Husband: “In high school I started getting deep hip and low back pain. I went to the doctor, who gave me an X-ray, which led him to conclude that there was a tendon rubbing across the bone of the pelvis. Looking back with what I know now, it was probably the psoas tendon. I kept playing by finding a new way to move. Then, when I was nineteen, what were the symptoms that made me go in? I felt like I needed to go poop all the time, though I didn’t need to poop. Just a real heavy pressure all the time. I felt it was anus related, or colon-related, I didn’t think it was the prostate.”

Katy: “Did you even know what a prostate was?”

Husband: “Nope. So I went to the doctor and he stuck his finger in my butt and said that I had a prostate infection. He gave me some medicine and it went away.

Katy: “Anything else in your prostate history?”

Husband: “When I was a pre-teen, I noticed that sometimes if I peed right after ejaculating it would burn severely. I learned how to tense certain muscles to decrease the pain. I guess I just learned to tense those muscles all the time. Are you going to write that?”

Katy: “Of course I’m going to write that. Does it suck being married to me? With respect to the blog, I mean?”

Husband: “Yes. Actually now that I think of it, I also had persistent lower back pain and pelvic pain I chalked up to years of competitive soccer. I never used any other muscle in my pelvic area except my psoas. Until I met you.”

Katy: “That sounds suggestive.”

Husband: “I meant, until I met you and took your alignment course. It all made sense after that and my body didn’t hurt for the first time in decades.”

Here’s a letter from a different man in my in-box:

It came on when I was 21 out of no where. I’m 28 now.  I went through all the motions, all the docs seem to follow the same order. First it was the anti’s, Doxi, Cipro etc. Even stayed on Cipro for months. They tried bladder muscle relaxers.

Then all the tests, Pelvic MRI, Bladder CAT scan, Camera up the Urethra, Rectal Prostate Ultrasound. Blood/urine test, urine flow tests. I probably have been to 9 different urologists, a disease infectious doc, and a holistic center in NYC.

It all started in my senior year at college, I had unprotected sex and really two weeks after I felt a pain at the tip and then the bladder issues started and went on from there. Although I told every doctor this they could not connect the two and kept saying it was prostate inflammation or prostatitis.

I really have two issues and the first is hit or miss after ejaculating (not during). The pain can be burning, and I really have to wait at least 30min before urinating or it could result in the worst burning ever. It feels like I am peeing barbed-wire out. Things that seem to help during an attack is jumping in a hot shower and slowly working the urine out.

The 2nd is  every day I feel a slight burning in the bladder and the urethra is always tender. Additionally the bladder wont empty completely either. I have noticed a spasm in the anus area as well. I noticed too if I strain to go to the bathroom it can effect everything. One thing is that its been 7 years and they are not as severe as they use to be.

Meds tried:

• Antibiotic specifically Cipro for 6 months. It did nothing.
• Flomax. Did not help.
• Flagry. It’s another anti. Did not work.
• Shower after. Feels better but it does not solve the problem.

Tests I had:

• Trans-rectal ultra sound of prostate before and after ejaculation. They did not find anything unusual.
• Various urine flow tests. Nothing really there either.
• CT scan of bladder.  Nothing found.
• MRI of pelvis.  Nothing found.
• MRI of lower back.  I do have a bulge in a disc but still going that route to see if that’s something.
• Scope the inside of penis.  Didn’t find any stones or blockage.
• Various does of Advil.  Nothing to note.
• Ph of the stomach by swallowing a pill that measures how fast I digested.
• Colonoscopy. Needed this for another reason but they didn’t see anything related to this problem.

Most recently I visited a different urologist where he did another scope and nothing was found (7 years later). He suggest Tranxane (anxiety med) for 6 weeks to relax the area. I’m not crazy about that.

***end letter

I get about 20 letters like this a month, all of them from men under the age of 35.

It doesn’t take a super-large literature review to find that the problem of young men and chronic pelvic pain/pain with ejaculation/pain with intercourse/erectile dysfunction — not associated with bacteria — is becoming more widespread. Research points repeatedly to pelvic floor hypertonicity (tension in the t’aint) and to chronic stress and/or anxiety. Of course, which came (HAHAHA) first, the anxiety or the burning pee? Who knows. This hypertonicity is why an anxiety medication is commonly prescribed for both men and women with pelvic floor issues.

What is also apparent is, pelvic floor issues don’t come on suddenly. Rather there are tiny things that seem unrelated, over time, that are all variables in the process of creating the perfect storm of a prostate issue. There are hypertonic muscles that develop in response to emotional stress and then there are hypertonic muscles that develop in response to movement patters — like a lifetime of soccer or cycling, for example.

Do you have a tendency for hypertonic muscles? Use this video to check your ability to relax the fronts of your thighs.

If your knee caps don’t move, then they’re locked in the “Up” position. What’s locking them “Up?” You are. I don’t know why you’re doing this. It could be from years of standing a certain way. It could be a reflexive action, due to the constant bombardment of stress. It could be motor-programs established for sports. Knowing why you’re tensing isn’t as important as knowing that your’re tensing. Once you’re aware of the tension you can learn to shut tension off, mindfully. Practice until relaxation comes naturally.

Turning off hypertonic on the fronts of your legs is easier than turning off your pelvic floor because you can see your quads. You can only see your pelvic floor “in your mind”.  Try applying the same “quad release” to the area between your penis and tail bone. The medical community calls this area the perineum, but I (and other classy people) call it the t’aint. Cuz it t’aint your penis and it t’aint your anus.

“You’re a debutante, Katy,” said nobody, ever.

Here are some articles that I’ve written on a hypertonic pelvic floor as well as Men’s health in general. I hope you find them them helpful.

A Too Tight Pelvic Floor   <—- This explains more about the mechanism of hypertonicity.

A Too Tight Pelvic Floor 2  <—- Here’s a list of risk factors, plus a note from my dad.

