Written by Christopher Kelly
Jan. 8, 2015
Christopher: Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive Podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly. And I'm joined today by Katy Bowman. Katy is a biomechanist, a mother an author of the new book Move Your DNA which I've just finished reading and I feel like I need to read it again. It's a fantastic book. So yes, post this podcast go and buy the book, read it and you'll get much more out of this interview.
Hi, Katy. Thanks for coming on.
Katy: Hi and thanks for having me.
Christopher: So let me explain a little bit of background here. When I first contacted you I said that I'd read your work and I had a feeling that it might be a missing piece of a puzzle that I've been trying to put together. So the rest of that puzzle had been all the stuff that you know about. I know you know because I've been reading your blog and all that good stuff.
So the diet, the rest, the exercise, the stress reduction, I've made some really poor choices in the first 30, 35 years of my life. And I guess that whole time I knew that something was wrong. It wasn't really clear what, but I was pretty sure that something was wrong and now I feel like what I'm doing is working, is right, but it might be incomplete, right.
So there are still some bits that I'm missing. And when I read your work and in particular the new book I started to understand what the missing piece might be. So you have this idea that humans don't just have a requirement for nutritious food, but they have a requirement for nutritious movement. So could you start by explaining exactly what that means?
Katy: Sure. Well, I use nutrition as an example when I speak and in the books. I think people understand it. The last 30 years we've gone to understanding that humans needs food, period, right. Food -- like getting enough calories is the first step to survival. But it does become more nuanced because there are populations that get adequate calories, but they're not getting adequate amounts of whatever -- nutrition X or vitamin X or mineral X.
And so then there are these diseases that arise over the long term of depletion of this one element to food. So we've dialed it in, certainly, over the last 30 years and we've gone from macronutrients. It's like, well, you do need fat and you do need protein. You can't just eat a total number of calories X. There are other categories --
Christopher: Ninety-five percent carbohydrate for example.
Katy: Yeah, right, right, right. And so then and then from that understanding macronutrients and even though we're still dialing in the exact ratios there were just even the concept was like, "Oh, it's not just eat food, period." It's ratios and then it got into now another level of micronutrients and it's like well, you can't just -- you could get adequate whatever the perfect ratio of macronutrients would be.
You could dial it even more micro because you would still have diseases that arise from this "perfect" macronutrient relationship. You could still have diseases because you could consume mathematically the right equation, but not get the same vitamin and nutrients that you perhaps need. And so what I'm just proposing is the same goes for movement that right now where we are with movement is move more which is equivalent to just eat more food.
You're starving so eat more, but it's not really that simple because there are these diseases that arise even in people whose movement is adequate. But they're missing these -- they're missing a distribution of -- in biomechanics it'd be loads. Loads is the equivalent -- the deformation that your body experiences based on the way you move and the position which you're moving in. That squash to the cells, everything you do is a different unique squash to your body and each one of those is a micronutrient.
And so what I'm proposing is that there is a range of micro squashes, micro loads that the human body needs and that is used to, that is adaptive to. That when you don't get it, just like when you're missing vitamin C there's diseases that arise when you have too much vitamin. Like if you have too much vitamin D there are diseases. It's not always depletion. Sometimes it's over consumption.
And so the same thing goes in athletic populations. They have adequate calories, but they over consume perhaps a very single nutrient and under consume all these other ones. So just tossing out those ideas and making suggestions to what the load profile would perhaps look like when certainly our nutritional -- movement nutrition deficits is where Move Your DNA starts.
Christopher: And I think that description what you just talked about there is beautifully illustrated by this one point, the story of the orca. I'm sure you're sick of telling this story now, but it is fantastic. So I'm hoping you won't mind telling it again.
[0:05:02]
Katy: No, I won't. And so I used orcas in captivity. So if you have never seen a video or a clip everyone can just go onto YouTube or can go onto Google and put in orca in captivity or sea world orca and what you'll see is you'll see a picture of an orca or Tillicum. Tillicum is the star of the most recent orca documentary and you'll see that their dorsal fin, that's the fin on their back is flopped over to the side.
And so I used that point to try to teach about the mechanical environment because the mechanical environment isn't as intuitive for reasons kind of stemming from the fact that we're an under moved population, we don't even really think in terms of movement. We only think in terms of exercise. So what I talked about is orca whales are exercised, right. They're swimming in their tank. There's no couch for an orca to lay on.
They are in their natural medium which is water, but the way that they are moving through their natural medium which is water is unnatural. So you're forced to swim in circles or they do swim in circles. They can't swim long distances in a straight line. They can't sprint. They can't go at different depths and all of those interactions between the way you move and the medium through which you are moving create a set of forces and that set of forces is a nutritional load if you will to your cells.
It's squashing your cells into a particular shape and the shape that arises in captive whales is that flopped over fin. They're not creating the mechanical environment to maintain their structure. And so we've got the equivalent to this what I call I call them diseases in captivity, right. And we've got the equivalent of these flopping parts and these failing structures not because the parts are missing. The parts of the machine or maybe said a little bit different. The forces are an integral part of the machine.
The forces were considered or were input during the time that you were adapting and since you've removed the forces that you're missing essentially parts to your structure. And so we don't really recognize them as it's not as clear. We look at a folded over a fin of an orca you're like, "Well, that's not natural. That's not conducive to swimming." And you have this comparison group of orcas in the wild to go, "This structure doesn't look right."
