DANI: Hello, there! It’s Dani, and I’m talking with Katy. Today, we’re going to be talking about an issue that everyone listening has tried to tackle at some point in their journey toward natural movement and better health. What makes natural movement hard? Are you ready for this, Katy?
DANI: Hello, there! It’s Dani, and I’m talking with Katy. Today, we’re going to be talking about an issue that everyone listening has tried to tackle at some point in their journey toward natural movement and better health. What makes natural movement hard? Are you ready for this, Katy?
KATY: Yes.
DANI: So, we’re going to ask: what are the hurdles that people face when trying to fit more natural movement into their life, and you have a huge job ahead of you, because you’re like the fix-it woman today.
KATY: Well, I’ll definitely be the throwing out some suggestions woman.
DANI: Right. And you don’t have to fix everything, because you are just a human woman, and that’s okay.
KATY: I am! I am just a human woman.
DANI: You are.
KATY: Thank you for reminding me of that. Sometimes I forget.
DANI: You’re just; you’re just a girl.
KATY: I am not a robot. I am not a machine.
DANI: No. Nope, you’re just like the rest of us, and I do, however, admire your ability to provide solutions. That’s something that you’re pretty handy with.
KATY: Thank you.
DANI: You’re pretty good with. So, let’s do what we can do. I asked folks questions on, like, you know, Facebook pages about alignment and got so many responses to this. So clearly, it’s an issue.
KATY: Well, right? I mean, I think in terms of – it doesn’t matter: natural movement, exercise, diet, changing anything is hard.
DANI: It is hard.
KATY: The change is the hardest part, it’s not the thing that you’re transitioning to or the thing that you want to start doing, it’s the decision to change. It’s restructuring your life, it’s changing who you – into who you’re going to be. It’s huge. That is the biggest piece. The thing – the running, the squatting, the cooking your own food, the walking to work – it’s – those aren’t difficult per se; they’re simple, but the inertia. The inertia is the hard part.
DANI: That is so true; in fact, we could just end this show now. There you go, everybody, the inertia’s the hard part.
KATY: I hope you liked our solution! I’m just a human! I’m only a human.
DANI: I’m only a human. Have a nice day. So we had about, probably 100 issues, questions and everything.
KATY: Whoa, oh my god.
DANI: But – but! For those of you listening who sent these in, or if you’re listening and you have your own thing and you didn’t send it – if you don’t hear your question featured, I bet you a million bucks if you’re listening closely to the show, you will find an answer that solves that which vexes you in regards to getting more natural movement. So you may not have your specific thing answered, but listen closely, because you probably will find an answer that is applicable to your specific issues. So keep an open mind and listen closely, and also we’re going to do something different: you always show us a stretch toward the end of the show, kind of halfway through the show. Can you kind of pepper this show with some stretches for us, just to show ways that you can get a little movement in all day long? Are you cool with that?
KATY: I’m only a human! Yes. Yes, I can. I will do my best – like, right now, what I’m doing is I’ve grabbed all of my hair, and I’m just twisting it to stretch the muscles underneath the skin of the head.
DANI: Like a scalp mover. Mmm.
KATY: And like, you have a lot of muscles on your scalp, and I was just thinking, I’m stretching my feet, like I’m on – like, I have to stand here for work, like most people have to stand there for work, so I’ve got a half dome under one foot, I’m twisting my hair, getting all those cranial muscles, and I’m standing up. So that wasn’t so hard. I’m still getting my work done.
DANI: You’re still doing your job.
KATY: I’m still doing my job.
DANI: That’s the crazy part.
KATY: Yeah.
DANI: All that movement and you’re still doing what you need to do. And here’s a quick hint from me: it should be pretty obvious to all of us, but while you’re listening to this, just get up and walk around.
KATY: There you go.
DANI: Walk outside, and then boom! You’ve done two things. You’ve got some movement, you’ve got your fresh air, working your eyes, and you’re listening to this and learning stuff. There; we’ve just given you a couple ways you can get natural movement into your life.
KATY: Yeah, I mean, the temperature, the goose bumps. There’s so much to natural movement that doesn’t have to do with exercise. But anyway, that will flesh itself out as we talk, so let’s go.
DANI: Yes. Okay. Two big things. Which one do you want to start with: toddlers or time? Those were the two biggest issues were time and toddlers.
KATY: Well, let’s talk about – let’s do time first, because they’re not really separate issues. But let’s do time first, because I think that’ll be the more appropriate order, even though I’m only human so I’m not really sure. Let’s try it.
DANI: And if I can just interrupt you before you go into time: everybody comes from different places in their viewpoints of the world.
KATY: Mm-hmm.
DANI: And so for time, we had people that they worked and they didn’t have time, but some other people worked at home and they didn’t have time. Some people stayed at home and raised their kids – so there’s many different ways; it’s not like any one person has more than the other.
KATY: No, and I think that that’s going to be the big, you said, keep an open mind and listen closely and I think that that’s going to be the big takeaway which is: the hurdle probably has less to do with what you perceive the hurdle to be, and the fact that hurdles are kind of nature – mental hurdle’s are nature’s way of keeping you from changing habits. So that’s why you’ll see that you’ll have 12 people ask the exact same question who all have, like I think with walking, right? “I can’t do too much walking because I live in the city,” and “But I can’t do too much walking because I live in the country.” It’s like, ok, wait a minute, because you’re – everyone else’s solution seems to be your current lack of situation. Doesn’t matter what it is. Like, the grass is always greener; we always perceive that we’re going to be able to change when our live is like X, but it doesn’t really work like that. It doesn’t have to work like that. The solution doesn’t have to be a huge, radical change. But anyway, again. Let’s go.
DANI: Well, let’s dive into time, then, human girl.
KATY: All right. I prefer woman?
DANI: Okay, so let’s talk about time. Question 1: I work, I commute, I have no time.
KATY: Okay, well, let’s talk about the period of time in which you are at work. You can get lots of natural movement into your work day without having to stop producing your output, whatever your output may be. So there’s different ways you can do that. One is you can restructure your standing workstation; we’ve done a whole show on that, right? Didn’t we do a whole show on the office? So go back and listen to that show – do you remember what episode it was?
DANI: Uh, I think it was 7.
KATY: Ok, Yeah. It doesn’t matter.
DANI: It was called, “Don’t Just Stand There.”
KATY: Don’t just stand there, right? So moving to a standing workstation is kind of like the general idea, only we get more specific and we say move to a dynamic workstation. So most people are just sitting at work all day. You get to work, you sit down, you’re in a chair until your lunch break and then maybe you get up a little bit, you eat lunch at your desk, and then you get back down, and so you’re really still for periods of time. So my real quick suggestions – there’s a lot more in that episode – would be: switch your body position around while you are at work. You can get a hanging bar in your office, I mean – it sounds crazy, but people spend a lot of time – I work a lot of times on Facebook, and there’s a lot of people who are at work who are also on Facebook. So I know you have time to step away from your computer. I will give you a hall pass from reading anything that I’m posting, because nothing I’m posting is more important than you walking over to go hang from this bar that you have in your office. Or say you have a really strict traditional kind of office, just put your arms up a wall. It’s so different than the computering position. What about the shoes that you’re wearing when you go to work? Do they have some sort of feature that’s limiting the mobility of the whole body when you do walk around the office to go to the bathroom or whatnot? Talk to your office about walking meetings – like, if you guys get together for 15-20 minutes or an hour long meeting, certain times a day, it’s like, you know what? Here’s all this research: we want this whole office to be healthier. Can we take this meeting outside? Do you spend a lot of time on the phone in the office? Can you consolidate all your calls to a specific range of the day in which you go outside and take a walk and do them on your cell phone? Like, there are so many solutions within being at work all day long that don’t have to affect the work that you get done and your job and your livelihood. That’s where I would go with that one.
DANI: Put a tennis ball under your foot.
KATY: I mean, whatever.
DANI: And roll your foot while you’re talking on the phone or working on your computer.
KATY: Yeah, yeah. And I think that people are still associating exercise with movement, right? So go back and listen to the Natural Movement podcast where, um, it’s not about these – it’s not always about these big, giant things. Like, I need to be moving more for so many hours. If anything, it’s about these tiny, subtle motions, getting them in. Like, what’s the – what was the latest research paper on – on changing the cells in the arterial system? I think you just had to get up for 2 minutes every 30 minutes and walk around, like at 2 miles an hour. That’s like going to walk over and wash your face with some water. Go out and walk out and look out a window. Walk around your office. Stand up. You know, I write a lot. I write a lot – my life has turned into writing. Writing and moving, that’s all I do. But, like, when I – I will sit down in front of the computer and hours can go by without getting up, you know? And so you just have to break it up. Think about less like moving in the traditional sense and more like breaking up your geometry.
DANI: Right.
KATY: Like, I’ve been in this particular geometrical position. Change. All right, so that was my solution. And then commuting – commute differently. Change how you’re sitting in your car, you can be – you know, you have to be safe when you’re driving, and everyone’s commute’s a little different. Is there a way to take public transportation where you can stand, and oh my goodness – I’ve been on public transportation all over the world this last year and it hasn’t really influenced my – it hasn’t influenced that I get natural movement. The type of natural movement changes, but if you’re stuck somewhere, you can always be stretching and standing, and I hang. Oh my gosh, I hang on the side of the train, on the inside, you know, I’m hanging on the luggage racks and I’m on airplanes and I’m standing and I – you have to get over feeling odd by being the only person not sitting, but that’s what this is all about, right? It’s about breaking free from a cultural restraint. So. So, anyway. I’m only human.
DANI: So, and I think that takes care, really, of the work at home parents that wrote in and said that they don’t have time, because there you go. There’s ways to get it in.
KATY: And at home, it’s a lot easier. At home, it’s much easier because you’re in your own clothes, you know, like, there’s –
DANI: No one’s looking at you.
KATY: Well, yeah – and, like, you can just go out and walk around the house. Walk around the structure of your house, outside, and then you might have even a little bit more freedom to take phone calls and whatnot. Get up from your desk and go do a house chore. That’s movement, you know? Do a few squats to do it. Instead of compartmentalizing our life, where it’s like, now I’m at work, and now I’m at home, and now I’m with the kids, and now I’m exercising, and now we’re eating, you have to kind of thing about how can I cross over some of these categories? So that would be again: dynamic workstations are super easy when you work at home. Much more easy than when you’re in the office.
DANI: So did we cover stay at home moms yet? Like, I have –
KATY: No.
DANI: I have an infant – I have no time. I have an infant and a toddler and the diapers and the laundry and cleaning that weird sticky thing off the chair, and I don’t have any time.
KATY: Well, that’s the cool thing, because – and that’s one of the reasons I’m so open with my life is that people can see that I am a stay at home, full-time mother. I have a 2 year old and a 3 year old. I have laundry, I have a home. I have family.
DANI: You have to cook meals.
KATY: I have to cook meals.
DANI: You have to chase after kids that are partially clothed.
