Imagine your body is made of clay, with each type and frequency of movement shaping the physical outcome. Take your imaginary body-ball-of-clay through your personal movement timeline, considering your early development, favorite activities, accidents or sports injuries, footwear habits, the desks at school, your favorite couch, and driving

Over time, heavy use of your body in one particular pattern makes strong tissues next to weaker ones, which creates an environment where an injury can slowly develop. The frequent consumption of varied movement is what drives essential physiological processes.

In most cases, modern environments do not prevent us from adopting behaviors with better health outcomes. We choose to drive instead of walk. To push our kids in a stroller and not carry them in our arms. To push our food in a cart and not carry it on our back. We slouch into our furniture, and let our shoes support our feet. Yes, our modern

“Good” nourishment, whether you’re talking about food or movement, cannot be reduced to a single or even a few variables, and bad diets or exercise programs are not the result of the deficit of a single component. When you’re eating a well-balanced diet (in every sense of the word) there is a sum total effect of wellness that permeates the entire

Generally, injury and therapy researchers miss (or at least fail to mention in their research) that level walking, performed at the frequency (or lack thereof) with which we have done it, is in itself a cause of injury. When we’re seeking therapeutic solutions to chronic issues of the foot, ankle, knee, hips, and pelvis, we mustn’t ignore the

Trade floppy fins for bum knees, collapsed arches, eroded hips, tight hamstrings, leaky pelvic floors, collapsed ankles, you name it—and consider our load profile. Walking on a treadmill an hour a day creates an entirely different load profile than walking over the ground for an hour. Wearing shoes to walk that hour creates a different load profile

This Rhomboid Pushup is often mistaken for a cat-cow yoga pose, but in the Rhomboid Pushup there is not a change in the curve of the spine. You

You can break down every type of exercise to the loads your body experiences during that exercise to find out if the perks of a favorite fitness activity come with any adaptations that detract from long-term health goals.

Dancing Skeletons, a book by nutritional anthropologist Katherine Dettwyler