But we don't unfortunately we don't have that. We're all in the tank together if you will. So our folded fins in the form of flat feet and tibial torsion and bulging disks and low bone densities and arterial plaques. And I can go on and on to list what are the diseases of mechanotransduction which are ailments that arise that have a mechanical influence. We all have them together. So they look quite normal and we don't have a wild population to study any longer and so you start missing it and the people doing the research are also in the tanks.
So it's like asking the orca with a folded fin to, one, recognize that he has a folded fin and then solve the problem of why not really knowing anything about -- never experiencing natural movements. So that's really the integral theme to the book and why we use that image of an orca which seems kind of strange on a book about human movements. Like why are there whales, pictures of whales with their dropped fins because it's an easy concept to grasp when you looked outside your species.
Christopher: It's a beautiful analogy and I suppose then that kind of what we've given those orcas are those basic macronutrients, right. They've got water. They need that to stay alive which you can consider to be like maybe sort of fat or protein or something. But, yeah, we've not given them all those micronutrients that they need to be to thrive, to be as good as they could be.
Katy: Yeah, there's something. There's definitely -- their environment is lacking. Their environment is more than water. It's the way they move through water. So we kind of got it half right, but we missed the critical piece.
Christopher: It's really fascinating. And then this idea of there being a tank and the orcas in the tank and then we're all in the tank because we can't -- yeah. It's a really beautiful analogy. But I wanted to talk to you about exercise because most of -- my listeners, they're all athletes. So I'm a pro mountain biker. The medical doctor I'm partnered with is also a pro mountain biker and we spend tons of times sitting and then the rest of the time cycling.
And everyone else has different types of exercise that they do, but it's still all exercise. And I'm starting to understand that perhaps exercise is not the solution to the problems that you've been describing.
Katy: No. If someone is movement-starved, if someone is entirely still, then it's entirely logical to give them supplements. It's a supplement. I try to say it like the exercise and the way that we do it is in the same way that we take a mineral or vitamin.
[0:10:09]
There's a void in our diet. There's a deficit in our relationship with consuming food. So we try to make up for it in a concentrated kind of an unnatural consumption. And in the same way that your diet cannot consist of minerals and vitamins your movement diet should not consist only of exercise.
Christopher: Okay, I get it. So the practice implications of this, the thing that worries me about it is it starts really from the earliest age. So I've got a one year old daughter that's still breastfeeding and I realize I definitely wasn't breastfed for that long. And in turns out even that, those first few kinds of loads are actually important. Can you tell me why?
Katy: Well, you're the most malleable. Your structure when you're born is extremely malleable. It's not -- while the tissue is still referred to as a bone, it's a different kind of bone. So the first five years are extremely heightened in terms of how the effects of loads parlay into the shape of your bones throughout the rest of your life.
And then that being said from five to 20 is a second set of super important load. You become more fused and it's kind of hard with the literature to separate the difference between have it being fused in the body and have it being fused in the mind. So it's not clear right now if one of the reasons people are so less adaptable physically as they get older is because their brain is working against them, meaning that the habit is really grooved in the mind.
And so to move outside of the groove is just a challenge. You have to be extremely mindful and be choosing all the time. But it's just -- it's important simply because your structure never adapts really more -- is never really shaped more than those loads early on than it is throughout the rest of your life. That all being said, you're so far away from natural swimming, you, orcas in the tank.
It doesn't really matter if you're going, "Okay, well, great. Well, I know that I spent a lot of time in a stroller and diapers and then I was wearing shoes my whole life and then I wasn't breastfed. Neither was I." I would say not to focus too much on that because the amount of distance you can still progress is huge, is immense. It's decades long. You can really make quite a bit of performance. It's just this little nuance adaptations like tooth eruption.
I use breastfeeding as helping people understand that -- the whole reason they put breastfeeding in there was to help delineate between movement and exercise. You don't think of -- like people have kids and my kids need exercise. They don't really need exercise. They need movement. And breastfeeding is one of those natural movements that you would find out of the tank that then goes on to affect the need for dental intervention.
If you haven't massaged your jaw with all of that very specific motor programming, then the tug to the bone, the jaw bone and the face bones which is the signal for how to grow and how to become shaped missing those. Then you're looking at issues that can arise from a malformation of your jaw and your palate and your facial structure. And it shows up later on in breathing and chewing and mastication as well as jaw alignment, occlusion and space for all your teeth to fill in, why people have to have pulled because their jaw does not have the space for all the genetically programmed teeth to come in.
So yeah, there are things. I mean she's one. That's exciting, but I wouldn't be too -- I wouldn't feel too discouraged by your first five years because there's so much more work to.
Christopher: Right. So I mean I guess the breastfeeding part, everybody's pretty much sold on that already, but there are some other things which I think are a lot less obvious for kids and I'm sure a lot of people listening to this will have kids. And in particularly you've talked about -- you mentioned nappies there and also shoes and strollers. And do you think I should get rid of those things immediately or what you think?