KATY: Yes! And I’m trying to garden, I’m trying to cook my food from scratch – like, it’s – again, I think it has to do with the feeling of being overwhelmed. All of that also, I’ll say that – I’ll say this. I’ll say that I am fortunate enough – one of the things with being a stay at home mom is that being a stay at home mom has become synonymous with being a single parent for large periods of the day. So I’m a stay at home mom, but I also have a stay at home dad. So I realize that that makes a difference because it’s two adults –
DANI: Mm-hmm.
KATY: On two children, and so one of the things with this natural movement kind of paradigm is: with natural movement would come natural tribal relations, meaning you would not be expected to have to care for your children all day long by yourself. And that is – that’s the next hurdle. Like, in my next book, which –
DANI: You mean your next-next.
KATY: Yes – it’s actually my next-next book. It’s actually my next-next-next book is actually talking about – because I have the diastasis recti, I’ve got barefoot, diastasis recti, and then this.
DANI: KB on DR.
KATY: That’s right. Is that one solution for stay at home moms is to get someone else in the home with you. It does not have to be a – someone who is relieving you of your tasks. So it’s not like, a babysitter or a nanny. I don’t have any of those things. But I do have a local niece who is 8, and then 9. And I can have her come over to be outside with me. So if I wanted to go out and get natural movement and I wanted my children to get natural movement as well, I could, you know, if my husband wasn’t here, bring another older child over. And I’ve found that the same results came from having other 5 and 6 and 7 year olds, that you can go outside to a playground with your small children and move right alongside of them. So I think that that’s – for stay at home moms is one: get some help. Find some help, help that does not cost you anything, because that’s I mean – time and money, right? Those are the two biggest limitations. But we’re always taking extra kids over here. Always. We take walks every single day and I know we’ll get to this: our walks are slow and labor-intensive, you know, in trying to get little kids –at least at first – little kids to start moving. But I found that, hey, when I had other kids, when I had a 4 year old and a 6 year old and another 2 year old, all of a sudden it wasn’t this adult, this single adult and these 2 kids bored out of their minds at being with another adult because children throughout time have been with herds of other children of all different ages, kind of motivating them to go to the next developmental step, you know.
DANI: Right.
KATY: It’s kind of modeling, it’s like, hey, I’m 2. What do 3 year olds do? Hey, I’m 3! What do 4 year olds do? Like, you’re always – they’re always being challenged but the challenge between a child and an adult is so huge, it’s just – I just watched my kids; they don’t want to do anything with just me. They would always prefer to do it with any other child in the universe. So I was just like, hey, does anyone want to bring their kids over? I’m taking a walk. And I found that other moms are sitting at home by themselves and other dads are sitting at home by themselves, and we just started creating community groups. It doesn’t have to be during the day, maybe it’s in the evening time. Let’s meet at this park; we’ll all bring a dish. We do this in the summertime almost 3-4 nights a week where we do a very casual text send out: I’m going to XY park, and I have got this dish to share, bring your kids. It’s not a party, it’s just dinner. It just happens to be outside. All of a sudden you’ve got 40 people there.
DANI: That’s awesome.
KATY: You’ve got 40 people there; you’ve got people without kids who want to hold your baby, and you’ve got someone who wants to push someone on the swing, and then you’ve got 2 people breaking off and going to do laps, you’ve got some people climbing trees, and that’s how you have to think about it. You have to think about it more like a lifestyle than more like how do I fit in 30 minutes of exercise? Because it’s not really like that.
DANI: That’s the biggest departure –
KATY: Yeah.
DANI: -- for many of us is that getting movement isn’t about bringing your duffle bag with you, changing into different clothes, moving at 24 hour fitness or whatever, and then leaving. I mean, you can really skip that and weave it in throughout your day, and you don’t even have to be that creative.
KATY: Right. Right. I think it’s just because we’re repeatedly told that it doesn’t “count” if it’s not exercise. It doesn’t count if it’s not intense or big or sweaty or time consuming or isolated. So that’s not the case.
DANI: And that really – you just kind of answered the next question which a lot of people have toddlers that are slow. They want to get out and walk, right? They just want to walk at an adult pace for miles, and you answered that question and also you did a great blog post about your kids when they were just little little, toddling after you and your husband and what you guys would do during those walks instead of just walking at a snail’s pace like you’re walking down the aisle to get married. You did stuff during those walks, too.
KATY: Right. And also, you have to keep in mind that natural movement is the pace of all humans. It is not you walking by yourself as fast as you can. That is not natural movement. It can be a component of natural movement, but it is not all natural movements. How do you think people walked 10-15 miles with every single person young and old in their group? They walked at a pace that everyone can tolerate. And sometimes you scoop up people along the way and carry them when they’re tired and then let them come back down. But I think, again, it has to be hard and at a particular pace for us to think that it counts instead of recognizing that – oh, someone posted a really great meme. I think it was Debbie Beane of Positively Aligned. She makes great memes where she takes these awesome pictures of her – I mean, she lives a crazy, crazy beautiful life as far as natural movement goes and she had put a meme over a picture that says, like, it was someone else’s quote that said, “walk quickly, walk alone, walk slowly, walk together” or something along those lines and I just think that’s – it’s really our idea of fast walking has to do with what you do on flat & level pavement ground. That you do want to be able to walk – you want to be able to walk quickly and you want to be able to walk up and down hills, and you want to be able to have your heart rate fluctuate throughout the day. It’s just that when you’re walking slow with your kids, it’s not that you’re not walking or not getting natural movement. It’s just that you’re getting some nutrients and then you can get your other nutrients later. And I think that for everyone but especially parents – especially moms, if they’ve been delegated that being the primary caretaker through the bulk of the day is that walking quickly by yourself is a stress reducer more than it is – I mean, it’s also good exercise but what you really want is just time for yourself, and I am all about that. I, too, needed that so what I had to do was get up at 5:30 to get it.
DANI: Yeah.
KATY: And I go take my 5 mile adult paced walk before everyone else gets up. And if we have a new baby, you will get there soon when you can go. But I also used to take my adult, by myself walks with my infant, with my littlest infant because I could go – I’m going to go do a fast, 2-mile walk carrying this 10 pound football on me and I’ll go pick up something at the mailbox and it wasn’t like I was always had to watch all of the kids. So you – you look for every single opportunity and you take it. You take it, and you never hem and haw. Just go. Just go.
DANI: Yeah, there’s all those different stages, you know.
KATY: Yeah, yeah. And that’s also, right?
DANI: Right!
KATY: Natural movement flows throughout life.
DANI: Totally.
KATY: Throughout life.
DANI: Babies have to happen.
KATY: Natural movement is a – babies happen and it slows you down quite naturally and it’s great, because it’s slowing you down as your body is coming back together again, right? Like, it’s all – it’s all packaged so nicely.
DANI: And so for you getting up so early in the morning, because one of the questions was, well, it’s too dark out. You have a walking buddy, don’t you?
KATY: I do, and I live – I live up in the Pacific northwest, I mean, it’s dark here until 5:00. There’s lights, you can go to a place that is well-lit. When it’s really – we are walking – I mean, it’s really rural where I live, like, wild animals and stuff rural. Like, dangerous wild animals rural. I just want to clarify that – and I’m only human – so we were doing it for a while, but you know, as the end of the summer and then it just getting darker, and with the darkness seemed a weight upon it so there was a certain point, I was like, you know what? Let’s go to our very small downtown area of our rural town, and we met there. And we just started walking 5 miles there. It was lit, you get a walking buddy, and I suggest that – I can’t tell you how getting a walking buddy right now is your biggest ticket to success.
DANI: It doesn’t cost a thing.
KATY: It doesn’t have to be someone that you love and adore. I have someone that I love and adore, but frankly, one of the reasons I love and adore her is that she will walk with me every day. Your relationship – it’s just everything that I need. It’s outside time, it’s natural time. It’s chilly, it’s natural loads to my skin, it’s dark, there’s no screen time, it’s talking, it’s adult social time, it’s child-free time, and it’s 5 miles of walking. It’s like 90 minutes. Anything else can happen the rest of the day and I feel good because I can always refer back to that morning. Do that. Put out a Facebook post, put out a Tweet: I am looking for one or two or three people to start this group. Because if you have more than 2 then even if one of you is tired or sick or out of town, the group continues to go. And do it. Just do it. It’s not too early; you will get used to it, and then you will come to love it, even if you’re not a morning person. Just do it.
DANI: And that being said about the time, if you really cannot do it early in the morning, then find a group that you can do it at 10 in the morning when you can carry your babies.
KATY: Sure, sure.
DANI: There’s so many different variations.
KATY: Yeah.
DANI: And it’s limitless, it really is limitless.
KATY: It is.
DANI: Because I know it changes at the ages that your kids are at.
KATY: Yeah, it’s – I constantly thought I was never going to walk, I was like, dude, my life is over! I have a 1 and 2 year old, I’m never going to do – it just changes. It changes and you don’t even realize it and suddenly you’re like, why aren’t I doing anything? No one needs me in the morning anymore. And I still nurse at night, so I just really want people to hear: I am a breastfeeding, stay at home, two small children, full time working mom.
DANI: Who is only human.
KATY: Who is only human, and I can do it. But I can do it, I believe, more so because I’ve mentally decided that I am going to do it first. The solution comes later, more than I just happened to have, like, I see – it’s like, oh, your life is so great and you have all these solutions, and it’s like, I worked my butt off for it.
DANI: Yeah, you – it was crafted. It – you made it happen.
KATY: Everything that I have right now I have crafted
DANI: Absolutely.
KATY: Because I – yeah. So, if you find yourself going down that road, just stop. And take a breath. And just find one thing that you can change – can change. It’s so easy to list the things – sometimes I’ll Facebook post something, and I’ll be like, ok, consider this – and I don’t want to hear any reason why you can’t! Not that there are not reasons that you can’t, but you have to start changing the way that you think about stuff, and list at least 3 “cans” before you go down the cant’s, because the can’ts are so much easier than the cans. You’ve been given can’ts your whole life. Where, like, can’ts, with a t, it’s just reflexive. It’s so reflexive, and when you get tired it’s so hard to come out of that space and when you get sick it’s so hard to come out of that space, so just start by writing down – man, I feel like Tony Robbins right now, like, you can do it! And it’s more like, objectively speaking, just make a list. Just make a list, because you will leave the cans off because, again, I believe it’s our natural mechanism to prevent ourselves from changing because it takes too much energy. Metabolic energy.
DANI: Right.
KATY: I don’t really want to sound preachy there, but I wanted to sound motivating. Did I sound motivating or did I sound preachy?
DANI: No, you sounded motivating, and you – you’re proof in the pudding. I mean, you’re not just saying it.
KATY: I thought I was human, now I’m pudding?
DANI: You’re human pudding. You’ve done it, and I know that you – it’s just, none of how your life is, you didn’t fall into any of it.
KATY: No.
DANI: You’ve worked hard for it, and you don’t do it all at once. Nobody does it all at once. You do it in bits and pieces, and you make it happen, so.
