my body is a mess I've got multiple chronic injuries I've developed some lower back problems and at least twice in the past year I've twitched my back so badly I could barely walk for a few days but why I mean I exercise every day I eat quite well except for the amount of chocolate I consume I've been doing yoga irregularly for the past 4 years I'm 28 years old and I should be the fittest I'll ever be yet some days I can barely function why that's what I wanted to figure out so I created another highly unscientific experiment step one I read a lot about how the human body should move and what it needs to thrive and found three toxic behaviors that were making my body fragile and you're also probably doing them step two I created a list of habits and practices that might fix these behaviors and made a commitment to try those habits for 100 days step three I tested my current level of Mobility which we know is isn't that good but I wanted to see whether my Mobility would improve during these 100 days and let's just say that the results surprised me there w look look at all these chairs seating you might have heard that sitting is the new smoking which might be a bit of an exaggeration but have you ever actually tracked your daily sitting hours cuz you might be surprised so every time I sit I'm going to start this tracker every time I stand I'm going to stop the tracker you're probably sitting while eating breakfast while driving or while commuting to work while working while eating lunch while driving or Comm commuting from work while eating dinner and while watching TV and for me all of that totaled to a nice sum of 7 hours 32 minutes that's a lot that's that's a lot of that's a lot of sitting that's um 7 hours of sitting per day seems to be at the limit of being detrimental to your health and from there the health risks increase gradually from 7 and 1/2 hours to 9 hours of sitting and get worse rapidly above 9 half hours of sitting for instance Kelly St a very well known and respected movement expert suggests that you sit less than 6 hours per day in his book built to move and that's what I wanted to aim for hey man sorry I'm not in Fr uh setting up this camera here yeah nice to see you too I've been a fan of your your content for quite a while or well I remember watching some of your uh flows I don't know three years ago maybe for the first time yeah this is Josh he's kind of like me like said he's fitter more mobile and wears ey can barely do a cartwheel he could do stuff like this he and his brother also have a massively popular YouTube channel with over 1. 7 million subscribers where they teach movement so I figured he would be the perfect person to call do you have any tips or tricks that maybe you use in your life probably the biggest tip that I use is actually what I'm doing right now is I'm sitting on the ground right so I just have a little cushion here and sitting cross-legged I think my first approach is to just put this right here and um I don't know just read right here and then then this this coffee table do you use any like equipment to sit on the floor more or or stand more or move more floor pillows I like I think more is better for these I just try to have one in like every single room so I can make that choice to sit on the ground pillows we need pillows maybe a few of these how about this one foam roller crossball I guess this is a good good start and this is just so much healthier for your body right you're not doing that passive turning off your body like if I'm sitting on the ground my core is still active I'm going to be like just more prone to like sitting upright being in an aligned posture did you have like uh sitting desks or something like that there it's it's basically just like a platform where you can set your computer on and sit down on the floor two stools and then a uh piece of trash plywood and T oh it has some spiders on it put a few pillows computer te and like that and then mixing in some standing as well like if you are doing some work at the computer mixing positions as much as you as much as you can cuz I think it's actually more of the cause of our discomfort is like being in one position for too long any second now first of all I read that having something under your feet can make standing a bit easier oh that's actually pretty nice I wonder if my Carabiner is enough for this one oh it's perfect so there it is a DIY fidget bar made out of a resistance band in a carabiner and so like when I'm working here at my at my desk we just have my my foot here hanging loose just check how much commercial fidget bar would be fidget [Music] bar3 and we just made it out of a workout band this is what you would call environment design instead of relying on your willpower you change the environment to change your behavior once the environment or system is set up it requires much less conscious effort to stick to the habits you're trying to stick to at least if you design the environment in a smart way and this way a little bit of effort now can save a lot of effort later this is my new favorite position now I got to say many of these positions do give me niggles here and there probably tells something about how immobile and stiff I am but it's yeah I probably need to progress into sitting on the floor like quite slowly even though IED usually spend at least an hour exercising every day the remaining 23 hours still had lots of room for improvement now if there's one thing Health gurus and movement experts seem to agree on is that walking is good and we should walk more so I looked for ways to add short walks to my day I started doing morning walks around the village I squeezed in a post lunch walk and I also started taking most of my calls and meets outside while walking I think just getting Outdoors is a very good idea in the morning getting some fresh air and movement I get my morning light exposure at the same time with these walks holy sh you are Overexposed I think walking is such a good way to reset your body after you've been just living life right