Katy: Well, I'll just tell you -- it's hard for me to say. It's a delicate line because you're walking a fine line between participating in society in a particular way and then also trying to optimize development by decreasing convenience. And so all I know is the example of my own two children. We didn't even own a stroller. When people hear that they're like, "Well, that's --" I couldn't do anything. And there are people who are single parents who have multiple children and a stroller is the only way their life functions as opposed to us where we've got two parents home and two kids.
[0:15:16]
And so when we take our kids out for five mile logs or if we go to the zoo or what not we carry them when they can't walk. Two-fold, one, because then our children's muscular skeletal system is participating and shaping their bones, but also ours is as well. Children's development is not only about the child. It's a relationship between -- most people don't have enough strength to carry their children.
That's also a big reason why they wouldn't not have a stroller. It's like I can't carry my kid for three hours, where it's totally natural to be able to carry your kid for an hour. Also, if you were in a natural baby carrying relationship your child would be hanging onto you. My children had the strength to hold on to me at one years old.
So while it looks like you're carrying your kid it's like well, really the kid is carrying themselves. So there are muscles and their gripping muscles and those attachments to the ribs that then influence how the lung tissue inflates. Those relationships are established early, early on. So it's -- we could talk for a really long time, but when you look at things that are completely normal for a population, for a particular culture you just have to realize that they're not really normal for the whole world and they're certainly not normal for the loads that need to be created.
It's a very highly processed food. If you look at junk food and you kind of understand. When you look at junk food that there's a short term payoff like energy for a long term negative where that short term payoff of energy usually caused you something to process. There was some sort of -- well, I call it a biological tax. There was some sort of tax you had to pay for that short term payoff. You're constantly doing that.
It's like the stroller for the short term ease not only doesn't benefit the child. It doesn't benefit you. And then now, you're going, "Well, now I have to go get my exercise in." Where for me, we don't exercise, we move. Our children don't exercise. They move, but I do it all in that three hours. That three hour walk to get my food was exercise for me, was exercise for the kid and I got food. I don't need any extra hours. I worked really hard. I certainly want to put my kids down a lot of the time because it's hard.
But as parents, I don't know if you experienced this and anyone else. Your life changed when you have kids. They told me that, but I didn't really believe them. You don't have the time. I know I was an athlete. Both my husband and I were athletes before and you lose training time. Your family, it just changes. And so for a long time I was lamenting like I can't get the level of work that I want. I can't do anything hard enough. It's so slow. You take your kids out for a walk and it's so slow.
And then I realized it's work. I'm trying to avoid a certain type of work because I've packaged what work is as this thing of exercise. So going on a three hour two mile lock with my kids, carrying them is way more work, way more -- it's much more of a nutritious load to my body than what I wanted to go do for concentrated exercise for an hour or for 90 minutes. Meaning that what I end up doing with my kids is much more natural for my body and much more of a challenge, right.
One of the reasons I don't want to do it is because it's challenging. Because I am more comfortable being challenged on a bike or on a run or something super repetitive that doesn't involve a swarming person that is constantly requiring that I do something different. Like what if your bike handles decided that they wanted to be in a different formation all of the time, your bike ride all of a sudden wouldn't be all that easy because one bike handle decided they wanted to be behind you. And then you're trying to hold on one hand in front and one hand on the back. And cross training is built into nature. So I use nature as my personal trainer I guess if you will.
Christopher: I'm just wondering why this is not the kind of a standard. Like what happened in exercise science, I presume it was, where someone suddenly decided that going for a walk where you ended up carrying your kids for three hours was going to be better for you than, I don't know, swimming laps in a pool or cycling on an indoor bike or something. What happened?
Katy: Well, exercise science is a 30 year old field. If you compare it to mathematics which is a 600 year old field or you could even say that it's a 2,000 year old field. The notion of exercise is a completely contrived thing. So while we call exercise science we put under kinesiology, which is the study of human movement, it is essentially a field developed by athletes. The first teachers of the kinesiology department really started as physical education.
[0:20:17]
So it's a program that's in the tank. So it's not -- it's no wonder that it is completely contrived or built with in the tank principles. It's young and the people -- we talk about memes and how it's just the assumptions. All science starts with underlying assumptions and you can only really assume that which you've experienced or have experience with and it's just that.
It's exercise science. It is a science of exercise and there's nothing really wrong with exercise science. It's just exercise science is not human movement. It is not -- they're different categories. They're entirely different things. I have a friend right now who's studying for his degree in the kinesiology department. And he took a class that said there are three forms of human movement: dance, athletics and fitness.
And that was in a textbook. That was a textbook and I was like, "Wow, that statement is false." So if you look at the textbooks and you look at the tenants of which the textbooks are built upon, while it's a logical mathematical proof -- for those of you are familiar with taking a logical step from the next step -- the assumptions are false.
So that means that everything in that textbook while it could be true based on that statement, that statement itself is not true. So and that's kind of crazy. I'm like, "Wow, what about --" I could come up with 17 examples on the tip of my tongue about another example of human movement that was none of those things. And so it's just that. It's just lack of critical thinking.
People really aren't thinking anymore. And exercise itself it's really hard to say, to go exercise. Like exercise is amazing and wonderful. It's just when you're talking about a scientific collection of facts, exercise is a very narrow, limited point of view to human movement. And you could be the ultimate, perfect exerciser and your mechanical environment could still be crap.
