When you look at how most people sit, walk, and do their "exercise," resistance training and/or cardiovascular, hopefully, and cardiovascular training, what are some of the most common problems that you see? Is it imbalance, like leaning to one side? Is it that their bodies are trained into asymmetry? Is there any way to kind of, you know, mass-diagnose everybody all at once in this first question?

Let me borrow a couple analogies from one of my favorite people, Katie Bowman. And first thing is, she will point out, and it's not a perfect analogy, so bear with us, is this notion of mechanotransduction, which means that at a cellular level, your tissues, some of your tissues specifically, need mechanical input to express themselves.

You want a strong tendon? How do you get a strong tendon? You have to load it, right? Does it do tendon things? Is it lengthening under load? Does it express shortening under load? Does it do isometric holds? So we can start at that level. She points out that if you put a—and again, not a perfect analogy, but if you put an orca into captivity, over a while, that orca fin will start to fold over.

Folded fin syndrome, it's nicer than floppy fin syndrome. That's hurtful. And what you're doing is when you alter the environment that this amazing animal lives in, it's not swimming, it's not fighting, it's not hunting, you're not loading the base of that fin. And so what happens is that collagen breaks down, and we start to see changes in that, in that expression of that.

So what we can start to say is, again, not romanticizing the Pleistocene era when human beings were paleo, but what is it that we need in our daily dose lives to maintain the integrity of our tissue systems? Exposure, so that our brain says, "This is safe," so that you actually have tendons and ligaments that can do what tendons and ligaments can do, and fascia that can be springy.

If—borrow another sort of Katie Bowman-ism—if we have a movement language, an actual language made up of words, how many words are you using today? And most of us aren't using that many words, so very few words. So I sit, I stand, I walk very slowly, I sit, I stand, I walk very slowly.

So everything is just in those few—and then I go exercise, using the same words, I'm on the exercise bike, right, I'm on an elliptical, which doesn't actually ask me to have any hip extension, and suddenly you can see that our movement language, which we're really codifying under intensity, load, right, we're becoming very competent in these adaptation positions.

Sitting. What ends up happening? Well, we start to see that our bodies are adaptation machines, and they just begin to adapt. And so suddenly what we have is a human body that doesn't express normative range. The brain may not think that that range is even safe and put there.

Then we start to sort of minimize the movement choices that the brain has, the movement options that the brain has. So really the question is, you know, at low loads—let's establish things. At low loads and low speeds, you can get away with everything. Why? Because this body is rad.

And it's designed—it's durable, it's not fragile, it's designed to be ridden hard and put away wet for a long time. Remember when you were 17, would cut off your hand, it would grow back the next day, right? You would. Think about the falls you took skating. And you'd be like, "Oh, that sucked," and the next day you put your shoulder back in, you just kind of respawn.

So what is it that we need to put into our movement diet? And then we can start to separate out, should that be exercise or should that be movement? And now the real filter that we should be beginning these real and earnest conversations about is, what is it in the environment, given that I'm a busy working person, and maybe I have some agency in the morning, and maybe I have some agency in the afternoon, but let's take exercise out of it.

The one-hour discreet, working on zone two cardio, working on my evidence-based practice, what should I be doing the rest of the time? So for example, one of the things that we're huge fans of in the evening is sitting on the ground for 20 or 30 minutes. In what? Cross-legged?

Yes. Squatting? Yes. Long sit. Side saddle. 90-90. Any time you need to fidget, fidget. And what you'll see is you start to accumulate exposure, which I think in my worldview is the first order of magnitude in problem-solving is how do we have the human be exposed to the thing we're trying to change or improve or restore normative ranges.

So that would be in the evening, just getting down on the floor? Yeah, that behavior alone cultures that toilet on the ground, sleep on the ground. We start to see fall risk in our elderly populations attenuate to zero, approximate zero. Lower hip OA, lower low back OA, and it may just be that we're using and touching some shapes and our bodies are saying, "Hey, let's just keep that around.

Let's normalize what the hip should be able to do." In terms of your connective tissue, think about the idea here is that we're loading you passively, actively, whatever, that you're saying to your brain, this is a quote from one of my PT instructors. And this is really important. If people take this away, they should listen to this.

