Interview: Move Your DNA with Katy Bowman

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Optimize with Bryan Johnson.

More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the the Optimize podcast. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Katie Bowman. Katie is one of my favorite new teachers. My wife Alexandra has been a big fan of her and her work for a long time. She's actually participating in a certification that Katie offers and we're going to do two separate interviews on two of Katie's great books that we've profiled. We're going to start with Move youe DNA, Restore youe Health Through Natural Movement. And then we're going to take a break and record the second one which we'll share separately, which is don't just Sit, Sit there. Transitioning to a standing and dynamic workstation for whole body health. Both of these books are fantastic and both literally changed my life. Simple yet profound ideas that literally changed the way that I live and move and have already feeling extraordinary positive benefits from it. So personally, I feel a lot of gratitude for Katie. She is one of the world's leading biomechanists and she makes the kind of science of moving your body inspiring, fun and practical via all of her work. She's also got a really popular podcast. I think it's called Nutritious Movement. Is that right, Katie?

Katie says.

Katie says. I'm sorry, the website is nutritiousmovement.com of course the podcast is Katie says. But with that, Katie, thank you for taking the time and thanks for doing all you do.

Thanks for having me and such a great intro. Thank you very much.

Well, that's just scratching the surface of all the things I could say to celebrate you. But let's jump in. Move your DNA. I'd like to start at the top. That's such a great title. Tell us about what that means to you.

Oh, man. Well, book titles are such a such a fun process. To go through. But Move youe DNA, I think was trying to address three ideas. The first idea is that I think people have kind of a fixed understanding of genetics, meaning you are just given a body and there's nothing you can do about it. That genes, the sequence of genes is not changing, but the expression of your sequence of genes is changing through your behavior. So that understanding is under the umbrella of epigenetics. The fact that there's just different things that are changing and move your DNA. I try to use the View Master Throwback to 1980s, this toy where you would put one of those discs in and you would toggle the switch down and it would change what the picture is. So you've got this. The disc is your set of jeans, but the toggling is your lifestyle. And it changes the view. It changes what you see when you look through the window. So that was my. That was my Toys R Us version of epigenetics. But accessible, I think at the same time, it was this idea that you can move your DNA. Not the sequencing, but the thing that expresses genes or not is movement. It's a movement of. They'll use the analogy, kind of. It's like light shining on some genes versus other ones go dark. So there's this movement mechanism on that level. It was that you could physically take your body and move it more over the planet, thus moving your DNA from here to there, not being so sedentary as an entire being. And then my graduate work was a lot of female pelvic work, the shape of the pelvis, pelvic floor disorder, birthing, the physics of birthing. So there's a big hunk of the book that's really about the ease at which we propagate the species, moving literally our DNA onto the next generation. And there's a bit of the book that's talking about, you know, there's some big, heavy things kind of going on right now with human beings and their ability to reproduce with ease. And there's some red flags. I don't think we're heating very well because technology makes it easy for us not to necessarily look at the biological state of things. We could focus on maybe the sociological, that we can still operate as a species, but lots and lots of intervention. So it was that third idea that. This is also about the ease in which there's a whole section on the pelvis, right? The ease at which men and women are able to move their DNA to the next generation, should they wish to be doing so, or even if they're not if they're concerned with the future of the human species. So it was all of those things in three words, right? Move your DNA.

That's awesome. And of course you unpack, touch on each of those themes and some in more depth than others. Talk to us about the fact that I was just blown away by whatever. Tell us what percentage of the trillions of genes or I'm sorry, of cells that we have in our bodies and the DNA within each of those cells that's connected to movement. Because it was just crazy.

