Why You Shouldn't Suck In Your Stomach, Why Standing All Day Is Bad For You, And How Kegels Are Killing Your Core.

Hey, it's Ben Greenfield here. Now, occasionally, in lieu of our normal weekly crazy Q and A podcast, I'll release a special interview that I find to be especially thought provoking, entertaining, educational, and extremely compelling and unique. So today is one of those specific interviews. I hope you enjoy it. And now onto today's interview. In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, you're putting in kinks into your hose, in your hips, and in your knees. And these areas correlate to the highest areas of plaque occurrence. You can think of it less as I need to get my heart rate up as opposed to can I just break up my geometry? Not just looking away from your computer, but looking at something really, really far away, it becomes uncomfortable on the floor without a pillow. There's these natural signals to change position that are muted, you know, by sleeping on pillows or Matt Hypertonicity of the pelvic floor is a very large problem in men and women right now. A lot of people are trying to work on constipation while they hold their stomach tight all the time, which creates an upward force opposite to the direction of where the food's trying to go. Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. We provide you with everything you need to know for total performance, fat loss, recovery, digestion, sleep, brain and hormone optimization. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you just want to show a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfield Fitness.com.

Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And you may remember member biomechanist Katie Bowman from the podcast. Episode that we had a couple years ago was really popular. The name of that podcast was Making Biomechanics Fun. How to fix your body, align your posture, and look like a million bucks from head to toe. Well, Katie's back. She just wrote a new book called Move youe DNA and I've got the dog eared copy of it sitting right here in front of me because just like all of Katie's books and her blog, which is over@katiesays.com, always got some really interesting information that really kind of goes against the grain a lot of the times, which I love, she thinks outside the box. And you're going to get to join in as I ask Kati about some of this out of the box information. In today's episode, we're going to go over everything from why sucking in your stomach might not be the best idea to why standing all day could be bad for you. What Katie's beef is with Kegel exercises and a lot more. So as you're listening in, if you want to access Katie's book or any of the things that we talk about in the show notes, I'm going to put the show notes for you over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com MoveYourDNA that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com moveyourdna which also happens to be the title of the book by Katie, Move youe DNA, Restore youe Health Through Natural Movement. And the photo on the front of this. Katie, I gotta ask you about the photo on the front of your book. It's like somebody hunched over a campfire. Is that you?

It's not me, no.

What's the idea behind that? It seems kind of random, honestly.

I know. Nor is she moving, you know, like she's sitting still. So everyone's like, what's with the person sitting still on the COVID of the book about movement? But, you know, in the book itself, I kind of explained the COVID by talking about how, you know, if you're in the fitness world, you know, you and I teach, we teach teaching movement. You're coaching people through exercise. There's that level of movement, but then there's also this other level of movement where you yourself are being moved by the environments in which you dwell. So the example that I think is easiest for people to get is, you know, you're looking at a screen, maybe you're looking at a screen right now and it's probably 30 to 40 inches away from your face, unless it's your phone in case it's 10 inches from your face. And so you by, by you picking with your arm how far to hold your screen from your face. There's a response in the muscles in your eye that control the shape of your lens, that allow you to see something up close or not. That process is called accommodation. So your environment, by staying in your house all the time, you are being moved, your environment is moving you, it's moving all of your tiny parts, tiny muscles that aren't on any app about, you know, how to get stronger buff, you know, but they are muscles still the same and they are moving to accommodate for, you know, your habitat. And so, so she's outside right now on the COVID of the book. And even though she is still in a, in sitting in a squat, not running, you know, she's not cycling, she's not doing a pull up or anything like that, she is being moved. She is moving in a different way because she's sitting there as opposed to in her house, the. The. Her sensors in her ears are being moved because she can hear bugs, and the muscles that change the pupil are being moved because she's sitting in front of a campfire instead of sitting in front of a screen. So that is movement still the same. And that's really the level that I think people need to start thinking about movement.

Yeah. Movement is not just like moving your muscles.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

Or consciously moving your muscles.

Right, right.

Well, let's just jump in with, like, a really popular form of movement that I know a lot of people seem to be kind of obsessed with these days, and that's st. Like standing workstations. And I'm standing right now while we're talking, and people are all about standing. And you have a part in the book on page 60 where you talk about how standing is the new sitting. So rather than sitting is the new smoking, which is what everybody's saying, of course. Right. You say standing is the new sitting. So what's the problem with standing all day?

Well, it's one. It's still stillness. It is still stillness. And. And although the loads are. Are better for you than sitting all day, they're really better for you because they're different. They're not necessarily, you know, more. More nutritious. It's not a better static position. It's only better because it's different than how you have consumed stillness in the past. You have to use more muscle to do it. But one of the reasons that almost all of us have chairs at work, you know, people listening to this, people who work all over, you know, the world, is because the bulk of movement used to be doing. Be done standing in an industrial line. And so there are people who used to stand eight to 10 hours a day, and they had very particular standing injuries. And so I just don't want people to forget that we've already gone through the standing injuries. And so, yes, there are now sitting injuries, and then there were. We had to sit better. But then there are still sitting injuries, which just seem to be associated with repeatedly sitting in a chair, no matter how you do it, whether it's ergonomically savvy or not, that what we really need to do is kind of recognize that there is no optimal way to be still, that our goal should always be trying to move more. That being said, I am standing also as you are, but I am doing lots of subtle movements. So although my face is not really moving away from the microphone as we're talking, I'm still In front of my computer, I'm still accomplishing my work. I'm not really still in the way that I think a lot of people are using their standing workstations. Right. Which is just standing in front of the computer and typing. I've got things going on under my feet. I have textured mats, I'm shifting my weight. There's ways to move that are so small that if you can incorporate those, you don't have to leave your place of work to still be moving. So that's kind of the direction I'd like to see more dynamic workstations as opposed to standing workstations.