KATY: And I also did not come from a family where it was modeled for me. I have not been like this my entire life – so it was a conscious decision around 17 or 18 to start making it happen. Like, I am naturally – I am naturally a very sedentary person. Just so everyone out there knows: I would always prefer, deep down, to be doing nothing except reading or watching episodes of Top Chef or something like that. Like, that is my – that is my default, really, really deep down because that’s kind of the modeling that I got early, early on. But I just started tapping into other, like, I’ve seen other things, and I just started becoming – I started changing. So you can do it. You can do it.
DANI: You totally can do it. So it’s just one step at a time. And speaking of steps, let’s do a little stretch, and then we move on to the next. We’ll do one right now.
KATY: Well, I’m still – I’m just going back and forth between one foot and the other foot, kind of simulating uphill, but what I was thinking is, right now if you have a doorknob handy or if you’re out walking – yay! – you can grab um, a pole if you’re walking around the streets. See if there’s something you can hang onto that’s sturdy – a sign pole or a tree trunk, and what you’re going to do is you’re going to grab on to the doorknob or the sign pole.
DANI: Bannister.
KATY: Whatever you’ve got! I have a bookshelf right here but I don’t think I’d hang on the bookshelf. But I have a doorknob kind of behind me. And you’re going to come down into a squat, and you’re going to keep – back your feet up. We tend to squat really close to doorknobs or what – if you’re doing a supported squat, which I love, we tend to hold the tension in our arms. You’re real close to it. Back way away from it so your arms are super, super long, and then get your butt back so it’s super, super far away and then squat down there. Hang on to the thing that you’re using to kind of stabilize your body and then – just stick your butt way, way back and over your heels and then shift your weight back and forth. I’m going to step away from the mic because it’s so good I have to do it right now. So I’m way down here and I’m shifting.
DANI: Ooh, that feels good. I’m hanging on to my big herkin desk.
KATY: Get into the hips by really shifting your weight to the right and the left. Like, squats for particular reasons because we’re after particular loads and outcomes, we’ve got all these alignment points on them. But getting down in there and moving while you’re down and in your squat, there’s so much value there. Like, I watch my kids and they’re building stuff, right? Maybe they’re building stuff out of blocks and they’ll lean their squat all the way to the right to get one block and then they’ll lean all the way to the left and their squat – you know, the legs will have tipped to one side and they’ll move forward and back and it’s very dynamic. I’m going to do it one more time. I’m down here, and then when you come up, push through your heels. Try to stay off your toes, and then really use your stability device, pull, trunk, and come on up, and there you go. See, natural movement: you could do that at your office. You could just do it behind your desk, hold on to your desk. Set a timer. That’s the cool thing: you’ve got all these gadgets. If you’re addicted to your screen, put it to good use. Set a squat alarm. Set a thoracic stretch, reaching your arms up a wall or just reaching your arms over your head. Just set a timer. Do it.
DANI: Love those reminder timers. All the time, stretch your neck, stretch your fingers. I use them all the time, because if you’re in front of a screen a lot like both you and I are, you kind of get in the zone, and sometimes you do forget to move. So I have to have actual, electronic reminders to do that. And it works for me!
KATY: Yeah.
DANI: Okay! Here’s another good hurdle that people have, very, very common. Temperature and some people – it’s too darn cold, and some people – it’s too darn hot.
KATY: Well, it’s – you know, I’ve been too hot and too cold sometimes, so I understand. I think, again, with hot and cold the easiest way to deal with hot and cold is about duration. So – and I remember giving this tip a long time ago. You know, there’s a mom, she lived in Nova Scotia Canada, it’s freezing, I’ve seen pictures. The whole thing is like, just a big ice ball. I don’t – it just seems like a snow house or something there, and she was like, I’ve got to put clothes on my kids and we all know how that goes, you’ve got to put all these layers on – no one wants to go out, they don’t want to get dressed, someone’s got to go to the bathroom. I mean, you do all this work to go out and despite the layers of clothing that you have on you’re cold within a short period of time. Everyone’s moaning, you’re like, this is not fun or stress reducing for anyone. So my suggestion was just, then, just go outside for 3-minute bursts and don’t worry about the clothes.
DANI: Yeah. That’s a good suggestion.
KATY: And she was like, of course, I just never even thought – we’re like, it’s got to be this, Katy Said you have to walk this many miles and I have to go do it! It’s like; don’t think about it in those ways. Get tiny little doses. Get tiny little doses of nature and movement and just – I think it’d be actually fun, I imagine, living in a snowball, running out of your house, you know you’re all cozy and warm and you start – see, when I get too still and warm I start to feel kind of like, I feel like I’m going to catch a cold if I stay here any longer! I feel very sluggish. And I don’t like that sluggish feeling any longer because it’s unnatural to me now because I – I think I’ve talked about this before, remember how you transition out of like regular shoes?
DANI: Mm-hmm.
KATY: And then you put on like a special occasion you put on a pair of old shoes that you had or a high heel or something and all you feel is like, your feet are all smashed?
DANI: Yeah, you’re off balance, like you’re going to fall over.
KATY: Yeah! Yeah! That’s how I feel inside now. I feel inside on my body and I never felt it before because my time outside has never been this abundant. So I feel inside and it’s like, eh, eh, get it off me! So I imagine that you could – that running outside – and I do this with my kids, too, like some days they just – I just want to watch a movie, can’t we just watch a movie and lay down? And you go, okay, you did walk 4 miles yesterday. But I’ll still be like, everyone outside. And she could just – or anyone in a cold place – just have everyone go outside, put your boots on, run around the house really fast and come back in. Go walk around the house really fast and come back in. Walk out to some thing and come back. Very short, the kids are fine because they know – they get bored. They just don’t – kids don’t like exercise because exercise doesn’t make sense. Moving for the sake of moving, it doesn’t make any sort of sense whatsoever. It’s not – it’s not for the purpose of fun – it’s just a modern thing that we adults have created to compensate for our choices to be sedentary the bulk of the time, so kids are like, what are you talking about, exercise? I don’t get the objective! It doesn’t make sense, it’s just wasting energy! My whole body is revolting against it! So just some little fun game. Maybe you go out and hide something in the yard. Everyone go out and hide it in the yard! And then if you don’t have kids – if it’s not the kids that are limiting, then go do what I just said and you’ll feel good that you got 4 or 5 minutes of exercise before it got too cold. Just do it. Just go out and do that.
DANI: Or if it’s too hot, like somebody wrote in and said, well, I could die. I’m in Phoenix, I could die it’s so hot. But, I mean, couldn’t you get up earlier when it’s cool
KATY: Sure.
DANI: --or walk later at night when it’s cool? I mean –
KATY: Yeah. I’ve lived in places that are warm like that and – and if you go to those places you will find people who exercise quite regularly in those places outside, but yes, you get up earlier or you do it when it’s dark, or like I just said, you take small, small doses throughout the day. You just take a walk out – also you have to – one of the reasons, one of the reasons temperature is so uncomfortable, despite the fact that it’s – when you’re talking about ends of a spectrum like this, it’s just uncomfortable – it’s that you don’t really strengthen the tissues – like if you think about the big muscles, you have tinier muscles that deal with shunting blood to deal with temperature. Those are totally deconditioned because you’re always in the perfect climate that you want to be, right? If it’s too cold you warm everything up and you dress to be the temperature that you’d like to be. Your body doesn’t do the work to regulate your temperature, and the same thing goes for when it’s really hot. You just create an environment in which the environment is doing the work of what your musculo-skeletal system will do. People have lived in those areas without houses or clothing and shoes, you know. I mean, they had some leather coverings, I think they just found a whole bunch of those in the Moab by Utah. But anyway, what I’m saying is, one of the ways to make it more comfortable is, in fact, to embrace the larger picture of natural movement, which is moving through uncomfortable temperatures is one way to condition yourself to the temperature, slowly and gradually, of course. We don’t want anyone freezing or overheating, but in tiny little doses is when we get some of those skills back a little bit.
DANI: That’s true, and you do adapt to different temperatures the more time you spend in them.
KATY: Well, its muscle, it’s your muscle. That temperature regulation is, again, it’s small movements in your body that are moving things around to regulate your temperature, and sometimes it’s moving things around like blood, and sometimes it’s just moving itself to create movement. Sometimes it’s lifting or lowering the hair, sometimes it’s moving water, but it’s still movement. Those things themselves are also the types of natural movement that I’m talking about.
DANI: Which is a perfect transition to the all-or-nothing question. You don’t have to put all the kids in their & bundle them up in their snowman suits to go outside. You can just run outside – the all or nothing, that’s one of my personal favorites as far as, you know, issues to overcoming habits or things like that. It’s – I gotta do it all. I have to do it all right, or it’s not worth doing at all. And I don’t know if you, personally, Katy, have ever run into that.
KATY: I don’t have that issue as anyone who has ever read anything I’ve written and seen how unedited is – like, I don’t – to me, the principle of the thing is always the most important thing at first. Then clarifying the details afterwards. That kind of sentiment is how I live my life. So worrying about – so there’s one type of person or personality that will say, it’s like, I can’t – I’m so worried about doing it wrong that the worry itself kind of negates the benefit of anything you’re doing because the stress is more of the primary health issue, I would say, more than the lack of natural movement. It’s just a stress. It’s just a way of processing information, and so of course, I think we can say – and hopefully everyone knows – that just doing everything a little bit is of value. The other thing, kind of along the same lines, like I remember that someone used to say, what if I wear minimal shoes sometimes? But then I wear regular shoes the other times – am I cancelling out the benefit, right? And so, it was such an intriguing question to me, because I don’t – I think it’s also because we talk about, like, if you’re reading magazines, it’s like, work off that dessert, you know? Or I have a brother who also runs, so his whole thing is like, I smoke a little bit but I run to negate my cigarette. It’s like, physiology doesn’t really work that way – like, is it better to eat all junk food, or half junk food and half whole food? You know, like, and you’d be of course, it’d be better to eat a few good meals and one junk food meal than all junk food meals, and it’s the same thing with natural movement, and anything. You’re not undoing anything. It’s just input. You’ve just changed some of your input to input that you think is going to improve your life a little. So there’s nothing wrong with doing a little bit, and then as you see changes or benefits you might have what we call intrinsic motivation. Like, extrinsic motivation is like, well, Katy said so right now. A lot of people are working on extrinsic motivation, or a piece of research they’ve read or an article they’ve read or something that someone has told them, but once you yourself begin to reap the benefit, that becomes an intrinsic motivator, which means you’re doing it now purely because your body is, like, just telling you to do it. You yourself are like, I want that again. And so that is a much – as far as exercise adherence research, habit change research – that’s where you want to be. You want to be in that intrinsic – intrinsically motivated space. So if you are, is a perfectionist the right word? If you are a perfectionist or an all or nothing kind of person, then don’t make “all” natural movement. Make “all” I’m going to do X, Y, and Z. I’m going to go outside 3 times for 5 minutes each. And then that way you can hit your “all.”
DANI: Right.
KATY: So just change what the all is.
DANI: That’s very good advice.
KATY: And then I think that would work for that type of person that has to check it off and to make sure – its like, well, then make it smaller. Make the thing that you’re trying to accomplish smaller, and then you will feel good about accomplishing the “all.”