Well, I mean all of them, I mean pretty much all of your cells are mechanosensitive, right? We have this idea of mechanically sensitive organs, right? Like we've got these organs that we recognize when we look at the body. Like, oh, that's a movement sensory organ or a mechanical stimulated organ. But really every single one of your cells, you know, for the most part is going to have a cytoskeleton and it's actually the cytoskeleton itself is an entire sensory organ, mechanically deformable organ and it's responding to that. So I just think that our in, in biology and really a lot of the sciences, physics has been taken out that like the mechanical forces of the body is not really studied that much. We mostly study it relative to chemistry. Right. Like what's your ph level? And you know, if we're trying to unpack a physiological mechanism, we'll look at things that are easily measured, like what is your blood, what's in your blood serum. You know, things that are easy to do, non invasive measures. It's very hard to measure cellular movement in a living body. So I think just once it started off, body knowledge hundreds of years ago really did start more towards the physics. You know, you have like people like Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo, they were kind of these earlier biomechanists who are trying to figure out that blood's pumping around in the body. Like they didn't know that you had a fixed volume that it was circulating. Right. None of the things they. Everything that we take for granted is like basic fourth grade knowledge. Wasn't basic knowledge at all. It wasn't until people figured it out. But. But once chemistry came in, like human, human body science kind of went down the chemistry path and no one really looked down the physics path much more, with the exception of maybe Wolf's law, which is again in the book, which is this idea that your bones are kind of responding in density and shape based on the loads that you place upon them. But parlaying that mechanical understanding to any other tissue besides bones just hasn't really happened. Is starting to now, maybe in the last 20 years, and really ramping up now with good nanotechnology and this understanding of this process called mechanotransduction. Now they're going, well, every cell is essentially doing that. Sensing the load and adapting. Sensing the load and adapting. That adaptation can be on the chemical level, but that chemistry eventually invokes a particular physical adaptation. And so they're just. They're very intricately related.

Yeah. And you make the point that this is like the factor. When we look at epigenetics, people just aren't talking about the fact that whether we're moving our body or not is impacting that as greatly as it is. And kind of one of those kind of missed things is people are bringing more attention to epigenetics in general, but missing the importance of movement. Right.

Yeah. And I think that that's a separate issue that's tackled in my newer book, which is this idea of how does a sedentary culture do science? You know, it's. You know, if you. If you are a sedentary culture, meaning all the people inside of it are sedentary. And that's another point in Move youe DNA is. We've got this kind of general. I exercise, so I'm not sedentary. And then all of you who don't exercise are sedentary. But the fact of the matter is everyone in our culture is sedentary. I mean, almost all of our movement has been entirely outsourced to other people, almost 100% of it. And so things like movement don't really occur when it's outside of your cultural paradigm or your cultural norm. So with mechanotransduction and diseases of mechanotransduction, the basic assumption is always like, oh, there's gotta be something wrong with the physiology. Then it's not sensing the input. Right. Not really questioning the input. That, like, maybe the input isn't that great, you know? You know, what's. If you're not putting anything in. Like, really, the adaptations of our body make perfect sense when you consider them in a. In a physics context of, well, that's the structure of an unmoving object, which is what you are. So you nailed it. You know, so. So just. I think that that's. I think that's changing. But as I'm working more and more on different elements within the body and mitochondria and within the cells and reviewing more and more Bodies of literature that are outside of my own personal feelings field of biomechanics. Everyone is still referring to sedentary and active as that person who exercises three times a week for 30 minutes like government guidelines, rather than what is the actual biological state of the person. So I think it's not going to be missed for much longer thanks to the Internet and shows like yours. Because researchers I think are still always like us, searching the Internet for kind of ideas and then they're going to see things and then, and then the language refines and then of course I make my own contribution academically as I can. But yeah, I think, I think we're on the beginning of recognizing, oh, it's time to move and it's time to move our thoughts as well.

Yeah, that's awesome. I want to. Next idea I wanted to talk about was movement vis a vis exercise. And the way that you framed that, you know, with the big circle of movement and the small circle of exercise is in fact conceptually the idea that just moved me so much in my sense of look, I'm reasonably active guy and I'm sedentary, you know, and it's, it's not a. Oh, you do one, then you can check the box. But before we go there, I just want to hear it really quickly out of my own enthusiasm for it. Next book is what the next book.

Is called Movement Matters. And there's no exercises in this book. It is just in that same, you know, you're talking about these Venn diagrams for move me your DNA, which were super simple, right. Huge circle movement, tiny circle exercise. It's kind of like that over and over again to really walk someone through what, where, what all the what doesn't, what is, what does a non sedentary culture look like? And what are all of the movements that nature has really packaged with human beings for millennia that we've unpacked and given to someone else. And we're extremely static at that point. So Movement Matters is a series of essays where I'm unpacking kind of this idea of movement ecology and really that your movement is directly related to social issues, environmental issues. And I'm excited for it and I'm excited that you're excited for it too. But it's going to be, I think it's going to be a nice partner with these other ones because you're going to have context, like a much bigger picture of context.

That's awesome. I can't wait. When does that one come out?

November 30th.

