the all-day, every-day stimulation created by wind, that dictates the girth of a tree’s trunk and branches as well as how often and at what angles a tree branches. Doesn’t that just blow you away? (What I find most interesting about this is, how does a tree store this mechanical input? Trees grow so high and for so long, they have to store the mech

The takeaway here is that every load is a unique cellular deformation (the movement equivalent of a nutrient), even when the applied force (thirteen pounds of pumpkin) is exactly the same.

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

Clearly, the amount of time we allot to “exercise” is very small compared to the amount of time we are capable of moving our bodies, which is a hundred percent of our waking hours.

In a more natural environment, not only would you have used your hands, arms, and shoulders way more, you would have also used a single arm way less often.

Muscles change length because their sarcomeres do. Muscles become shorter when their sarcomeres increase their overlap; they become longer when their sarcomeres reduce overlap. Active moving requires the muscles (read: sarcomeres) on one side of a joint to get shorter while the opposing muscles get longer.

The loads we experience in today’s world differ hugely from the loads people experienced a hundred, a thousand, and ten thousand years ago. Yet we blithely accept that our health issues—which so many of us share—are genetic. Genetic, a term we’ve internally defined as beyond our control. Whether out of convenience or ignorance, we have failed to ad

each foot has 33 joints,

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 well-