Meaning I could come up with the perfect evidence-based exercise program for the whale and the tank, but I've failed to consider that the tank itself is what I am correcting the exercise program for, like I am trying to fix the whale's fin, right. I'm going, "Okay, floppy fin to the left, we're going to do some curls of the fin to the right. You're going to foam roll out the left side of your fin."
But meanwhile this part, there's a part missing to the equation. I can see the fin. I can see the mouth. I know the dorsal muscles, but what I have not considered are the forces that pushed the fin over in the first place because the fin did not fall. The fin was pushed. And so the forces if you don't understand forces and anatomy and biology people don't consider forces. They're two separate fields, right. We reduced it to physical science and life science.
And so only a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago that they recognized that cells felt gravity.
Christopher: Oh, I didn't know that.
Katy: Yeah, they just -- I mean it was an underlying assumption that cells are too small, right. So it's so small that the relative pull of the gravitational force can't affect anything that tiny because -- and that says -- it's again it's an ego-centric perspective where the size of your whole body is so much bigger than the size of your cell compared to the universe.
It's like the difference between you and the cell is like saying that you're going to get closer to the sky by hiking up to the top of Mt. Shasta. It's such an insignificant difference. However, not to the person who is coming up with the idea. And so what do we do now with this understanding of like cells do affect gravity. All of our studies into cellular behavior has been done on the chemistry. What's the chemical environment? Because we'll just take mechanics out of the equation because, frankly, the math is too complicated for any human being to do at this time.
And then also the other big revelation in the last year was all cells have been studied in a petri dish which is two dimensions. Meaning that you've essentially studied cells in captivity and when they created this three dimensional way of studying cells, it started moving in a completely different way. There are all these motors inside a cell and behaviors of a cell that were completely altered.
So our whole understanding of biology at this point was not considering mechanical forces. And so that's about to change, it has been really changing for the last 20 years. And the universities are starting to shape, are starting to offer more robust programs in mechanobiology and it's brand new.
[0:25:18]
I just think that people forget that science is completely in progress and it's not very old. It's very, very young and so it's like, "Well, why didn't we know about it?" It's like because you are a spec on another spec and that spec has been around for like three seconds. Like that's just why, just big picture, big picture, big picture.
Christopher: Yeah, it's incredible. And so tell me, how do I know that I've been affected by all this, right? So my environment is lacking and I've been missing really important parts that are required for my body to be fully healthy and function well. How do I know that it's going wrong?
Katy: Well, I mean I think it's a pretty complicated, but the book -- what do I say? Make a list. Put a list down of every pill you take and for why, every salves you rub on your body and for what, every surgery you've had, all the things that your parents had. You make a huge list. Make a huge list about basic biological functions like how did your pregnancy go? Was this something you're able to do well? Did you suffer through it? Did you require intervention, technological intervention to do things like eat your food, digest your food, go to the bathroom?
Do you require external assistance to get down or to accomplish your basic biological function? Then that is an indicator that your system does not have all of its parts or is not experiencing what it should be experiencing. Because the physical forces, again, back to the orca, if the dorsal fin is so important why doesn't it have a bone in it? Why is it allowed to collapse? Why didn't your body come with -- there's no muscle in dorsal fin. It's just a fibrocartilage.
So that question comes up a lot and it was like -- so maybe the dorsal isn't so important because if it was so important it wouldn't be collapsing. And it's like, "Well, you have to understand energy conservation and adaptation and evolution to go -- you don't have unnecessary parts." Machines in general don't have unnecessary parts. They don't have too many and they don't have too few. They have the parts that they require.
And those parts come from the interaction of swimming because why would an orca ever not be swimming in the ocean. So there hasn't been any time to adapt to some sort of structure that doesn't require moving. If you had a bone it would cost a lot more energy to maintain it, right. You'd be heavier. You'd have to keep it fed nutritionally. You'd have to eat more. And so then you'd have to move even more.
So you're of this constant tradeoff between energy and biological task, accomplishment and there's this really organic relationship where the movement to accomplish your biological imperatives is also the part that maintains you structure. So when you took away the movement you lost some of your parts.
Christopher: So do you think it's possible then to define a set of test, some kind of -- all about quantifying things? I'd love to be able to do a test and then if I'm failing it, try and figure out why I'm failing it and something that I can do to fix the problem.
Katy: Well, it's complicated. I think that one of the reasons exercise science has persisted is those measures that we have are like I think I talked about the cardio -- I mean I know I talked about the cardiovascular system in the book, but I'm taking about everyone wants to have a healthier heart. And it's like, well, what's the purpose of the heart? It's like to get -- deliver oxygen to the body.
It's like, yeah. Well, what does that mean? So most specifically it's to get red blood cells marching single file through every capillary in your body because that's how your whole cells are filled. And so there's no way to measure that without being inside -- there's no way to measure the oxygen distribution to 100% of the cells in your body. So what we did is we simplify this.
It's like, well, we know that it has to do with the strength of the heart. So let's make the strength of the heart the measure. And I can see what my stroke volume is, what my beats per minute are, like how the time over which I can get my heart rate up and then back down again. How long can I sustain it high? Like so we've come up with all of these tests, but in the end the greatest test for you to pass is, how is your body? How are you performing?