November 30th. Okay, cool. So then I'm very much looking forward to getting that copy and hopefully reconnecting in this context again, such important stuff. And just to celebrate you as well, one of the things that Alexander and I admire most about you is your embodiment of these ideas. Katie has very little, if not no furniture, very little furniture in her house. Alexandra's moving us in that direction. And just the way that you are living these truths is one of the things, if not the thing that most inspires me is just being that change that you desire to see. So just as a virtual high five there, I think that's super cool.

Well, and that's. I mean, I have a very hard time discussing or putting forth any information that I myself wouldn't apply to myself. It certainly doesn't need to be that way. But I mean, it's about authenticity. And it's also, you know, I think a lot of people will often counter some of, like, that's impossible. You can't do that. And I was like, well, I know that I do it, and I know of 17 other people who do it. So it's not about the solution not existing in the universe as much as it is that you can't see how it's done, which are two separate things. It's nice to hold those separate in your mind. Just because you can't imagine how it can be done doesn't mean that it's not possible.

Yeah, that's awesome. And for me, just to celebrate a little bit more, it's more than just the authenticity. It's the, I'm all in. This is what's possible. And I'm not just going to do what I say is, but I'm going to actually stretch it and demonstrate it and then bring it back as a living model of it, and then I think, translate it so that it's not some, you know, you're out of control, you know, unplugged. No, you're running a really successful business, you're training an extraordinary number of people, you're engaged in modern civilization, and you're playing by your own rules. That's. That's what I think is so cool about it.

Well, that is true. And also, you know, I've put a, you know, I've put a big. I've laid a big hand on the table, which is essentially the level, you know, asking people to essentially exercise less and move more. A primary difference between those two being mindset with which you approach what it is that you're doing. So it would be hard to ask people to do that if I myself wasn't able to maintain my well being and my strength and my fitness variables and then also maybe non fitness variables that aren't measured. Other aspects of health and physiological performance while still working and participating in society and being a full time mother of very young children. I mean, how could I, how could I even, I mean I could be laughed off, you know, the stage really for putting that on. Unless I could say here's, here's what I'm doing and I won't do anything in the wings that I'm not telling you to do. And this is, I mean this is at least one outcome of it. So it's, I mean it's just experimentation. It's the scientist part of myself. It's like I have to experiment with myself. Clearly.

Yeah, it's so cool. But there's just that fun playfulness and how do you like them apples? This is how it's working. Okay, so then let's talk about movement vis a vis exercise. What's the difference and why should we care?