Low Hanging Fruit <—— Is your cremaster muscle working overtime to hike up the boys?

Eyes (and Meatus) Open <—- How is your orifice geometry? Check out your pee stream for prostate insight.

Men Have Pelves Too <—– It’s true!

I typically write for women because I am a woman. And it’s hard (HAHAHA) to write about penises when you don’t have one. Or rather, I believe a man would like to hear information about his penis from a man. But, I feel compelled to write this because it appears that there aren’t any men out there writing it down for you. Which isn’t really true. Read this to point to a couple resources written by men: for treatment (Dr. David Wise’s A Headache in the Pelvis) and to not feel like you’re going mad being referred from treatment to treatment (Teach Us to Sit Still by Tim Parks).

You can also read:

This blog post (click) written by one of our Whole Body students, detailing his experience with Male Pelvic Pain.

More on Dr. Wise’s point-of view on prostatitis here (click).

I’m presenting a (free!) online lecture on this topic called The Painful Pelvis, the Paleo Pelvis and Sex at Underground Wellness’ SexyBack Summit next week. I’ll be talking more about certain types of fitness-exercise (treadmill use, bicycles) and the pelvis, how to use your pee-stream (men) as a bio-indicator, and how to deal with pelvic pain in the bedroom. There are also a ton of other presentations on natural ways to get your mojo back. You can check out the line up and register by clicking (here).

CONTEST! Research shows that men don’t talk about PFD with others. To help spread the information, post this article saying something like “Don’t lose your Mojo to a Painful Pelvis!” to your Facebook or Twitter account tagging @AlignedandWell. Come back here to comment that you shared. I’ll draw a random number from the comments below Monday, May 20th. The winner will get a copy of my Below The Belt for Men DVD.

P.S. I just added a Men’s Health section and I’ll be adding writing more on this topic as well as others. Next up: HOW does chronic perineum tension irritate the prostate.

P.P.S. This post is dedicated to my husband who, never once was under the illusion he was marrying a debutante.

For all nerds with children, and mother’s of nerds — today’s biology lesson is for you:

I wrote this for our local newspaper almost 30 years ago:

What would you write for your mom and what was her mantra (and did it stick)?

“We are showing that tissue organization is sensitive to mechanical inputs from the environment at the beginning stages of growth and development,” said principal investigator Daniel Fletcher, professor of bioengineering at Berkeley and faculty scientist at the Berkeley Lab. “An early signal, in the form of compression, appears to get these malignant cells back on the right track.”

Click (here) to watch a video of a TED talk that gives a general overview of some of the procedure used in the experiment.

I wasn’t going to post on this topic because of the time necessary to give a good enough explanation BUT I had just written about this for my next book, so I can justify the time to cut-and-paste:

“If you attended high school in the last 100 years you were probably presented with a cellular model that states, basically, that a cell’s nucleus contains all the information necessary for cellular replication, with the genetic code (DNA) determining the outcome of a cell’s behavior. Following the tenets of this model, the state of every tissue made up of cells, and every organ made up of tissues, and every system made up of these organs is dictated by your DNA.

After more study, however, it was observed that simply having a particular gene didn’t automatically create a fixed outcome. This means that you and your neighbor could both have the same gene on your DNA strand linked to breast cancer, for example, but only one of you has cancer. The fact that genes behave differently, despite the notion that genes contained a final blueprint for the way they act, led to a new field of study: epigenetics, a field of biology trying to deduce how a cell’s environment can affect the behavior of the cell itself.

By assessing the mechanics at this minute level, we can better understand that the body is shaped by the movement of both gross whole-body motion and the movement of individual parts. Every cell, much like the human body itself, contains a rigid network (similar in function to our bones) called a cytoskeleton. Findings in cellular biomechanics demonstrate that the deformation of the cell itself, the load placed on the cytoskeleton, affects each cell’s behavior.”

Just as a geneticist is fascinated with genes, a biomechanist will be fascinated by the mechanosensing cytoskeleton. Unfortunately, information on the cytoskeleton is not typically included in cellular imaging.

Evidence A: A drawing of a cell, done by Ms. Katy Ann Bowman, age 10. No cytoskeleton.

Evidence B: A college-level Anatomy & Physiology book, 2000. No cytoskeleton.

This will probably change in the future. Best quote ever, swiped from Ms. Altman from the Vital Gaitway: “I’d like an updated revision of my expensive biology [textbook] that illustrated organelles with smoke stacks and postal hats.”

The concept that a cytoskeletal load can change genetic expression (1,2) is not new — it’s only new to cancer research. For example, studies looking at the effect of exercise on the cytoskeleton within many tissue types show intra-cellular adaptations to the proteins that make up the cytoskeleton of a muscle cell, thus changing its shape and behavior.

Does this cancer article, showing that the compression of cells can alter cellular outcome, mean that we should all start squeezing our breasts? No, not necessarily, and here’s why: Every cell’s job is different, which means the “right” load to every cell is unique. This load is not only unique to each cell or cell type, it’s also unique to each person. To try to simulate this necessary load by man-handling (HAHAHAHA) your breasts isn’t really feasible — load is a very specific thing. For every load there are seven qualites that affect cellular outcome: magnitude, location, direction, duration, frequency, variability, and rate. Your squeezing is probably not refined enough (let alone not frequent enough) to generate the environment  the breast would be creating on its own, naturally.

I can totally see someone creating a CRUSH THE $#!T OUT OF CANCER bra or a new machine that hooks itself under your arms and gives you a 20-minute shaking. Which isn’t to say that these wouldn’t work, only that it’s unlikely. But let’s not focus on what the info doesn’t say, but what it does. The mechanoenvironment in which your breast cells live influences how they behave.

So what type of environment should they be living in? This is tough to say as there is no way to measure all the loads and all the individual outcomes. What is easier, perhaps, is the approach used in evolutionary medicine/biology — that is, our body behaves “best” when under the same loads as experienced while we were evolving.