[0:30:05]
And then, again, I'll just refer back to that list, make that list. Make that list and look at it and then movement -- I think if I could have anyone walk away with the gist -- or not the gist, but an important detail of Move Your DNA is movement creates localized loads, not systemic. So when you look at your list, look at the location of the ailments that you have. Not just that you have the ailment, but the location and then learn more about the mobilities that should be in those areas because ranges of motion, every degree of a range of a motion is also a part.
And that's why we focus on range of motion because it is very related to how things are moving in that area when you move. So I just wrote a blog post about it yesterday where like a lot of people's model of muscle is still muscle gets longer or shorter as it's contracting. But it also gets wider and more narrow.
And it's that width. It's that change in width that pushes on surrounding tissues. So you're like, "I'm going to use my bicep." And you think the bicep moves the lower limb closer -- allows it to move farther away. But that motion of moving the lower arm, all of the tissue around the bicep got displaced in you using the arm. So all the way up from the elbow to the shoulder is also the loads are also affected in that area just by you doing something with your lower limb.
And so since we've got this over simplified anatomical understanding that doesn't really consider forces, it's going to be hard to grasp than I'm talking more about movement than I am about exercise.
Christopher: Okay. I think I understand. I think I have a general grasp of it. The heart thing is interesting as you kind of reminded me. I wanted to ask you what you thought about what some people call chronic cardio. Anyway, I know that as an endurance athlete many people consider the changes that happen to heart muscle to be like a pathology, like something has gone wrong. Do you believe that to be true or is that like a good adaptation?
Katy: well, I mean there no good or bad adaptations. An adaptation is simply the response to what you do to make what you do easier on your body in the short term. There's no longevity associated with an adaptation and there's no positive or negative. It's about short term survival. So now, adaptations are good because you didn't die today.
However, with chronic cardio I don't know. The things -- moments are never a good way to evaluate something. It's all about context. If someone did chronic cardio outside of a den of sloth which is what everyone is doing, right. We are a sedentary population. We are a sedentary culture. Even our top exercisers are marathoners, are ultra-marathoners. If you look at time spent moving there's still most of the time.
So there's this new category now in exercise research where they just -- before there was a category you were active or you were sedentary. And if you were a regular exerciser you are active, but then now that we know -- now that with all the sitting. Sitting is a new smoking research. It's like, well, even people who fit in the active category really die at the same rates of the same ailments than people who are in the active category.
So that wasn't a good categorization. So now, there is active, sedentary and actively sedentary. Meaning that if you're active you have to be moving more than your exercise and the whole foundation of exercise as a cardio exercise -- actually, I don't know if it was cardio exercise. I think it was exercise affecting a population.
It was looking at people who were -- I believe it was a trolley or train. There were conductors and there were the drivers. One sat and one stood up and was just moving in small ranges of motion, just moving back up and down the train, ticket takers. And it's going -- the movers were better even though they weren't exercising. They were moving eight hours a day and we've just assumed that our one hour exercise, because we're playing with variable of an intensity or whatever, is getting us the same thing as if we had done that eight hours of movement.
So I think that instead of saying chronic cardio is bad or good. That nothing done in an hour a day is going to really be adequate for probably why you're doing that thing. If you're doing it for performance that's different, but I'm always assuming biological health is -- biological health is my platform.
[0:35:18]
Christopher: Yeah, I mean I think it's everybody's goal, really, when you look at it. So I mean I call myself a pro mountain biker. Really, I'm a hobby pro which means I just do it for fun and nobody's paying me a salary. And so of course although I do care about performance really what I care the most about is the time that I spent with my daughter outside of racing and training.
But I wanted to ask you again about bone density is definitely something of interest to cyclist. And I saw -- it came upon on our email group just this week actually this doctor that had been doing exactly what you've just described, right. He's probably spending eight hours a day a desk and then he'll go out and spend three or four hours on a road bike which is kind of quite smooth.
And then eventually he crashes and smashes his pelvis and his hips and all the rest of it in a fairly low speed and uneventful accident. And the conclusion was although cyclist they need to be going to the gym and lifting heavy weights in order to stimulate the bone growth and to make sure that this doesn't happen. But I'm not kind of very convinced by that after reading your book and listening to what you have to say. What do you think?
Katy: Well, I mean bone density is a huge issue. I mean with the latest stuff of young women in their 20s and 30s who just took upon themselves to start a six week cycling program. So in six weeks, they all had decreased bone density in specifically their hips, the head of the femur and the pelvis. So that's a big deal because everyone goes through -- not everyone.
But a lot of people will go through a phase in their life where they want to train for something. And sometimes training for the thing is just about the thing, just about accomplishing the things. Well, I think a lot of people do a race or a big hike or something for the sake of accomplishment. And I certainly think that that's hugely valuable.
It's when you start doing that thing for your health that we run into problems. And so bone density in cyclist is a big deal. And I've talked with populations before who our cyclist. And I live an area -- I live in Washington State and it's a huge cycling population. Portland and Washington are very green states. And so they use bikes in lieu of cars and they really pride themselves on riding three hours a day.
It's just that riding to and from work or whatever using their bike from, they're crossing off the exercise box. And so that's really where the issue runs into -- where you run into -- you didn't really get your movement nutrition. It's fine that you rode your bike to work. But if that's the only movement that you did then you essentially sat all day long because sitting on a bike for sitting's sake is still sitting.