Oh well, I think the foundational difference is really that when you're exercising the difference isn't what your arms and muscles, body parts are doing. It's not necessarily what it looks like when you're doing it. It's about the intention with what you're doing and also what you're reaping from it. And so exercise is really time parsed out of your life where you're working on a single objective and that is setting aside some sort of like rhythmic movement activity for the purpose of reaping a physical benefit. So this, this is something I talk a little bit about in Move youe DNA. But in Movement Matters I think it's, it's much more thoroughly defined because I think that was a big one of a big question after that book is like I kinda got the difference, but what's really the difference? And the reason I think that the difference is important is not because you'll the physiological gains in the moment when you're moving versus exercising. It's that if you're going to continue to be an exerciser versus a mover, you'll never be able to parse enough away from your regular life to get the quantity of movement that you need. You are leaving your life, you're stepping out of all of your other roles of partner, humanitarian, parent. No other nourishment is being brought to you. You have a lot, you have a lot of biological requirements just in yourself and all of that is set aside for this single bout where you're only extracting movement out of your life. You're not accomplishing anything else. So in Move youe DNA, what's the example is I'm looking at an apple tree. You said, how do you like them apples? I'm looking at apple tree in my backyard. I could, you know, hang up a seven foot bar and jump up and grab that bar 20 times in a row, you know, for my natural movement training. Or I can just hop up into this tree and at the same time, not only am I getting those same movements done, I'm going to grab a couple apples as I come down and that process is going to nourish me more fully in that I was able to move, to execute something, something else that I needed to get done in my life. In this case, food was something else that I needed to do. And that's really, I would say, if anything else, that's the difference is why doesn't my life require any movement? Because I'll tell you that it does. It's just someone else is doing all the movement that your life requires for you. Probably in a different country and probably in a scenario in which you would not even condone. If you were really fully aware of it, you would be like, I would gladly do this on behalf of myself if I, if I knew that it meant this other person wouldn't have to have this particular moment in time. You and I, it's different for everyone if you don't have small kids. But I, you know, if you're familiar with my work, it had a lot to do with young families and women, and women who are parents. That's a particular niche of exercise. It's a very difficult period of time to get your movement in while still engaging your children, being with your children, providing a role model. Right. You know, sewing the options really for getting exercise. And you know, I'm a lifetime exerciser. I come from an exercise background. Just in case anyone is listening. Like I come from a kinesiology background. My, I was an exercise teacher for 20 years. I still love, I love exercise. But as soon as I had my first child, it's like a whole part of the movement, part of my life stalled out and I didn't feel good. And, and you know, taking an hour for yourself just, it didn't really cut it with me. Like I needed more. I mean, I was coming from exercising four to five hours a day. Like as an athlete, there was no way to get that and I was freaking out. A little bit, you know, And I was like, I want some intensity. And. And it only took me like a few weeks. They're like, wait, this is crazy. I'm moaning because carrying my. And we don't have strollers, right? So we carried our kids everywhere. I realized that I could, I didn't want to. I didn't want to deal with the effort of carrying my child who was, I don't know, maybe £8 to £13 during this period of time. I didn't want to carry my kid for two miles because that would be too much work. But I wanted someone else to watch my kids so I could go throw weights around in a gym for an hour to get that intensity. And then I just realized I'm like, here's what it is. Like, I am, I'm so sedentary that carrying my own child doesn't count as self care. It didn't count as exercise. And I wanted that to go away so that I could go do this parsed thing, because that's what that was, my strong relationship with this parsed thing. And then my husband and I were somewhere carrying our kids and someone says, I can't believe this huge bodybuilder guy came up to my husband, who's fit but not a huge bodybuilder guy. He's like, I could not carry my kids because my back would kill me. Because we had been carrying him around. I don't know if we were like in an amusement park or a fair zoo or something and had been carrying him back and forth for probably five hours. And this guy had been seeing us in these other places. Like, I could never do that. So then we just were like, this is our training program. And. And then we just slowly got stronger and stronger because we were doing this lower intensity doesn't look like exercise. You can't put it down, you can't tap out. The hour is never over exercise program. And we ended up stronger with more endurance at 40 than we had when we were athletes in our 20s. Like, it was, it was radical, but it didn't look anything like what we were used to it looking like. And so that's just an example of shifting your life away from parsed out movement. That only serves us one purpose, to like, we got all this outside time and our, and our, you know, our kid got all this, he got movement time too, right? Because he was being physically moved around and challenged to hold his own body up. You know, we didn't tie him on. Like, it was really, it was intense and it Was like we were in this marathon training program without. It felt that same way. When you're training, if anyone's ever trained for anything, we wanted out of it. In the same way you want out of a run, you're like, I got 12 miles to do. You want to tap out at mile four, but at the same time you're fully committed, you know you're not going to because you want what's at the end. It was like that. It's like we just, we want to be able to move through our lives. And so it took us like two and a half years to transition our bodies from these bodies that were fit for their specific activity and a preference for doing only really that activity for movement. I didn't want to do anything else. I wanted to do my workout and then I would pay someone to deliver and stack my lumber, you know what I mean? And so it was a super inefficient. So it just slowly started taking back all the movement that we had given off. And it was more joyous. We were hanging out while we were doing it. A lot of it, A lot of movement happens outside when you're not outsourcing it. A lot of it is as family or a community. So we weren't alone. And then we found that we still needed those hours to ourself. I mean, I think every new parent is like, you know what? I need an hour to myself. It's just it didn't have to be filled with going to the gym, which is frankly another obligation. It could be I could do whatever I wanted in that hour because I've been exercising for 11, I'd been moving for 11. So that one hour became even more rich in I could do whatever I wanted with it. So I guess that's a good example maybe.

Yeah, that's awesome. I think it highlights the mindset shift, you know, really importantly that it's just let your life be the opportunity to be engaged and as you said, non intense yet consistent levels. And you mentioned the stats, something like, you know, the really active person these days, if they move for 300 minutes a week, that's pretty impressive. We've got to rewind the clock not that far to see that. We used to move 3,000 minutes a week. And I think that integration into our life rather than the parsed out, as you said, hey, let me go carve this out is so powerful.