Yeah. And you said that we've already gone through a period in time where we had standing injuries. What would some of those standing injuries be like? What are things that people should be aware of?

The biggest one I would say is like varicosity, varicose veins. And that's if you look at, if you think a lot of people think of it as a lower leg issue. It's like, oh, it's a bulging vein, it's a cosmetic issue, but it really is a problem with your cardiovascular system. Right. Your veins are part of your highly valuable cardiovascular system. So it is a bigger, it is a bigger issue. And the varicosity is just an early warning sign, you know, that you get of your. The venous return system is not working as it should. So that's, that's why I like keep people moving with their lower legs a lot when they're standing.

Do you use like compression gear or. And I've actually recommended on this show before, like doing like yoga inversion poses, things like that to help with blood pooling in the legs.

Well, that's kind of like one time, right? So with load, something else that I talk about in the book, load cycles are really what is driving the blood back up to your body. If we're going to talk specifically about the lower leg. So any sort of inversion, putting your legs up a wall, you know, compressive gear that can create a one time motion, but it's not. The issue with varicosity is this repetitive downward load. So even more I think that you would want to think about is how can I, while I am standing and my blood is being pulled down under the gravitational load, be doing something with my legs that causes it to pump back up. And so your venous return system depends heavily on muscular action which is active, not passive. So you can compress to keep fluid from coming down in there. But that's not really working on the movement level. Itself, meaning there's forces and sarcomere contractions that should be driving it back up for you. You want to try to get that as much as possible.

Okay. So did these standing mats, anti fatigue mats. There's like one called the topo. I know that's done on Kickstarter, and I've got one standing on right now. It's like this dense foam that kind of moves underneath you. Are those things that will help with the varicosity problem?

Yeah. You know, I think the cool thing about the topo mat that I don't think they're actually out yet, but some of the research that they did is they had people stand on a common anti fatigue mat, which could be a gel mat or it could be, you know, a dense foam or whatever. It's flat. They added topo, added texture. So it actually has hills and bumps and it's not symmetrical. And then they just put a force plate underneath both. And they found that people, just because of the texture itself, were stimulated to move. That texture itself might be an input that changes how muscles are firing. And they did another cool study. I don't know, it's been about 10 years where they just took inserts in people's shoes that were textured. They had different textures, like little tiny dots and little lines. And they had EMG on calf muscles. And just by someone standing or walking in a shoe with a teeny tiny bit of texture was enough to create calf muscle use that was different than calf muscle use. You find just in static standing, that the texture itself is deforming the joints in your foot. And then you get, of course, a muscular response to that. So texture is key. I think if, even if you're like, well, I don't have a mat, just go get some towels and wad them up underneath your feet. Right. At least you'll be changing the incline of your ankle. You're still getting your work done, but you'll be moving more.

What are you using right now?

I've got a. I got a half foam cylinder, right, the half dome that we use a lot. And I've got a bolster behind me that is, you know, 10 inches high. So I'll just stand on that with one leg. And I've got a cobblestone mat, which is, you know, just something that you buy. And so I just kind of cycle through. I'm going to be here for an hour. That doesn't mean I don't have to stop moving, you know, to get it done. So I'm just fidgeting while I'm talking, I'm moving my feet and my ankles. And of course then your knees and your hips move as well, and your pelvis shifts and your core muscles fire to accommodate it. And it's tiny. It's not big fitness, endurance type of motion, yet it's still essential.

Yeah, cobblestones sound very European too.

It is. Just saying it. Well, and you can do, you can get it. I saw people are starting to do like a, do it yourself, where they get a tray, like a thin, maybe 2 inch deep tray, and they just fill rocks and sand from outside, bring it in and put it in front of their, you know, at home workstation. If you're lucky enough to work from.

Home, it's a great idea, unless you have a cat. So you also talk about, about the idea behind arterial stiffening, which we all think of as like something that, that happens just like to your, you know, your coronary arteries or something like that. But you get into the idea of how the geometry of your vessels could actually change when you, for example, are in a still position for most of the day. Can you explain what's happening there and why it could be a problem, for example, to be still all day and then say like, go for a run or go do a weight training workout?

