Stand on one leg – and 16 other life-changing daily moves that will keep your body happy

Are you sitting comfortably? Well, get up! Stay healthy and supple by adding these basic movements to your daily routine writes Kelly Starrett and Juliet Starrett in The Guardian 


Things have changed a lot since the days when humans chased animals for food and had to walk long distances for water. But our bodies haven’t: we are still built to move in all the ways our ancestors needed to. Add in today’s personal transport, mechanical conveniences and screens that glue us to our chairs, and what do you get? Achy hips and backs, stiff necks, sore knees, and a significant downgrading of many markers of good health.

Generally, it is better to think about pain and discomfort in the body not as tissue damage or trauma but as a request for change. We have spent two decades coaching everyone from athletes to ordinary people who just want to feel better. We’ve found that motion can counteract the effects of modern living, enhance your capacity for easy movement and improve all the body’s systems (digestive, circulatory, immune, lymphatic). The following moves are basic body maintenance, and suitable for everyone. They are the key to being able to do all the things you love well into old age.

Motion can counteract the effects of modern living, enhance your capacity for easy movement and improve the body’s systems

Some of these moves you will already be doing; you may just need to do them a bit differently. And many of the others can easily be worked into your day. Stand on one leg while you brush your teeth. Sit on the floor to watch TV. Walk during phone conversations. And squeeze your bum while standing in a queue (no one will know). What you once thought of as idle moments are, in fact, little opportunities to move – opportunities that will add up to a big change in the way you feel. Do them daily or as often as you can.

Sit on the floor (three ways)


Spending 15 to 30 minutes a day sitting on the floor helps take your hip joints into ranges they don’t normally reach and loads your spine in advantageous ways. Both payoffs help undo some of the pain-inducing positions the body adopts when you sit in a chair for a freakish amount of time to work on a computer or binge-watch a box set.

We suggest switching between three positions:
1 Crisscross: sit with legs crossed in front of you, like you did at primary school.
2 90/90: sit with one leg bent at 90 degrees in front of you (your thigh straight out from your hip). Slightly resting on the front leg’s side of your bum, bend the other leg at a 90-degree angle so that its foot is behind you. Change sides after five minutes.
3 Long sitting: sit with your legs straight in front of you, back straight or with your torso leaning slightly forward.

Get up off the floor unaided

What goes down must come up, but can you get straight up off of the floor from a cross-legged position without holding on to anything or placing a hand or knee on the floor? Don’t worry if you can’t – it takes practice, but it’s worth working on: the ability to rise without assistance is not only a predictor of a longer life (research supports that acing this test correlates to decreases in all causes of mortality and morbidity), it’s an indicator that your body is stable, supple and efficient.
Squat

In some cultures, squatting is as common as sitting in a chair. It’s not seen as a strength training exercise, but is an innately human position that is beneficial for the knees, hips, back and pelvic floor. The ideal squat is with knees bent, bottom a few inches above the floor, hip creases well below the knees, toes pointing forward, and heels flat on the floor. If that’s too difficult, simply squat as low as you can go – feel free to hold on to a door or the back of a chair for stability – and hold for between five and 10 breaths.

Make like a bird


If you’ve ever practised yoga, you may be familiar with pigeon pose, another great move for your hips (like sitting crisscross). This setup is similar but easier, and just as effective. Place your right foot on a bench (or tabletop), letting your knee drop to the side and your calf lie across the bench perpendicular to your body. Place your left hand on your right foot, “stapling” it to the bench, and rotate your torso to the left. Next, rotate to the right. Continue alternating between the two positions for two minutes or for as long as possible. Switch sides.
Stand on one leg

It’s well known that balance diminishes with age and that falling is a real danger for older people. But falls are the third most common cause of unintentional injury worldwide for ages 18 to 35, too. Try standing on one leg for 20 seconds, then switch sides. If you can master that, try it standing inches from a blank white wall. A wall with no visual cues makes it harder. Then try it with your eyes closed.

