We need to remind ourselves to keep moving.
“Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming”.
Sometimes, we’re Dory, encouraging others. Sometimes we’re Nemo. Angry, resentful, giving the side-eye to anyone who refuses to let us wallow in our misery.
We do know this, instinctively.
We, in the modern world, don’t move at all compared to our ancestors. Probably you are arguing with me right now. Most patients do. But really, we’re kidding ourselves. We’ve fallen for the idea that if we go for a walk around the block maybe 4-5 days a week we’re good.
Probably, if you do that, you ARE above average!
In fact, do you know how many people take the stairs if an elevator/escalator is present? 2%.
That’s it. 2%.
But let us consider life before cars, 18 inch thick memory foam mattresses, living room recliners, and the greatest wonders of the civilized world: Running water and the porcelain throne.
Our forebears had to squat to poop. Most of us never have and never do, and wouldn’t even know how if we had to.
Remember Little House on the Prairie? Remember Ma and the children walking to town to sell eggs, and walking to and from school everyday? And Pa walking to town to work at the mill? It was 1.5miles from their home – 3miles round trip. Kudos to you if you walk 3 miles every day – and it doesn’t include the miles you put in just walking around living daily life.
We drive – to everywhere. Most children are driven to school.
(In 2017 9.6% of kids walked to school https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211335519301950)
Those who do walk, don’t walk very far. And in some places, it isn’t safe to let them.
We sit, passively, on cushy couches, in fancy office chairs, expensive recliners, and in our fancy cars. Very few people ride horseback to work or school, though if you did this it would be active physical work.
We never just sit on the ground, or squat-sit like humans have done since the dawn of man.
Interestingly, we can study the Hadza tribe in Tanzania for a peek into pre-civilized hunter/gatherer human lifestyles. They don’t farm or store their food. They live in huts. They’ve never asked someone what kind of matress and pillow they should buy. They hunt and gather each day’s meal.
They aren’t racked with muscle pain, joint pain, diabetes, heart disease, or any of the chronic physical and mental diseases we have. (And no, they don’t all die at 30 either, they have high child mortality which skews the numbers.) A researcher found that they really were not much more active than we are! The difference is that when they are just sitting around, they are much more active than we are! Without chairs, recliners and couches, they squat, kneel, and sit on the ground. This also means that every time they get up, they have to get up from all the way down on the floor. Sitting or squatting on the floor requires active muscle use! They spend, on average, 2hrs a day bodysquat sitting. If we exercise at all, we might do a handful of squats 3 days a week. If we are really ambitious, we do a few squats with a weight in our hands.
No. Contest.
Our couches and office chairs are essentially: Coffins. Final resting places, and we just don’t move once we’ve plopped ourselves there. Our furniture does the muscle work of sitting for us, while we do – nothing.
OK, maybe, if we are sitting in our office chair writing the next great American novel, or on the couch working on our laptop, our brains MIGHT be working (if we aren’t web surfing and catching up on brain-hijacking social media), but our muscles, joints and tendons, heart and lungs are lying nearly dormant, stiffening up and atrophying. As each minute ticks slowly past. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year. Until our children inevitably drop us off in a nursing home somewhere.
Take heart, if you’ve been really sick and stuck in bed, then just sitting up in bed is actually considered “work”.
We don’t walk down to the river for the day’s water and walk back home with a bucket on our heads like people still do in some parts of the world. I wonder, would any of us struggle with our posture if we all still lived that way? When I was a child, we lived in the suburbs of Detroit, in a small house with the usual American accoutrements: 3 little bedrooms, running water, a flush toilet, a washer and dryer, and a bathtub. But, we also had property “up north”, an old trailer on a plot of land by a weedy little lake. I remember waking up in the morning to find mouse droppings on the sheets. We picked wild blueberries on the lakeshore, and wild blackberries along the road. I can still smell them just writing this! It was comfortable, had a mattress and a couch, and kept us from being eaten by bears in our sleep, but by no means was it glamping either. We’d drive up there, in dad’s Ford Thunderbird outfitted with big comfy couches front and back, about 5hrs away, on weekends and holidays. Our home away from home was very different from our house in the city. There was no running water. We had a well with a hand pump. We had to walk down to the lake to get a bucket of water to pour in and prime the pump. Then we pumped, by hand, water into another bucket and then carried it into the trailer for drinking, washing dishes, ourselves and our clothes.