doing work or taking care of the kids or whatever it is like you go for a walk you kind of release some energy it's one of these experiences that is active but it's also like really grounding as well and you know a lot of the time people come up with their best ideas when when you're walking around right so um I've also tried to find ways to gamify walking and many people mentioned this game called uh walk Escape so I'm going to create a character character name potato blueberry I've revealed my secret username for most sites I'll just put my phone in my pocket and go for a walk I guess I'm going to go play Walking game my task is to forage things bye core of the game is that you select an activity for your character and complete actions by walking in real life okay we uh we we we want to go foraging steps required 75 okay H foraging level up unlocks no new unlocks for this level okay but so I walked and I leveled up that's me that's me right there right there see there a big map look at that I'm not quite sure yet how it works but I'll figure it out yeah until then steps we're going that way it's it's kind of hard to explain why you would want to walk for a kilometer to craft a a an iron sword in the game but trust me it's freaking addicting in the beginning I didn't really kind of like get the point of the game but after about 2 weeks of playing this game I'm getting pretty addicted and already on a few occasions I've gone for a walk just to play the game or at least it has been one of the main motives for going for a walk but quite often I think I get like 500 to 1,000 extra steps just because of the game and I mean it's it's quite significant considering that it's both adding steps to my life and it's freaking fun and you might be thinking that playing the game will distract you during your walks but the way they develop the game is that you choose an action or activity before you go for your walk and you don't really need to look at your phone before you get back home it's brilliant now the game is still in glowed beta so if you want to try it out which I highly recommend and this is not sponsored uh you can join a waiting list to get access to the game and I would really recommend it because warscape is the first game that made me realize how incredibly effective it can be to gamify positive behavior changes my cooking level is 12 now crazy like I was uh I don't know somehow I woke up and I was pretty irritated at everything like putting my shoes on I was already like getting angry or something but now that I'm almost through with the walk I feel much more calm so it's like uh the great neutralizer in the morning but there was one final toxic behavior that wasn't as obvious in my training I was doing the same workouts with the same exercises I had been doing for years using the same limited ranges of motion so a lot of the time this is why we become stiff is because we don't use our joints full capacity and it's just the saying of like if you don't use it you lose it right so I started adding in some sessions where I focused more on movement and skills rather than strength or endurance my idea was to practice basic human movement that I lacked in my everyday life it includes movement which is well basically crawling then it has hanging mostly from Rings uh and then it has uh carrying so I carry things and yeah yeah those are the main three things that I I do in like a movement session so crawling hanging and carrying yeah those are like such like Primal things to do things that just our body naturally likes like I yeah I love that session and for the first first time ever I was also starting to seriously focus on improving my weak points for instance I've always felt I've had bad overhead mobility and hence I've limited the amount of overhead exercises in my program so instead of trying to fix a problem it's been easier to just steer away from overhead lifts and exercises all together like we specifically have our daily practice routine this is about a 10minute movement stretching routine that we really like because we're just like using all of the joints of the body body's full range of motion right if we can just take something that only takes 10 minutes I mean you could even pick the ones that you like the most and do this 5 minutes a day and you just do this simple routine say every morning when you wake up or whenever is convenient for you maybe at lunchtime whatever you're going to be taking care of your body and over time these these benefits are going to accumulate the more that you can just commit to doing it and the more that you can commit to making it a routine right this isn't something that's going to like work if you just do it like once a week right you really got to kind of build this into an every other day thing or even an everyday thing if you can um So lately I've been using this uh hack basically I'm just using two applications or extensions on my computer and multiple times a day those applications launch a sequence that opens up a uh follow along Mobility routine video so in short here's how it works first I use use Windows task scheduler to trigger the sequence I think it's a default app on Windows and it allows you to schedule specific tasks for your computer to execute using task scheduler I schedule Chrome to open multiple times a day at various times and then 2 seconds after Chrome opens a Chrome extension calls Auto opener opens the Skil Yoga website with my favorite Mobility Program then I just simply click any of the sessions and get started hey athletes welcome to your daily Mobility break so as an example let's say I'm uh writing something my back is aching neck is stiff no time for any movement right and then suddenly boom Chrome opens that's the first step and then boom it goes to skill yoga and then I just click play put the computer somewhere nearby and then uh it will guide me through a Mobility section okay bit doing here Mobility you get the point right and this sequence uh launches every day I think at noon at 300 p. m.
and at 600 p. m.