On the bounce

Skipping is another excellent way to enhance your balance capabilities. But if you haven’t picked up a rope since you were 10, consider bouncing, a modified version of skipping: with your hands resting lightly on a counter, rise up on your toes and quickly bounce up and down 50 times. You don’t need to lower your heels to the ground each time; just drop them part-way as you bounce.

Step up your steps

There is nothing better for your body than walking. Walking doesn’t just stress (in a good way) the bones, joints and muscles, it also increases circulation and decongests your system. Walking also promotes better sleep and weight loss, and strolling around your area might help you get to know your neighbours, so it fosters community too.

If you go walking with someone else (which we highly recommend – conversation makes the miles fly by), this can help stave off loneliness, something we now know is detrimental to physical and mental health. Aim to build up your step count, with a goal of between 8,000 and 10,000 steps a day.

Load up

Adding weight to increase the force on your body is known as loading. That force elicits a positive adaptation response in your bones, muscles and other tissues, making them stronger and healthier. You don’t have to lift weights to load – you can do it while walking.

One way is by “rucking”, which involves walking carrying a backpack loaded with between two and 4.5 kilos of stuff (tinned foods work well). Walking uphill is another form of loading, because it increases the workload on your body. Walking briskly has a loading effect too. All three are excellent ways to improve your cardiovascular system.
It’s not enough to work out if you’re going to park yourself in a chair for the rest of the day
Sit less, stand more

Research shows that women and men who sit for more than six hours a day are, respectively, 37% and 18% more likely to die early than people who sit for less than three hours a day. The message here is that it’s not enough to work out – even if you work out hard – if you’re going to park yourself in a chair the rest of the day. But change your mindset and you will change your body, too: standing burns twice as many calories as sitting, and will make you less prone to aches and pains.

If you can, get a standing desk, or start working on a counter. If that’s not possible, take lots of standup breaks during the day and always opt for the “harder way”: taking the stairs rather than the lift, standing while you wait for the bus, leaning on the counter at a bar, giving your seat on the sofa to someone else at a party. After a while, it will become second nature. 

Fidget

One reason we encourage standing is because it causes us to frequently and naturally adjust our posture for comfort. Not only do this and other types of fidgeting – such as changing position on the floor, or sitting in a variety of positions at your desk – keep the body moving, they also increase calorie burning. One study, from the Mayo Clinic/Arizona State University Obesity Solutions, found that compared with lying still, sitting increased energy expenditure by only 6%. But sitting and fidgeting increased it 54%. (Standing and fidgeting increased it by 94%).

Extend your hips


Most things humans are designed for – getting up and down, walking around carrying stuff, lifting – require hip extension. When this is restricted, it inhibits movement. To improve it, try the “couch stretch”: stand with your back to a couch, leave one foot on the floor, tuck the other knee into the area where the seat and back meet, or as far back as you can reach. Rest your shin and foot, toe pointed, on the back of the couch. Squeeze your bum and inhale for a count of five, then release and exhale for five. Do five times then swap sides.

Circle your arms

Remember arm circles in PE? Swap those baby-size revolutions for sweeping ones to keep shoulders and neck muscles supple. Stand tall with your arms above your head. In wide arcs, circle your arms out and down 10 times. Repeat in the other direction.

Rub your feet (and toes)

As well as being our foundation, feet are also the site of proprioceptors, sensors that tell us where our body is in space, helping us maintain balance. Unfortunately, most of us have desensitised our feet by walking around in shoes that block information from the ground. Help remedy this by going barefoot more often and by massaging the heels, arches, balls and tops of your feet for several minutes at a time. Use your fingers to spread your toes and to twist the front of your foot back and forth. 

Roll with it

We’re big fans of using foam rollers or balls (although a tennis ball will do) to address pain in various areas of the body. Place it beneath the achy area (perhaps your calf), tighten the muscle as you breathe in for four seconds, hold it in place for four seconds, then relax the muscle and breathe out for eight seconds. Repeat. Continue the process as you move around both up and down and across the sore muscle.

