Interview: Don't Just Sit There with Katy Bowman

Hey, this is Brian with a quick note before we jump into today's show. If you haven't signed up for the Optymyze Premium membership yet, A, what are you waiting for? And B, you can now get the first 30 days of optimizing for free. Just cruise on over to Optimize Me and sign up. Over 10,000 people now start their days with Optymyze so they can actualize their potential, including best selling authors, leading entrepreneurs, and even NCAA championship teams. Two of them. So again, 30 days of free optimizing at Optimize Me. If you're already a member, thanks for your support. Now for the show, You're listening to Optymyze with Brian Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimize podcast. This is, this is part two of our two part series with Katie Bowman. Soon to be a three part series which I'm very excited about with her newest book Movement Matters, which is coming soon. But for now we just chatted about Move youe DNA. So check out the podcast episode on that. And now we're going to talk about Don't Just Sit There, another one of Katie's great books. Subtitle so the book is called Don't Just Sit There, subtitled Transitioning to a Standing and Dynamic Workstation for Whole Body Health. This is a really quick reading, fun book. I raved about Katie in the prior introduction. She's awesome. Nutritious. Movement.com, katie says podcast, et cetera, et cetera. Katie, welcome back.

We're here. We're going to do it.

Let's do it. Okay. So is sitting the new smoking?

Well, you could argue yes, but I would probably also argue no, it's not really the new smoking because sitting itself isn't. I would say that you could confound easily sitting with not moving and that we should probably focus on the static position of sitting and then the frequency of which we are in that single position. So like sitting in your chair is like reaching for a cigarette? I don't know. Because smoking that cigarette is going to. Smoking that cigarette can be affecting you no matter what. Where sitting is kind of a perfectly natural thing to do. Maybe not just for every minute or almost every minute of the entire day.

Love it. And then one of the big distinctions of the book is it's not even so much sitting. Like you can move from sitting in the same static position all day long to standing in the same static position. And we're going to talk about the subtitle of the book is transitioning and how important it is to transition. But can you talk to us about the difference between static vis a vis dynamic movements?

Well, static means that. I mean, static just means that you're not moving. So I think with the. I've put this joke in, maybe I put this joke out there as often as possible, mostly because I love it. But, you know, if you think that it's sitting that's harming you, then you feel like if you just stand there the entire time, that you're going to be safe. Like, as soon as you sit in the chair, it's like they're going to come attack your arteries or something. Where it's being static. Right. It's the lack of changing your position. So when you're maintaining the same position, whether it be sitting or whether it be standing or whether it be doing a handstand, you've stopped moving. So I've really tried to push this. I don't think that a lot of people maybe recall that everyone used to stand to work in a factory setting, and there was a lot of injuries that came from standing. Right. Which is why everyone collectively migrated towards the chair to take the weight off the legs. Right. The varicose veins and the back pain and whatnot. And then now we're, like, trying to get everyone to stand again. It's like, well, let's. We've already done that. Let's maybe do something a little bit more dynamic. Let's look at workspaces, office furniture that affords you many different postures and thus movement throughout the day, that maybe since we've already done the standings thing, we jump over that and go to the thing that we have, the technology and really the knowledge to deal with at this point.

That's awesome. And dynamic workstation, that we're. Dynamic is kind of the word that jumped out at me so much. As a guy who reads a lot and then writes a lot, this is another one of the things that fundamentally changed my orientation to my work. And therefore my life is just that static position. You know, not breathing, just sitting there.

Just the same thing over and over, tense, you know, your. Your tensions holding you in place.

Yeah. You know, I'm going to actually just jump in from a. From a personal perspective as I look at kind of the dynamic workstation. I read a lot and I write a lot. If you were in my position, and obviously you, you know, you write a lot and you create a lot of content and you talk about this some in the book, but how would you coach me in terms of setting up my kind of daily structure, if you will.

Well, there's definitely things that you need to be in the same position for or certainly in the same location. So, like, I'm trying to think. I'm kind of working backwards off this. I was an avid reader. I still am an avid reader, and I have been for 35 years at this point. It's been a long time. But I recently gave up some of my regular books for audiobooks. So that was. That's one coaching thing I give across the board because that's easiest. Like, you know, if you find yourself reading for pleasure, consider swapping out a couple of those for audiobooks, because then it doesn't matter what position you're in, you can take it on the go. You could be, you know, I'm going to do yard work and listen, so you get that pleasure need or that input, learning need, but with some other need packaged alongside of it. So that's one personal thing that I did which was huge. I even swapped out an evening movie session for just going to bed early, resting my eyes. Right, there's the eye element, too. It's not all hips and knees and shoulders. It's your eyes for an audiobook, and that's been great. The other part is, do you do a lot of standing? Did you go from a sitting desk to a standing desk, or were you already at the standing desk?