DANI: Yeah, you don’t have to tackle everything, just tackle a few things.
KATY: Right.
DANI: That’s very good advice. See how you are? Okay. Um, let’s see – oh! Ooh, this is a good one that came up a lot – I don’t even know what kind of answer you’d have for this. Let’s just. The cost of minimal shoes.
KATY: Mm, Mm-hmm.
DANI: That was a biggie. They’re expensive for some of them. Some aren’t, and some are. And I guess it depends what you’re looking for.
KATY: Well, I think in most of my books, what I’ve listed as the least expensive, like, under $10 in most cases are swim shoes. You can slap swim shoes on your kids: there’s a minimal shoe, you can usually find them at like K-mart or Wal-Mart or a sporting good store.
DANI: Or drugstores.
KATY: Drugstores, yeah, they’re like $6.99.
DANI: Wow.
KATY: Next question.
DANI: There you go.
KATY: Only human, folks! Only human!
DANI: Fear of –
KATY: And also – let me do this other thing. There’s a couple other places I’ve found minimal shoes. One is Ross, like minimal dress shoes. Minimal is in style now. In fact, for dressy, so I’m thinking right now I’m thinking like spring and summer
DANI: Right
KATY: Right, because those are the cutest shoes. If you go to places like Ross and you go to your shoe size, you will find that there are a whole bunch of minimal shoes.
DANI: So cheap! So cheap!
KATY: They’re so cheap!
DANI: Stock up.
KATY: They are less than $20, less than $25, and they are – they’re not exercise minimal shoes in all cases, sometimes they are.
DANI: They’re for work, or to go out.
KATY: Yes! Like you have professional – there’s your whole summer shoe right there. Your whole summer shoe line. Also, I let people know, like, REI, if you’re a member of REI, they have what’s called a Basement Sale for members a couple times a year, in which case – I think I’ve picked up 4 or 5 pairs of Vibrams. They’re used and they’re returned. So it’s stuff that’s been returned, not usually because it’s faulty but because they have a great return policy. If you don’t like it, bring them back. A lot of people went right into Vibrams and then they didn’t do any transition, they don’t do any exercises and then now they’ve got weird stuff between their toes – like, I don’t like stuff between my toes and they just take them back. So there are just piles of Vibrams and other minimal shoes for like 50%.
DANI: Yeah, you can really look online, too, because I’ve never paid more than $45 for a pair of – I call them Vibrams – but –
KATY: Yeah, I call them Vibrams.
DANI: Vibram/Vibram, tomato/tomahto. But you can, if you really look, there’s so many sites that sell them on clearance.
KATY: Yeah.
DANI: And if you know your size, then boom, you’ve – I’ve got a closet full of them that I’ve paid $30 or $40 bucks for. I’m just waiting for a pair to wear out and then I move into the next one.
KATY: Yeah, you can – it’s more legwork, but –
DANI: Haha, sorry. That was pretty good for someone who is only human. Oh!
KATY: Oh my god! That was actually a superhuman pun, because that was a pun on so many levels.
DANI: I bow down. I bow down to you.
KATY: Wow.
DANI: You’re the punny queen.
KATY: You’re the pun. You’re the punny queen. Right there, I mean, you’re the pun girl. Right? Pun girl, you prefer pun girl to pun queen.
DANI: Pun girl, yeah, I’m a girl. Pun girl.
KATY: You can be the pun girl, and I will just watch you from a distance in admiration. Okay, so cheap shoes. Cheap shoes, let’s stay on track. Those are solutions. Those are solutions right there. I think that you can find something that’s quite adequate for much less than you think.
DANI: It’s true. Fear or hurting oneself. That was something that came up because people get scared of creating an injury, and then separate people that are dealing with injuries.
KATY: Well, yeah, that’s certainly, I mean, that’s a valid – you should have – I don’t know if you should have a fear of hurting yourself as much as I want to make sure that I ‘m transitioning smartly, and so the best way to do that is to read and understand the concepts as much as possible before starting anything. So most people who would be afraid to follow a – you know, you need to get more rugged terrain, you know, your body needs more Vitamin Rugged Terrain – will walk across their front lawn without thinking that that’s the kind of stuff that I’m talking about. Where when I say it, the fact – it’s like, I could hurt my ankle, I could do whatever – it’s like, you’re already mindlessly doing so many of the things that I suggest, you just don’t see them as a therapeutic doing them consciously and choosing to do them. So I think that you should just read and make sure you understand the concept before trying it out. Make sure you’re doing the corrective exercises and not just – oh, Katy says hanging! Even though I listed like 14 steps of exercises to try before and say, make sure you do this over 6 months, everyone’s like, I just went out to thing and I tried hanging! And it’s like, okay, so, that’s on you. You know.
DANI: Yeah.
KATY: It’s like, you have to think about the 10% rule. In exercise science, transitions are recommended like 10%. You’re trying to change your body 10%, and you’re nudging. All you’re doing is exercising, you’re just exercising and adding new exercises. It’s just the stuff seems radically different than the 7 other exercises that you might have done. Meanwhile, you are injured – if you are injured – but your injury comes from doing the things that you are now currently doing for the most, in most of the cases, you know, your injuries are not about the 1 thing or the 2 things that you’ve done. They’re like this long term accumulation of how you’ve moved.
DANI: Yeah, a culmination.
KATY: Yeah. Yeah, so that’s all we’re having you do is one – look back! Look back at how you’ve moved before and assess that. We’re trying to give you tools. I’m trying to give you tools to help you quantify how you’ve moved in the past, and then from that point it’s like, now let’s make a 10% change to that.
DANI: You said something very cool in the boob show that we did about people transitioning to braless, and it really stuck with me. You said you should give the work back slowly.
KATY: Mm-hmm.
DANI: To those other tissues and those other body parts that have not been working. You can’t just dump it all on them; you have to give the work back slowly.
KATY: Yeah. And it’s – it’s an exercise principle that I think everyone listening to this understands. And yet what they don’t understand why taking a boob out of a bra is akin to exercise. They’re just boobs, there’s no bones, there’s no muscles. It’s like, you have to start thinking about your body like, everything that you’re doing is movement and exercise is also movement. All the same rules apply. Just because it doesn’t look like this contrived thing of exercise doesn’t mean that the load science doesn’t apply, that the physiology responds any differently. You’re trying to grow new parts in many cases. You’re slowly giving work back where it has been outsourced previously to flat and level ground, to your couch, to your shoes, to your belt, to your bra. Whatever it is, you have been casted, and just as if taking off any cast, you are gentle with the casted part, but the casts that we’re talking about here – they’re literal. They’re not metaphorical, they’re just more invisible. It’s hard to see the boundaries of them. And so as you’re slowly getting rid of these hard to see casts, just always think, like, I am someone who is fresh out of a cast. What tiny thing can I do and how long can I do it, and when should I choose to do the next tiny thing? How about when the first tiny thing feels a bit better, and so on, and so on.
DANI: Okay. Next hurdle – okay, this is a good one. Extra weight. Some people wrote in and that’s their hurdle to getting more natural movement.
KATY: Well, again, you have to break natural – like, natural movement is a category. It’s a category of things. When you have extra weight, all you have is really a really heavy load or a kind of heavy load or I should say a more natural load than what you would have had – or what you will have eventually. So you just kind of have to think about what are the requirements in going, how can I make sure that I’m not over-overloading anything? And I think that in Move Your DNA the most concise place it said was in Move Your DNA where it’s like, if you have a knee problem, like say you have an ACL issue or whatever and you go to the doctor and you have extra weight, there’s a chance that you will be told that your weight is creating the knee problem, and so a lot of people have knee problems and they have extra weight. It’s like, well, you need to move more to lose the extra weight, but I can’t move more because I have a knee problem. So in that case, as I talked about in the book, you have – like you can adjust your foot and thigh position to reduce the load, i.e. the weight on that knee just by changing your skeletal orientation. And that’s why I start with alignment points. So natural movement, you know, the book seems really big, but if you’ve been reading all the other books, there are so many alignment points along the way. So maybe you’re not going to walk 4 miles because it’s natural movement. Maybe you’re going to walk 1/10 of a mile, but that tenth of a mile that you walk distributed – even if it’s distributed throughout the day – can be better for you if you heed some of the alignment points. That those points will help you deal with your weight because they will distribute that weight better over your body so that the weight itself does not become an injury maker in any one isolated point. You know, people strap all the time an extra 70 or 80 pounds onto their back and go hiking, so the weight isn’t the issue as much as the lack of muscle to deal with the weight. And that’s what – that’s what you want to get first, is you want to get a better mass distribution meaning more muscle to help you deal with your weight, then what starts happening is your fat mass will start decreasing, because as you get more muscle to deal with your weight, you then expend more energy, which then decreases the fat mass.
DANI: Good answer.
KATY: Thank you.
DANI: You’re welcome. We are so over our time, but this was a huge show. Let’s do one more.
KATY: Ok, all right. Well, time – time’s a problem for me. How do we finish our podcast in time?
DANI: Oh, I don’t know! How about where to start.
KATY: Start with your feet. Start with your feet. Your feet are this huge, neglected part of your body that every other motion is going to pass through. So start with your feet. It’s the first book that I wrote, and subsequently it’s the 4th or 5th book, I have another newer book out. Start with changing your foot. Like, change your shoes. Changing your shoes and the alignment of your feet and the strength of your feet could take you a large amount of time, um, meaning that there’s a lot of bang for your buck there. But all you have to do for time, who have like, I don’t have time, it’s like, ok, all you’re doing is putting a new shoe on in the morning. You’re already going to put shoes on, it’s no extra time.
DANI: No extra time.
KATY: No extra time. The exercises that you can do at your desk can all be for the foot and the ankle and strengthen your foot. No time away from work necessary, you’re still getting more movement, you’re still getting more natural movement, and you’re strengthening the foundation. You can, since you’re walking slow, if you have little kids, you can be extra mindful about your walking position and how you’re walking and how you’re using your feet because you’re just walking at 1 mile per hour. Perfect, problem solved. If you have extra weight, then learning how to deal with your extra weight through a stronger foot: so much better for your foot and your knee and your hip, and eventually it will transfer over to being able to move longer and faster, so start with your feet. Final answer.
DANI: It’s a great answer. I’m going to give you the slow clap. That was awesome. And you just talked about your next book, so let’s talk about that next podcast. The first foot book that you wrote, Every Woman’s Guide to Foot Pain Relief, which I just can’t say this enough: it’s for men and women.
KATY: I know.
DANI: It has a high heel on the front.
KATY: As given away by the cover and the name.
DANI: Yes, but it’s really for both. So that’s a good one. But the next one that’s coming out, let’s talk about that next podcast. It’s your Whole Body Barefoot book, which –
KATY: Dun – dun – daaah! Yeah.
DANI: Totally geeking out about that one.
KATY: Yeah, it’s like – it’s really cool. I think ti’s the most – it’s – I’m so excited.
DANI: Oh, let’s just not. Let’s just talk about it next time.
KATY: Okay, let’s talk about it next time! Okay, bye.
