This is not your typical exercise class.
It's a movement workshop.
It's a class that shows people how to move
in more diverse, healthier ways.
There's me. I'm Molly, a journalist
and also what you might call a sedentary person.
I really hate exercise.
It's not just me.
We're more sedentary than we've ever been as a species.
And it's having a serious effect on our health.
Welcome to the movement movement.
A way of framing fitness not by how much we exercise,
but by how little we move.
We talked to scientists and movement experts
to find out if, maybe, we've been thinking about exercise all wrong.
I'm Molly Rubin. This is Quartz.
Please subscribe to our channel.
- This is your living room?
- It is.
To learn more about the movement movement,
I traveled to a small town on the Olympic Peninsula
to meet Katy Bowman.
- I don't see a couch.
- You don't see a couch. There's no chairs really in the entire house.
- We've got lower tables.
Katy is part of a larger, global fitness trend
that emphasizes diverse, natural movement
and is gaining followers from Hong Kong to Israel to the UK.
Even at home, Katie takes movement very seriously.
- I will put things that I use most regularly
where I have to go the lowest or the farthest.
There are monkey bars in the bedroom.
She sleeps on a mat she rolls up every day.
- So this is our bedroom. It's hanging here on the walls.
It might seem like a lot...
- Where are your chairs?
But for Katy, it's natural.
She built her life to maximize movement wherever possible.
- Why is movement so important?
- We have an epidemic as far as sedentary behavior.
Katy is a trained biomechanist and fitness instructor
who teaches people how to add more movement to their lives,
which she says is an essential part of staying healthy.
- We seem to only value long duration, big, intense.
We no longer see the value in small, slow, accumulating.
Katy preaches more movement, not more exercise.
- Movement is any physical change in shape,
whether it's whole body, or an area, or a cell.
For me, the exercise hater, movement sounds too good to be true.
I wanted to know more about how and why we need to move.
- You don't have to go to go to a gym!
Keith Diaz is an exercise physiologist
and he says sitting at desks all day,
spending hours in front of the TV or computer, could be killing us.
- Sedentary behavior increases your risk
for things like heart disease, diabetes, early death.
Exercise is good. But even if we exercise,
it doesn't undo the harmful effects of sitting for hours on end.
- When you're not utilizing your muscles,
they start not regulating like they should—
your blood sugar levels, the fat in your bloodstream.
Think about the math.
If you exercise for half an hour every day,
that's 23 and a half hours you aren't moving.
But even a little bit makes a big difference.
- If you replace 30 minutes of your sitting time
with 30 minutes of light-intensity physical activity,
so a casual walk down the street or down the hall,
you'd lower your risk of death by 17%.
- Wow.
And there's an even bigger advantage
to breaking up that movement throughout the day.
- Those individuals who frequently kept their sitting breaks
to less than 30 minutes at a time, had a lower risk of death.
It's not just how much you sit,
but how you accrue that sitting time over the course of the day.
- Why is movement so important from a physiological perspective?
- Our bodies are designed to move.
What he's talking about here is evolutionary mismatch.
- Hi!
Herman Pontzer is an evolutionary anthropologist who studies the Hadza,
one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer tribes.
- How can hunter-gatherer populations be models for public health?
- They don't get sick from the things that are going to kill us.
They don't get heart disease.
They don't get diabetes, they get less cancer.
Our bodies are built...they were shaped by evolution
for two and a half million years to be hunting and gathering.
So our lifestyles today are completely mismatched
from the lifestyles in which our bodies were shaped.
This lifestyle is extremely weird.
And another thing about the Hadza...
- How much time per day do the Hadza spend running?
- Zero. The Hadza don't run at all.
Back in Washington, Katy has a pretty unique way
of thinking about our need for movement.
- Well I really liken movement to nutrition, to dietary nutrition.
Just like food, she says, our bodies need a healthy movement diet.
As far as dietary nutrition goes,
it's all about the diversity of foods that you eat.
The bulk of us are movement-starved, and so that is why
the recommendation keeps being,
"Just move more, just move anything more!"
And if high-intensity exercise a few times a week is all we do,
we're not getting a broad range of movement into our diet.
- Maybe movement is what it's about
and that exercise is great,
but maybe not the best that we can be doing.
And the idea of exercise itself is pretty new.
Exercise science really didn't come about until the 1960s and 70s.
- I would say that exercise is more like the solution
that's erupted from designing a society
that doesn't require very much movement.
We're primed to think of high-intensity aerobic activity
as the healthiest way to move.
But taking a long walk means moving
for two or three hours versus 30 minutes.
Why choose less movement?
- We sip the exercise Kool-Aid.
It's about re-examining your entire life and environment
to be more active overall.
The key is finding ways to stack movement
on top of things you're already doing.
- So for example if you go out on a date, is there a chair involved?
Is there a lack of movement involved?
You can layer movement into the things that are already happening.
- I'm sure you hear all the time the counter arguments to stacking
and people say, "I just don't have enough hours in the day."
- If you can't walk all the way to work,
could you drive halfway or three quarters of the way?
Don't worry about not being able to fit in a five mile walk,
or a three mile walk, or even a one mile walk.
Do you have six minutes?
Even sitting can be movement, if you choose to sit differently...
- Choosing to sit on the floor in your home is stacking.
...because you're moving your whole body
all the way down and all the way up.
I don't think many of us will get rid of our couches anytime soon.
But it's not about turning your life upside down.
It's about having an open mind.
There are extremists: Ido Portal became a viral Internet star
preaching a lifestyle that requires a ton of time and money.
Videos of athletes like Conor McGregor movement training
rack up millions of views,
but we all have the tools to do it.
My trip to Washington opened my eyes
to how often I choose the easy way.
Changing the patterns of your daily life
is a daunting challenge,
but the more willing you are to make a shift,
the more benefit you'll get in the long run.
- I think the Hadza teach us that getting older is inevitable,
but getting frail and sick are not.
- I can't wait until I'm 70.
You know, just to have gone through
so many different phases to see where movement fits in.
I've been climbing the stairs
to my fifth floor apartment for six weeks now.
It's a small change, but I can already feel a little bit of difference.
And I find myself itching to move just a little bit more.