Well, you know, your, your arterial walls, they are moving too. They're constantly moving to accommodate fluctuations in intensity. You know, it's kind of like a really beautiful water canal. You're trying to keep water flowing smoothly through the whole entire body as much as possible. But when you assume a particular geometry. So people, some people think of sitting in terms of metabolic variables. Like, okay, so if I'm still, I'm just not putting out a lot of metabolic activity. But biomechanically, I look at position more in terms of geometry. So you have your venous and arterial system. It branches, you know, goes from big tubes to smaller tubes to smaller tubes. That branching is not really arbitrary. That branching is maximizing the flow to keep it what we call laminar smooth flow. So you've got all of these natural branches that allow movement of blood coming from big tube splitting into two smaller tubes to make that trend transition smoothly so that blood is flowing in the same direction. Laminar flow is the opposite to turbulence. If you've ever been on an airplane, it's bumping around. What happens is the air in the sky is not all flowing in the same direction and it's getting bumped and you're kind of hitting it like a skipping a rock. And so what happens is, airplane is, yes, still moving forward, but it's also moving up and down while it's moving forward. So if you plotted the vectors of it, you would see that the airplane is kind of moving in different directions. So your blood, yes, it's all moving forward, but if it starts going up and down, there are particles in it, you know, that we call blood cells. And those can interact with the walls, which are also cells. And so when you start having cells banging up against walls, then you start getting little tiny injuries. And those injuries are in the form of increasing the mass of the walls. We call it plaque. But I like to kind of remind everyone that it's a. It's a defensive mechanism. It's a protective mechanism. Your plaque is kind of the spot where your arterial wall is trying to take care of itself to beef up from the trauma that you're applying. Because when you sit, when you. When you assume a repetitive geometry, let's not. Let's not just make it sitting, but it is sitting for most of us. If you look at the way your hips bend and your knees bend repetitively, chronically, not just like the day of your workout, but the last 27 years leading up to your workout, you've been assuming the same position. So your stiffness of your arteries is, in a way that protects you from what you do most often, which is sitting. So when you get up to then do something with endurance where you require a surge of blood, you're accelerating your blood. Your walls of your blood vessels should be able to accommodate for that by changing their diameter, because being able to change their diameter is one way they can control their blood flow. But in order to be able to control their diameter, they need to be soft and malleable, just like any other muscle. Right? Any other muscle. When you want to get into a position, it should be able to yield, and it should have this flexibility, if you will. But our walls of our blood vessels lose that because they don't one, they don't open and close on a regular basis because we don't do very much movement throughout a day and throughout a lifetime. And then you get up and you do something high and high intensity. Then you end up accelerating your blood through turbulent, turbulently, turbulently. I'm not sure if that's a word, but you know what I mean? And then it ends up having a potential penalty associated with it. So I think that's probably why a lot of the guidelines for things like high blood pressure come with, you know, trying to watch your intensity, because there Is this association between intensity and pre existing cardiovascular conditions? Because those cardiovascular conditions are an indication that your cardiovascular system mechanism isn't behaving as it's supposed to.

Okay, so for example, if we were sitting all day, that could potentially take all these loops and all these branches of the blood vessels that you just described and essentially create almost like, like areas of higher resistance where you're, where you're kinking those all day long in that seated position. And when that happens, you could get potential for, for example, increased blood pressure or even. Are you saying that might contribute to plaque buildup as well?

Yeah, that you're actually. So I think of it this way. If you have a hallway in your house, let's say most hallways are straight. If you roll ball down a hallway, it's rolling down straight, straight, straight. Now imagine that someone puts a kink in your hallway and you are still rolling the ball down as you always did. You're going to increase the number of times that that ball interacts with the wall, because there's a wall there now and there shouldn't be. And the area, the volume of your hallway didn't change. The only thing that changed was the position of it. So if you think of, you know, you think of your carotid arteries on the right and left side of your neck, and you think of them as tubes, and then you jut your head way forward, you know, towards your computer screen, and you imagine that blood's still coming up through this area. You're putting in kinks into your hose, in your hips and in your knees. And these areas correlate to the highest areas of plaque occurrence, which is really interesting. You know, in the whole plaque discussion, it's always approached as things like how's your diet and how's your exercise in general? That, that your diet and exercise have a sustain systemic response on your body that is arthroprotective or, or that would keep plaque at bay. But again, biomechanically, it's like, yes, but the whole, the whole fact that people accumulate plaque in very specific areas, right side versus left side, like everyone, when you have plaque, you don't have it everywhere. You have it in a few local places. That, that is a huge red flag, biomechanically, of going, what's the mechanism here? Because it's not laying down systemically.

Wow. Okay, so basically anybody who's listening in, who has like an office job, who's sitting for long periods of time, should be making it a big point to get up and move, which they've probably already heard, but now they've got all the more reason to do it because you're basically increasing your risk of having, you know, basically, for example, like a heart attack or other issues if you're getting up and exercising hard at the end of a long day of being sedentary like that.

Yeah. And I think it helps make sense of more of why, why one bout of exercise doesn't mitigate the risk of sitting all day. Right. That's the whole sitting is a new smoke. And it's like, hey, even people who exercise regularly, it's this whole long bout of being still or in a repetitive geometry that is the risk factor. So just get, I mean, get up every 30 minutes. Just break up. Think of it as breaking up your geometry. You can think of it less as I need to get my heart rate up for a little bit as opposed to, can I just break up my geometry? Because if you're at work, you're a lot more likely to break up your geometry, which doesn't require, you know, special clothes or breaking a sweat or you don't need a shower, but you can go. You know what, I'm going to go for a two minute walk and in this two minute walk, change the hallways of my blood vessels in my knees and my hips and my head and my shoulder. You know, go and reach up a wall and just stretch out your body and then sit back down or stand up or, you know, sit in your chair cross legged or whatever. See if you can assume a different geometry when you are still because that is also breaking up your old geometry.