Get in seven to eight

Hours of sleep that is. Yes, technically that’s not moving, but adequate sleep helps sustain movement, giving you the energy you need to mobilise as nature intended.


 
Breathe deeply

When people come to us with persistent back and neck pain, the first thing we look at is their breathing. Breath is like a canary in a coalmine: if you can’t breathe deeply in a position – whether it’s lifting weights at the gym or carrying a box out to the garage – you don’t have command of that position. We recommend regular deep breathing exercises and to focus on breathing through your nose, which activates breathing musculature more efficiently.

Squeeze your bum

Glutes – the big muscles in your rear – control the pelvis so that it doesn’t pitch forward and cause you to have a swayed banana back, and the strain and instability that come with it. You can improve your glute strength and hip extension by alternately squeezing your butt for five seconds, then relaxing for two over the course of several minutes. Do it while waiting in a coffee queue, while washing the dishes and brushing your teeth. Make every second count.

Just don’t do it: 10 exercise myths

We all believe we should exercise more. So why is it so hard to keep it up? Daniel E Lieberman, Harvard professor of evolutionary biology, explodes the most common and unhelpful workout myths by Daniel E Lieberman in The Guardian 

Yesterday at an outdoor coffee shop, I met my old friend James in person for the first time since the pandemic began. Over the past year on Zoom, he looked just fine, but in 3D there was no hiding how much weight he’d gained. As we sat down with our cappuccinos, I didn’t say a thing, but the first words out of his mouth were: “Yes, yes, I’m now 20lb too heavy and in pathetic shape. I need to diet and exercise, but I don’t want to talk about it!”

If you feel like James, you are in good company. With the end of the Covid-19 pandemic now plausibly in sight, 70% of Britons say they hope to eat a healthier diet, lose weight and exercise more. But how? Every year, millions of people vow to be more physically active, but the vast majority of these resolutions fail. We all know what happens. After a week or two of sticking to a new exercise regime we gradually slip back into old habits and then feel bad about ourselves.

Clearly, we need a new approach because the most common ways we promote exercise – medicalising and commercialising it – aren’t widely effective. The proof is in the pudding: most adults in high-income countries, such as the UK and US, don’t get the minimum of 150 minutes per week of physical activity recommended by most health professionals. Everyone knows exercise is healthy, but prescribing and selling it rarely works.

I think we can do better by looking beyond the weird world in which we live to consider how our ancestors as well as people in other cultures manage to be physically active. This kind of evolutionary anthropological perspective reveals 10 unhelpful myths about exercise. Rejecting them won’t transform you suddenly into an Olympic athlete, but they might help you turn over a new leaf without feeling bad about yourself.

Myth 1: It’s normal to exercise

Whenever you move to do anything, you’re engaging in physical activity. In contrast, exercise is voluntary physical activity undertaken for the sake of fitness. You may think exercise is normal, but it’s a very modern behaviour. Instead, for millions of years, humans were physically active for only two reasons: when it was necessary or rewarding. Necessary physical activities included getting food and doing other things to survive. Rewarding activities included playing, dancing or training to have fun or to develop skills. But no one in the stone age ever went for a five-mile jog to stave off decrepitude, or lifted weights whose sole purpose was to be lifted.

Myth 2: Avoiding exertion means you are lazy

Whenever I see an escalator next to a stairway, a little voice in my brain says, “Take the escalator.” Am I lazy? Although escalators didn’t exist in bygone days, that instinct is totally normal because physical activity costs calories that until recently were always in short supply (and still are for many people). When food is limited, every calorie spent on physical activity is a calorie not spent on other critical functions, such as maintaining our bodies, storing energy and reproducing. Because natural selection ultimately cares only about how many offspring we have, our hunter-gatherer ancestors evolved to avoid needless exertion – exercise – unless it was rewarding. So don’t feel bad about the natural instincts that are still with us. Instead, accept that they are normal and hard to overcome.