The issue with affluent ailments such as breast cancer is that incidence correlates with modern behaviors. This is why evolutionary medicine/biology researchers are calling for a return to “more natural” behaviors. Medicines and surgeries cannot bridge the gap between the cellular experience of modern habits and ancestral habits.

What you can do is begin assessing the environment you are creating for your tissues and consider the difference between Nature’s loads and the loads you personally experience.

Natural loads created by the breast include:

• Full-weight movement in various directions; hanging, swinging, sloshing over to the left and right when lying down as well as occasionally hitting yourself in the eye.
• Full-weight accelerations while walking and moving through daily life.
• Your breast weight itself, is it natural, as in compared to a size created by naturally-available types and amounts of food?
• Breastfeeding.
• Using your pectoralis and the muscles in the shoulder girdle — carrying loads in your arms, reaching to pick, repetitive foraging motions, etc.
• Natural (non-anxiety) breathing, with rib and thoracic movements underneath breast tissue.

When you consider how we’ve altered the loads to our breasts via bras, heavy computer use, lack of arm movement in general, purses, stress-induced neck and shoulder tension, anxiety breathing, etc., it is easier to see how breast cells could potentially lose their bearings.

Loads to the cytoskeleton give a cell context by which it selects its behavior. Unfortunately, research like what I’ve referenced here very rarely transfers into therapy. Cytoskeleton loads can’t be induced externally because they are specific to the individual. Larger breasted women would naturally create larger loads and need larger loads to get the appropriate cellular adaptation and therefore function. Maybe this is one of the reasons that bra use and breast size have been indicated as risk factors for breast cancer, as has exercise habit.

Would I recommend taking off your bra? Probably not, especially if you’re large-breasted. In the same way I don’t recommend people take off their shoes and jump into negative or minimal footwear, I do not suggest you take off your bra and jump into, well, jumping I guess.

Here’s what I do suggest, not to “avoid cancer,” but to improve all functions of the breast:

If you’re not already, sleep without a bra. And, if you wear a super-stiff one, I suggest you switch to something with slightly less support for at least a portion of the day. Over time (the larger the breasts and the longer you’ve been wearing a bra, the more time) you can reduce the support to slowly introduce the load of the breast to the breast tissue.

Hook your fingers underneath the front of your armpit wall. What does it feel like? Flaccid? Start to move your arm around and see how the load to the tissue changes. Historically, you would be using your arms with much greater frequency and varying loads throughout the day and a lifetime.(Read more on your armpit hole here.)

Start using your arms more. If you’re already “exercising” your arms, think of all those variables I listed and try to evaluate how many different positions your shoulder takes on, the loads you carry, how often they are unique, etc. Arm swing while walking or running is good, but it’s just one range of motion. Imagine reaching and lifting your arms (the ribs would need to stay more or less in place to really load the breast tissue) and then doing all of movement with varying weight.

Take care of any adhesions that limit shoulder movement. If you have tissue that sticks to itself, even if you load a part, that load doesn’t transfer naturally to the stiffened area. Cells, in this case, are essentially deaf. They cannot “hear” loads beyond the border of the adhesion and then duplicate without the benefit of a compass. I just posted on foam rolling but am currently in love with Jill Miller’s therapy balls:

Although yours might not have a million cute teething cuts in them.

Make no mistake, in the end outcome is always the result of every variable. This is one of them.

P.S. Here’s a note from a ten-year old Katy, highlighting the importance of language. (This post is dedicated to Penelope Jackson.)

Watch how a load (a 21-pound baby) in my arms can cause my arm bone to move away from my scapula — applying a tensile load to the ligament instead of the shoulder muscles.

While hypermobility is complex, the corrective — stabilizing the joint — is fairly simple. Which isn’t to say that it’s easy. I catch myself screwing my ligaments over 1,000 times a day. All I can do is work on my awareness and my muscles and connective tissue 1,001 times a day and slowly accumulate the benefit of tiny changes.

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Which means that a video must be worth a million words. And since thoughts are worth a penny, and thoughts are typically about a hundred and fifty words, this post is clearly worth $66.00. I’ll take your payment in kind thoughts or you can donate $66.00 to good times. Either works for me.

It seems like you are looking for me to explain why running on a treadmill is “no good” (to paraphrase). I did not imply running on the treadmill was no good. As I have mentioned many times on the blog, I am not speaking of metabolic variables, such as heart rate or calories burned. These are well-tested variables demonstrating benefit. In this case, I am speaking specifically of the biomechanical and physiological differences between moving on the ground versus moving on a treadmill. <—– There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of articles on the benefits of exercise. I, myself have written hundreds of articles on the benefits of exercise. I typically use a statement like “of course, movement of any type has benefits” in my writing, but if I have to prequel every post by reaffirming that what you are doing is “just fine,” this weakens the “hook” of what I am trying to say.

I don’t write to make you feel good or bad. I simply write about data that is not widely spread. Also, once you’ve created anything metabolized by the masses it becomes clear that every individual takes away a message based on their personal internal workings. The way something makes you feel has not only to do with the content, but your mood that day, the situation in your life, past occurrences and the habits you hold dear. There are no judgements here. It’s just impossible to write for every individual. Instead, I write for myself and how I’d like to be presented with information. That’s what a blog is.

I often get requests for “research or proof” by people who don’t use research on a regular basis. They’re looking for a single document that says something in the title like, “This Study Proves That Treadmill Walking Creates Knee Osteoarthritis” or something like that. People think that research titles should read like magazine headlines, when actually every study presents just a tiny aspect of something. Scientists look at lots and lots (think thousands) of articles to get an idea of how something works. Oftentimes, a lone research paper can misconstrue information compared against a full literature review.