Well, before I had a standing desk, which I used infrequently, you know, as often, but not as often as I could. So it was a little bit of. Not as much more now.

Yeah, well, I think that almost all of us still sit in some capacity, whether it be in your office chair, if you're listening in the car, if it's in the car, if it's your couch at home, the first thing is to sit differently. All right? So you don't even have to stop sitting, but look at how you're sitting, the posture of what you're sitting, or the alignment of how you're sitting and mix it up a little bit. And I think that that's not necessarily radical news. People have been told to lift their chest up and don't let themselves slouch a little bit. But I focus a lot on the hips. Look at your lower back. Is it kind of rounded? Are you kind of slouching? Put something up underneath your hips to allow your pelvis to kind of tip forward, forward a little bit. Look at your legs. Do you do the same thing over and over again? Take note of that. I like the word body constellation. So if you could probably figure out your work or your office body constellation, it's that shape that you see over and over again. As much as you try to fix it, pretty soon you got the left leg straight, the right leg bent. You have a shape and you have that shape because you always use that shape and thus you reinforce it. So every time you try to come out of it, which is like, okay, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to square my knees and my hips and I'm going to, you know, fix my chest and my head and then you just get back in your work and you lose it. You know, to pull yourself back, that's one way of checking in. Another one is assume something radically different. Sit cross legged in your chair, turn your chair around so it's backwards and straddle it. You know, try to find, try to find a big strategy that allows you to break up your body geometry. Because before, if you're transitioning to someone who's going to sit less, sitting differently is on that spectrum. So it's really, there's no sitting or standing, there's just different geometries. And so if you can break up the one that you have in your chair, you'll be successful because it's a small transition, it's easy to make. And then of course, sit less, meaning get a standing workstation. Or it could also mean take a look at how much time you're spending in the sitting position. I write a lot, as you know, and I found that there was quite a bit of desk time that wasn't being parlayed into output time. I think writing and probably all work requires a heavy creative process where you're not outputting something productive yet you are working on it, you're formulating. It's not like you just sit down and, you know, you're converting keystrokes into, you know, production output, you know, that you can sell or is measured. There's quite a bit of creative time. And they have found that people are much more creative while moving and while moving outside than when they're static. So once I realized that the amount of time that I needed to be in front of the computer to actually be productive was smaller, then I actually restructured my whole entire time and I work for myself, that's easier to do. But a lot of HR departments and the research is certainly on your side. You know, if you are a CEO or you're working in an office, things like walking meetings are becoming more and more typical. That you can go outside, that you don't have to have everyone come into like a air conditioned room and then like sit and slouch and try to come up with an amazing idea for your company. It's like, why don't you radically change the scenario? Because people are just, they're more creative on their feet and while they're moving and engaging and just take a little recording device so that you can record it if it needs to be transcribed. If you're worried about notes, you know, bring a small whiteboard if you wanted to write stuff down, you know, And I just think that the solutions aren't going to be in the box. They're not there. The box is what we're trying to get out of. So you're going to have to look literally outside of the cubicle to find the key to your success in it.

Yeah, that's awesome. So much goodness there. Go all the way back to the audible. And you mentioned the qualifier if you're reading for pleasure. For me, it's like reading is like an archaeological dig of like, okay, I'm all in here. So I'm still experimenting with the audible. That'd be my nirvana, you know, just to be able to be moving in different tempos as we talked about in our last chat. But one of the other things I've done is opening my hips while I'm reading, you know, and looking at all the postures that you share in the book and on your side of just, okay, well, find all the different ways that you never move. I never sit in a pigeon pose, but can I read in that, you know, and, and get that cross functionality, if you will, while I'm achieving a business, you know, in creative initiative, but not being locked into that exact constellation that my body knows so well. Right.

Yeah, Well, I, everyone's like, what position do you read in? I was like, all of them. I mean, there, there's no, I think we're, I think we just, this is in. Don't just sit there. We have been saturated with this idea of ergonomics. Like, everyone wants me to keep presenting well, but what is the single best position? Like? There is no single position. You're never going to. You could dig all you want, but you're, you're not going to find the single position in which the body works the best because it doesn't work in a single position. It's not a, it's bunch of dynamic systems that have been packaged in a movement body because that movement is part of how those systems work. We have removed. It's like pulling the plug on your tv. You're like, what's wrong with my tv? It's not working. You're like busy taking it apart, the insides. And you've removed an essential flow from this piece. You know, the electricity. There is no electrical part. And so it's very easy to overlook it as part of an anatomy of a television set. Movement is part of the human operating system. And we've removed it and we are digging to figure out why these different systems are failing. I was like, plug yourself in, you know, do something, move it around a little bit. Because it is really an underlying component of all systems in the body.

