Barefeet, Movement Hunger, and a Home with No Furniture - Interview with Katy Bowman

Ginny: Welcome to the One Thousand Hours Outside podcast. I am thrilled today to have Katy Bowman on the podcast talking about movement and how much movement matters. The other day I was looking Katy up before I got information on her and I hopped on Amazon to look up her newest book. And there was another book and then another book. It’s such a huge accomplishment to write one book. It says you have nine books that I thought I counted ten, but I must have counted wrong. Is Grow Wild the newest one?

Katy: Yes, that is the latest.

Ginny: So we're talking today about Grow Wild, The Whole Child, Whole Family Nature-Rich Guide to Moving More by Katy Bowman. It's a fantastic book. She's also written “Move Your DNA”, “Movement Matters”, “Whole Body Barefoot.” There's so many here.

Ginny: Congrats on the book. That's so impactful. Have you been writing for a long time?

Katy: I started with writing short articles in blog form and I got really good at writing short form, which is completely different from long form. I actually think there's probably 10 books, but one of them was rereleased. So we just count that as one because it was minimal editing to make it. 

Ginny: Well, I count it as two.

Katy: Ten books. So then when I transitioned to writing books, it was challenging because writing short form is different from writing long form. And I think once they did the work to shift my brain into writing long form, I was like, well, I'll just pop these books off like blog posts. I was nursing two kids and I feel like I was just really pouring out of a lot of things at that time. So a great number of them are written in that four year period. And then I've taken a break for a few years and then Grow Wild is the one that just sort of bubbled up of late. 

Ginny: Oh, that's so awesome. I'm excited to read the other ones. They all looked really intriguing. So I wanted to read part of your bio. It says you’re a best selling author, speaker and leader in the Movement movement bio. And you’re a...

Ginny: Katy Bowman is changing the way we move and think about our need for movement. Her nine (but really ten) books, including groundbreaking “Move Your DNA” and “Movement Matters”, have been translated into more than a dozen languages worldwide. She's been on the Today Show, CBC Radio One, Seattle Times, Good Housekeeping. This is all just so phenomenal that you are really impacting people to move. And the Grow Wild book is beautiful. It feels good. And it's filled with all these gorgeous color photos of real people doing real movements. I love that two hundred full color photos are from all sorts of families who sent them in.

For people who are listening (or reading), if you're looking for something new to read, something to inspire you to move, you definitely want to check out Grow Wild by Katy Bowman.

I thought maybe we would talk about a couple of the topics that are in your book and some of the things that really piqued my interest. One of the things was about “stacking.” In the book you talked about something I think so many parents relate to. There are so many pieces to the puzzle, so many pieces to the puzzle when you have children. Can you explain kind of what stacking is and how does that help families kind of put all those pieces together? Sure.

Katy: So the idea of stacking comes from the concept of permaculture. It's the idea that multiple needs are being met, multiple functions are being met at the same time.

Many parents attempt to meet multiple needs at the same time through multitasking. It’s this idea that we're going to go out and we're going to take a walk, but I'm going to take a couple of work phone calls while I'm doing it. Maybe you're trying to grocery shop, but you're also you've got your kids there. You're going to try to get food for dinner, but you're also taking a call and it just gets very chaotic. And the thing with multitasking that they have been able to figure out is that even though you’re seeing yourself accomplish multiple things at once, you're not really able to focus on multiple tasks at once. Your brain's really shifting back and forth between them, you're just really trying to get a lot done in one particular space. So you don't you're not able to give many things your attention when you do the multitasking approach.

Stacking is a little bit different. So stacking is also trying to meet multiple needs in one period of time. But instead of bringing multiple tasks to, let's say, an hour, you're looking for one single task that you can give your attention to, because that's how we work. We can focus on one thing at once that meets multiple needs. So it's a little bit different. It's such a slight difference.

So an example would be you could take a walk. You know, we have individual needs as grown ups for movement. Our kids have their individual needs for movement. We have our needs to work on our relationships together. We have other needs, like getting food for breakfast, lunch and dinner. We also have to be outside. We have this nature requirement. We also have to know about the natural world. And so one of the tasks that I picked when my kids were really young was to go out on, I'll call them foraging walks. It was this idea that we needed to get out of the house. I need to walk. You need to walk. Let's go get some nature time.

But I would make it really specific because kids really like to eat and they really love to go gathering, especially little kids. Little kids are really keen to pick apples and pick berries and there was a tree a mile away. And so we would just walk to this tree and then along the way there were neighbors who were out. So we are getting this community dose at the same time. And we would have a backpack and we would just gather what we could along the way. And some of it was food. We had neighbors pass us things over the fence that they were growing. It might be a bouquet of flowers for decorating the home. And then we would also be getting this other wild food that we were foraging. So what we were doing is usually spending like three hours to take this mile walk. But it met so many multiple needs. And there's just something about outside that really has a grand capacity to hold lots of energy and pressure. And so that would be one idea. 

Now, I know that that's not practical for everyone all the time, but that's just an idea. The concept is you look for that single task. Yeah, go pick apples off an apple tree. And then what you see is many needs being met at the same time. So it's a very efficient way to get us out of that loop where every day we're sort of going, “Oh man, I didn't get some needs met.” You know what I mean? Like, I fell short on multiple needs and then that causes quite a bit of stress. So I'm just trying to show a slightly different way and also pointing out that we probably have more needs than we recognize and we don’t understand necessarily all the needs that we have.

Ginny: I like that you give that example. I call it agritainment. Some people call it agrotourism, but I like the term agritainment. I would say that our favorite thing to do outside is hike. My kids really like to do outdoor things if they're with friends.