For example, I think of the hundreds of published articles on pelvic floor science, supporting the use pelvic floor contraction as a means of improving pelvic floor function. When you run an evidence-based practice, getting articles like this are helpful because they support the therapies you offer. But what happens when newer data comes out showing that surface EMG or manual vaginal readings aren’t necessarily a valid measure in determining an improvement in function? Is there a research-manager that goes back and flags all previous pelvic floor studies using these methods with a “Sorry! this study is no longer valid as a portion of the methods have been shown to misconstrue conclusions?” No. There is no such process. Nor is there a requirement for future researchers or users of evidence to update their understanding. This is the difference between a practitioner and a scientist. It is (or should be) a scientist’s job to stay up-to-date and inform the end-user of data.

For those that do use scientific publications for the purpose of modifying behavior, I expect you to review the literature in depth before commenting. With respect to the treadmill post, if you were to search GoogleScholar.com or Pubmed.com using key phrases such as “comparing overground and treadmill running biomechanics,” you would get articles comparing the two. By doing that, you would see that before the 1970s, physiologists assumed them to be equal (without testing)

and it was only in 1972 that someone with training in physics thought “Hey, I don’t see how the two could be equal at all,”

and tested it.

And as you may see from the subsequent data, that while treadmill and over-ground movement may appear to look the same to the eye, the forces created between the two are quite different (different muscles used, different joints moved, and joints used differently). Then you can read more on how they are different (i.e. treadmills use more hip flexion) and what those differences beget. Then you ask yourself, What’s the big deal with that? Then you search on Google Scholar something like “hip flexion low back pain therapy injury.” Up comes all the data on various muscle patterns found in those with chronic pain issues and you’ll find that those that are used in the hip-flexion gait pattern are often correlated to malfunction in the kinematics of the body. THEN, you go to your biomechanics research (or gait textbook or whatever literature review) and read how muscle proteins adapt to chronic or repetitive use and see that these muscles atrophy or waste in the same way as documented in the back pain literature. It’s a time consuming puzzle that I’ve been working on for almost 15 years now.

Nowhere in my post does it say anything about treadmills being worse than not moving at all and there was no statement similar to “exercise machines have no benefits.” I actually wrote the opposite to both of these statements, yet despite this, you didn’t read it that way. <— Although I do accept that it’s very likely I write poorly, what do you do when someone infers the exact opposite of what you’ve written? I don’t know what else to do except say “please go back and read the article again” and even that tends to make me feel like a butt head.

When I write for academic professionals my articles are much more research-supported, of course, but when I write on the blog or Facebook, I write quickly, not to mention for free. I have two babies here. I assume that most people are not able to actually analyze a research article (on biomechanics) for validity, and that they are more reactively asking for “PROOF!” and that proof boils down to a few key words in plain English in an abstract that is linked to someone or something that looks like it has authority. This link to research seems to mean to many “OK, I can believe what she says.”

I’d much rather have people NOT jump from belief to belief based on this pseudo-form of learning. And if you do have scientific training, then I will assume that your are interested enough to do the work yourself — searching articles, reading, and taking the appropriate educational courses. So many of them (mathematics, physiology, symbolic logic) are now free online through sites like Coursera.org.

I am perfectly happy with you (and everyone) not believing what I’ve written here; this is my entire point for writing for the public. I’m trying to highlight our lack of thinking critically. Most of what we do is because everyone else does it. We are currently in a place (even in science) where enough people subscribing to something seems to imply validity.

Our relationship with scientific proof seems to be based on something other than trying to understand nature. It seems that we are unable to move to action unless NOT ACTING has been proven to wreck something beyond repair. We spend much more time trying to disprove suggested behavior modifications than we spend actually doing the behaviors that we’ve already determined, through common sense, to be beneficial.

I popped open a book last night (I often pop open a book to the middle and read a few pages as I believe that I will get some sort of message) and this is what it said:

Though it’s quite apparent that the environment has been grossly polluted and the natural world abused and defiled, you seem to prefer to continue pondering effects rather than preventing causes. You want proof, you insist on proof. A Dr. Lave from Carnegie-Mellon — and he’s an expert, an economist and an environmental expert — says that scientists will have to prove to you that you will suffer if you don’t become less of a “throw-away” society. To try to appease your appetite for proof, for example, scientists have been leasing for experimentation forty-six pristine lakes in Canada. They’ve been intentionally contaminating with a variety of pollutants…in one of the boldest experiments in lake ecology ever conducted. They’ve been doing this since 1976 and have found in these preliminary studies is that pollutants are really destructive. It took eight years to make this happen…and it will take hundreds of years for the lakes to recover. They think.

- Joy Williams, “Ill Nature”

Many people seem to believe that science approves or disproves behavior choices. Published research is rarely conclusive or applicable to every individual in every situation. Data collection is meant to weed out the next question and inspire further thinking. There is no possible way to test and measure the outcome of a lifetime of something. Is our relationship with proof simply a diversion?

With respect to the treadmill post, if you’re looking for proof in a long-term, double-blind study, that doing something in the modern world is hurting your body, please understand that you will never find it. While we are perfectly happy destroying the environment to prove that it can be destroyed, we are not so liberal with people. Any more. We don’t create and get approval for studies setting up a population to do something harmful to see how bad the outcomes are. At least not anymore.

If you live an evidence-based life, then without data you’ll have to use yourself as an example. If your health is great, then no worries! What you’re doing is apparently working for you. If your health is less than great, then consider changing habits. Does walking on the ground instead of a treadmill put you at great risk, where you would need data supporting the transition? Think critically and then decide for yourself.

Though words like Law are often used to describe equations used in science, this does not imply that the derivatives of science are infallible. The Law of Gravity has demonstrated itself every day up until now but this does not automatically imply that gravity will behave the same way tomorrow. The trend of gravity implies that it will, but the Law of Gravity has not been proven…for tomorrow. Still, you have to hang your hat on something. Or at least I do.