Sure, maybe we hand wash a few delicate items, but none of us stand over a bucket and washboard washing the week’s laundry anymore. We don’t ring out the entire week’s worth of laundry by hand. We don’t haul our rugs outside, hang them on the fence and beat them clean. We aren’t spinning our own yarn and we aren’t hand sewing our own wardrobes. I, for one, don’t even know how, despite the fact I actually own a sewing machine.
We aren’t hunting deer or bear or bison, and preparing the hides for blankets and pants and dresses, or using them to trade for a new cast iron pot. We aren’t gathering thorns for needles and preparing deer sinew for thread. We use very few hand powered tools and machines. We don’t make our own shoes. Very few of us are raising, butchering, hunting for and home-canning our entire food supply. Very few of us regularly go out to the yard and run around chasing the chickens, to catch one and prepare it for dinner. Very few people even know how today. There was a time, and not very long ago, when this was an essential basic life skill for feeding oneself and one’s family. Very few of us hunt for the majority of our protein supply. If we do it at all, we generally hunt and fish for fun, to relax, to get in touch with our roots, and MAYBE to supplement for food. We don’t live hunt-or-starve-to-death world. We just drive to the grocery store and pull an already boned and skinned package of chicken breast off the shelf.
Most people don’t trudge out into the woods, select and chop down trees then further haul and chop enough wood to heat their home for a northern winter and cook meals over an open fire. My husband and I did this once. A tornado came through our town and we drove around with a trailer and chainsaw, opened up some roads and driveways for people, and gathered enough wood after that storm to heat our home in Michigan winter for 3 winters!
We don’t even squat once a day to poop. Most of us couldn’t if we wanted to. But there are places in this world where even the old people still can, and still do. In the modern world, the was a time when EVERY human did and well into old age too.
So, we don’t really do much physical day-to-day labor of living anymore in our modern, cushy world. Hence, we’re told to “exercise”. For most of us, it’s a slog to exercise, and we don’t. I don’t blame us, it’s “fake” physical labor. And it’s hard. And we like being cool, and comfy. And lazy.
But it’s killing us.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Keep moving. Move more.
Move it or lose it, Baby.
Move it or lose it.
No, I’m not throwing away my couch either. But let’s find some ways to incorporate movement into what we do everyday anyway. It can be, but doesn’t have to be, “exercise”. Park far away from the entrance of the store. Do a few squats every day, maybe while you are standing in front of the stove waiting to stir the pot, or while the coffee is brewing. Sit on the floor to put on your shoes so you HAVE TO get yourself up off the floor, at least once a day. Set a timer every 30 minutes to stop working on the computer and walk around the office. Put weighted objects around the house and just lift them in as many ways as you can think of. I actually do do this. I even have a short, stubby little soft hand weight in the truck, although I only use it on those long lonely stretches of Texas highway. Maybe you have tile floors like I do. Iron dumbells placed here and there just won’t work for me. Sandbags are dirt cheap, you can make them up just the weight you want them, and they won’t crack the tile. I keep a sandbag on the back porch and lift it while I’m just standing there letting the dog out for his last potty break for the night. It’s like baby bear’s porridge, hefty but not too hefty, just right. It won’t make me an Olympic athlete but it’s a whole lot better than sitting on the patio furniture watching the dog sniff around to find just the right spot to do his business.
And here’s a quick tip – engage your core, (tighten down like someone is about to punch you in the gut) before you try to get up from sitting position. Every time.
It will change your life. It will not only help you get off the couch and toilet for years to come, it will help keep your back stable and keep you independent and living in your own home longer.
Plus you’ll be adding essential core work into your day without adding a single minute of “core exercises” to your schedule.