You know, they've done a lot of different surveys on people like what would make your life better and they very frequent response is more exercise. I Don't think I actually believe that people aren't as exercise resistant as they seem. I don't think our society is set up to support any other type of movement besides driving to the gym. It requires a special outfit. It requires that you hire someone to help you. If you've never been to a gym and you're not part of that culture, I would imagine it's extremely. You feel vulnerable going in. You don't know where any of these buttons are and you don't belong. And I think that if we could transition away from exercise, we would find people. And I think that's probably what the last four or five years of my work has been about is going. We can all move more. Don't worry about, don't even touch your exercise program right now, whether you have one or not. Just look at these simple things of, you know, putting your dishes here instead of here. You know, like little crazy things. But once you start moving, it's just like a biofeedback loop. You know, I think that we're not used to feeling what it feels like to be nourished through movement. We feel fine. And then you get a sense of what it actually feels like and then you want, oh, I want more of that. And then you just keep looking for more and more places to put movement into your life.

Yeah, no doubt. And we'll talk more about that in our. Don't just sit there conversation about some of the things that I've done. Um, but yeah, I mean, just walking to the store and just, just little things where it's just part of the, the natural process of the day. But again, it's the mindset shift. Mindset shift to see the value move your DNA epigenetics wise. It's not enough to go to the gym for the hour, then be sedentary for the rest of the day. You've got to get up and move. And yeah, again, we'll talk about some of the micro movements and opportunities to move and that sort of thing in our next chat. Talk to us about walking and how powerful walking is.

I love walking. I have a close friend who's a well known, highly accomplished mover. He's a sprinter and we were having this conversation because his health isn't great as far as his organs are going. And I was telling him I feel he doesn't walk at all. He prides himself on only sprinting. So he does these like really short sprints and that's. And then he's so exhausted from sprinting because it's still a high metabolic demand that he has nothing left over. And he's like, I don't have to walk because I'm sprinting. Like, in his mind, that the intensity can eradicate the need for other kind of movements, which is a big part of Move youe DNA, which is that's not the case that you could really think of every single separate type of movement as its own nutrient. And so if you applied your understanding of nutrition to movement, you would be way more informed about how movement actually works, rather than thinking of it as minutes that you have to do something. And the end, you know, that'd be the same as. As long as you eat 3,000 calories, wherever they come from, you won't be sick. That's not the case. Right. You need macro and micronutrients. They need to be in particular ratios for you to be well nourished. It's exactly the same with movement. So finally, he couldn't hear me about the sprinting and I think I probably even shouted because he deals with people on a diet perspective. I said not walking is the equivalent of not having any fat in your diet. It is a huge foundational macronutrient, if you will. And so if you've eradicated that for these other types of more like junk food or whole food, but of only a single nutrient or type, you're going to be mega malnourished. And fat has been something that we completely eliminated in what, the 1990s. And then now it's become like, oh, it turns out that you're going to get really sick without a lot of fat in your diet. It's the same with walking. Walking is taking care of. I use the word nutrition a lot. It's nourishing. And you can refer back to what I mean by nourishing in Move youe DNA, which is, it's moving particular cells in a particular way, meaning that there's going to be a resultant shape to your body when you're done doing it that supports lots of systems. And so movement is a huge category. And it seems like. I mean, I've read it numerous times on different health, even on health articles and, you know, the New York Times. And is this idea that walking doesn't count, that, yeah, okay, walking is good for you, but you still need to exercise like that. Walking doesn't. It's like exercise has really become so narrowly defined as something at 75% heart rate max, you should be sweating while you're doing it and you should barely be able to do it for Longer than this many minutes. Right. Like, we've really got a tiny bubble of what we would consider to count for this exercise. And because we count it, we discount everything else if we got. It's like trying to find that, like, what's the one vitamin that you. That if you take it doesn't, like, renders the need for all other vitamins not there. There's not one. Like, if it's a nutrient, it means you need some of it. You know, even if it's in a trace amount, it means that your body does not run without it. Nutrients are found. In hindsight, it means that there's some disease that that nutrient is known to be associated with. And so not walking is not nourishing a whole lot of your body in a lot of different ways.

Yeah. That's amazing. And again, this is one of the profound shifts in my life of I've always walked. Not always, but it's been a consistent goal of mine to walk 10,000 steps. But. And again, we'll talk about this more in the next chat. But just the difference between, you know, three walks of a mile versus 113 mile walk. And I used to be the guy that would go out and it's like, yeah, of course. I go on a hike for an hour and boom, There you go. 8,000 steps later, you know, I can.

Sit down the rest of the day. Yeah.