That's awesome. And again, dynamic. Dynamic. Dynamic. You had a joke in the book about what's the favorite. Sorry, what's the best ergonometrically friendly desk? What did you say to it?

I think it was a chair. Like, right, like someone.

A chair, rather. Sorry, chair.

And it was just like, you know, the stand up, like the one you.

Use the least, right?

Oh, that's right. That's right. The chair. The best chair is the one that you use the least. It is true.

It's great.

I still get questions about like, well, what, okay, well if I can't do that, what's the next one like? There is no next one. Like, I can't rank what's least good for you on a scale. Like, it's just. You just do your best.

That's awesome. And again, dynamic. In one of the things, the phrases that I pulled out of that don't just sit there as micro movements. Again, we have this myth that we touched on in major DNA that it has to be these huge, expansive, sweaty, certain uniformed out movements to qualify. Right? And you're like, no, no, actually just sitting cross legged or pulling a leg up. These micro movements do more than we might think, right?

Yeah. I mean, I think you think if you're. If your arms and legs aren't pumping and you're not sweating, like you didn't move, but if you just shift your leg weight from one leg to the other and the front to the back, and I call it like, it's like the little subtle stuff that you can do while you're being productive. You know, those are, those are huge. That really comprises a large percentage of movements that are natural for your body. So I said movements part of these operating systems. Exercise is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the fact that your legs are going up and down. I mean, you can do stand and do some calf raises as opposed to stand static all day long. You know, you can, I call them workout on company time. Right? You can easily. You can even do them low profile. They're low profile moves that don't affect your production rate and they don't really even call attention to you that you're setting something up radically different for yourself. But at the same time, you can move all of the time, which is better than what you have been doing, which is moving almost none of the time.

As a side note, when you were discussing before too, just the writing and how, you know, the keystroke motion as part of the creative process for writing is actually very small part of it. When I chatted with Amy Cuddy who wrote Presence and talks about all that, we were talking about how like locked we get when we write and it's almost like we're in our head. I need to connect you guys to have a conversation around that because it was one of those threads that we started pulling that it's just fascinating. So I'm excited to hear the two of you guys chat about that presence and that energy while creating. So kind of a side note there. But yes, personally excited to think about what might come out of that.

Does your whole work skit, I mean, everything about the way you can be productive can change and only for the better. Right?

You know, I am 100% sold. And this is good. Okay, talk to us about your eyeballs and how you had some really cool stuff in there about how it's. We need to train our eyeballs, basically. Talk to us about the little tip on that.

Well, you know, it's funny when you're talking about reading, reading and mixing it up, if you, if you wouldn't go, if you went and grabbed a book or a piece of paper to look at right now, you are going to find that you have this fixed angle of your elbow that positions the thing that you're reading from your eye. And you use that distance all of the time. You don't need to. You have parts in your eyes that change the shape of your lens so that you can focus far away and also up close. Right. Those are movements. So I try to explain. You have this ring of muscle in your eyeball that kind of operates similarly to your bicep. It's getting. Your arm gets long, you let your arm down, your bicep gets longer and then you flex your elbow and the bicep gets shorter. That there's this movement and. But you're holding the elbow at a static position the entire time you read. And thus the ring in your eye has to fix at that position. So your eyes are. The muscles in your eyes are smoother. They're responding to the input that you choose to put in front of them. So if you moved that thing away from your face, your eyes are going to move. The muscles in your eyes can only be released if you choose to look at something at a different distance. So we're in this kind of small world. You know, it used to be your computer screen. I think the computer screen is considered to be near work for all eyeball research. And I don't know, maybe it's 26 inches or whatever it is from your eyes. But what are we? Everyone's on smartphones now, right. Which is even closer. It'd be interesting for you to figure out what the distance you use for your smartphone is because that's going to be an even tighter tension, even tighter contraction on your eyeballs. And so your eyeballs are kind of like biceps where you've never actually put your arm all the way down. It's like you spent your whole life going to 90 degrees and then back up. Or really, it's actually much smaller than that. I think I did the numbers once, and you're really operating, giving the eyes capacity to see up to a mile. You're really using like a percentage of distance. So it would be like dropping down three degrees with your biceps. So if you imagine what your arms, what your biceps would be like if you only dropped your arms down, you know, three inches and pulled back up, and that was the full extent of them, they would adapt to that. And if you can imagine the tight kind of protruding ball of your biceps muscle, then you can imagine the tension and the length increase perhaps of an eyeball and what that's like for the shape of the eye. And for those that don't know that the radical, unprecedented increase in myopia, which is nearsightedness in young children, and it's alarming, but we don't use our eyes like, we're not exercising them, if you will. They're on a very narrow training program of pumping out these short, tiny contractions. And so I always sit next to an open window where I can see. I can't see up to a mile, but I can see up to a quarter of a mile. And it's my way of cross training my eyes while I'm working just to get up and focus on something else. Because that's the only way to relax your eyes without medicine.

