Biomechanist Katy Bowman is a globally recognized author and movement science communicator driven by a passion for reintroducing movement into people’s everyday lives. As the founder of Nutritious Movement, she directs and teaches at the Nutritious Movement Center Northwest in Washington state. She’s the leader of the ”furniture-free for more movement” movement, and consults on movement-rich design for community and educational spaces.

Katy’s many published books include Dynamic Aging, Diastasis Recti and the bestselling Move Your DNA, which all have been critically acclaimed and translated worldwide.

Katy spends as much time as possible moving outside with her husband and children, and her latest book, Grow Wild, explores the importance of movement and nature-rich environments for young bodies.

Grow Wild is now available for pre-sale at GrowWildBook.com, and we caught up with Katy to unpack some of the main ideas and inspirations behind the book. Read on for the interview and order your pre-sale copy of Grow Wild now until April 1st.

PRE-ORDER GROW WILD

You’ve written eight(!) books about movement so far. What inspired you to write your new book Grow Wild?

I’m regularly inspired by two things: the questions from my readers about their individual situations and watching my children develop their movement habits.

The bulk of my books are about how to use movement to address a variety of ailments. Human bodies evolved with a lot of movement and still require a lot of it, even though most of our modern environments are created to eliminate movement through convenience. When you give an adult corrective exercises and explain how movement works in the body, most people say things like “I wish I had known this when I was younger,” or “What can I do with my kids now so that they don’t have similar outcomes?” I raised my own kids considering their body movement at every stage, starting when they were newborn, and I shared what I was doing on various platforms over the last 10 years. It just became time to organize it all into a book for easy reference.

I enjoy helping folks learn how to improve their own physicality, but I also want to change society in a way that decreases the prevalence of ailments arising from a lack of movement. That gets us to Grow Wild and how we can all—as creators of the environments children are regulated to—improve upon a sedentary culture.

In your research for the book, what did you find were the biggest challenges parents face when trying to encourage kids to move more?
I know from experience, it can be any of these: not enough time, too much resistance, a lack of creativity, a lack of support. Ultimately, though, I think the biggest issue facing us all is we’ve set up a sedentary culture. Grow Wild is organized by environment: culture, apparel, food, home, learning, activities, celebrations. I break down each of these categories, noting the movements that used to be found within them, and how to restore them (and in turn more nature and community and joy). Learning what movement is, exactly, makes finding the time and place for it so much easier.

Venn’s spherical Air Chairs are designed to encourage movement and are loved by many kids ages 3+. What are some ways of using the chair that you’d recommend for kids and why?
Well, there’s the obvious “replace their conventional chairs,” but I think my own kids have informed me best, of all the ways one of your Air Chairs can be used, especially when paired with permission and encouragement to move in “big” way inside the house as well as a lot of space—we don’t have much other furniture and we don’t have any knickknacks or other things that might deter more robust kid movement or make it more hazardous for them:

· Sit-n-bounce

· Balance challenges: “airplane,” kneeling, sitting cross-legged or standing on them (then see: “balance competitions,” where you do this at the same time as someone else to see who falls off first)

· Throwing or rolling them at each other (my least favorite, but as one of my kids says, “you can have the pleasure of knocking someone over without them getting hurt)

· Tossing them up and catching them like a huge bouncing ball

· Lie over them backwards

· Lie over them on your stomach

· Lie on your back and balance them on your feet

· And finally, one I’ll describe: from a crouched starting position, leap forward to zoom the length of your body over the ball, landing on your hands, then push off to zoom back into a crouch. Repeat 20 times.

Why do I love all of these ball-chairs? They keep my kids constantly moving: their hips, spines, torsos, and shoulders. They offer movements that challenge balance and sometimes even require some risk assessment. They fill kid-time. They’re fun. And the balls provide opportunity for all of this by just sitting there, out in the open—no need to book a class, or drive to someplace else to find the movement they need. They’re an invitation to play — even during periods of time when kids have to sit there and do otherwise body-boring homework.

