The right-angle seated position is embraced by only a third to a half of people in the world, writes Cranz, a professor in the architecture department at the University of California, Berkeley. People in non-Western countries, she points out, might squat to wait for the bus, kneel to eat, sit cross-legged to write a letter. This may account for why

Your ultimate goal here is to work up to sitting on the floor at least thirty cumulative minutes a day, every day. Start where you’re at and work up to thirty. Again, use the back of a couch or a chair or a wall for support if you need to. If five minutes feels like all you can do, there’s your starting point. Begin with five minutes in position 1.

Flexion is a movement that closes the angle between body parts, like bending over. Extension is a movement that widens the angle between body parts, like straightening your elbow or pulling your leg behind you.

The idea that the nervous system, breath, and mental perception are all intertwined is actually an idea that has been around for years. The celebrated yogi master B.K.S. Iyengar once said, “Nerves are king of the breath and the breath is the king of the mind.”

If, for instance, you sit in a chair all day or spend a lot of time driving, your hips’ range of motion will shrink and the joints will become stiff. Mobilizations are techniques designed to counter the effects of this type of mono-positioning and lack of movement. They’re not strength-building exercises.

But when you sit on a chair in the traditional right-angle fashion—and do so for the freakish amount of time that many of our lives demand—the femurs just end up resting in one position, and it’s a position that isn’t great for fostering stability. What happens without that support? Your body solves the problem another way, usually by enlisting the

3. Long Sitting With your butt on the ground, sit with your legs straight in front of you. Try to sit with your back straight or with your torso leaning slightly forward.

There’s a sneaky way to get a more robust position in your chair by adjusting its height (this only works with chairs that have rollers at the base). Set the height of your chair higher than usual, then see if you can get enough purchase with your feet to scoot the chair back and forth. When your chair is set high, it’s hard to powerfully move the

Functional at the level that allows us to do everything we want and need to do?