‘For most of us, telling us to “Just do it” doesn’t work’: exercise needs to feel rewarding as well as necessary. Photograph: Dan Saelinger/trunkarchive.com

Myth 3: Sitting is the new smoking

You’ve probably heard scary statistics that we sit too much and it’s killing us. Yes, too much physical inactivity is unhealthy, but let’s not demonise a behaviour as normal as sitting. People in every culture sit a lot. Even hunter-gatherers who lack furniture sit about 10 hours a day, as much as most westerners. But there are more and less healthy ways to sit. Studies show that people who sit actively by getting up every 10 or 15 minutes wake up their metabolisms and enjoy better long-term health than those who sit inertly for hours on end. In addition, leisure-time sitting is more strongly associated with negative health outcomes than work-time sitting. So if you work all day in a chair, get up regularly, fidget and try not to spend the rest of the day in a chair, too.

Myth 4: Our ancestors were hard-working, strong and fast

A common myth is that people uncontaminated by civilisation are incredible natural-born athletes who are super-strong, super-fast and able to run marathons easily. Not true. Most hunter-gatherers are reasonably fit, but they are only moderately strong and not especially fast. Their lives aren’t easy, but on average they spend only about two to three hours a day doing moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. It is neither normal nor necessary to be ultra-fit and ultra-strong.

Myth 5: You can’t lose weight walking

Until recently just about every weight-loss programme involved exercise. Recently, however, we keep hearing that we can’t lose weight from exercise because most workouts don’t burn that many calories and just make us hungry so we eat more. The truth is that you can lose more weight much faster through diet rather than exercise, especially moderate exercise such as 150 minutes a week of brisk walking. However, longer durations and higher intensities of exercise have been shown to promote gradual weight loss. Regular exercise also helps prevent weight gain or regain after diet. Every diet benefits from including exercise.

Myth 6: Running will wear out your knees

Many people are scared of running because they’re afraid it will ruin their knees. These worries aren’t totally unfounded since knees are indeed the most common location of runners’ injuries. But knees and other joints aren’t like a car’s shock absorbers that wear out with overuse. Instead, running, walking and other activities have been shown to keep knees healthy, and numerous high-quality studies show that runners are, if anything, less likely to develop knee osteoarthritis. The strategy to avoiding knee pain is to learn to run properly and train sensibly (which means not increasing your mileage by too much too quickly).

Myth 7: It’s normal to be less active as we age

After many decades of hard work, don’t you deserve to kick up your heels and take it easy in your golden years? Not so. Despite rumours that our ancestors’ life was nasty, brutish and short, hunter-gatherers who survive childhood typically live about seven decades, and they continue to work moderately as they age. The truth is we evolved to be grandparents in order to be active in order to provide food for our children and grandchildren. In turn, staying physically active as we age stimulates myriad repair and maintenance processes that keep our bodies humming. Numerous studies find that exercise is healthier the older we get.

Myth 8: There is an optimal dose/type of exercise

One consequence of medicalising exercise is that we prescribe it. But how much and what type? Many medical professionals follow the World Health Organisation’s recommendation of at least 150 minutes a week of moderate or 75 minutes a week of vigorous exercise for adults. In truth, this is an arbitrary prescription because how much to exercise depends on dozens of factors, such as your fitness, age, injury history and health concerns. Remember this: no matter how unfit you are, even a little exercise is better than none. Just an hour a week (eight minutes a day) can yield substantial dividends. If you can do more, that’s great, but very high doses yield no additional benefits. It’s also healthy to vary the kinds of exercise you do, and do regular strength training as you age.

Myth 9: ‘Just do it’ works

Let’s face it, most people don’t like exercise and have to overcome natural tendencies to avoid it. For most of us, telling us to “just do it” doesn’t work any better than telling a smoker or a substance abuser to “just say no!” To promote exercise, we typically prescribe it and sell it, but let’s remember that we evolved to be physically active for only two reasons: it was necessary or rewarding. So let’s find ways to do both: make it necessary and rewarding. Of the many ways to accomplish this, I think the best is to make exercise social. If you agree to meet friends to exercise regularly you’ll be obliged to show up, you’ll have fun and you’ll keep each other going.