Yeah. One of the things that I do, one, one rule that I actually follow during the day is, is I sit. But my rule is I only sit to eat or I sit to drive. Those are the two times I sit. And the rest of the time my rule is I just have to find some other position to be in. But I do find that sitting to eat, whether it's sitting on the floor or sitting in a chair is kind of relaxing. And then the rest of the day I just don't sit. So that's my rule, only sit to eat. I want to get into some other things that you talk about in the book, Katie. You talk about core activation. You say core activation, s' more activation. And it's kind of interesting because we've all been led to believe that we should just kind of like suck in our stomachs during the day to keep our abs activated. And that's a really good way to just like passively train your Core all day long and also, like, look really good from the side or look really good posturally. Why are you not a fan of core activation like that?

Well, I think it's, I think my, my resistance to core activation is that it's fairly, it's a contrived motion. But even, I think even more specifically is that with loads to the body, they are supposed to fluctuate. So I think right now we're in this, you know, we're, we're, we are reacting to huge amounts of stillness and bad posture and bad form and bad alignment and all those things by creating this perfect utopian body position and muscle activation. Forgetting, you know, it's very similar to wanting to replace sitting with standing. We want to replace abs that never contract with abs that are always contracted. Forgetting that every motion that you do is actually a unique abdominal contraction that if you break abdominal contraction down to more than just on or off, that, you know, if you twist and if you're doing like some gardening or if you're digging a hole, you know, your rib cage rotates relative to your pelvis, and that is a different load if you're digging or if you're twisting and that if you were moving in nature and you didn't have any of the things that you had, the amount of work that would be done between your rib cage and your pelvis, what we call the core, the amount of work that would be done there would be much higher, as would the variation of the type of work. And so biomechanically speaking, because move youe DNA is not just about loads. It's also about the genetic expression that is created by particular loads. And so that's what I'm most interested in is that there are, is looking at the very specific cellular behaviors outside of loads that it is not natural to have your abs engaged in the way that we do it. Right. Belly button to spine, you know that.

That whole thing suck in your stomach, basically.

Yeah. That is one load. And that one load pushes on your organs in a particular way, right? You're, you are a closed system. So if you have organs, everyone's hopefully listening has their organs. You have your organs inside. And then you fire your TVA or pull your belly button to your spine or suck it in. Those organs have to be displaced somewhere. So when you start doing it all the time, you have to go, well, what was happening to the stuff that was in there before it went under this particular load? And then if you think about it, you've got a highly repetitious Displacement or pressure system. And then that comes with anything repetitious comes with, you know, usually injury. So that's why we add variability to our workout. So that if we don't do the same thing over and over and over again, Break down these tissues, not train these other tissues. So everyone's this kind of hyper vigilant about keeping their abdomen fixed. But they're doing it in an unnatural frequency. And an unnatural position like you being upright with your belly button to your spine creates a certain pattern that then when you go to do other biological things for a lot of people, like get, have babies and go to the bathroom, digest your food, your mechanical environment can affect these things. Because it would be much more natural for you to be having your stomach relaxed a little bit here when you're sitting. And when you're transitioning, it should engage. And then when you talk really loud, it should engage more. But then it should soften back up. And we've just picked up stomach activation 273. Set the dial. And it just sits there all the time. And then your pelvic floor and your diaphragm and your abdominal contents and the tension in these muscles adapts unnaturally.

Okay, so basically, in the same way that we should be moving all day and not just standing all day, we should be allowing our abs to kind of like stick out some of the time, to twist side to side from some of the time, to suck up some of the time, but never just like hold this flat ab position because that will create almost like a. Is it like it gets stuck in that position? Do you create like limited mobility or what happens physiologically or biomechanically when you're just like constantly sucking it in?

Well, repetitive positioning causes adaptation, I think most people know, but the adaptation I think is the mechanism of adaptation. It might be a little confusing. So if you put on a shoe that has a heel on it, your muscles in your calf have to accommodate for that shoe, right? You, you're basically pointing your toe. So whatever happens, when you point your toe, the calf muscles shorten. Happens when you also put a high heel on, that causes chronic plantar flexion. But when you do something chronically, at first, your plantar flexion, your pointing of your toe is just the muscle length overlapping. And then you take the shoe off and it goes back. But when you do something repetitively, eventually what happens is you, it's no longer muscle tissue overlapping, shortening, and then getting longer. When you're done, you actually lose muscle mass in series. So the actual length the number of sarcomeres in the chain of muscle gets less on one side and becomes longer on the other side. So you actually start playing with your mass distribution when you do something repetitively. And so a lot of people can't relax their abdomen. And also, to clarify, there's a difference between sucking your stomach in and firing your tva. So if everyone. A lot of people will suck their stomach in when they think they are firing their tva and then some.

What's the tva?

Transverse abdominis. The transverse muscles that go, like, when you're pulling your belly button toward your spine, the muscle that kind of runs like a belt, you know, in that direction that people will fire that all the time to move their belly button in towards their spine.

And.

And then other people will actually take a breath and suck, pull their belly. Their belly button will move in because they've taken their diaphragm inside their body and lifted it up towards the heart and lungs, creating a vacuum which passively pulls the viscera and all your guts in your stomach up. And then that is what moves the belly button in. So there's a whole different way to get your stomach in. One that doesn't have anything to do with the stomach muscles at all. And for a lot of people, hiatal hernias is a huge deal. Right. Where your guts end up in your thoracic cavity.

Yeah.

So that's not great, but it's also created, like you create it yourself. You. You create a vacuum all the time by sucking in. That displaces things up. And eventually your guts end up where your lungs are and you have to have surgery to pull it out. So can you.