DANI: Well, thank you for your time. Go out and be only human.
KATY: Every day.
DANI: I love you for it. Thank you so much.
KATY: Every day.
DANI: And we’ll talk to you next time!
KATY: All right, thanks, Dani. Thanks, guys!
KATY: Yes.
DANI: So, we’re going to ask: what are the hurdles that people face when trying to fit more natural movement into their life, and you have a huge job ahead of you, because you’re like the fix-it woman today.
KATY: Well, I’ll definitely be the throwing out some suggestions woman.
DANI: Right. And you don’t have to fix everything, because you are just a human woman, and that’s okay.
KATY: I am! I am just a human woman.
DANI: You are.
KATY: Thank you for reminding me of that. Sometimes I forget.
DANI: You’re just; you’re just a girl.
KATY: I am not a robot. I am not a machine.
DANI: No. Nope, you’re just like the rest of us, and I do, however, admire your ability to provide solutions. That’s something that you’re pretty handy with.
KATY: Thank you.
DANI: You’re pretty good with. So, let’s do what we can do. I asked folks questions on, like, you know, Facebook pages about alignment and got so many responses to this. So clearly, it’s an issue.
KATY: Well, right? I mean, I think in terms of – it doesn’t matter: natural movement, exercise, diet, changing anything is hard.
DANI: It is hard.
KATY: The change is the hardest part, it’s not the thing that you’re transitioning to or the thing that you want to start doing, it’s the decision to change. It’s restructuring your life, it’s changing who you – into who you’re going to be. It’s huge. That is the biggest piece. The thing – the running, the squatting, the cooking your own food, the walking to work – it’s – those aren’t difficult per se; they’re simple, but the inertia. The inertia is the hard part.
DANI: That is so true; in fact, we could just end this show now. There you go, everybody, the inertia’s the hard part.
KATY: I hope you liked our solution! I’m just a human! I’m only a human.
DANI: I’m only a human. Have a nice day. So we had about, probably 100 issues, questions and everything.
KATY: Whoa, oh my god.
DANI: But – but! For those of you listening who sent these in, or if you’re listening and you have your own thing and you didn’t send it – if you don’t hear your question featured, I bet you a million bucks if you’re listening closely to the show, you will find an answer that solves that which vexes you in regards to getting more natural movement. So you may not have your specific thing answered, but listen closely, because you probably will find an answer that is applicable to your specific issues. So keep an open mind and listen closely, and also we’re going to do something different: you always show us a stretch toward the end of the show, kind of halfway through the show. Can you kind of pepper this show with some stretches for us, just to show ways that you can get a little movement in all day long? Are you cool with that?
KATY: I’m only a human! Yes. Yes, I can. I will do my best – like, right now, what I’m doing is I’ve grabbed all of my hair, and I’m just twisting it to stretch the muscles underneath the skin of the head.
DANI: Like a scalp mover. Mmm.
KATY: And like, you have a lot of muscles on your scalp, and I was just thinking, I’m stretching my feet, like I’m on – like, I have to stand here for work, like most people have to stand there for work, so I’ve got a half dome under one foot, I’m twisting my hair, getting all those cranial muscles, and I’m standing up. So that wasn’t so hard. I’m still getting my work done.
DANI: You’re still doing your job.
KATY: I’m still doing my job.
DANI: That’s the crazy part.
KATY: Yeah.
DANI: All that movement and you’re still doing what you need to do. And here’s a quick hint from me: it should be pretty obvious to all of us, but while you’re listening to this, just get up and walk around.
KATY: There you go.
DANI: Walk outside, and then boom! You’ve done two things. You’ve got some movement, you’ve got your fresh air, working your eyes, and you’re listening to this and learning stuff. There; we’ve just given you a couple ways you can get natural movement into your life.
KATY: Yeah, I mean, the temperature, the goose bumps. There’s so much to natural movement that doesn’t have to do with exercise. But anyway, that will flesh itself out as we talk, so let’s go.
DANI: Yes. Okay. Two big things. Which one do you want to start with: toddlers or time? Those were the two biggest issues were time and toddlers.
KATY: Well, let’s talk about – let’s do time first, because they’re not really separate issues. But let’s do time first, because I think that’ll be the more appropriate order, even though I’m only human so I’m not really sure. Let’s try it.
DANI: And if I can just interrupt you before you go into time: everybody comes from different places in their viewpoints of the world.
KATY: Mm-hmm.
DANI: And so for time, we had people that they worked and they didn’t have time, but some other people worked at home and they didn’t have time. Some people stayed at home and raised their kids – so there’s many different ways; it’s not like any one person has more than the other.
KATY: No, and I think that that’s going to be the big, you said, keep an open mind and listen closely and I think that that’s going to be the big takeaway which is: the hurdle probably has less to do with what you perceive the hurdle to be, and the fact that hurdles are kind of nature – mental hurdle’s are nature’s way of keeping you from changing habits. So that’s why you’ll see that you’ll have 12 people ask the exact same question who all have, like I think with walking, right? “I can’t do too much walking because I live in the city,” and “But I can’t do too much walking because I live in the country.” It’s like, ok, wait a minute, because you’re – everyone else’s solution seems to be your current lack of situation. Doesn’t matter what it is. Like, the grass is always greener; we always perceive that we’re going to be able to change when our live is like X, but it doesn’t really work like that. It doesn’t have to work like that. The solution doesn’t have to be a huge, radical change. But anyway, again. Let’s go.
DANI: Well, let’s dive into time, then, human girl.
KATY: All right. I prefer woman?
DANI: Okay, so let’s talk about time. Question 1: I work, I commute, I have no time.
KATY: Okay, well, let’s talk about the period of time in which you are at work. You can get lots of natural movement into your work day without having to stop producing your output, whatever your output may be. So there’s different ways you can do that. One is you can restructure your standing workstation; we’ve done a whole show on that, right? Didn’t we do a whole show on the office? So go back and listen to that show – do you remember what episode it was?
DANI: Uh, I think it was 7.
KATY: Ok, Yeah. It doesn’t matter.
DANI: It was called, “Don’t Just Stand There.”
KATY: Don’t just stand there, right? So moving to a standing workstation is kind of like the general idea, only we get more specific and we say move to a dynamic workstation. So most people are just sitting at work all day. You get to work, you sit down, you’re in a chair until your lunch break and then maybe you get up a little bit, you eat lunch at your desk, and then you get back down, and so you’re really still for periods of time. So my real quick suggestions – there’s a lot more in that episode – would be: switch your body position around while you are at work. You can get a hanging bar in your office, I mean – it sounds crazy, but people spend a lot of time – I work a lot of times on Facebook, and there’s a lot of people who are at work who are also on Facebook. So I know you have time to step away from your computer. I will give you a hall pass from reading anything that I’m posting, because nothing I’m posting is more important than you walking over to go hang from this bar that you have in your office. Or say you have a really strict traditional kind of office, just put your arms up a wall. It’s so different than the computering position. What about the shoes that you’re wearing when you go to work? Do they have some sort of feature that’s limiting the mobility of the whole body when you do walk around the office to go to the bathroom or whatnot? Talk to your office about walking meetings – like, if you guys get together for 15-20 minutes or an hour long meeting, certain times a day, it’s like, you know what? Here’s all this research: we want this whole office to be healthier. Can we take this meeting outside? Do you spend a lot of time on the phone in the office? Can you consolidate all your calls to a specific range of the day in which you go outside and take a walk and do them on your cell phone? Like, there are so many solutions within being at work all day long that don’t have to affect the work that you get done and your job and your livelihood. That’s where I would go with that one.
DANI: Put a tennis ball under your foot.
KATY: I mean, whatever.
DANI: And roll your foot while you’re talking on the phone or working on your computer.
KATY: Yeah, yeah. And I think that people are still associating exercise with movement, right? So go back and listen to the Natural Movement podcast where, um, it’s not about these – it’s not always about these big, giant things. Like, I need to be moving more for so many hours. If anything, it’s about these tiny, subtle motions, getting them in. Like, what’s the – what was the latest research paper on – on changing the cells in the arterial system? I think you just had to get up for 2 minutes every 30 minutes and walk around, like at 2 miles an hour. That’s like going to walk over and wash your face with some water. Go out and walk out and look out a window. Walk around your office. Stand up. You know, I write a lot. I write a lot – my life has turned into writing. Writing and moving, that’s all I do. But, like, when I – I will sit down in front of the computer and hours can go by without getting up, you know? And so you just have to break it up. Think about less like moving in the traditional sense and more like breaking up your geometry.
DANI: Right.
KATY: Like, I’ve been in this particular geometrical position. Change. All right, so that was my solution. And then commuting – commute differently. Change how you’re sitting in your car, you can be – you know, you have to be safe when you’re driving, and everyone’s commute’s a little different. Is there a way to take public transportation where you can stand, and oh my goodness – I’ve been on public transportation all over the world this last year and it hasn’t really influenced my – it hasn’t influenced that I get natural movement. The type of natural movement changes, but if you’re stuck somewhere, you can always be stretching and standing, and I hang. Oh my gosh, I hang on the side of the train, on the inside, you know, I’m hanging on the luggage racks and I’m on airplanes and I’m standing and I – you have to get over feeling odd by being the only person not sitting, but that’s what this is all about, right? It’s about breaking free from a cultural restraint. So. So, anyway. I’m only human.
DANI: So, and I think that takes care, really, of the work at home parents that wrote in and said that they don’t have time, because there you go. There’s ways to get it in.
KATY: And at home, it’s a lot easier. At home, it’s much easier because you’re in your own clothes, you know, like, there’s –
DANI: No one’s looking at you.
KATY: Well, yeah – and, like, you can just go out and walk around the house. Walk around the structure of your house, outside, and then you might have even a little bit more freedom to take phone calls and whatnot. Get up from your desk and go do a house chore. That’s movement, you know? Do a few squats to do it. Instead of compartmentalizing our life, where it’s like, now I’m at work, and now I’m at home, and now I’m with the kids, and now I’m exercising, and now we’re eating, you have to kind of thing about how can I cross over some of these categories? So that would be again: dynamic workstations are super easy when you work at home. Much more easy than when you’re in the office.
DANI: So did we cover stay at home moms yet? Like, I have –
KATY: No.
DANI: I have an infant – I have no time. I have an infant and a toddler and the diapers and the laundry and cleaning that weird sticky thing off the chair, and I don’t have any time.
KATY: Well, that’s the cool thing, because – and that’s one of the reasons I’m so open with my life is that people can see that I am a stay at home, full-time mother. I have a 2 year old and a 3 year old. I have laundry, I have a home. I have family.
DANI: You have to cook meals.
KATY: I have to cook meals.
DANI: You have to chase after kids that are partially clothed.
KATY: Yes! And I’m trying to garden, I’m trying to cook my food from scratch – like, it’s – again, I think it has to do with the feeling of being overwhelmed. All of that also, I’ll say that – I’ll say this. I’ll say that I am fortunate enough – one of the things with being a stay at home mom is that being a stay at home mom has become synonymous with being a single parent for large periods of the day. So I’m a stay at home mom, but I also have a stay at home dad. So I realize that that makes a difference because it’s two adults –
DANI: Mm-hmm.