Literally move around a couple other times, and I would do that. And your challenge, you know, to get up and move and to use those little micro walks where everything counts. You know, for me now, the tally is I get my 10,000 steps, but I've got to also go for at least five walks of five minutes. And that's still a modest goal, but it's amazing how that shifts my energy in such profound ways. And I'll let you reflect on that, then we'll talk about doing so in nature.

Well, I got a couple things about that. The first one is, I think the number 10,000 is throwing us off. If we called it what it was, which was two and a half miles, it wouldn't seem so grand. It's like you are 10,000 of something.

Come on, it's five miles, right?

Well, no, 10,000 steps depends on your particular stride.

I'm all excited about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's the thing is steps, your pedometer, first of all, doesn't measure steps. It measures jolts. And so you need to calibrate it relative to your particular stride length. But it is kind of small. And I used to want to design. I feel like such a jerk sometimes. I used to want to design a pedometer that gave you your number of steps walked relative to how many you could have walked that day. So it's like, congratulations, you walked a half of 1% today. Because I think we are choosing to frame it in a. I totally understand the reason we need to do that for motivational purposes. But when you start seeing that kind of stuff in the scientific rationale, you're like, okay, there's a difference between what society needs to hear to get them to transition, to be movers and how we talk about it on the level of analyzing human movement. So there's that. The other thing. What was the other thing?

I want to know. I want to know the percent. So 10,000. If I did 10,000, what would you say is, congratulations, you got what percent?

I don't know.

Well, as a playful, I like to make things a game, so numbers are fun for me. From a motivational perspective, what would you estimate?

Well, it depends on the amount of time that it took you to walk those 10,000 miles, right? So this is where it gets a little bit more complicated. If you walked really fast, and I've been wanting to do a blog post on this for a really long time. When you walk with small kids, so we're used to thinking of walking. You're saying, like, well, walking is a macronutrient, but walking is a huge category of many other things. So I have this. You'd have to. You'll have to kind of imagine what I'm doing right now, for those of you listening at home. But if you turned on a YouTube video of, like, a butt exercise, and the trainer was there doing the. Let's say hip extension, right? Is when you're standing and you got one leg going back behind you, and you went onto YouTube and you saw someone, you know stand up. I'm gonna model for you because I know you want to see me do it, because this is what I was doing in the class. Who stands up and they're like, okay, you're gonna do these hip extensions. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. You know, the personal trainers out there would be like, that's terrible. You're never gonna develop muscle. You do them slow and controlled, right? So that's the difference of walking slowly versus walking quickly. There is a whole different muscle adaptation to walking slowly versus walking quickly because your muscles are doing different things. And so if all of your walking is done fast because you framed it as. I also need intensity. You're Going to miss that. A natural component of human movement is just walking from point A to point B with a bunch of other people who aren't going as fast as you like. The fact that you have to execute it and get it over so quickly changes the nutrition of that walk. It changes the nutrients that are found there. So walking different speeds too. Like are you doing your 10,000 miles in 37 minutes, 10,000 steps in 37 minutes, or are you doing like me trying to model for my little kids how to walk those 10,000 steps are going to take me four and a half hours. So what's the physiology to walking for four and a half hours versus walking for 37 minutes? You and I both walk 10,000 steps, but those two 10,000 steps can't even be compared to each other because they bring about different epigenetic responses.

It's so awesome.

It's so awesome.

It is so awesome. And my wife and I just had a chat because with a four year old we were literally talking about this and the mindset that we had was it's just different, but from a negative perspective of you can't walk at the, at the, not even aggressive pace, but just kind of a quote, normal pace.

You can't even get anywhere with a.

Yeah, you're like, okay, you know, literally like, you know, you've gone X hundreds of yards rather than X, you know, mile or two.

But it's your strength training and balance. Like you have to, you have to see what it is affording you. You've lost that intensity and the ability to get your movement over quickly. But what you got was four hours outside, which is if I asked you on paper what it is that you wanted, you would probably put that anyway, that you wish that you could be outside moving in nature for four hours. You just didn't know it had to look like strolling.

And with whom? With your family. With your family. Right. So it's more time with your family outside, moving, active, enjoying. I mean it's, it's, it's all mindset at the end of the day.

Yeah.

Talk to us about, there's so much more here. But talk to us about forest bathing, reducing techno stress.

Well, that's when you just go naked and rub yourself up against a tree.

Of course, this is what you do on a daily basis.

Yes, Every day.

Every day.