Can you explain, by the way, how this could be also linked to constipation?

Yeah, well, you know, stuff's trying to move down. Stuff is trying to move down and out. And the movement of your abdominal muscles is part of that system that gets things down. It's not like you don't live in a vacuum. So your intestines are inside of a pressurized cavity that you can change the pressure based on what you do with your muscles and how you sit and. Or don't and how much you move or don't. And so a lot of people are trying to work on constipation while unbeknownst to them, they hold their stomach tight all the time, which creates an upward force. It creates a force opposite to the direction of where the food's trying to go. So you yourself can keep your food static in your gut.

Wow.

That's crazy. I know.

That is really crazy. Especially for, like, all the people who exercise a bunch, who take a pride in a flat stomach, always sucking in their stomach. Like maybe there's a reason they walk around looking like they're constipated. Interesting.

Hey, everybody. Brock here. I hope you're enjoying the podcast so far. And if you are, I hope you will check out the sponsor of today's show. And That's Harry's from Harry's dot com. That's H-A-R-R-Y-S dot com. What is Harry's, you ask? Well, Harry's bought this blade factory over in Germany, and that factory has been crafted, crafting some of the highest quality blades for over a century. Harry's has taken these amazing blades, cut out the middleman, and is now selling them to you for a fraction of the price that you would pay for a drugstore brand. So you can get this starter kit from Harry's for 15 bucks, which includes a razor, three blades, and your choice of shaving cream, which my girlfriend loves the smell of when I'm not sporting my big winter beard like I am right now, or their foaming shave gel. Personally, I like the gel, but I know Ben is a big fan of the cream, probably because he likes to pretend he has a big white beard like I actually do when he shaves. Anyway, as an added bonus, you get $5 off when you use the code BEN over at Harry's.com so you get an entire month of shaving for just $10. Plus the shipping is free, which is awesome because shipping can really suck if it costs more than the item itself. So use the coupon code BEN to get $5 off at Harry's.com now back to the podcast with my buddy, Katie Bowman.

Okay, so you also, I want to talk about a few of the other really interesting things that you get into. And, and one of the things that you talk about, because I've always heard that it's a good idea when you're staring at a computer, staring at a screen like you were talking about earlier, to just like stop and take breaks to look away. But you talk about why that really might not be enough when it comes to taking care of your eyes, especially if you're like a computer person. Can you explain?

Yeah. So near work is the research term for things like looking at your computer or reading or playing an instrument or knitting or whatever you're doing with your eyes repetitively. That's, that's again, 30 inches away from your face. So the recommendation is, well, you need to take a computer break, look away from your computer or whatever, and that's fine. However, that does not automatically work out the muscles of the eye because if you look away, if everyone looks away from their computer for a minute, chances are you look away to something that is still only 4 to 5ft in front of your face. Meaning that the muscles that control the shape of your I lens don't really get as big of a release as much as you think. It's like if you pull a bicep curl all the way up, it's like saying you're going to relax your biceps by dropping them one inch down and then you go back to your computer and pull them back up. So what I suggest would be the equivalent to letting your arms all the way down after a bicep curl, and that would be not just looking away from your, from your computer, but looking at something really, really far away. Trying to look at something that was a quarter or a half mil away. Try to look out a window and see the farthest possible thing that you can. And in doing so, you will release the full contraction that is created in your eye to look at things up close.

What if you're inside and like the farthest thing away is like whatever, like 20ft?

Well, you got to get to, I mean, try to get to a window. I mean, I realize that not everyone has a long distance view, but at least a few times a day you should be looking at something really, really far away. And if you can't, if you're not by a window, then I suggest moving your desk if you can, to look at something far away. It's distant, dependent, it has nothing to do with anything else besides how far it is between the object that you are looking at and your eyeball.

Have you ever experimented with. There's something called the Bates method out there. There's also a newer version of that called the vision gym. And it's just like a series of eye charts and exercises you can do, for example, like, like with a pencil, like convergence and divergence exercises for all the muscles around the eye. Have you ever messed around with or seen any of that stuff?

I haven't. I've seen a lot of it. And there's, you know, there's a lot of new stuff popping up and a lot of people have been working on this for a long period of time. Of working with, like, you gotta take off your glasses and your contact lenses and holding up something that you can focus on right at your field of vision, whatever distance, for me, it would be like 3 inches from my face because I'm horribly myopic. And then you just start pulling it away and then refocus there. And you just spend, you know, days working on just the perimeter. I've started taking walks without any sort of supported vision, you know, in areas where I know the terrain well enough to know where I'm going. And that seems to help. It's helped with things like eye headaches. I'm not measuring my vision with any regularity right now, so I don't know. But I've had other people say that they have actually had measured from their optometrist improvements in vision just by doing those types of things.

Wow. So about how often do you think it would be a good idea to just like take a break and look away?