Remember that science is not the pursuit of truth, it is the systematic acquisition of data for the purpose of understanding how nature operates. Truth is moot. In the words of the great Professor (aka Indiana) Jones: “If it’s Truth you want, Professor Kant’s Intro to Philosophy class is just down the hall. We deal in facts here.”

(Article snippet from Biomechanics of overground versus treadmill running. Medicine and Science in Sports. Nelson, et al. 1972)

Junk Movement: A way of moving that provides short-term fitness benefits at the expense of long-term health.

Food, like movement is a complicated issue. I hope that by this point in your internet-reading career you understand the difference — at least in principle — between whole food and junk food. Fresh, organic, unprocessed foods are now recognized in many circles as superior to their preserved, extended shelf-life, highly processed counterpart. Then, to make matters even more complicated, it turns out that even fresh, organic foods (like grains) eaten extensively and repeatedly throughout a lifetime aren’t so hot either.

Junk food does have a place though. For example, if a starving population were in need of calories and junk food was the only thing available, then junk food would be a short-term solution by providing this population with energy. While the benefits of junk food pale (pale pale) in comparison to benefits from a diet rich in varying, naturally occurring whole foods, there are undeniable short-term benefits. Of course most of us aren’t starving. Instead, we have a serious convenience habit. Our desire for “quick and easy” as well as inexpensive food has led us to a habit of selecting junk food out of preference. We reap the short term energy benefit while paying the biological tax of decreased health and/or longevity.

You can apply this model to movement as well. For most of us time limitations have eaten away the space in our lives for the all-day, life-long varying whole-body movement required for biological function. In lieu of a “natural movement” diet, we partake of short, daily bouts trying to manipulate variables so that we might create a similar effect, in 60 minutes, to what we would have gotten over a 24-hour period. Exercise is convenient, for sure, but it can also be a highly processed version of what our body requires from movement. Exercise can fall way short of the nutrients movement provides. In short, exercise is the junk food of moving.

(Uh-oh, I think I may have just lost a lot of you, but please hang with me! At least to the end of the post.)

Most of us think we eat food to feed our body, but really the eating of food is to fuel the process of feeding oxygen to cells. It is the movement of oxygen through the walls of the capillary and into the cells surrounding that area. Movement is essential to that cellular feeding process and there are movement habits that deliver oxygen more so than others. Said another way: You can sit in a bed and have excellent-quality food brought to you every single day, and your cells will still die sooner than later. Why? Because movement is the vehicle for cellular feeding.

The body’s movement requirements are very specific as every muscle drives it’s own circulation. “Exercise” tends to improve circulation through the main arteries, but they way we do it, hundreds of muscles go unused. The key to long-term health requires circulation in the tiniest of the blood vessels — the capillaries. Most people have learned that the heart does all the work of the circulatory system. What is seldom taught is that each muscle (and you’ve got over 600 of them), when it is used, pulls blood out of the artery and into the capillaries in every muscle’s area.

We currently live in a movement-drought. Yes, even regular exercisers are essentially sedentary compared to the quantities and qualities of movements used by our ancestors. Which is why a daily bout of exercise doesn’t get you a ticket out of heart-disease town when you are still for the bulk of the day. Exercise in a movement drought absolutely serves a purpose, but what we are failing to recognize collectively is the way we are choosing to move is “junk food movement.”

Exercise programs vary greatly, some of them more processed that others. Equipment can be a dead giveaway. I’d like to point out that sometimes equipment can be used to help reach a body-part otherwise unreachable due to the modern jungle we now live in. And sometimes that equipment is simply used, over and over again (like some grains I won’t mention) simply because we like it and find it convenient.

Which brings me to the topic of treadmill desks. “Tread desks” seem to be the new thing when it comes to getting more aligned with all-day movement. As I have written before, though — treadmills create what is essentially the reverse of the human’s natural reflex-driven (movement initiatives stored in your brain) gait program. Which might not seem to be a big deal if you are thinking in terms of exercise science. It’s a huge deal though when you are evaluating with biomechanical science.

Exercise science reduces enumerable benefits of movement into primarily metabolic ones, like calories burned, heart rate, blood pressure. Of course, in most cases, moving in any way trumps not moving at all. But what is often left out in the over-simplified presentation of exercise for the masses is, there are biomechanical benefits to movement that are missed when you partake of junk food walking (on the treadmill) instead of actual human walking.

Yes, I said it: treadmill walking is the junk food of walking. As with processed food, the use of a treadmill removes much of the biologically beneficial “movement vitamins” and replaces them with empty fillers, some of them actually doing harm over time. In my upcoming book, I’ll go into the evaluation process more deeply, but for for a quick read, this is a short sample of the biomechanical differences between treadmilling and walking:

• The belt of a treadmill reverses natural gait from one that is posterior-driven (using the contraction of the posterior pelvic, hip, and thigh muscles to move forward) to one that is hip-flexion (using the psoas and quads). This means that there is no longer a natural balance to pelvic floor activity, slowly creating a situation where the pelvic floor can generate hypertonicity. Treadmill gait patterns call on body-position programs similar to the ones used for sitting all day.
• Reversing the use of the legs reverses reciprocal arm swing. The naturally posterior driven swing of the arm aiding in balancing the rotations to the spinal column, stabilizing the shoulder girdle, and moving the lymph in the axillary (armpit/breast) tissue is reversed. On a treadmill, arm swing is muscularly similar to computer/driving arms. And, if you’re actually working and/or typing while you tread, the muscles down the spine must fire excessively to pick up the work of the arms.
•  Your head is still, relative to the environment, despite your moving limbs. This is so confusing to your brain, your brain automatically resets proprioceptive information to match your environment. Have you ever gotten off a treadmill only to feel like you are walking a million miles a minute? Perplexed at new data (I’m moving my arms and legs in my regular gait, but no visual input is streaming past my eyes), your brain concludes that you must be walking very, very slowly. Then, when you get off, still running the treadmill data, the streaming of info past your eyes leads to your brain to conclude that now you are walking really fast! Your brain and body have a temporary disconnect because the info just doesn’t add up.
• And speaking of mind-body connection — your treadmill desk decreases the cerebral benefits that come from somatic movement. You’re not paying attention to walking because the surface and pace never provide anything for your body to react to. After doing the same movement for a couple of minutes, your brain switches from running a regular motor program (through your motor nerves) to an inter-neuron process. Lack of variability is “hypnotizing” (for lack of a better word) and zoning out away from your body is likely. If you’re watching TV or the internet, then it’s unlikely you’ll maintain an awareness of your choice of movement.
• You’re indoors. (Although, you might have an outdoor treadmill. Does anyone out there have an outdoor treadmill?) We rarely consider are all of the teeny muscles in our skin that work in response to environmental conditions. These skin-muscles atrophy in response to stagnant air and unvarying conditions throughout a lifetime. They need to respond regularly to keep their tone!