Muscles and tissues are like obedient dogs. At no age, do you stop adapting? At no age, do you stop healing? Those things slow down. It's a little bit harder to have the same adaptation we did. We weren't in full-fledged puberty, but you can always adapt. In the first order of business, if you spend 20 or 30 minutes sitting on the ground, you're going to start to see that hamstrings start to feel better.

My hips start to feel a little better because I'm just spending time in these ranges and my body's going to start to adapt as I increase my movement language. Would you extend what you just said to, like if somebody has a hardwood floor and maybe a little low-pile rug or something like that, and they're going to watch a podcast or a movie or a show in the evening, they stretch out on their belly, like sort of up dog or cobra or whatever it's called.

So basically any kind of movement where you're on the ground, any kind of squatting, and maybe they start to stretch a bit here and there. Oh, so now we're into the real magic, the behavior. Where are we going to stack these behaviors? So if you have to get up and down off the ground, plus one, right?

I got to get up and down off the ground every day. So if you're an older person who may hasn't gotten off the ground, I'm older, I'm just talking about over 50, you may not have gotten up and down off the ground for 100 years. You just don't do it anymore, right?

We want to hear why I think MMA is so amazing. You have to get up and down off the ground a lot, right, if you go to Jits, right? How about yoga? How about Pilates? You're like, wow, there's a lot of time organizing on the ground. So a lot of people, Ida Rolf really said, hey, how do we help the person organizing gravity first and foremost, right?

Then we have someone like Phillip Beach, who is this incredible, he wrote this book on functional embryology, which I highly recommend, called Muscles and Meridians, I think, Muscles and Meridians. But his hypothesis is that one of the ways that the body tunes itself is by being on the ground.

Again, restoring native ranges, re-approximating joints, right, kneeling, walking, and if you just took a step back and said, what's it look like for the last 10,000 years, you know? When have we, 10,000 years ago, my understanding is that I'm a little fatter, your femur's a little longer, but we're pretty much the same people.

Maybe I don't digest milk yet, maybe that's the understanding. But ultimately, what behaviors have changed, we're off the ground. And so this is an easy, don't need any equipment, can drop this in, I can answer my emails, watch TV. That seems like how we're going to improve and be able to start to untangle this very complex score, not when people have a lot going on.

I love this. And as you pointed out, sorry, the roller's already there. So you're sitting there and the roller's there, another barrier to adherence knocked out. So you're like, oh, I might as well just, what's stiff today? What hurts today? How could I have some self-soothing input? And when we're working at high levels of performance, like the highest levels, these range of motion, like keeping you being able to access the full sort of arsenal of what you can do with your body, this movement solutions, sort of like Ido Portal plus the Olympics, right?

You would see that this is an easy way for our elite athletes to work and integrate without having to do another thing. So what I'm getting here is that everybody, regardless of age, should get down on the ground once a day and get up off the ground at some point.

And you can use whatever you want to help you get up and down off the ground. So for those who are listening, you're like, I can't do that. You know, there's a test we write about in the book that if you just do crisscross applesauce standing, you should be able to lower yourself to the ground and stand back up without using your hands.

Cross the feet just for those that are just listening, cross the feet and then just slowly lower yourself. That's right. Don't collapse. Just lower yourself to the ground. And then without putting your hands down or knee down, can you stand back up? And should one be able to do it with either foot over the other?

Seems like I should use my left leg and right leg equally, right? I shouldn't have a good side and a bad side. But what's interesting is the data I think is that, like, it's a nice predictor of all cause mortality, morbidity. That's fine. But what it really hints at is your changes in how your body interacts with the environment.

That because you've adapted, suddenly the skill that you've done 100,000 times, 200,000 times as a kid in crisscross applesauce, you suddenly are confronted as an adult with a skill you can no longer perform. And it doesn't require massive hip range of motion. It doesn't require full range of motion in your ankles.

It's actually a really fair test. But if you're missing some of these end ranges, you're going to struggle. And it's nice now that I have this, like, what's the session cost? I've become a-- I love cycling. Mountain biking's my jam. But if I ride my bike a ton, my hips get super tight.

But if I have some assessments, just like vital signs, blood pressure, 120 over 80, that's not good blood pressure. But it's a nice, decent reference. Now I create some movement minimums that help me understand how my body's interacting with stress, environment, nutrition, exercise, et cetera.