KATY: On two children, and so one of the things with this natural movement kind of paradigm is: with natural movement would come natural tribal relations, meaning you would not be expected to have to care for your children all day long by yourself. And that is – that’s the next hurdle. Like, in my next book, which –
DANI: You mean your next-next.
KATY: Yes – it’s actually my next-next book. It’s actually my next-next-next book is actually talking about – because I have the diastasis recti, I’ve got barefoot, diastasis recti, and then this.
DANI: KB on DR.
KATY: That’s right. Is that one solution for stay at home moms is to get someone else in the home with you. It does not have to be a – someone who is relieving you of your tasks. So it’s not like, a babysitter or a nanny. I don’t have any of those things. But I do have a local niece who is 8, and then 9. And I can have her come over to be outside with me. So if I wanted to go out and get natural movement and I wanted my children to get natural movement as well, I could, you know, if my husband wasn’t here, bring another older child over. And I’ve found that the same results came from having other 5 and 6 and 7 year olds, that you can go outside to a playground with your small children and move right alongside of them. So I think that that’s – for stay at home moms is one: get some help. Find some help, help that does not cost you anything, because that’s I mean – time and money, right? Those are the two biggest limitations. But we’re always taking extra kids over here. Always. We take walks every single day and I know we’ll get to this: our walks are slow and labor-intensive, you know, in trying to get little kids –at least at first – little kids to start moving. But I found that, hey, when I had other kids, when I had a 4 year old and a 6 year old and another 2 year old, all of a sudden it wasn’t this adult, this single adult and these 2 kids bored out of their minds at being with another adult because children throughout time have been with herds of other children of all different ages, kind of motivating them to go to the next developmental step, you know.
DANI: Right.
KATY: It’s kind of modeling, it’s like, hey, I’m 2. What do 3 year olds do? Hey, I’m 3! What do 4 year olds do? Like, you’re always – they’re always being challenged but the challenge between a child and an adult is so huge, it’s just – I just watched my kids; they don’t want to do anything with just me. They would always prefer to do it with any other child in the universe. So I was just like, hey, does anyone want to bring their kids over? I’m taking a walk. And I found that other moms are sitting at home by themselves and other dads are sitting at home by themselves, and we just started creating community groups. It doesn’t have to be during the day, maybe it’s in the evening time. Let’s meet at this park; we’ll all bring a dish. We do this in the summertime almost 3-4 nights a week where we do a very casual text send out: I’m going to XY park, and I have got this dish to share, bring your kids. It’s not a party, it’s just dinner. It just happens to be outside. All of a sudden you’ve got 40 people there.
DANI: That’s awesome.
KATY: You’ve got 40 people there; you’ve got people without kids who want to hold your baby, and you’ve got someone who wants to push someone on the swing, and then you’ve got 2 people breaking off and going to do laps, you’ve got some people climbing trees, and that’s how you have to think about it. You have to think about it more like a lifestyle than more like how do I fit in 30 minutes of exercise? Because it’s not really like that.
DANI: That’s the biggest departure –
KATY: Yeah.
DANI: -- for many of us is that getting movement isn’t about bringing your duffle bag with you, changing into different clothes, moving at 24 hour fitness or whatever, and then leaving. I mean, you can really skip that and weave it in throughout your day, and you don’t even have to be that creative.
KATY: Right. Right. I think it’s just because we’re repeatedly told that it doesn’t “count” if it’s not exercise. It doesn’t count if it’s not intense or big or sweaty or time consuming or isolated. So that’s not the case.
DANI: And that really – you just kind of answered the next question which a lot of people have toddlers that are slow. They want to get out and walk, right? They just want to walk at an adult pace for miles, and you answered that question and also you did a great blog post about your kids when they were just little little, toddling after you and your husband and what you guys would do during those walks instead of just walking at a snail’s pace like you’re walking down the aisle to get married. You did stuff during those walks, too.
KATY: Right. And also, you have to keep in mind that natural movement is the pace of all humans. It is not you walking by yourself as fast as you can. That is not natural movement. It can be a component of natural movement, but it is not all natural movements. How do you think people walked 10-15 miles with every single person young and old in their group? They walked at a pace that everyone can tolerate. And sometimes you scoop up people along the way and carry them when they’re tired and then let them come back down. But I think, again, it has to be hard and at a particular pace for us to think that it counts instead of recognizing that – oh, someone posted a really great meme. I think it was Debbie Beane of Positively Aligned. She makes great memes where she takes these awesome pictures of her – I mean, she lives a crazy, crazy beautiful life as far as natural movement goes and she had put a meme over a picture that says, like, it was someone else’s quote that said, “walk quickly, walk alone, walk slowly, walk together” or something along those lines and I just think that’s – it’s really our idea of fast walking has to do with what you do on flat & level pavement ground. That you do want to be able to walk – you want to be able to walk quickly and you want to be able to walk up and down hills, and you want to be able to have your heart rate fluctuate throughout the day. It’s just that when you’re walking slow with your kids, it’s not that you’re not walking or not getting natural movement. It’s just that you’re getting some nutrients and then you can get your other nutrients later. And I think that for everyone but especially parents – especially moms, if they’ve been delegated that being the primary caretaker through the bulk of the day is that walking quickly by yourself is a stress reducer more than it is – I mean, it’s also good exercise but what you really want is just time for yourself, and I am all about that. I, too, needed that so what I had to do was get up at 5:30 to get it.
DANI: Yeah.
KATY: And I go take my 5 mile adult paced walk before everyone else gets up. And if we have a new baby, you will get there soon when you can go. But I also used to take my adult, by myself walks with my infant, with my littlest infant because I could go – I’m going to go do a fast, 2-mile walk carrying this 10 pound football on me and I’ll go pick up something at the mailbox and it wasn’t like I was always had to watch all of the kids. So you – you look for every single opportunity and you take it. You take it, and you never hem and haw. Just go. Just go.
DANI: Yeah, there’s all those different stages, you know.
KATY: Yeah, yeah. And that’s also, right?
DANI: Right!
KATY: Natural movement flows throughout life.
DANI: Totally.
KATY: Throughout life.
DANI: Babies have to happen.
KATY: Natural movement is a – babies happen and it slows you down quite naturally and it’s great, because it’s slowing you down as your body is coming back together again, right? Like, it’s all – it’s all packaged so nicely.
DANI: And so for you getting up so early in the morning, because one of the questions was, well, it’s too dark out. You have a walking buddy, don’t you?
KATY: I do, and I live – I live up in the Pacific northwest, I mean, it’s dark here until 5:00. There’s lights, you can go to a place that is well-lit. When it’s really – we are walking – I mean, it’s really rural where I live, like, wild animals and stuff rural. Like, dangerous wild animals rural. I just want to clarify that – and I’m only human – so we were doing it for a while, but you know, as the end of the summer and then it just getting darker, and with the darkness seemed a weight upon it so there was a certain point, I was like, you know what? Let’s go to our very small downtown area of our rural town, and we met there. And we just started walking 5 miles there. It was lit, you get a walking buddy, and I suggest that – I can’t tell you how getting a walking buddy right now is your biggest ticket to success.
DANI: It doesn’t cost a thing.
KATY: It doesn’t have to be someone that you love and adore. I have someone that I love and adore, but frankly, one of the reasons I love and adore her is that she will walk with me every day. Your relationship – it’s just everything that I need. It’s outside time, it’s natural time. It’s chilly, it’s natural loads to my skin, it’s dark, there’s no screen time, it’s talking, it’s adult social time, it’s child-free time, and it’s 5 miles of walking. It’s like 90 minutes. Anything else can happen the rest of the day and I feel good because I can always refer back to that morning. Do that. Put out a Facebook post, put out a Tweet: I am looking for one or two or three people to start this group. Because if you have more than 2 then even if one of you is tired or sick or out of town, the group continues to go. And do it. Just do it. It’s not too early; you will get used to it, and then you will come to love it, even if you’re not a morning person. Just do it.
DANI: And that being said about the time, if you really cannot do it early in the morning, then find a group that you can do it at 10 in the morning when you can carry your babies.
KATY: Sure, sure.
DANI: There’s so many different variations.
KATY: Yeah.
DANI: And it’s limitless, it really is limitless.
KATY: It is.
DANI: Because I know it changes at the ages that your kids are at.
KATY: Yeah, it’s – I constantly thought I was never going to walk, I was like, dude, my life is over! I have a 1 and 2 year old, I’m never going to do – it just changes. It changes and you don’t even realize it and suddenly you’re like, why aren’t I doing anything? No one needs me in the morning anymore. And I still nurse at night, so I just really want people to hear: I am a breastfeeding, stay at home, two small children, full time working mom.
DANI: Who is only human.
KATY: Who is only human, and I can do it. But I can do it, I believe, more so because I’ve mentally decided that I am going to do it first. The solution comes later, more than I just happened to have, like, I see – it’s like, oh, your life is so great and you have all these solutions, and it’s like, I worked my butt off for it.
DANI: Yeah, you – it was crafted. It – you made it happen.
KATY: Everything that I have right now I have crafted
DANI: Absolutely.
KATY: Because I – yeah. So, if you find yourself going down that road, just stop. And take a breath. And just find one thing that you can change – can change. It’s so easy to list the things – sometimes I’ll Facebook post something, and I’ll be like, ok, consider this – and I don’t want to hear any reason why you can’t! Not that there are not reasons that you can’t, but you have to start changing the way that you think about stuff, and list at least 3 “cans” before you go down the cant’s, because the can’ts are so much easier than the cans. You’ve been given can’ts your whole life. Where, like, can’ts, with a t, it’s just reflexive. It’s so reflexive, and when you get tired it’s so hard to come out of that space and when you get sick it’s so hard to come out of that space, so just start by writing down – man, I feel like Tony Robbins right now, like, you can do it! And it’s more like, objectively speaking, just make a list. Just make a list, because you will leave the cans off because, again, I believe it’s our natural mechanism to prevent ourselves from changing because it takes too much energy. Metabolic energy.
DANI: Right.
KATY: I don’t really want to sound preachy there, but I wanted to sound motivating. Did I sound motivating or did I sound preachy?
DANI: No, you sounded motivating, and you – you’re proof in the pudding. I mean, you’re not just saying it.
KATY: I thought I was human, now I’m pudding?
DANI: You’re human pudding. You’ve done it, and I know that you – it’s just, none of how your life is, you didn’t fall into any of it.
KATY: No.
DANI: You’ve worked hard for it, and you don’t do it all at once. Nobody does it all at once. You do it in bits and pieces, and you make it happen, so.
KATY: And I also did not come from a family where it was modeled for me. I have not been like this my entire life – so it was a conscious decision around 17 or 18 to start making it happen. Like, I am naturally – I am naturally a very sedentary person. Just so everyone out there knows: I would always prefer, deep down, to be doing nothing except reading or watching episodes of Top Chef or something like that. Like, that is my – that is my default, really, really deep down because that’s kind of the modeling that I got early, early on. But I just started tapping into other, like, I’ve seen other things, and I just started becoming – I started changing. So you can do it. You can do it.
