PNTV: Don't Just Sit There by Katy Bowman (#314)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, Don't Just Sit There by Katie Bowman. Don't Just Sit There. Subtitle Transitioning to a Standing and Dynamic Workstation for Whole Body Health. Katie Bowman is basically the world's leading biomechanist who's helping us apply wisdom from that domain to optimizing our lives. She has a super popular podcast called Katie Says and you can check out her blog at. I think it's nutritiousmovement.com My wife Alexandra is a huge fan of Katie. We are systematically removing furniture from our house. We could engage in better movement while relaxing, etc. A whole nother conversation. This book is packed with big ideas. It's a short, quick reading book, but fantastic. Fantastic. Philosopher's Note. Bunch of my favorite big ideas. Five of them here. So the first big idea is static versus dynamic. I often say that when I read a book, there's one word that jumps out more than any other. Right. That kind of is the theme for the book. I would say that this book actually has two movement and dynamic. And one of the big points that Katie makes in the book is it's not enough to go from a static seated position to a static standing position. So a lot of people are getting out of sitting all day long and they're installing a standing desk that has a lot of potential benefits, but it also has a lot of potential drawbacks. And she says the thing we really want to think about is moving from a static environment, whether it's sitting in the same position all day long every day, or standing in the same position all day long every day. They're both static. What we want to create is a dynamic workstation. What's the difference? Well, you're not just in one position, you're not sitting in one position or standing one position. You are engaging in tiny little dynamic micro movements throughout the day, which we're going to talk about in a moment. And that's essentially what the book, or a lot of what the book is all about, is finding little ways to introduce more dynamic movement throughout your day. Your cells are literally being reformed when you sit in the same exact position all and when you stand in the same position all day long. So remember, dynamic, dynamic, dynamic. We'll get to more details on how to implement that in a moment. Second big idea is active and sedentary. So you can actually be active and sedentary. How is that possible? Well, you can get up early or whatever in the Morning and go bust out an awesome workout and. And then come back home in your car, Drive in your car, commute to work, take a short little walk to your desk and then sit basically all day long before you hop back into your car. Drive home sitting, and then sit and eat dinner and entertain yourself with digital entertainment, however you do it, right? So you can be active. You worked out, maybe even training for a marathon. Yet you're also sedentary because you're spending all day in a static position. Active and sedentary. We want to be active and not sedentary, of course. How do we do that? Well, here's one way to approach it. Think about movement as more than just your big workout, right? So workouts are obviously important. We want to work out in a smart, practical way, right? And train and recover and all that good stuff. But the way that I thought about it as I was reading the book, Katie doesn't say it quite exactly like this, but it kind of breaks down in this way. We can think about our movement in these three different categories, right? We have micro movements, mini movements, then macro movements. So the macro is basically our workout that's pretty straightforward. We want to engage in that whatever way we find to be most inspiring. Most people are aware of that. Then we have mini movements which are basically. She describes them as imagine taking a three minute walk every hour or so. Go out. She might even say 30 minutes. Every 30 to 60 minutes, go take a three minute walk, just move. And if you actually did that throughout the day, you can get an extra 48 movements. It must have been every half hour, right? Get an extra 48 minutes of movement a day by simply taking 3 minute walks regular intervals throughout the day. That's a mini movement, right? That's not a macro. Huge sweaty, you just went nuts and gone to with the gym type of workout, right? Michelle Seager, the leading authority on the science of healthy motivation, right? For health behaviors, wrote a great book called no Sweat. Check that out in the interview. She's awesome. She calls these little mini movements opportunities to move. OTMs. We need to look for OTMs. Opportunities to move throughout our day. Park further away from the grocery store rather than trolling for that spot right by the door, right? Walk up the stairs rather than taking the elevator. These little opportunities to move add up another one that would be a mini example of movement, right? Is this nerve stretch. Imagine do it right now. Feel this, right? Katie has exercises you can do. We're going to talk about micro in a moment where you're actually working and moving your body. Then you can take breaks. You're at work, right? You don't need to go to the gym. But you can do little movements like this, where you're extending your arms out more from your shoulders than from your elbows. Right? Kind of extending that. Your. I don't know if my palms are out or not. Your palms are like that. Fingers are up. And you feel that. That's a nerve stretch. She's got a ton of little exercises like that in the book. That's a mini movement. You can do that for X seconds. And that's awesome. It's totally restorative. Moves you out of static into a very subtle, simple dynamic state. Then we have micro movements again. She's got a list of these. These are things you can