Forest bathing is walking through a group of plants that are giving off these particular chemicals that they give off that beefs up their response to bugs and whatnot. You know, so like plants are busy defending Themselves. We're all busy taking care of ourselves. And humans have always been really bathed in plants, with the exception of a very short period of time in which we've been kind of boxed away from that. We've boxed ourselves away from them. So humans are kind of used to interacting with the environment that plants provide. So much so that it could even be that these chemicals are nutrients to us. So it's kind of hard when you're trying to figure out what a nutrient is. There's got to be some. It's a hindsight type of thing. What they do know about these chemicals is that these chemicals decrease your stress and they change your physiology. They can affect your blood pressure and your heart rate, and they measure biofeedback. So if you go in particularly tense, you just walk around and you're interacting with these chemicals and there's some shifts. And then they had to further delineate it by, like, well, what if you just sit in a chair with these trees around you? You get that same calming, relaxing benefit. So they've measured these chemicals. So Shinrin Yoku, I think, is the Japanese. The bulk of the research started in Japan. So it's a. It's a fun rabbit hole to go into if you. If you dig research. But that's what it is. It's just about reconnecting with plants. Because human and plants have always been an organic relationship. It's only recently that we've tried to really exist without regular direct interaction.

So cool. And I love this, the emphasis on nutritious movement, nutrients that we don't even know are missing. And I think it was John Ratey who said that exercise in nature is like exercise squared. Like there's all these benefits, or movement in this parlance, is just so powerful. So you're in my mind every time I make, you know, discipline myself, which it takes for me to go looking at the mountains right now and do the hike, you know, and how much more relaxed and grounded and centered I feel each time I. I do that versus the roe, you know, indoors.

Yeah, Nature. I think that it's really. It's interesting because it kind of seems from a biological perspective that we are transitioning to a domesticated version of humans, of what humans still are in some places, but what all humans used to be. And domestication is interesting. It's an interesting topic to kind of broach. But they've said a couple of the hypotheses about domestication is that, like, dogs, for example, would be domesticated wolves, that the domesticated version almost is like an infant version of the non domesticated animal. So a full grown dog would really have the function level of a newborn wolf. And you know, and so I kind of feel like that's. A lot of people have this relationship with nature where it just feels like a lot of work. I mean, like whether you have to go to it, you know, that could be an actual physical limitation. It's like it's gonna take me, you know, 20 minutes to get there and I don't have time to do the 20 minutes. But I think it's. Nature is the best trainer for natural movement because it's going to offer variability and textures, which is movement. It's going to offer more movement and movements that you're not used to. So it could also be just a natural reaction where your body senses, your wisdom, is aware that to go out there is going to demand a lot more from you than executing your workout. Something flat, level, temperature controlled, smooth. Like you've. You've reduced the amount of movement from your workout. Very much so. And so it's just gonna demand that you work out so much harder, that you move so much more of you and that you move yourself more that I think we tend to avoid it. And then also I'm not sure that everyone has the skill. I mean, if you're hiking down something and your foot slips out from underneath you, that never happens any other time. Right? You're supposed to wear rubber shoes on the soft rubber floor with a rubber grip. I mean, you've made it so nothing unexpected can happen in your movement and therefore very little moves.

And therefore you have very little strength. And that that metaphor of the domesticated. Not even a metaphor, that it's not a metaphor. The reality of the domesticated human, well.

It means that you are adapted to living inside it. Just what it does is it perpetuates your inability to move outside of your domain, thus ensuring that you're going to stay there. So you get caught in a loop. It does take. You're gonna have to like, you're gonna have to work uphill quite a bit to reconcile yourself with nature because you yourself are nature. You've just protected yourself from it quite a bit.

So much we can talk about in this. Let's press pause on kind of wrap up the Move youe DNA chat. And Again, Move youe DNA. Katie Bowman, check it out. Your website is nutritiousmovement.com Is that right?

That's right.

Okay. Nutritiousmovement.com and then Katie's podcast, Super popular health podcast Katie says. Check that out. I think you're going to love if you enjoyed this, you're going to love both the book and all of her other work. Katie, thank you so much.

Thank you so much.

And so this is part one. So join us for the next interview, which is don't just sit there. We're going to talk about is sitting the new smoking. Katie has an awesome answer to that question and how important it is to make dynamic movement part of your life. We touched on some of those themes in this chat, but we're going to go into more depth in the next chat, so join us for that Isn't.

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