At least, at least every 30 minutes. Prepare it with getting up out of your chair, I guess, if you can. But you know, there's some new apps that will darken your screen for you that will. You can set a timer and it'll just put your screen dark for a second. And it's like you need to take a two minute break and you get to set the frequency and the message. And for me, it's just hard for me to break away from a project without some sort of external reminder. I'm good about the walking. I'm not so good about the looking. Like my eyes consume everything, but with that it's just like, well, the computer's dark and then I just go look out a window. And even if you're on a walk or outside, take a peek, pun intended, to see how far you actually are looking in front of you. Because we are just. You go outside. And this is one of the reasons why, you know, with outdoor vision people, people who go outside on a regular basis, it seems to be protective for myopia. You know, that's the literature. It's a huge. Myopia has become very prevalent. I think it's like 80% in Asian countries now where there used to be one or two kids with glasses in elementary schools. Now it's like 80%. It's a big deal. And they know being outside is protective and they were thinking like vitamin D, but they're just keep eliminating all those factors. But we go outside and we tend to not look that far away because we always have looked, we always look close. Right. You just. It's the same thing with working out. It's the same thing with how much mobility you have in your hamstrings and your chest. If you only use a little bit of motion, you just go back there repetitively. So you have to kind of have a strategy and look away if you're running, if you're out for a walk or whatever, riding your bike, look. Look farther into the distance, because that is using a different muscle, same muscle in a different way.

Yeah, there's a bunch of apps out there. Like, some of the ones I know of are like, protect your vision is one. There's one called Work Rave. Timeout is another. But if you just, like, go to, like, the App Store, you know, the App Store might not be the best place to do it. I'll. You know what I'll do? I'll try and find some links for the show notes for people who want to, like, download some of these apps that you're talking about. Just because those. Those can be useful if you just don't want to remember to look away.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, cool. So a few other things that I wanted to ask you about. You talk about how you're not a fan of pillows. And I gotta say, like, I recently got, like, a really nice mattress. Like, a really, really nice mattress. And I love it. Like, I'm. I'm just, like, sleeping like a freaking baby. And then I read your book and I got a little bit guilty. I'm like, am I just, like, being, like, too nice to my body during the night and not allowing it to build up toughness because I'm sleeping on this super soft memory foam mattress? I mean, like, can you explain your take on the whole mattress pillow thing?

Well, it's just, again, it's limiting. It's limiting motion. Motion that is biologically necessary. So there is, you know, in the same way, there's nothing wrong with sitting in a chair. The problem is sitting in a chair all the time. There's nothing wrong with a pillow or a mattress. It's just the exclusive use of it. And then it's the inability to not use it. You know, a lot of people, when they go to camp or they go to a hotel and they sleep in a mattress or with a pillow that's not theirs, they're, like, wrecked. Their body's totally wrecked. They have no ability to accommodate these tiny, subtle shifts in ranges of motion that come from a different mattress and a different pillow. So it's just that you are. I mean, you hate to say it. You're like, you're not really strong enough to sleep in any way different in the same way that you can't really lift weights or do a move or some sort of exercise that you haven't done before. It's the law of specificity on a very, very small scale. On a scale that you wouldn't really apply it to automatically because it's like, I'm just laying there. What's the difference? Like, well, imagine if you were laying on the ground, the pressure and the way that gravity would be interacting with all of your cells and how you would not assume a repetitive geometry so easily if it weren't for the giant, you know, bits of cotton that we sleep in. That if you were like animals that we are like other animals that we have and that we see, you would shift your position more often because it becomes uncomfortable on the floor without a pillow. And it becomes, there's these natural signals to change position that are muted, you know, by sleeping on pillows or mattresses. So I don't, I don't, I hate to say that I'm not a fan because I love sitting and sleeping on fluffy things. It's just my body feels better for not doing it and it took a while.

So. Did you not use a mattress?

No, we have, we have pads on the floor that are like about 2 inches of foam. And I don't use a pillow anymore. But, you know, it was a long process and I found actually that I was unable to sleep with the pillow. So once I became unable to sleep with one, then of course it became my thing. It's like, okay, I need to maintain the mobility to have one. And so I think if people are listening and they're going, there's no way I could do that. It's like, just get like, get like three different pillows and start cross training in an easy way. Keep your pillow, but introduce small mobilities by not always using the same pillow, not always sleeping on the same side of the bed, not always sleeping in the same bed, which is real easy. If you have kids, like for some reason you just start swapping beds. You know, you fall asleep in someone else's bed, you know, moving around and use. If you have a guest bedroom, sleep in that sometimes because every mattress has a different load and so cross train that way.

That is one thing I noticed since I got like the softer memory foam mattresses. Even like my guest room mattress is a little bit more firm and hard and I'll go down there and sleep sometimes and I notice it. But I also camp and you know, I lay on the ground all the time doing like Turkish get ups and you know, I do the Spartan races where I'm crawling through barbed wire for, you know, 100 yards. And so I think I probably expose my body to enough fluctuation to where I personally don't. Let me put it this way. I'm not that guilty about sleeping on the soft mattress, but I could see how if you were living a typical westernized lifestyle of comfort, that that would just be like, one more thing that piles a little bit more lack of movement into the equation.

Yeah, it's just one more. It's one more thing that subtly limits how you move. I call them casts. Right. You're just being cast in lots of different ways, but, like, it's real easy to still stay comfortable and just start introducing small loads. But yes. Or just lay. Just lay on the floor. If you don't want to get rid of your bed, then it's. Make sure you're spending 15 to 20 minutes laying on something really hard. You know, there's so many different ways to take this information and utilize it that you really can't fail.

Have you ever laid on a biomat? Or have you heard of a biomat before? No.

It's a biomat.

It's like this mat that's covered with these amethyst and tourmaline crystals, and it plugs into this deal that releases infrared light. So it's like warming, but it's incredibly hard. Like, it's. It's hard to, like, sleep for the night on one, but I have one of those in my office, and I lay down on my stomach and on my side sometimes when I'm. When I'm working on this biomat, which is kind of cool because it, like, heats you up at the same time, but it's. It's extremely hard. It's like being on a pile of rocks.