Your legs are moving, yes, but as far as being weight bearing -- no. So the misunderstanding though of weight bearing is going, "Okay, well, if I sit on my bike then I'm going to balance my sitting by, again, a 30 minute high intensity leg squats or something to keep the loads to my bones strong." And this goes down to the under -- the misunderstanding of the specificity of a load.
And a large group was men. So men, by default, normally aren't screened for bone loss where women are. It's a normal part of everyone's -- women. It's usually part of their insurance plan where they're going to start bone density screenings on a regular basis. But it's not the same for men where that's not usually the base plan.
But I highly recommend that male cyclist go out and get a baseline DEXA ASAP or else you have no --
Christopher: Baseline, right.
Katy: We have no leg to stand on literally and figuratively. Don't assume that you're outside of this box because there's nothing like not being able to walk and it happens quite a bit and it happens -- falls happen when you're a cyclist. You don't want to fall on a weak bone, but also you lose really just your strength to ambulate. You decrease overall your ability to function not on the bike, like that's what adaptation is, right. It's making you a great cyclist.
So cyclists are getting a ton of load to their legs, but the adaptations to what you're doing on a bike is not the distribution of bone mass that you need to support you while you're standing up. The only way to get that is to stand up. The only way to get the bone density -- it's really not just bone density. I think that's a problem too is we just -- we put in a category of like what's your bone density?
It's about distribution of bone. It's about the literal shape of your bone which density is affecting. Density is just a broader way of thinking about it. You want a distribution of bony mass that supports you for biological function of which walking is a primary one.
[0:40:16]
So in order to maintain your bones for the sake of walking, you need to walk. That's the only way you will get the bone mass distribution to support that thing.
Christopher: Okay, so not necessarily then. So the conclusion from this particular article was, okay, all cyclist need to be doing strength training in the gym. And so that's probably wrong then.
Katy: You'll get stronger in whatever you do to strength train. It's the law of specificity. It's like exercise 101. If I told you I wanted to be a cyclist, but I decided I'm going to swim my way to be a better cyclist you would roll your eyes and go, "Okay, you need to go read a book." It's the same thing. It's just a little more nuanced.
If you want to have stronger -- you don't want stronger bones. Stronger boned the end is not the goal. What you want is the distribution of mass that supports the loads created by whatever you want to do X. I'm going to assume that being upright would be on your tasks of things that you would want to do.
So the law of specificity says you have to do that thing. Working out in the gym doing leg exercises will get you stronger in a distribution of mass speaking whatever doing those exercises require. But if doing those exercises is not the thing that you wanted to be able to do when you're done doing the exercises then it wasn't a good exercise design.
Christopher: Okay. I think I understand.
Katy: You're with me?
Christopher: Yeah, I think so. I thought -- my original thought was that maybe we were not so badly affected as mountain bikers because there's so much kind of vibration stuff. It's difficult to describe to someone that's never done it, but when you go hurtling down a hill at 25 miles an hour in this eight inch breaking bumps on the surface that you're -- that's kind of a lot of force.
But what you've just told me that's still not walking which is really what our skeleton was designed or our bodies were designed to do. So it probably isn't going to help completely either.
Katy: Well, and I put that in the book, the difference between the two between road cyclists. I mean the bone density as a whole. So you have to look at when you're looking at literature you have to look at do they measure bone density as a whole? Do they do site location because bone density as a whole doesn't really tell you anything. You could have extra bone density in working parts in your arms and that's going to increase your overall bone density, but doesn't say anything about the area that you're concerned with which would be in the populations I work with, hip fracture, right.
Hip fracture is the thing that if you break your leg there's like a one year mortality trend if you've broken your leg for people who are -- yes, it's huge because walking, again, movement is driving breathing. It's driving blood. That's why when you're bed ridden your health declines very quickly because your systems depend on your mechanical environment. When you are totally bed ridden, all of your systems, they're positioned poorly.
Gravity is a main driving force in the body and without it then things have to start working harder to try pump out water. There's a range, a physiological range to which you can adapt and in the same you can live your life on your head and then expect adaptive forces to just like we'll just strengthen your muscles to reverse the way your body works. Your range of adaptation is not broad.
So yes, bone density in mountain cyclist are better a lot of times because they're actually standing more.
Christopher: Yeah, so I do a ton of standing. I didn't realize that was important at first, but now it's kind of -- mountain biking is actually a lot more fun if you stand up more often. And people should do it more, but yeah.
Katy: Yeah. So if you're a road cyclist it hard because, again, if it's about your event you're trying to log in towards your event. But if you have both bikes and you just like cycling it's like well, then why don't you just switch up your bike? Why don't you switch up your route? There are so many ways to change your loads. Why don't you switch up the way that you're pedaling?
There's a lot of different ways to cross train within doing the same mode, but that all being said, if you want to maintain a structure that's fit for biological function you have to do said biological function.
Christopher: Okay. I understand. Now, you said something earlier which I kind of -- you said that cells feel gravity which I think is obviously new and really important concept. And I was kind of wondering about my degree. My apprenticeship was actually in electronic engineering and we used to spend tons of time in the lab screening equipment against electromagnetic frequency.