I don’t mean to be a Debbie Downer here (I’m actually quite fun at parties!), but I think we’re missing the critical point that exercise, as we know it, doesn’t work in the way we’ve led ourselves to believe it does. Is it better to do the treadmill in lieu of doing nothing? I don’t know, frankly. If I say “Yes,” then many people will feel like I’ve given a nod of approval to jumping on the treadmill whenever life (or weather) seems too tough to rearrange. If I say “No,” then many feel paralyzed to move at all when life seems too tough to rearrange. In the end, the bigger picture to see is we feel trapped by our life. And this is the underlying factor to most health outcomes, I’m afraid. What I will say is, I encourage you to start viewing life’s unchangeable obstacles as entirely changeable. No, it’s not convenient, and yes it takes effort. But effort is the very thing we are trying to get back to. So there’s that.

The time constraints of a modern lifestyle play heavy on our choice to consume junk movement. I understand this, personally, all too well. But the presentation of information like the differences between natural and unnatural movement shouldn’t go away because people are too busy to move naturally. The reason we strive to replace exercise (processed moves) with natural movement is the same reason we strive to replace processed food with whole food. Your body and all its biological processes simply run better.

Here’s my new t-shirt idea:

Moving “better” takes just as much work as eating better. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t a place for junk food movement. It’s fun. And convenient. But it’s not the stuff health is made of. And, as with all healthy decisions, the “missing time” in our day will likely need to come via working less, being on the internet (Facebook*, Facebook, Facebook) less, etc. I wish there were another way, but the answer to all the big questions (health, family, fuel consumption, global environment) simply comes down to doing less. Such a challenge.

P.S. My 30-day Facebook break was a huge change in habit, but I survived and my body thanked me…immediately!

*You should totally come visit our Facebook page.

Tibetan Buddhists have a tradition of creating sand mandalas. These are beautiful and time-consuming works of sand-art that are ritualistically deconstructed as soon as they are complete.

Many people cringe at the breakdown of something so lovely that was so obviously time consuming, but this process is the physical practice of letting something go in order for it to become something else. It is impermanence personified. Or sandified, I guess.

You missed my made up words like sandified while I was gone, didn’t you?

What I learned most about my time away from blogging and writing and just plain communicating with the masses was, my every thought does not need to be recorded lest I forget it. Everything is fleeting, which isn’t to say that a good blogging lesson won’t turn up in my mind again, but that it is OK if it’s gone. Everything goes away eventually.

And because I’m a terrible Buddhist (not to mention not a Buddhist at all), while I was letting blogs be impermanent, I was furiously working on a book that I hope is forever published so that it never (ever ever) goes away. Clearly, I’m a poser. A juxtaposer.

So, how about a chunk of thoughts from this poser’s upcoming book on ancestral health?

From my book:

When utilizing a paleo model of health, consider how our modern construct of abundance with respect to foodstuffs affects the way we think about and initiate movement programs. The ancestral model of movement says movement initiates reflexively via a desire to find food. In order to satiate biological hunger, movement was initiated in an organic way. When food became readily available without movement, our relationship between food and movement did a 180. Now we move as a response to too much food. This perspective, that movement is necessary to mitigate the effects of food, is a repeated mantra by every health publication and practitioner. The notion that movement’s purpose is to avoid negative repercussions of food is fundamental to our modern beliefs about health. This reversal of natural thought process and the chemistry cascaded by negative thinking is very different to the mental chemistry of the hunter-gatherer.

Our currently utilized model sets both food and movement as a negative. Energy from food is something we must dissipate via the atonement of exercise. It is no wonder so many people feel unable to begin moving (and eating) in a way that honors both food and our innate ability to move. We’ve got it all backwards in our mind.

Thoughts are powerful enough to shape outcomes, as repeatedly demonstrated via the placebo effect. While it is integral to mimic hunter-gathering behaviors when following the model of ancestral health, we must also consider the chemical mechanism by which they and we are motivated. Motivation (and thoughts) create most of the body’s chemistry, so they way you think about eating and moving could, in fact, be undoing some of the positive benefits you were intending to reap by choosing to eat and move well.

How many times have you told yourself something like, “I ate so much yesterday I have to exercise today?” When consuming food, how often have you thought, “I’m going to eat this right now and pump up my workout to burn it off!”? Thoughts like these can interfere with your reflexive, natural motivation to move and rather than adding to your health, can actually subtract. When utilizing the hunter-gatherer model of living consider the unconsidered. Think about mimicking even the smallest (perceived as inconsequential, perhaps?) of behaviors like thoughts, as it will bring you more in line with the holistic perspective that reaps the abundant-health reward.

(I’m speaking at the Ancestral Health Symposium in Atlanta this August. Will I see you there?)

Massage, technically, is the passive* application of pressure. Whether a therapist is applying pressure (think pushing down onto your body) or creating a shearing motion (not pushing as deeply, but just enough to create traction followed by a “sliding” action) the result is a tensile load to the tissues below the skin. The difference in techniques alters the primary tissue loaded, but I think an argument could be made that every technique offers some sort of benefit.