So I think I've gotten. My equivalent is like the Lego mat, which is just when a whole bunch of Legos end up under your sleeping mattress.

Well, the difference is the biomat is like a thousand times more expensive than the Lego, Matt. Okay, so anyways, the. The Kegels, you. You talk about the great Kegel debate and your. Your thoughts about Kegels, can you kind of explain why it is that you are. Are not a fan of Kegels?

Well, and so Kegels is that pelvic floor contraction. So in the same. In. It's really. It's the same argument over and over again, just applied to a different body part that your pelvic floor does many, many things at many, many. Your pelvic floor should be doing Many different types of contractions. The loads of to your pelvic floor should vary based on all of the different things that you're doing. Getting up and down off of the floor, squatting, walking, you know, thousands of miles a year, and jumping and carrying baby weight and all of these things that your pelvic floor should be doing. But because we don't do any movement, then we have come up with this kind of treatment for, well then fake movement. Since since your organs are not busy accelerating up and down on your pelvic floor in a varied way, since you never really vary up the position of your hips, because your pelvic floor is going to attach the top of your femurs, the top of your leg bones, and since we don't sit on the floor cross legged with any real frequency, and since we're not getting up and down off of the floor 100 times a day, and because we don't squat to go to the bathroom, your pelvic floor is basically this like inertia hunk of muscle. And then it's not circulating well, it's not responding well because you do nothing with it. And then you start doing the equivalent to, you know, sit ups for the pelvic floor, which is contract, release, contract and release. So my, my, I like how you call it. Would you call it the, the kegel beef? I'm gonna think about that first.

Yeah. Your beef with kegel.

My kegel beef. My beef with the kegel is not so much that, that the kegel is. Well, it is a little bit that the kegel is problematic, but for a different reason. It's that it's not a replacement for all the things that the pelvic floor should be doing. And right now it's kind of lauded as the ultimate exercise for your pelvic floor. It's like your pelvic floor doesn't need an exercise. Your pelvic floor needs to be used through movement. The isolated exercise of your pelvic floor outside of any sort of context of movement, doing it while you're sitting there in your chair is to just not see the larger picture, which is you are so still, your pelvic floor is doing nothing. Now, the second piece is that what happens to the pelvic floor when you only do one type of motion with the pelvic floor, you know, big squeezes and releases, big squeezes and releases, when it has a full spectrum of other things that it should be doing, is that you. Then you get this adaptation to these big squeezes and hypertonicity of the pelvic floor is a very large problem in men and women right now that's been on the rise and causes years of discomfort, thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more, in surgeries. People, men have problems with their prostate only to find out after five years of investigating and poking and prodding their prostate and being in chronic pain, that it was simply a too tight pelvic floor. Meanwhile, someone's been giving them kegels for their pelvic floor to help out with their prostate, that the Kegel itself can exacerbate this very prevalent problem. So I think it's just that it's a non specific exercise given to everyone, like it's vitamin C that everyone should just be taking. And if you want a strong pelvic floor, you should just do it instead of going. Your pelvic floor should be a lot stronger and more supple and more dynamic and also have a lot more varied types of motions to it.

You know what my secret is, Katie, for strengthening the pelvic floor is when I do deadlifts. If you stand tall, like at the top of a deadlift, and you kind of push your hips forward just a little bit after you've picked something heavy off the ground, it's impossible to not fire every single muscle in your pelvis and your pelvic floor. So. And I do deadlifts a couple of times a week. And every time I do them, like when I get to the top of the deadlift, I stand as tall as possible, I push my chest out and I squeeze my butt, and that just contracts everything in that pelvic floor. So that's my trick.

All right.

Okay. So I want to ask you also, in the time that we have left, about your kids, because you've got kids, and from what I understand, you're kind of using some cool child rearing methods with them as far as exposing them not only to the wide variety of movement patterns we've talked about, like, say, not using pillows or, you know, doing lots of standing and things of that nature. But their education is also a little bit unique as well. Can you talk about what you're doing with your kids as far as education?

Yeah, well, they're. So they're young, right? They're only 2 and 3. My 3 year old's close to 4, but so they go to outdoor school. Outdoor school is probably the most radical education decision that we made because, you know, you want your kids to have all of these things that come with education. But yet at the same Time. I know through all my own academic work and research that putting them inside for, you know, hunks of time is really for them, for all of us is where our sedentary habits started and where our physical health started to decline when, when we started basing the bulk of our life around a chair. So we were fortunate enough to have an option of an outdoor Preschool. It's a 100% outside, there's no building, all weather besides, you know, real extreme thunder. I don't think they go on thunderstorms and they don't go when it's, you know, more than three below or something like that. But yeah, it's a, it's that, it's, it's moving all day, it's fresh air, it's natural.

What kind of stuff are they doing? Just like exploring the wilderness all day. Like they are at school or. And you just drop them off and leave and they go off with a teacher out into the wilderness.

