Gone are the days when most people had to earn living by farming and other physical jobs. We don’t have to climb a tree to enjoy a banana or use a shovel to dig up our daily dose of potatoes. Neither do we have to get out into the wild to shoot some form of protein for the plate. If you are like me, you do most of your hunting through the supermarket aisles trying to figure out where the hell they keep the dried chickpeas.
There’s no doubt that because of the all the advancements of the modern society, our life quantity has increased. But when it comes to our bodies, I am not convinced that the rise in quality is linear with quantity once we hit past a certain age. We end up hunched over with brittle bones and struggling to hit the depth when squatting for toilet or car seat.
We have gone from daily hard labor to the other side of the spectrum and missed the sweet spot somewhere in the middle. Convenience is here to stay (and it’s great) so it’s up to us all individually to improve our functional longevity.
The modern quest for the eternal fetal position
Let’s do some math. If you live in a relatively big city, commute to work and slay away in an office environment, your day will have some form of resemblance to the list below:
- You sit down for 15 minutes in the morning to eat breakfast. (+15min)
- You commute to work anywhere between 30-60 minutes. (+45min)
- You sit at work for another 8 hours and have a 30-60min lunch while seated. (+510min)
- Another commute to get home. (+45min)
- Sit down for a 30 minute dinner. (+30min)
- Couchtime, trying to decide what to watch on Netflix (+60min)
The sitting math then.
A total of sitting per day is 705 minutes. That’s almost 12 hours of sitting Monday to Friday.
No wonder if your shoulders roll forward, lower back gets sore and front of the hips start to build up some tension. Your body is spending most of the day back in a fetal position while the brain is wondering if you somehow crawled back into the womb.
Even throwing in a 60 minute workout during lunch doesn’t make much of a difference to the numbers. Sure, 60 minutes of training is great, but you are still left with close to 11 hours of sedentariness in any given day.
Improving quality and quantity of movement
One of the simplest ways to combat the fetal position syndrome (did I just coin a term?) is to add short but frequent bursts of movement into your day, breaking up the sitting and sedentariness. You want to move from the left to the right:
Fetal position syndrome ———————————————————-> Tall, able and mobile
(shameless alteration of Marc Halpern’s diet diagram)
Now, this is not solar science. In it’s simplicity you want to to add activities that keep you away from the left and get you closer to the right. For most of us the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle. This way you can still have a normal life without becoming a hyper mobility bunny prancing in lycra.
If you are a gym junkie and love all things smart movement, you are somewhere closer to the right of that scientific equation above. But if you are a gym junkie only focusing on the pump and getting tired, it will not be enough.
And before you ask, no, standing won’t make much of a difference to sitting because anything done too much needs undoing. If you stand all day hunched in front of a computer screen I still consider it inactivity since you are not going anywhere.
Instead of thinking that exercise and training are the only ways to combat sedentariness, start thinking about movement just for the sake of movement. Don’t only rely on weightlifting, pump classes or running to get in your daily movement practice.
Despite your fitness goals, work on maintaining the basic level of few movement qualities: adequate hip and shoulder mobility, squat pattern, lunge pattern, single leg stability and core stability. How you keep them is up to you but your fitness efforts should not decrease any of these baselines. Basic movement competency has to come before specific movement skills.
Here’s a non-comprehensive list of movement activities you could incorporate:
- Couch stretches for the front of the hip and quads:
These are good on that third day of a seven day Netflix binge. Don’t be like me, do these with shoes off. - Sit on the ground when watching TV instead of on the couch. It’s hard to get comfortable on the floor so it forces you to shift positions.
- Get one of those chin up bars that go in the door frame and hang off it for extended periods of time. Keep your shoulders away from your ears.
- If you are pinched for time, choose one joint that you’ll mobilize and open up each day. Or just focus on hips and shoulders on every other day. Every minute counts over a course of a week. Here’s a hip flow (an idea from Dean Somerset:
- And here’s something for the shoulders and hips (a’la Functional Range Conditioning, I think):
To regress, drop your knees to the ground. Also, try not to make same faces as I do. It looks ridiculous. - Then, one of my favorites: daily crawling. Get on your hands and knees and crawl. This will improve coordination, stability and mobility throughout the body. All while increasing left and right brain activity. Go forward, backward, sideways, in circles:
If you think that you are “too advanced” to crawl, let me tell you something: you’re not. And if you think that it’ll make you look silly and people will laugh, let me tell you something else: maybe, possibly. But only because they don’t understand. Either way, you’ll end up with the last laugh.
Getting better at movement is no different to getting better at playing guitar, painting or improving your fluorescent light shadow boxing skills. Short but frequent bouts of practice beats monster sessions done infrequently.
These are just some examples of what you can do.
Daily activities and challenges (hey, there’s beer at the end of the rainbow!)
Maybe it’s just me, but thinking daily activities as challenges makes them fun too. The other day I carried home a giant bag of kitty litter and a pack of beer from the supermarket. That’s a solid 2km walk to get to the shops and a 2km loaded carry on the way back.
In a hot climate it’s easy to up the challenge by buying the the beer cold. Depending on the climate, that is. And if you want to up the ante even more buy the kitty litter (or toilet paper works too) in a paper packaging and do this trip when it’s just about to rain.
A list of activities that will sneak up the daily movement total:
- Leave the train one stop earlier and walk the rest.
- If you drive to the train station park further away and walk the rest.
- In the office, set a reminder to walk to the water cooler every 30 minutes. Make sure to come back though. Hah, a joke.
- Do meetings while strolling through a park.
- Do some of your shopping without a car. Do gardening. Take the dog for a walk. Get a bike. Throw frisbee with the kids, dog, neighbour’s dog or Aunt Elma.
- Pack a lunch and a bottle of wine and go for a nice walk in the woods.
Whatever you decide to do find ways to add small amounts of activity throughout the day and don’t think of it as “training”, think “movement”. Make it into a playful practice where you explore different aspect of movement and what your body is able to do. None of these movement activities are excessively strenuous*, and that’s the key.
*Well, I guess it also depends on how much beer and kitty litter you are going to carry home.
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