So they weren't interfered with, right. And so people kind of know what this is because you've heard -- do you remember when you used to put a mobile phone near another phone it would stop making that horrendous beeping noise or next to a speaker was the classing one. And I'm starting to wonder whether cells can also affected by this energy. So what do you think about that?
[0:45:06]
Katy: Well, I mean it's certainly disconcerting given that we've got equipment literally strapped to our body.
Christopher: Yeah, exactly. Mobile phones are really obvious example.
Katy: Right. So the most recent thing that I have come across in the literature that's the most recent was the study on sperm cells. Did you see that study?
Christopher: I heard you talk about it on your podcast, but I'd love you to tell me about it now.
Katy: Yeah. Well, and I don't have it right in front of me, but -- so what they're doing, it's an easy sample to gather really. So they can gather a sample and then they can place that sample -- no, what do that do? They had the subjects actually wear the phone on their hip and then took samples to see the behavior of the cells. And so it was different after -- I'm sorry. I don't have the exposure next to me. If you go to my Facebook page, I posted it a while back. So you can find that or you can just Google search it. Probably just look for EMF and sperm cells.
Christopher: EMF and sperm cells, yeah. So I will. I'll link to that in the show next to this one. So it's not like they saw anything bad happen. It's just that there was something.
Katy: No, it's a change. Yes, so that's the thing is bad or good is a scale, right. So when you're -- and also, I just want to put in there -- what they weren't able to do was separate if it was the temperature of the phone or if it was the EMF of the phone. So that's going to be the next study.
I also, I saw just a really sad study on embryonic development, fetal development where the fetuses were already planned on terminating. So they were -- they did this study on them. It's really -- I don't know how ethical it is. It wasn't done in the United Sates, but they could see there was an effect that the development was different when developed with a device.
Again, whether it's temperature or whether it's EMF, I don't know. But the way I operate as well. All I need to know is there an effect or not. Like that's all I need to know. I don't have to have evidence to see how long that effect needs to be there to be what we would consider a negative change. So my solution was since our cell phones are around us all the time it's just turning them off airplane mode.
So if it's temperature, that's one thing. But I don't have it on my body at night, but I used to use it as an alarm clock. So it's sitting by my and my child's head for eight hours a day. So I was like, "Well, this is an easy solution. It still functions as an alarm clock. I turn off the EMF which is just turning it on an airplane mode, problem solved." I don't need proof in the most disturbing forms to change my habit because it doesn't matter one way or the other.
There's no reason. It doesn't do anything for me to have it on airplane mode all the time. There's no positive benefit. It's just convenience. It's laziness. I want to have my phone on all the time. Yet at the same time I don't have my phone on all the time. So I just turn it off. But that was my solution. That was my solution to that.
But it'll be interesting. It's not too hard to test, but at the same time there's a lot at stake. There's a lot at stake. There are test that come back. I mean, what would everyone do if it was a definitive yes, EMF is enough change and over 17 years results in X or Y or Z. I still don't think anyone would turn off their phone.
Christopher: No, of course not. No.
Katy: So what's the point? It's kind of like we're at that stage right now where --
Christopher: It's like gluten, right. Everybody knows, but everyone's going to eat it anyway.
Katy: No, you just change when you're ready to the thing that you just intuitively feel like you're ready to do. Even people who swear they're evidence based it's like you're not really evidence based. You just make the choices that you want to make. Like the end. So yeah. Yeah, I found that was interesting and sub-lethal, right.
So sub-lethal effects are this new category, so so much is something good or bad is based on lethal or not or lethal within a year or two years. But when you go to the doctor, if you're looking at a range like you'll get blood lipid profile and you'll see you're in the normal range. And that's fine if that's where you're looking at. It's like, "I'm normal. I'm normal. I'm normal." But over ten years if you didn't see a trend in micro-changes -- physiology is micro change.
It's only when it gets to a certain stage that we give it a name. So we're now we're on like a semantics, general semantics thing that the name of a thing is really important to people right now. Not so much the function.
[0:50:03]
So if you were plotting your -- I suggest everyone go out and get their blood lipid profile and plot the actual number. Don't worry if it's normal or abnormal. That doesn't tell you really anything except what your insurance wants to know or your doctor based on what they're going to prescribe you. But if you're really interested in machination, if you're interested in how you function, plot your data.
And then pull up a ten year trend and see what direction your body is trending to, not so much these isolated once a year data points. That because someone else has said we only need to look at good range or bad range really distracts you from what you need to know.
Christopher: Yeah, I think that's an excellent idea. And of course those levels that you see on the lab test they're not arbitrary, but they're just the average of all the numbers the lab has ever seen, right. So it's going back to that idea that everybody is inside the tank.
Katy: Right, right. Yeah, and also a lot of times those ranges are set based on things that have nothing to do with health and have to do with when are dollars going to be moving around. And as far as insurances and diagnostic codes, it's much more of a political many times. It's certainly monitoring your health, but it's not only about your health. It's about many other things.
So I just plot my own data and then I can remove the bias. I don't really care what the ranges are. I just want to know how I'm functioning.
Christopher: Yeah, absolutely. It's a great idea. And finally, I wanted to ask you, there must be lots of other biomechanics experts out there. But I don't really know any quite like you. So what does it that makes you different? Like have you got to this point? What makes you different?