Yeah, it's so cool. And I do that now. I'm looking out of the mountains here which are, I don't know, a couple miles away maybe, but just that literally cross training for our eyes. It's a powerful idea. We didn't talk about it as much as I would have liked to. We have a constraint here time wise. But I just want to quickly share the one of the ideas from and I don't remember which book it was where you had the just move consistently even think about a timer or something that gets you kind of moving. I now have a countdown, 20 minutes where I get up just out of whatever I'm doing. It doesn't matter. I could be mid sentence reading a book or typing out a sentence and I get up and just breathe and move. Katie also challenges us in again, I forget which book it was where you say literally stop right now and get up and read and get up and go for a walk. And the first time I read that like I like to do things that the author encourages, right?

Yes.

But it's like 6:45, I've got my like morning routine, you know, before the family gets up. And it literally was a bit of a struggle for me because I just don't do that in the morning. But I got up and I went for you said, look, it just needs to be three to five minutes, not a big deal. And I did it and it fundamentally changed the way I approach my movement now. So I highly recommend that set an awareness, a mindset shift to actually move more consistently. Engage in these micro movements of posture shifts, go for the walk around, look at something from a different vantage point, etc. All these tips Katie talks about, of course in the books, but I just want to make sure we highlighted that because it's been so impactful for me.

Yeah, well, I mean personal trainers work because it's an outside person kind of, you know, motivating you a little bit. And so I think you have a timer, there's apps now that can just shut down your computer screen with this like and you can program it like you yourself. None of this is against your will. You have said I want to stop and take a two minute walk every 20 minutes. But when it comes up, it's like almost a resentment to it. It's like, but I don't want to. And that is what I'm talking about. The sedentary nature that we really have a deep resistance to movement. And if you want to experiment that with yourself, set a timer that you can't really change and when you see that need for movement, interrupt the thing that you wish that you wanted to do, even though the movement is also the thing that you wanted to do, you'll see the reaction to it. And then the more familiar you get, like, oh, that's just the old part of me that doesn't want to move, which is different than me, than the part that does. I'm going for the move because I choose to, because I chose it. And then that's when you're further aligning just yourself with your behavior, which nothing bad can come from that.

That's so cool. And in my own experience, as it's been over the last X weeks since I was introduced to this idea, it's moved from being that, oh, gripping. I don't want to do it, but I'm a pretty disciplined guy, so it's like, I'll do it to. Yeah, this is awesome. This is nourishing me, as you would say, you know, nutritious movement. It's so simple and subtle, yet so profound.

It needs to be intrinsic, though. I mean, like, at first, that's extrinsic. That's why we call the podcast Katie Says, because, like, I feel like people use Katie Says as the why they're doing it at first, even though they themselves have chosen it. But they're gonna parlay that responsibility on me because I said so. But once you do it, you that it comes from you, it comes from within. You have reaped the benefit of the movement. It just once you're consistent enough with it, then the movement is its own momentum, ironically, where you just get more and more of it.

Yeah, this is awesome. We're running up against a hard stop here, so we're going to wrap it up and I'm going to kind of very much look forward to our next chat on Movement Matters. Katie's newest book, we talked about Move youe DNA in the last chat. Don't just sit there. Both of them are awesome. Can't speak highly enough about you and your work. Thank you, Katie.

Thank you so much.

And just a reminder, Katie says podcast. Check it out. And then nutritiousmovement.com There we go. Hope you enjoyed. Isn't it a bit odd we went from math to science to history, but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course, it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up yet. If you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life and actualizing your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on optimal living and pulling out the big ideas that can truly change your life. You know those sections you asterisk and underline and mark all up? Then imagine that guy me connecting those ideas to other great books and helping you apply them to your life today. Well, that's what I do with something we call Philosopher's Notes where I break down each great book into a simple 6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3 and 10 minute Philosopher's Notes TV episode. Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in fun, inspiring, super practical optimal living 101 classes on stuff like purpose 101, confidence 101, business 101, meditation 101, that sort of thing. You've got a personal trainer? I'm kind of like your personal philosopher. Ancient wisdom plus Modern Science plus Common sense plus Virtue plus Mastery plus Fun. That's what our optimized membership program is all about. We'd love to have you join us. Check us out at BrianJohnson. Me join.