DANI: You totally can do it. So it’s just one step at a time. And speaking of steps, let’s do a little stretch, and then we move on to the next. We’ll do one right now.
KATY: Well, I’m still – I’m just going back and forth between one foot and the other foot, kind of simulating uphill, but what I was thinking is, right now if you have a doorknob handy or if you’re out walking – yay! – you can grab um, a pole if you’re walking around the streets. See if there’s something you can hang onto that’s sturdy – a sign pole or a tree trunk, and what you’re going to do is you’re going to grab on to the doorknob or the sign pole.
DANI: Bannister.
KATY: Whatever you’ve got! I have a bookshelf right here but I don’t think I’d hang on the bookshelf. But I have a doorknob kind of behind me. And you’re going to come down into a squat, and you’re going to keep – back your feet up. We tend to squat really close to doorknobs or what – if you’re doing a supported squat, which I love, we tend to hold the tension in our arms. You’re real close to it. Back way away from it so your arms are super, super long, and then get your butt back so it’s super, super far away and then squat down there. Hang on to the thing that you’re using to kind of stabilize your body and then – just stick your butt way, way back and over your heels and then shift your weight back and forth. I’m going to step away from the mic because it’s so good I have to do it right now. So I’m way down here and I’m shifting.
DANI: Ooh, that feels good. I’m hanging on to my big herkin desk.
KATY: Get into the hips by really shifting your weight to the right and the left. Like, squats for particular reasons because we’re after particular loads and outcomes, we’ve got all these alignment points on them. But getting down in there and moving while you’re down and in your squat, there’s so much value there. Like, I watch my kids and they’re building stuff, right? Maybe they’re building stuff out of blocks and they’ll lean their squat all the way to the right to get one block and then they’ll lean all the way to the left and their squat – you know, the legs will have tipped to one side and they’ll move forward and back and it’s very dynamic. I’m going to do it one more time. I’m down here, and then when you come up, push through your heels. Try to stay off your toes, and then really use your stability device, pull, trunk, and come on up, and there you go. See, natural movement: you could do that at your office. You could just do it behind your desk, hold on to your desk. Set a timer. That’s the cool thing: you’ve got all these gadgets. If you’re addicted to your screen, put it to good use. Set a squat alarm. Set a thoracic stretch, reaching your arms up a wall or just reaching your arms over your head. Just set a timer. Do it.
DANI: Love those reminder timers. All the time, stretch your neck, stretch your fingers. I use them all the time, because if you’re in front of a screen a lot like both you and I are, you kind of get in the zone, and sometimes you do forget to move. So I have to have actual, electronic reminders to do that. And it works for me!
KATY: Yeah.
DANI: Okay! Here’s another good hurdle that people have, very, very common. Temperature and some people – it’s too darn cold, and some people – it’s too darn hot.
KATY: Well, it’s – you know, I’ve been too hot and too cold sometimes, so I understand. I think, again, with hot and cold the easiest way to deal with hot and cold is about duration. So – and I remember giving this tip a long time ago. You know, there’s a mom, she lived in Nova Scotia Canada, it’s freezing, I’ve seen pictures. The whole thing is like, just a big ice ball. I don’t – it just seems like a snow house or something there, and she was like, I’ve got to put clothes on my kids and we all know how that goes, you’ve got to put all these layers on – no one wants to go out, they don’t want to get dressed, someone’s got to go to the bathroom. I mean, you do all this work to go out and despite the layers of clothing that you have on you’re cold within a short period of time. Everyone’s moaning, you’re like, this is not fun or stress reducing for anyone. So my suggestion was just, then, just go outside for 3-minute bursts and don’t worry about the clothes.
DANI: Yeah. That’s a good suggestion.
KATY: And she was like, of course, I just never even thought – we’re like, it’s got to be this, Katy Said you have to walk this many miles and I have to go do it! It’s like; don’t think about it in those ways. Get tiny little doses. Get tiny little doses of nature and movement and just – I think it’d be actually fun, I imagine, living in a snowball, running out of your house, you know you’re all cozy and warm and you start – see, when I get too still and warm I start to feel kind of like, I feel like I’m going to catch a cold if I stay here any longer! I feel very sluggish. And I don’t like that sluggish feeling any longer because it’s unnatural to me now because I – I think I’ve talked about this before, remember how you transition out of like regular shoes?
DANI: Mm-hmm.
KATY: And then you put on like a special occasion you put on a pair of old shoes that you had or a high heel or something and all you feel is like, your feet are all smashed?
DANI: Yeah, you’re off balance, like you’re going to fall over.
KATY: Yeah! Yeah! That’s how I feel inside now. I feel inside on my body and I never felt it before because my time outside has never been this abundant. So I feel inside and it’s like, eh, eh, get it off me! So I imagine that you could – that running outside – and I do this with my kids, too, like some days they just – I just want to watch a movie, can’t we just watch a movie and lay down? And you go, okay, you did walk 4 miles yesterday. But I’ll still be like, everyone outside. And she could just – or anyone in a cold place – just have everyone go outside, put your boots on, run around the house really fast and come back in. Go walk around the house really fast and come back in. Walk out to some thing and come back. Very short, the kids are fine because they know – they get bored. They just don’t – kids don’t like exercise because exercise doesn’t make sense. Moving for the sake of moving, it doesn’t make any sort of sense whatsoever. It’s not – it’s not for the purpose of fun – it’s just a modern thing that we adults have created to compensate for our choices to be sedentary the bulk of the time, so kids are like, what are you talking about, exercise? I don’t get the objective! It doesn’t make sense, it’s just wasting energy! My whole body is revolting against it! So just some little fun game. Maybe you go out and hide something in the yard. Everyone go out and hide it in the yard! And then if you don’t have kids – if it’s not the kids that are limiting, then go do what I just said and you’ll feel good that you got 4 or 5 minutes of exercise before it got too cold. Just do it. Just go out and do that.
DANI: Or if it’s too hot, like somebody wrote in and said, well, I could die. I’m in Phoenix, I could die it’s so hot. But, I mean, couldn’t you get up earlier when it’s cool
KATY: Sure.
DANI: --or walk later at night when it’s cool? I mean –
KATY: Yeah. I’ve lived in places that are warm like that and – and if you go to those places you will find people who exercise quite regularly in those places outside, but yes, you get up earlier or you do it when it’s dark, or like I just said, you take small, small doses throughout the day. You just take a walk out – also you have to – one of the reasons, one of the reasons temperature is so uncomfortable, despite the fact that it’s – when you’re talking about ends of a spectrum like this, it’s just uncomfortable – it’s that you don’t really strengthen the tissues – like if you think about the big muscles, you have tinier muscles that deal with shunting blood to deal with temperature. Those are totally deconditioned because you’re always in the perfect climate that you want to be, right? If it’s too cold you warm everything up and you dress to be the temperature that you’d like to be. Your body doesn’t do the work to regulate your temperature, and the same thing goes for when it’s really hot. You just create an environment in which the environment is doing the work of what your musculo-skeletal system will do. People have lived in those areas without houses or clothing and shoes, you know. I mean, they had some leather coverings, I think they just found a whole bunch of those in the Moab by Utah. But anyway, what I’m saying is, one of the ways to make it more comfortable is, in fact, to embrace the larger picture of natural movement, which is moving through uncomfortable temperatures is one way to condition yourself to the temperature, slowly and gradually, of course. We don’t want anyone freezing or overheating, but in tiny little doses is when we get some of those skills back a little bit.
DANI: That’s true, and you do adapt to different temperatures the more time you spend in them.
KATY: Well, its muscle, it’s your muscle. That temperature regulation is, again, it’s small movements in your body that are moving things around to regulate your temperature, and sometimes it’s moving things around like blood, and sometimes it’s just moving itself to create movement. Sometimes it’s lifting or lowering the hair, sometimes it’s moving water, but it’s still movement. Those things themselves are also the types of natural movement that I’m talking about.
DANI: Which is a perfect transition to the all-or-nothing question. You don’t have to put all the kids in their & bundle them up in their snowman suits to go outside. You can just run outside – the all or nothing, that’s one of my personal favorites as far as, you know, issues to overcoming habits or things like that. It’s – I gotta do it all. I have to do it all right, or it’s not worth doing at all. And I don’t know if you, personally, Katy, have ever run into that.
KATY: I don’t have that issue as anyone who has ever read anything I’ve written and seen how unedited is – like, I don’t – to me, the principle of the thing is always the most important thing at first. Then clarifying the details afterwards. That kind of sentiment is how I live my life. So worrying about – so there’s one type of person or personality that will say, it’s like, I can’t – I’m so worried about doing it wrong that the worry itself kind of negates the benefit of anything you’re doing because the stress is more of the primary health issue, I would say, more than the lack of natural movement. It’s just a stress. It’s just a way of processing information, and so of course, I think we can say – and hopefully everyone knows – that just doing everything a little bit is of value. The other thing, kind of along the same lines, like I remember that someone used to say, what if I wear minimal shoes sometimes? But then I wear regular shoes the other times – am I cancelling out the benefit, right? And so, it was such an intriguing question to me, because I don’t – I think it’s also because we talk about, like, if you’re reading magazines, it’s like, work off that dessert, you know? Or I have a brother who also runs, so his whole thing is like, I smoke a little bit but I run to negate my cigarette. It’s like, physiology doesn’t really work that way – like, is it better to eat all junk food, or half junk food and half whole food? You know, like, and you’d be of course, it’d be better to eat a few good meals and one junk food meal than all junk food meals, and it’s the same thing with natural movement, and anything. You’re not undoing anything. It’s just input. You’ve just changed some of your input to input that you think is going to improve your life a little. So there’s nothing wrong with doing a little bit, and then as you see changes or benefits you might have what we call intrinsic motivation. Like, extrinsic motivation is like, well, Katy said so right now. A lot of people are working on extrinsic motivation, or a piece of research they’ve read or an article they’ve read or something that someone has told them, but once you yourself begin to reap the benefit, that becomes an intrinsic motivator, which means you’re doing it now purely because your body is, like, just telling you to do it. You yourself are like, I want that again. And so that is a much – as far as exercise adherence research, habit change research – that’s where you want to be. You want to be in that intrinsic – intrinsically motivated space. So if you are, is a perfectionist the right word? If you are a perfectionist or an all or nothing kind of person, then don’t make “all” natural movement. Make “all” I’m going to do X, Y, and Z. I’m going to go outside 3 times for 5 minutes each. And then that way you can hit your “all.”
DANI: Right.
KATY: So just change what the all is.
DANI: That’s very good advice.
KATY: And then I think that would work for that type of person that has to check it off and to make sure – its like, well, then make it smaller. Make the thing that you’re trying to accomplish smaller, and then you will feel good about accomplishing the “all.”
DANI: Yeah, you don’t have to tackle everything, just tackle a few things.
KATY: Right.
DANI: That’s very good advice. See how you are? Okay. Um, let’s see – oh! Ooh, this is a good one that came up a lot – I don’t even know what kind of answer you’d have for this. Let’s just. The cost of minimal shoes.