Rolling on a foam roller (or on any apparatus) is also a passive treatment, and creates a similar cellular effect as massage or stretching. Although the magnitude of tensile load can differ between the method used, the load-type (tensile) is the same. Below I’ve attempted a video demonstrating six different “moves” to do with the roller. You can also search Youtube.com for other ideas.

Massage is my most favorite passive therapy because I can blend a meditative relaxation with the skills of the therapist. But body work is often limited due to money and time constraints, which means learning to do it yourself is helpful.

Here’s a video, shot my typical “whatever the opposite of professional is” fashion. I’m not exactly sure why my hair is channeling “rooster” but I can assure you that I only care a little bit.

1. You can find a foam roller here (or, a hundred other places): www.foamerica.com. That’s right. Not FoamAmerica, but Foamerica. Clever. I like both the 6″ x 36″ and 4″ x 36″ full (not half) roller. They are totally worth the minimal expense. If you’re going to practice log-rolling, the 4″ is easier.

2. To recap my noisy video, I demonstrated:

• Lateral thigh (rolling the outside of the thigh)
• Quad and inner thigh (rolling the front of the thigh with the feet and thighs turned way out like a ballerina)
• Back of the thigh
• Front of the shin
• Lower rib cage, near the upper psoas attachment
• Mid-back and shoulder blades (lots of bra-strap area if you’re nursing and baby-carrying!)
• Side of the rib cage (Careful, this can be a tender spot!)

3. You can make up any motions on the roller and if you take the ones I’ve give you and position your body at slightly different angles, you’ll effectively be reaching new areas. Each position varying by a couple degrees is entirely unique — even if it looks quite similar.

4. I would like to note here that I am officially trademarking the term “Watch Me!” Please send $0.05 every time your child uses it. Thank you.

5. Don’t like rollers? Fascia-release balls (softer than every-day tennis balls) can create loads no roller can touch. Check out my friend and soul sister Jill Miller’s therapy ball program here (click). You can also check out Jill’s friend, Sue Hitzmann’s MELT method. Sue, why aren’t we friends yet? Call me. xxoo

Invest in yourself!

*”Passive” means that the muscle receiving pressure is not actively contracting. Only, truly, we typically tense at the application of pressure. An often-missed benefit to body work is learning how to soften your body at will. The way massage or foam rolling feels is a result of not only what the therapist (or roller) is doing to you, but how you signal your brain to interface with the pressure. For mind-blowing results during body work, practice relaxing your body when a pressure feels like it’s too much. The amount of sensation you feel when people (or a roller) pushes on you is a result of both how are you are being pushed on and how much you are resisting with your body. Resistance is futile. Or something like that.

Um, 
what? What? After I read the title 20 times to make sure it was written in English, I actually said holy $#!t out loud and then laughed for about 20 minutes.

I tried as hard as I could but I found that I cannot resist sharing this with you. I mean, there are just some things you need to know, and this is one of them. It also just so happens I have found myself in the back of a van with two sleeping kids, so the universe has aligned for us (you and me) once again.

To recap: Menstrual cycle variation in women’s preferences for the scent of symmetrical men.

Just wanted to put it out there again. It’s less a research article title and more like some sort of strange personal ad. Or my next musical album. Did I tell you my band’s name is The Scent of Symmetrical Men? Well it is.
Part of the methods section from this study: “College women sniffed and rated the attractiveness of the scent of forty one T–shirts worn over a period of two nights by different men.”

I bet a lot of you do something similar only don’t call it research but laundry.

According to this paper, women can best smell “attractive,” attractive being further quantified as face and body symmetry, when they are most fertile.

Which made we wonder, does getting more aligned make you smell more attractive? The article also made me want to quit my job and start an alignment body spray line called Symmetry. For him.

But then I read another, similar article and found something interesting: Non-American college ladies picked asymmetrical men when they were most fertile. And, according to the paper’s deets, they also found asymmetry more attractive. So it seems that in addition to just smelling symmetry, women might be able to hone in to the scent of a person they are attracted to.

An important note: I could find no studies determining if attraction to chocolate fluctuated, so obviously, further research is needed.

I totally got sucked into about 10 articles before I had to yell enough! and throw my computer across the room. But before I stopped, some of the things I found in my (procrastination-like) literature perusal were:

• a person’s smell can possibly be an indication for metabolic and immune function. Got funk? How much are you moving? Whatcha eating?
• oral contraceptives alter a woman’s ability to identify a major histocompatibility complex (MHC). The MHC is where pheromones come from — pheromones being smells that contain data  about our gender and genetic identity. Women not taking the pill rated individuals (based on smell) and preferred those that were most different from them, genetically speaking. Women on the pill seemed to lose their ability to “sniff out genes.”
• something about symmetrical men and a woman’s orgasm. But I digress.

Although, not necessarily supported by any of this literature, it certainly can’t hurt to work on your alignment, fellas, just in case the chicks dig it. It’s also a good reason to skip a shower, perhaps, in case all your fluffing up puts out a smell that isn’t a good representation of your chemical counterpart.

I was also going to write about this article: Women’s preferences for male behavioral displays change across the menstrual cycle. But do I really need to?

P.S. I’ve written you a little note here, explaining where I’ll be for the next month! I decided that, while writing a book on why natural living=health, I needed a little internet detox. I am finding that spending more time writing, while trying to keep up my same pace interacting with you all online, is cutting into my outdoor, walking, mobilizing, natural-living time. A problem that is both unacceptable  and simply (although not easily) remedied by changing my habits. I’ll see you in a month!

1. Do women’s preferences for symmetry change across the menstrual cycle? Cardenas, RA. Harris, LJ. Evolution and Human Behavior 28 (2007) 96 – 105

2. Menstrual cycle variation in women’s preferences for the scent of symmetrical men. Gangestad, SW. Thornhill, R. Proc Biol Sci. 1998 May 22; 265(1399): 927–933.