Myth 10: Exercise is a magic bullet

Finally, let’s not oversell exercise as medicine. Although we never evolved to exercise, we did evolve to be physically active just as we evolved to drink water, breathe air and have friends. Thus, it’s the absence of physical activity that makes us more vulnerable to many illnesses, both physical and mental. In the modern, western world we no longer have to be physically active, so we invented exercise, but it is not a magic bullet that guarantees good health. Fortunately, just a little exercise can slow the rate at which you age and substantially reduce your chances of getting a wide range of diseases, especially as you age. It can also be fun – something we’ve all been missing during this dreadful pandemic.

Adjust your Defaults

This column will change your life: adjust your defaults

'This notion turns out to be a surprisingly useful way to think about other kinds of habit change'

• 
• • Oliver Burkeman
  • The Guardian, Friday 7 December 2012 22.59 GMT

 

'Every hour spent sitting watching TV knocks almost 22 minutes off your life.' Illustration:ladythingamajig.co.uk

Are you sitting comfortably? Then get up, because sitting is killing you. Or that, at any rate, was the conclusion of two studies widely reported a few weeks back: one suggestedthat, after the age of 25, every hour spent sitting watching TV knocks almost 22 minutes off your life – twice the impact of one cigarette. The other found that the average adult spends 50-70% of the day sitting down, with the most sedentary among us at vastly greater risk of disease and early death. Across the world, I'm guessing, people saw this news and leapt from their chairs, determined to take the first of many bracing walks – before becoming distracted by something on TV and flopping absent-mindedly back down, like a dead-eyed crystal meth addict lured back to his destruction. Except with a sofa, instead of crystal meth. I'm aware this analogy may need some work, but I trust you see my point.

Fashionable solutions to the sitting epidemic, in the context of work, include standing desks (one of Donald Rumsfeld's favourite things, along with reckless military interventions) and treadmill desks (great, so long as you don't mind the sweat-flecked keyboard). But I solved the problem differently, by accident, while trying to solve another. As a feckless work-from-home type, I decided it was time to make sure I was sitting with good posture, so I forked out £500 for a widely recommended Norwegian ergonomic chair, the Håg Capisco. Its seat resembles a saddle, so instead of slouching, you perch. Or that's the idea; in reality, it's just rather uncomfortable. After 40 minutes, it's extremely uncomfortable – so I get up, stretch, go for a stroll, or squeeze out 30 push-ups, although technically I've never done the push-ups. Now I don't sit for too long, because it's simply no fun to do so. After a few weeks, I realised that something intriguing had happened: I'd switched my default state. Standing or strolling was now my automatic, baseline behaviour; sitting was something I actively "did".

This notion of adjusting your defaults turns out to be a surprisingly useful way to think about other kinds of habit change. It becomes easier to resist the siren call of the web and social media, for example, if you come to see "not being online" as the default state, and "being online" as the active, chosen one – something you sporadically choose to do, then stop doing. It's also the spirit behind the idea the productivity blogger Thanh Pham calls"clearing to neutral": the habit, after any activity, of clearing up the equipment involved – dirty pans, work files – so they're ready for next time. Gradually, tidiness becomes the default, mess the anomaly, and the good habit happens without thinking or effort. My latest experiment is a default bedtime of 10.30pm. I'm not sticking to it religiously, but that's not the point: it's what I revert to when there is no good reason to do otherwise.

This idea goes deeper: "adjusting your defaults" is one way that the meditation teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn defines the goal of mindfulness meditation. Being lost in thought is the default state for most of us; adjusting your defaults involves not ceasing to think, but rather making "present-moment awareness" the default, with thinking as the activity you choose to do when it's useful. He doesn't pretend this is easy. But it is a shift in perspective worth contemplating – preferably, of course, while standing up.