time, but actually force your fricking teeth and jaw and mouth to break down food all on its own. Can you get into the concept behind that and how you implement that in your life?

Well, it's just another. It's another sedentary area. Right. Like you have almost. You grew up in a culture, we all grow up in a culture where the work that our faces and our jaws used to do has been almost completely outsourced to machines that have milled or cooked or tenderized, blended our food down. Where mastication that. That physical process of converting, you know, something that you put into your mouth into something that you will then ingest. Like, we've gotten rid of all of that motion. We are so used to talking about movement as relating to fitness that we forget about the non fitness benefits to movement. So I just got back from sitting on Alzheimer's panel, a panel about movement and Alzheimer's. And they know that mastication, that act of chewing, is part of the way the brain receives blood flow. So you might want to think about us only smoothie diet. Right. Because if you've eliminated the chewing, there is a purpose in that mastication and it's blood flow, but it's also being able to continue to masticate. So you are keeping the bone density of the jaw and the muscles in the face really well developed. It's not only the jaw. Like, if you put your hands on the side of your face and chew, you're going to feel around your temples move, right? Chewing is a very vigorous activity, but it doesn't fall under the fitness category for most people. They would have never thought of their face needing to work out. But if you've ever gone, there's a man at the Polynesian Traditional center in Hawaii who's. Who does things like he tears a raw coconut open with his teeth. Something else to remember is that your teeth, they were not only you.

I can barely get a raw coconut open with a freaking machete.

I know, I know. And the guy's just like, he's peeling it off with his teeth. Like his jaw and his. And his like beautiful huge white smile, you know, of just like all these teeth just nice in a row. And his face is just, just so buff, you know, like his jaw muscles are huge. That you're. That. We used to use our. Our mouths as tool. As a tool. Like now it's like, oh, don't open that with your teeth. You break all your teeth off. But they used to be, you know, you would tan leather. You would masticate large quantities of food. A lot of people would like, there's a lot of drinks, like traditional drinks that are the mastication of these plants that is done over like an entire day where everyone's like chewing and chewing and spitting and chewing and spitting into this big pot that's slowly being developed. You would make. I just got back making a purse out of buckskin, and I had to make a cord. I had to make my own string and my own rope. And I had to use my mouth as the third hand, right, to hold this piece as I'm twisting and weaving. Because string is made out of twisted fibers that are then twisted around each other. So I have to make my own string in this course that I'm taking. And my jaw is completely tired because I'm not used to using it really for anything. And so we have this idea of a whole food diet. But I would counter to say it's only whole chemically. It's not whole mechanically, thus, it's not whole. There's a whole other element of processed to our otherwise whole food diet. When things are chopped with steel and blended using electricity or cooked to the point of just falling apart and softened. And there is a value. There's a need to use your jaw and your teeth and the muscles of your face in a way that keeps those tissues that are not only used for, but benefit from that motion healthy.

Yeah. And even for me, when I'll make my smoothie, I add things like coconut flakes and cacao nibs and all sorts of chewables on top of it and then blend it thick enough to eat with a spoon. So I actually chew my smoothie. What's the saying Go. You should chew your liquids and. And drink your solid. Something like that anyways, though, so it's not like you can't have your morning kale smoothie or whatever, but you need to be cognizant of the fact that you should challenge your mandibles. The other thing that I do a lot of now, this is after interviewing Dean Carnazes, the runner who told me about how the ancient Spartans and Greek warriors and Greek runners used to chew on this stuff to strengthen their masseter muscles and also to induce gastric flow and reduce gastric distress while they're running. Is this mastic gum, which is like gum, but it's really kind of like hard and difficult to chew and your jaw muscles get tired. But I chew on this stuff now, and it actually helps out with not only your vagus nerve and your trigeminal nerve, but also the strength of your jaw muscles and the bone density in your teeth and your jaw. So it's just in line with the kind of things that you talk about in the book. And for those of you who want to listen to that podcast episode, just go look for my episode with Dean Carnazes and we get into mastic gum and I'll put a link in the show. Notes to that one. It's actually a really interesting show. But yeah, that's what I do now is I'm constantly chewing on mastic gum. Except, of course, when I'm podcasting, since that would get annoying. But I'll put that one in there. For those of you who want to listen to the podcast with Dean, where we talk about that, we really only scratched the surface, by the way. For those of you listening in, in terms of what is in, not just this book by Katie Movement Matters, but also all of her other books, and I've done other podcasts with her, too, that you should definitely listen into. So I'm gonna link to that and a whole bunch of the other stuff that we talked about. If you just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com MovementMatters I'll link to all that and you can check it out. And in the meantime, Katie, thanks so much for coming on the show and giving your time and sharing all this stuff with us. I love your work and every time you get a new book, like I mentioned, I just eat it up.

Well, thanks for having me, Ben. I really appreciate it.

Awesome. All right, folks, well, thanks for listening in again. The URL is BenGreenfieldFitness.com Movement Matters, where you can learn more about Kati previous podcast episodes. I've done with her all the shownotes for this show and until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Katie Bauman signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

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