“Hey, I just found your blog and I’m overwhelmed, and I’m trying to read it all while squatting and holding my baby in my arms, and wiggling my toes, and keeping my ribs down! But I’ve always heard that I’m supposed to keep my stomach in and my feet supported with good shoes, and I have scoliosis and I don’t have regular pelvic floor disorder, I have a rectocele and I’m searching keywords and I don’t find a blog post written about me, exactly so now I am paralyzed to move because it might cause my organs to fall out or my bunion to worsen or knees to grind or my baby to contract some weird alignment-induced ailment and by the way, is my belly really supposed to be hanging out like this and why didn’t anyone tell me this a long time ago? I’m just going to sit here until you answer my email, ‘kay?

So I decided to create you a little road map.

1. CALM DOWN!

2. There is no wrong way to move, it is just that you’ve only moved one way for a very long time — it is time to both move differently as well as bring some of your movement habits more inline with the loads you would have incurred had you moved in a time without modern convenience.

3. Read this blog post, so you know what you’re getting in to: About This Blog.

4. Do not freak that you are messing up your kid. It’s practically a fact that it can take decades to botch up your kids. And you can certainly learn about alignment as it relates to biological function in less than a year.

I’m kidding of course.

It takes much longer than a year to learn about alignment.

5. Do not be so paralyzed to move incorrectly, that you don’t move at all. The information written here it to help you, not hinder you. Your plan, should you choose to accept, is to transition gradually from one paradigm to another. Or, maybe you never transition, but just like a couple of the exercises or concepts I’ve posted. It’s good all around.

6. If you’re truly interested in how alignment works with biology, start with the feet. I’ve written what is, essentially, the primer for alignment, starting with the feet, in this book.

Yes, this book about feet, but it’s not only with feet. Nor is it only for Women. Marketing science kind of blows. Yes, it is entirely OK to start with another body part, like the butt or the pelvis, and focus on the squat — but then, you’re only getting better in the moment you do the exercise. Which is like 5 times a day. If you learn about how footwear chronically affects the position of your ankles, knees, hips, pelvis and ribs, then by simply changing your footwear in conjunction with the exercises in the book, just walking around while you’re not exercise makes you better. Dig?

7. There are hundreds of articles to be read here here. And, guess, what: They are ALL about you. I don’t write, that often, about a specific set of ailments because my advice for all ailments would be the same: whole-body alignment. The points and correctives we use will be the same no matter your starting point. Read EVERYTHING. Watch all the videos on Youtube.com and listen to all the interviews and audio courses on the “radio” page. I’d start by listening to the Liz Koch-Psoas interview and then move on to the one on Interneurons and Inertia. All of this information is free, although you’ll have to put up with the fact that it’s not organized well. <—— Did I mention that it’s free?

8. Did I mention that you should really start with the book? It will set you back about $11.50 right now on Amazon. Consider investing $11.50 into the future health outcomes of your entire family. You will not be disappointed and you will find it interesting too. Can I get an Amen?

9. If you’re on Facebook, friend our page.  This is where I spend any free education time I have and I answer about 20 questions there daily. I can’t, realistically, respond to your email. I can help you help yourself, by writing information free for everyone. Writing to you, personally, isn’t an option. Unless you live in the mouth of one of my 2 kids and the question is Boob? and breast milk is the answer. In all other cases, my answer would essentially contain all the info here. So, consider yourself answered.

10. If you discover, shortly, that you are what we like to call an alignment nerd, figure out how you can make taking the Whole Body Alignment course happen. No, you do not need any background. Nor, if you have a background, will this course be redundant. Watch the first two hours (also free) on our site. Then, if the information resonates with you, write an email to your friends, family and clients, asking them to donate to your new path of education. Or, instead of donating, how about selling them a one-hour session with you, where you can do some hands-on sharing of this info? Here, I’ll write your letter:

Dear Friends, Family, and Clients:

I have recently discovered a health-through-movement program that teaches me some of the basics of optimal human movement. In this program, I will learn to quantify my (or your) current ranges of motion, how to modify behaviors to incorporate better body-loading throughout the day, and a bunch of exercises to help awaken areas in the body that have atrophied from decades of misuse.

I am volunteering my time to take the course and share this information with you one-on-one. I am trying to offset the cost of the course by taking $50 donations, in exchange for an hour with me when I’m done with my training. I am hoping that there are twenty of you out there looking for information like this too!

Signed,
A potential whole-body student.

11. I have GOT to get back to writing my book. It’s a book on the body you should have — would have had, if you had grown up in a time and location where being a hunter-gatherer was still necessary. As a thank you for reading this, and many other posts, I give you these paragraphs from the newbie to mull over:

Viewing ancestral-health data through modern eyes can skew our conclusions with what to do with this information. Because we come from a movement-free culture, our relationship to moving tends to boil down to exercise. Only, exercise science, like nutritive science, has attempted to isolate the variables it perceives as most beneficial to the human. Despite the fact that we now know the quality of food varies with its freshness, the way it was fed and or grown, and even the way it was treated (or not), food is still most often evaluated by caloric quantity and percentage of fat, sugar and protein. This, despite the fact that these are not the most important variables when it comes to eating for health, they are still our culturally-selected variables.

In this same way, human movement has been reduced to variables that those evaluating science-data have determined to be most influential in health. Things like heart rate, or intensity of exercise and for how many minutes. The amount of pounds or kilograms to be lifted and the number of times before resting. The length of resting before repeating the loads again. Like nutritive science, exercise science has come a long way in the last 30 years, but also like nutrition, our relationship with exercise is deeply-tinged, culturally speaking with variables that have little to do with actual, sustainable health. <— From Katy Bowman’s Kick Ass New Book.

Yes, feel free to share those paragraphs with your friends.

The end.