KATY: Mm, Mm-hmm.
DANI: That was a biggie. They’re expensive for some of them. Some aren’t, and some are. And I guess it depends what you’re looking for.
KATY: Well, I think in most of my books, what I’ve listed as the least expensive, like, under $10 in most cases are swim shoes. You can slap swim shoes on your kids: there’s a minimal shoe, you can usually find them at like K-mart or Wal-Mart or a sporting good store.
DANI: Or drugstores.
KATY: Drugstores, yeah, they’re like $6.99.
DANI: Wow.
KATY: Next question.
DANI: There you go.
KATY: Only human, folks! Only human!
DANI: Fear of –
KATY: And also – let me do this other thing. There’s a couple other places I’ve found minimal shoes. One is Ross, like minimal dress shoes. Minimal is in style now. In fact, for dressy, so I’m thinking right now I’m thinking like spring and summer
DANI: Right
KATY: Right, because those are the cutest shoes. If you go to places like Ross and you go to your shoe size, you will find that there are a whole bunch of minimal shoes.
DANI: So cheap! So cheap!
KATY: They’re so cheap!
DANI: Stock up.
KATY: They are less than $20, less than $25, and they are – they’re not exercise minimal shoes in all cases, sometimes they are.
DANI: They’re for work, or to go out.
KATY: Yes! Like you have professional – there’s your whole summer shoe right there. Your whole summer shoe line. Also, I let people know, like, REI, if you’re a member of REI, they have what’s called a Basement Sale for members a couple times a year, in which case – I think I’ve picked up 4 or 5 pairs of Vibrams. They’re used and they’re returned. So it’s stuff that’s been returned, not usually because it’s faulty but because they have a great return policy. If you don’t like it, bring them back. A lot of people went right into Vibrams and then they didn’t do any transition, they don’t do any exercises and then now they’ve got weird stuff between their toes – like, I don’t like stuff between my toes and they just take them back. So there are just piles of Vibrams and other minimal shoes for like 50%.
DANI: Yeah, you can really look online, too, because I’ve never paid more than $45 for a pair of – I call them Vibrams – but –
KATY: Yeah, I call them Vibrams.
DANI: Vibram/Vibram, tomato/tomahto. But you can, if you really look, there’s so many sites that sell them on clearance.
KATY: Yeah.
DANI: And if you know your size, then boom, you’ve – I’ve got a closet full of them that I’ve paid $30 or $40 bucks for. I’m just waiting for a pair to wear out and then I move into the next one.
KATY: Yeah, you can – it’s more legwork, but –
DANI: Haha, sorry. That was pretty good for someone who is only human. Oh!
KATY: Oh my god! That was actually a superhuman pun, because that was a pun on so many levels.
DANI: I bow down. I bow down to you.
KATY: Wow.
DANI: You’re the punny queen.
KATY: You’re the pun. You’re the punny queen. Right there, I mean, you’re the pun girl. Right? Pun girl, you prefer pun girl to pun queen.
DANI: Pun girl, yeah, I’m a girl. Pun girl.
KATY: You can be the pun girl, and I will just watch you from a distance in admiration. Okay, so cheap shoes. Cheap shoes, let’s stay on track. Those are solutions. Those are solutions right there. I think that you can find something that’s quite adequate for much less than you think.
DANI: It’s true. Fear or hurting oneself. That was something that came up because people get scared of creating an injury, and then separate people that are dealing with injuries.
KATY: Well, yeah, that’s certainly, I mean, that’s a valid – you should have – I don’t know if you should have a fear of hurting yourself as much as I want to make sure that I ‘m transitioning smartly, and so the best way to do that is to read and understand the concepts as much as possible before starting anything. So most people who would be afraid to follow a – you know, you need to get more rugged terrain, you know, your body needs more Vitamin Rugged Terrain – will walk across their front lawn without thinking that that’s the kind of stuff that I’m talking about. Where when I say it, the fact – it’s like, I could hurt my ankle, I could do whatever – it’s like, you’re already mindlessly doing so many of the things that I suggest, you just don’t see them as a therapeutic doing them consciously and choosing to do them. So I think that you should just read and make sure you understand the concept before trying it out. Make sure you’re doing the corrective exercises and not just – oh, Katy says hanging! Even though I listed like 14 steps of exercises to try before and say, make sure you do this over 6 months, everyone’s like, I just went out to thing and I tried hanging! And it’s like, okay, so, that’s on you. You know.
DANI: Yeah.
KATY: It’s like, you have to think about the 10% rule. In exercise science, transitions are recommended like 10%. You’re trying to change your body 10%, and you’re nudging. All you’re doing is exercising, you’re just exercising and adding new exercises. It’s just the stuff seems radically different than the 7 other exercises that you might have done. Meanwhile, you are injured – if you are injured – but your injury comes from doing the things that you are now currently doing for the most, in most of the cases, you know, your injuries are not about the 1 thing or the 2 things that you’ve done. They’re like this long term accumulation of how you’ve moved.
DANI: Yeah, a culmination.
KATY: Yeah. Yeah, so that’s all we’re having you do is one – look back! Look back at how you’ve moved before and assess that. We’re trying to give you tools. I’m trying to give you tools to help you quantify how you’ve moved in the past, and then from that point it’s like, now let’s make a 10% change to that.
DANI: You said something very cool in the boob show that we did about people transitioning to braless, and it really stuck with me. You said you should give the work back slowly.
KATY: Mm-hmm.
DANI: To those other tissues and those other body parts that have not been working. You can’t just dump it all on them; you have to give the work back slowly.
KATY: Yeah. And it’s – it’s an exercise principle that I think everyone listening to this understands. And yet what they don’t understand why taking a boob out of a bra is akin to exercise. They’re just boobs, there’s no bones, there’s no muscles. It’s like, you have to start thinking about your body like, everything that you’re doing is movement and exercise is also movement. All the same rules apply. Just because it doesn’t look like this contrived thing of exercise doesn’t mean that the load science doesn’t apply, that the physiology responds any differently. You’re trying to grow new parts in many cases. You’re slowly giving work back where it has been outsourced previously to flat and level ground, to your couch, to your shoes, to your belt, to your bra. Whatever it is, you have been casted, and just as if taking off any cast, you are gentle with the casted part, but the casts that we’re talking about here – they’re literal. They’re not metaphorical, they’re just more invisible. It’s hard to see the boundaries of them. And so as you’re slowly getting rid of these hard to see casts, just always think, like, I am someone who is fresh out of a cast. What tiny thing can I do and how long can I do it, and when should I choose to do the next tiny thing? How about when the first tiny thing feels a bit better, and so on, and so on.
DANI: Okay. Next hurdle – okay, this is a good one. Extra weight. Some people wrote in and that’s their hurdle to getting more natural movement.
KATY: Well, again, you have to break natural – like, natural movement is a category. It’s a category of things. When you have extra weight, all you have is really a really heavy load or a kind of heavy load or I should say a more natural load than what you would have had – or what you will have eventually. So you just kind of have to think about what are the requirements in going, how can I make sure that I’m not over-overloading anything? And I think that in Move Your DNA the most concise place it said was in Move Your DNA where it’s like, if you have a knee problem, like say you have an ACL issue or whatever and you go to the doctor and you have extra weight, there’s a chance that you will be told that your weight is creating the knee problem, and so a lot of people have knee problems and they have extra weight. It’s like, well, you need to move more to lose the extra weight, but I can’t move more because I have a knee problem. So in that case, as I talked about in the book, you have – like you can adjust your foot and thigh position to reduce the load, i.e. the weight on that knee just by changing your skeletal orientation. And that’s why I start with alignment points. So natural movement, you know, the book seems really big, but if you’ve been reading all the other books, there are so many alignment points along the way. So maybe you’re not going to walk 4 miles because it’s natural movement. Maybe you’re going to walk 1/10 of a mile, but that tenth of a mile that you walk distributed – even if it’s distributed throughout the day – can be better for you if you heed some of the alignment points. That those points will help you deal with your weight because they will distribute that weight better over your body so that the weight itself does not become an injury maker in any one isolated point. You know, people strap all the time an extra 70 or 80 pounds onto their back and go hiking, so the weight isn’t the issue as much as the lack of muscle to deal with the weight. And that’s what – that’s what you want to get first, is you want to get a better mass distribution meaning more muscle to help you deal with your weight, then what starts happening is your fat mass will start decreasing, because as you get more muscle to deal with your weight, you then expend more energy, which then decreases the fat mass.
DANI: Good answer.
KATY: Thank you.
DANI: You’re welcome. We are so over our time, but this was a huge show. Let’s do one more.
KATY: Ok, all right. Well, time – time’s a problem for me. How do we finish our podcast in time?
DANI: Oh, I don’t know! How about where to start.
KATY: Start with your feet. Start with your feet. Your feet are this huge, neglected part of your body that every other motion is going to pass through. So start with your feet. It’s the first book that I wrote, and subsequently it’s the 4th or 5th book, I have another newer book out. Start with changing your foot. Like, change your shoes. Changing your shoes and the alignment of your feet and the strength of your feet could take you a large amount of time, um, meaning that there’s a lot of bang for your buck there. But all you have to do for time, who have like, I don’t have time, it’s like, ok, all you’re doing is putting a new shoe on in the morning. You’re already going to put shoes on, it’s no extra time.
DANI: No extra time.
KATY: No extra time. The exercises that you can do at your desk can all be for the foot and the ankle and strengthen your foot. No time away from work necessary, you’re still getting more movement, you’re still getting more natural movement, and you’re strengthening the foundation. You can, since you’re walking slow, if you have little kids, you can be extra mindful about your walking position and how you’re walking and how you’re using your feet because you’re just walking at 1 mile per hour. Perfect, problem solved. If you have extra weight, then learning how to deal with your extra weight through a stronger foot: so much better for your foot and your knee and your hip, and eventually it will transfer over to being able to move longer and faster, so start with your feet. Final answer.
DANI: It’s a great answer. I’m going to give you the slow clap. That was awesome. And you just talked about your next book, so let’s talk about that next podcast. The first foot book that you wrote, Every Woman’s Guide to Foot Pain Relief, which I just can’t say this enough: it’s for men and women.
KATY: I know.
DANI: It has a high heel on the front.
KATY: As given away by the cover and the name.
DANI: Yes, but it’s really for both. So that’s a good one. But the next one that’s coming out, let’s talk about that next podcast. It’s your Whole Body Barefoot book, which –
KATY: Dun – dun – daaah! Yeah.
DANI: Totally geeking out about that one.
KATY: Yeah, it’s like – it’s really cool. I think ti’s the most – it’s – I’m so excited.
DANI: Oh, let’s just not. Let’s just talk about it next time.
KATY: Okay, let’s talk about it next time! Okay, bye.
DANI: Well, thank you for your time. Go out and be only human.
KATY: Every day.
DANI: I love you for it. Thank you so much.
KATY: Every day.
DANI: And we’ll talk to you next time!
KATY: All right, thanks, Dani. Thanks, guys!