One idea you explore in Grow Wild is that kids growing up as “digital natives” also means they're inadvertently growing up with much more sedentarism. How can parents manage their kids’ relationship with tech and devices so that they have more movement-rich experiences in early life?

What I note in Grow Wild is this: This is the first set of parents trying to figure out how to parent in a device-rich environment. This way of life is entirely unprecedented. We have a history of introducing new things to society, seeing what the impact looks like in hindsight, and then coming up with “good use practices.” We simply are new to this landscape, and therefore are having to go it alone, in many cases.

I’m no parenting or device expert (I didn’t get one until I was in my 30s!) but our strategy was to come up with our own family’s good use practices and stick to them. This includes things like using our devices for work but keeping them off at other times as much as possible. We have a cheap mechanical timer we put on our modem that clicks off in the evening and back on in the morning lest we forget (which would probably happen a lot!). We have a family movie night, but never had a television, and when we need parenting relief to make a phone call or just a straight up break, we’re not averse to using devices when they benefit us--we’ve just figured out how to pair them with our computer for something dynamic and highlights the tech (the device) without needing to add media (what you’re consuming while using the device).

For example, we showed them how to use a laptop to take a delayed photo and they spent 60 minutes trying to get it to get a photo capturing themselves in mid-air jumps or handstands. That’s 60 minutes of jumping and no media needed to do it – just a device and a little creativity!

Just like food, I believe there’s a way to use tech to take you and your family in the direction you’d like to go, but you have to stay aware of when it’s use is taking you in the opposite direction. We rarely talk about devices and so much of our daily to-dos now being online as movement-reducers but ultimately that’s what most technology is—ways we’ve figured out how to move less for the thing we’re getting. Entertainment is fine, but just like our homes and clothes and food, humans used to have to make it for themselves. A big part of our household’s parenting strategy is to ditch the super-easy, stimulating entertainment. There’s art, building, making up songs, climbing a tree, staring at bugs, putting on a puppet show, jumping off the back porch steps 100 times in a row to see how far you can land…stuff kids used to do right up until a handful of years ago. Boredom is the catalyst for creativity and movement. We are all in unchartered waters and the fact that most of us are in these novel waters together doesn’t mean continuing in this direction is inevitable, it just means we have yet to get our bearings and chose what to do about it. Talking about it with your community helps. Are there good use practices your group of parents can implement together so all kids – who desire to fit in with others – learn and practice them as a collective?

In Grow Wild, you introduce parents to the concept of “Stacking Your Life.” Tell us more about what that means.

“Stacking your life” is an approach to moving more through adjusting the tasks you’re selecting. We all have multiple needs—food, sleep, education, community, nature, etc.—and we meet them, often one at a time, by selecting tasks—make dinner, take a class, hanging out with friends, etc. When you stack your life, you pick a single task that meets multiple needs at the same time. So you and your friends sign up for the same class and you’ve met two needs at once. Or you and your friends sign up for a cooking class and meet three at once. Grow Wild presents more movement-rich tasks and shows how many of them can meet both a child and their family’s need to move as well as many other needs…all at the same time.

For example, we have living spaces, but they’re not often set up to move us more. A great stack is swapping out a piece of furniture that offers one movement (sitting) for one that allows, even encourages, more movement. There’s no more time involved. You’re just setting up your living room or workspace, but the choice you make moves you (or doesn’t) again and again and again.

Another example is, kids need to learn. Right now that learning looks very, very sedentary—more sedentary than ever before! How can kids get their learning and moving on at the same time? With a dynamic learning set up, but also by taking lessons outside and on the move. Learning is a very important environment for children—it’d be the equivalent to the “work/job” held by adults. It’s often the environment they’re in the most. From flexible seating to adding nature education to simply taking indoor lessons outside, there are many simple tasks that will enrich our movement without requiring a lot of extra time.

Grow Wild is available for pre-sale until April 1st. Buy it here, and follow Katy on Instagram @nutritiousmovement for more inspiration on living a movement-rich lifestyle.

Katy Bowman’s new book Grow Wild helps parents and kids move more