do while you're working. So you can get a little. A little towel that you roll up or a little foam pad or whatever and stretch your calf. If you're standing while you're working, you can actually stretch your calf while you're typing away, or you can just shift your weight. That's a little micro movement. You can still be working, but that micro movement in itself is doing something right versus being purely static the entire time. Again, she has a bunch of other little things we can do, but micro mini macro. We want to get out of just thinking about the macro and think about how we can create more dynamicism via these three aspects of movement, with, again, emphasis on micro mini. So then the fourth big idea here is night lighting. Night lighting. We talked about this a ton in optimal sleep 101, circadian rhythms. Right. The light bulb was invented in the 1800s. It's been used heavily for about 100 years. Less than 100 years. That's a blink of an eye in terms of our species evolution. It's crazy to think about how we're jacking ourselves up at night. And she shares the story of some research she did in Cancun with sea turtles. Excuse me, Sea turtles. Apparently, these sea turtles would use something called sea finding. Right. Where they would find the sea based on the moonlight. Right? So somehow they evolved where. That was how they tracked their way to where they needed to go right after being born. But in Cancun, they built all these hotels on the beach that had obviously huge lighting at night. And these sea turtles could no longer find the sea. Right. They were so disrupted by this unnatural nighttime light. Again, they evolved over however many hundreds of millions of years to do a certain thing that now suddenly is different and it's disrupting them. And These little sea turtles were dying on the beach or in the pools at the hotels. And the point she was making was, all animals are disrupted by unnatural light at night. And as I said In Optimal Sleep 101, quoting Sean Stephenson, who wrote Sleep Smarter, the number one thing we can do to improve our sleep immediately is to turn off electronics at night. That blue light disrupts our melatonin production, which disrupts our sleep. Flip off your iPhone, your iPad, your TVs, and get a good night of sleep. Allow the world's natural circadian rhythms to kick in and don't disrupt that process where you might wind up like the sea turtle in a hotel pool that you didn't want to be in. Fifth Big Idea is a great study on if you want more creativity, if you want to have good ideas, move. Super quick study was they brought people in, they wanted to test their creativity. Four different conditions. One group sat inside, another group sat outside. Another group walked on a treadmill inside, and the fourth group walked outside. As you would guess, the group that walked outside outperformed all the other groups in whatever function of creativity they were testing. She says, well, use that to your advantage. There's no reason why a lot of us can't do more work from home. 10 to 50% of our time, we can be working from home where we don't have all the pressures of a normal corporate environment. She says, look, I take all of my phone calls, interviews, I do any negotiations I need to do while walking outside. I'm getting my steps, I'm getting my movement, and I'm working. She's stacking these behaviors in a really conducive way. When I used to have a lot more meetings and calls and all that stuff, I would try to do as many as I possibly could, either together on a walk or a hike with whoever I was meeting with or by myself on the phone, encouraging them to get out and move at the same time. You're going to have better ideas and you're going to create more of this dynamic movement. That's a winning combination. In the note, I quote John Ratey, one of the world's leading authorities on the science of exercise, in Go Wild, he says that exercise in nature is basically exercise squared. It's a good thing. So if you're looking for good ideas, get out and move in nature and find all the little ways you can integrate these new habits into your life. The tiny, tiny little shifts. One percent improvements, aggregated, compounded over time, lead to huge results. Remember those sea turtles as you Turn off your electronics tonight. I got a note literally yesterday from one of our members who enjoyed the Optimal Sleep 101 class and she said she was struggling with sleep and she had a really hard time turning off the electronics. She was scared about that because she was so used to doing it, but she turned it off as I talked about in the class and for the first night and however long she slept all the way through the night, usually she was getting up twice a night. That's awesome. That's super cool. Turn off your lights if you're struggling at all to sleep at night. That's the place to start. We Talked about our movements 3M's micro, mini and Macro. We want to integrate all of them such that we're both active and not sedentary. Because you can work out, but then be sedentary. If you spend all of your time commuting, working and then chillaxing with digital stuff and not moving enough. So again, it's not static moving from sitting all the time in one position to standing all the time in one position. We want to focus on dynamic. Don't just sit there. Katie Bowman, thanks for the great book. Check her out Katie says Podcast and Nutritious Movement Blog for more. And of course, get the book. What was your favorite big idea? How are you going to make that a bigger part of your life? Get on that and have another awesome day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that PNTV episode. A lot of people don't know all the stuff I do beyond these free videos I share on YouTube. 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