Katy Bowman: I’m all about natural movement and alignment being a component of that. But I would say that the reason we moved up there was that we were just unable to execute our life the way we wanted here.
There’s a physical blockage to moving in the way that we need to move and I was like, well, the only way to remove that blockage is to take ourselves away from the environment that is limiting this way of moving which is larger than it sounds. It’s not like, make sure you get these exercises in to your work out, it’s very broad and it has to do with the loads that you’re by experiences and that goes for light and noise and all the different ways your cells are deformed by your habitat.
When I talk about movement, I really liken the way that we move to be similar to animals that are in zoos. If you ever go to a zoo and checkout that kind of unfortunate thing, you’ll see these animals and they have movement. They have cages or habitats designed for them, but the way that they use them is pretty narrow, and,** that goes for us as well.**
That’s why the move. I just wanted less people, more space, less rules, haha, less noise, more water.
**Joe Rogan: **When you say we’re being deformed. Like in what way?
KB: Well in the book, the analogy that I use, cause I think it’s easiest to understand is, if you look at orcas in a place like Sea World. Have you seen their folded over fin? That’s the kind of deformation that I’m talking about.
**You are shaped really by the forces that you experience all the time. Your mechanical environment is 100% of the time so the resultant shape of your body is based on this exposure in the same way that this orca was missing input, it was missing mechanical input and it was exposed to high levels of mechanical input that gets this resultant shape. The difference between, when you look at an orca, it’s like clearly, it’s not supposed to be at Sea World. And clearly that shape doesn’t seem conducive to swimming. At least in a straight line. **
So, we don’t see that in ourselves very well though, because we are the orca in the tank. And everyone else is in the tank with us. So it’s really hard to see how you would have been shaped. And it’s really hard to imagine what the resultant shape of us would be culturally, if there were more examples of people who moved in drastically different ways. But there are not.
— Katy Bowman on the Joe Rogan Experience #601
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