Katy: Oh, gosh. So many things that I play the accordion, I don't know.
Christopher: Why is this not all common knowledge? I mean there's no one else saying the stuff that you're saying.
Katy: No, I mean that's how anything's ever said. Like anything that's ever said is just said by one person. It's never a group of 100 people come to it. It's just the insight of a particular person and everyone goes, "Yeah." And then that becomes the next trend. I mean this is how it has always been. Studying history and studying ideas and knowledge it's always one person who comes up with it.
That all being said, there's probably many people -- not biomechanist, but many people, 15 or 20 all over the planet who have thought these things. I just am blessed with living in a country with the internet and I'm a writer and I put, I mean I just put it out there. But I think in terms -- like biomechanics is really, again, a broad category where there are lower case bioMECHANICS. So focus on the mechanics, not so much on the bio.
And then there's this trend now. So in biomechanics it's the study of Newtonian physics, rigid body mechanics as applied to biological systems. That's been really the basic direction of biomechanics and that's my training as well. But, again, as biology, as we recognize that the separation of biology and physics wasn't very helpful, there's this new understanding that by reducing everything to a rigid model much is lost because you are not a rigid model.
So there are many other forces and interactions going on that are eliminated by that particular model. So there's -- I would consider myself more of a BIOmechanics where I'm trying to help people apply what -- by reducing it to the physics -- what we're able to find then go. But you need to be able to apply it to a biological system.
Life is not mathematical models. People will need to know how their cells are squashed. The fact that you don't have mathematics sophisticated enough to process that shouldn't mean that we don't talk about it. That it is just complicated and say, "I can't tell you the equivalent in the same way I can tell you kind of your macro and micro chemical nutrients and we've named them." You need all these vitamins and all these minerals and we've got the names for them.
It's not going to be as easy to isolate loads because loads are too complex to quantify. It's too nuanced. So I mean for those of you who are mathematical based and applied force is a vector, but a load is a vector field. Like it's just and you're reducing it to the vector field that you can measure. It's just it's tiny. It's too small.
So I just thought it was time to go. Let's give our study of biomechanics some biological context. And so I'm just bridging that gap for the popular science interest and I'm specializing in health with a niche in movement. And that's just -- I don't know. That's what makes me different. It's just the path I've decided to take.
[0:55:11]
Christopher: That's cool. I'm glad you did. It's been fantastic following you over the last few years. And then the book obviously, Move Your DNA, is full of fantastic big ideas. But in the end of it what I really wanted was some kind of video or training course or something a bit more interactive that I could actually take part in. And can you tell me, does anything like that exist? I heard there was some sort of relations with Mark Sisson in his Primal Blueprint Certification. Tell me about that.
Katy: Well, for that they just brought me on the board to kind of check over some of the stuff. But in our institute, I teach all these in courses. So we have actual -- I actually certify people in kind of the baseline where we start with the exercise platform. So you're an exerciser. It's like great. Let's put you through some diagnostics about what you can move and what you can't and therefore --
Christopher: That's what I want.
Katy: Yeah. So that you just go to Restorative Exercise Institute and click on "study" and you'll find lots of different courses. There are video based courses. I had so many students I closed the certification process, but I'm actually going to start -- I haven't released this yet. But I'm actually going to start a yearlong course that is -- you just get something every week. Some little biomechanics/biology function lesson and a corrective exercise/diagnostic.
And because we're all kind of overwhelmed with information that you can just do it over a year, 52 lessons. And then when we're done we'll have basically this textbook that I wanted to create for some time. So instead of a rigid body, traditional biomechanics textbook it's really more a user-friendly how do I apply this thing that you're talking about, this ideas to my own structure right now for the sake of better health. That's going to be coming pretty soon. So just make sure you follow us and then you'll get notification of that.
Christopher: Cool. So is this something that anybody can do then? I mean you must be certifying people who are sort of practitioners of other types and not just end users.
Katy: Yeah. Well, we have a lot of medical professionals. I tend to work with allopathic and physios and also just movement teachers who are not allopathic. But we call that allied health services. So anyone who's teaching movement or doing massage or doing like alternative health, kind of giving them some concrete this is how that works.
But the course, even though the certification portion of it is closed right now, the actual course. Like how can I just start learning how to see where I move and where I don't and what are the loads that I need to start introducing. That's still available on the website.
Christopher: Okay, that's cool. That's the only bit I really care about. These certifications is like, "Okay, great. I've got a certificate now." But what I really care about is the knowledge.
Katy: Yeah. So it's just a -- it's hard because in the end what you need to learn is how to see where you do and do not move. The quantifying it part isn't -- like the understanding of the background, the kind of stuff that I'm talking about isn't as critical to start applying. However, I wanted a place to have basically my life's academic work and I put that in Move Your DNA.
Christopher: That's cool. Well, thank you so much for your time. This has been a very enlightening conversation and I'm really grateful because it's the holidays in case you're listening like you don't really know. But this will be out in a few weeks. But yeah, so I'm really grateful for you giving up your time. Thank you very much.
Katy: Oh, you're very welcome. Thanks for having me.
Christopher: Cheers, Katy.
Katy: Cheers.
[0:58:36] End of Audio
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