Yeah, it's a real school. So there's, I think it's no more than three kids to a teacher. And it's a. I would say that probably the bias of the school is it's a science school in that, but it is, it's still child based learning, which I think is, you know, a buzzword. It's not, you know, there's no, there's no workbooks in the school. There's no pencils. They're not doing anything like that. But yet if I go on a hike with my son, he'll tell me the names of all the trees, all the plants. He'll think this is edible, that's not edible. And can you see the difference between too? This is. If you don't see this little X on this berry, you can't eat that. But these are salals. We can eat up to this many berries. You can make tea with that structure building, you know, so it's math, right? It's, it's, it's all of the things that you want the kids to learn for, you know, to have them fit into education, whatever, you know, whatever that means. But in a way that is totally practical and functional and still aligned with what I want for their health. And so it's just through, it's just that, you know, they. How to get over streams. We got to build a bridge.

Move.

They have the physical labor of moving stuff over. You know, they're not sitting and building with Legos where they get those engineering principles, but without the movement. So they get both. They get both. And I love It. It's great.

So is this like A K through 12 type of school or.

The one here is not the case. There are more science outdoor schools popping up in the United States. They're very big in Europe. I think it's called Kinder Forest. Kinder. I think it started in Germany and it's been there for, you know, 20 years. And the one that just started up here, I was on the board for. And it's only in its. At the end of its first year. And it's just K through no preschool. Preschool through first grade, so. So three through six. Wow.

Interesting. So what would be the best place for people to, like, if people wanted to go look at what, what your kids were doing or they wanted to go to the best website to learn more about this. What's a good resource?

I think if you just Google. If you just Google like forest kindergarten, forest preschools, they're every. They are everywhere. I live in Washington state and they are abundant here. And. But they're also like in Minnesota and places where you would go. There's no way it's safe for people to be outside. And it's like, like people have been outside for eons. You just need to know how to do it safely. And they've got all the literature on. And so what I find most interesting now, you know, I. Since I'm a biomechanist, I'm just really interested in the mechanome, which is all of the mechanical stuff that affects the genome. And maybe in the last few years there's been all this stuff about being outside on a regular basis, how good it is for your immunity. Right. That we think of like, you're sick. You should stay inside and stay warm. And they're like, you really need fresh air. You need to be moving outside. Light activity is actually really great for your immune system. So I'm now working through NASA's NAS, NASA's assessment of all the risks for space travel. Space flight travel. What happens to humans, why they don't. Humans don't last very long in space. They have to come back because they get very ill. And what most people know about is like, you know, they get low bone density, their spine changed shape a little bit because of the gravitational difference. It's such an extreme environment. But in this report, which is this year now, they're looking at there's actually that the mechanical environment is affecting your immune system, that the actual immunity, your body's response to microbes and antibiotics changes based on the gravitational load. So that's huge. That's huge because so much of our immunity is always put to that chemical, like biochemistry. And it's like, like now that we understand really that everything has this movement component to it and that we really do depend on gravity, then your position that you assume for the day how much you move, all of that is going to matter down to infectious disease, like, which is what this NASA report was about, is like they are responding differently to infectious disease up in space. And I was like, that's huge. That is huge, huge stuff. So we stay outside and move as much as possible.

Yeah. Wow. Cool. Well, I'll put a link to any resources I can find on the forest kindergarten thing. I get, you know, I, I'm in Washington state too, Katie. I don't know if you knew that.

Oh, cool.

I'm over on the, on the, on the west side or on the east side rather, in Spokane, Washington. But I live on 10 acres out in the forest out here. And so when my kids get home from their school, which is actually on 120 acre campus, they're kind of like outside all day or a lot of the day anyways. When they get home, it's just more of kind of like home forest. It's not kindergarten. They're in first grade. But yeah, I'm right on the same page with you as far as getting kids outside goes. So.

And I think that, I think, I think parents, you know, they listening. It's like there's no, we live in this, you know, beautiful natural area. But I think as a parent, I think it's okay to talk to your, you know, most preschools, a lot of preschools, or kindergartens or even regular Traditional K through 12 schools have campuses and, you know, you can inquire, is there any way to skip seated circle time, you know, and just do those 20 minutes outside, you know, it doesn't have to be all day outside. Again, it's just like, is there any way to get 15 more minutes or 20 more minutes, especially for the younger kids who don't have. They're not doing academic testing. Right. Where that's the school's resistance is we got to get the kids to pass the tests.

Right, Right. Yeah. Interesting. Well, I mean, this could be like a whole other podcast in and of itself. So obviously though, there's a ton of stuff for folks to dig into here. I'd say the biggest things are, you know, move all day instead of just standing would be a big one. Definitely don't go for a run. Whether or not you've, you know, whether you've been sitting on an airplane for the past 12 hours or whether you've just like been sitting at your office. Don't go out and exercise hard and be sedentary all day and expect not for there to not be ramifications. Don't suck in your stomach all the time, especially if you're constipated. Take occasional computer breaks and especially make sure you stare at things really, really far away. Consider sleeping occasionally on things other than your mattress, although I am way, way on the fence about getting rid of my mattress, period. And then be careful with Kegel exercises. Do things that contract your pelvic floor not in isolation, but rather in combination with other muscles working, and get your kids outside. So I think that's a lot for people to work with.

Man, we covered a lot of stuff when you list it like that.

We did. So check out Katie's book, Move youe DNA. Go to the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com MoveYourDNA and I'll put a bunch of resources, the stuff we talked about, like Forest Kindergarten and Anti Fatigue Mats and Katie's book and everything else. And Katie, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me back. It was great.

All right, cool, folks. Well, this is Ben Greenfield and Katie Bowman signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

For even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice.

Sam.