I would say that my right underneath hiking, is agritainment, because for me as a mom, we can go to the blueberry farm and you're talking a dollar twenty five for a pound of blueberries or something like that. And so as a mom, I'm hitting the snack requirement, and they're just really engaged. There seems to be a fair amount of u-pick type places and places that are pretty accessible and are fairly cheap.

And they facilitate different types of movements. You have to reach up to pick the apple. you're having to climb the tree and apple trees are perfect for climbing. I think they're made for children. But then  with the blueberries you are squatting or the raspberries, or the strawberries - you are squatting down. So it's neat that even in nature, the different types of things that you forage would facilitate different types of movements while hitting all these needs.

I think in the book it talked about soup night, which I was drawn to, and I thought that was a really great idea. And just like you said, facilitating relationships. I was talking to this author yesterday, Dr. Chris Winter, who came out with this book called The Rested Child. And he was talking about how all these things are what releases serotonin - the relationships and the being together in the community and the warm food and the outside. So I love this idea of stacking as a way to meet needs. So you have a lot of information in your book about that. I think that's great for parents.

I like how you opened the book with talk about trees and how trees experience movement. That's something I never thought about before. Can you talk about that and about how movement affects trees and how that relates to us? 

Katy: Well, some of biomechanics is the study of how physical forces affect living systems. That can be humans, but it's really any living system, plants, trees included. So when I write books, when you read all 40 books that I've written or will have written, someday you'll notice that my style of writing, my style of teaching through writing is to use non-human examples, because I think when we can detach the humanness from from the lesson, there's less ego involved and we can hear it a little bit better.

And so we chose to use the plant analogy. It’s an analogy, but it's also that we have the same set of laws living things follow, the same set of laws in the universe.

So I start with saying that children are like trees and then I go on to talk about the shape that trees have. We have a lot of cedar trees here in the Pacific Northwest. Everyone's got their own set of trees and trees have genetics that make them identifiable as to what type of tree that they are. You can recognize oak trees, and cedar trees, and alder trees, and redwood trees because you recognize the colors of their bark or the shape of their bark, or the way that they branch that's held in their genes.

But trees also have a shape. You're not going to see carbon copies of trees. The branches - the geometry that they branch, how many limbs and then branches and then twigs that you have, each piece is the shape that they create in response to what they're experiencing. We know the trees are competing for light and they're competing for other inputs from the soil. They are growing in response to where it's shaded or where it's not.

Trees are very tall and big and they have to be able to withstand the physical environment. And so they branch - that goes for above ground and in their roots below ground, based on what's happening to them physically.

So winds come through. If you have a wind in a particular direction, you're going to see branching that reinforces their ability to have good leverage in that regular wind. I did another podcast interview and the woman interviewing me had said when they were in a hurricane that had a strange direction of wind, it took all the trees out because the trees had not grown to resist that direction of wind. They were not set up to withstand every single thing.

We're built to withstand the environment that we're exposed to regularly. If you have snow, like you have snow loads and it breaks different branches off. But then what is left is able to sort of like select its shape that's going to do really well in that particular environment. That's a process called Sigma Morphogenesis. It's a fancy word I like. I mean, it's a fancy word, but to me it's a real clear word because it's just made up of really simple words. Fig is touch. Morph is grow. Genesis. Genesis is also amorphous, I guess, to change shape. So it's like a shorthand for a big word.

But there are trees that are grown in greenhouses, a lot of trees are. And it's like, “Great, we need to sell trees. We're going to make tons of trees and we're going to grow them in these greenhouses because we can control the environment.” But what they are finding is that plants that grow inside of greenhouses don't transplant well to the outside. They can't do well because they do not have the shape for anything else but being in the greenhouse. And then it's sort of like, “OK, well they are great living in the greenhouse.” But that shape isn’t actually good for just living either.

It turns out that plants and humans alike need outside, which I think obviously your listeners and followers are going to understand. But the piece I'd like to point out is that the load that you're experiencing outside has a lot to do with it, that part of nature is not just the natural sunlight and the microbiome. It's really the pushes and pulls on your body when you're out there. And we need them. Our anatomy needs them. Our physiology needs them, and it needs them early on because you're setting your adult body in childhood.

This is the first generation that has been a mostly indoor plant. Even though we've become unprecedentedly sedentary and inside, never more so has it been with this generation coming up and never more so, has it been in the last year and a half for everyone. So we're like in this really strange pocket of time where our physical bodies won't see things until later on. 

In the book I talk about bone, bones and trees are really easy to sort of superimpose on each other. So osteoporosis, for example, is really a pediatric disease that manifests In later years. We don't think about that because you're not concerned with it. But it's revealing what in most cases what your childhood was like in terms of load and also dietary nutrition like minerals. But even if you have an abundant amount of minerals without the movement, those minerals can't be inputted in. So it's both of those things. 

Childhood is important for these reasons. It's not something we can sort of make it up later on the other end. Right. That's not how that works. 

Ginny: And you see it within the movement. Our kids, from very young ages, would climb up on the fallen log and they're going to jump off. Then, as they get older, they're going to go on something higher and they're going to jump off. With each of those impacts they’re strengthening their bone structures. We don't really see adults doing those movements, right? It's a movement that kids do and that they're intrinsically drawn to do and at increasingly higher challenging levels.

So I like what you're saying there. It's like there is this window of time to capitalize on. And I really do think that using those natural examples, it makes you excited instead of defensive. You're like, “Oh, I could be like a tree - exposing myself and making my roots stronger and growing better for my environment.” I really like that approach. It's a really interesting example right off the bat. It drew me into the book and then the format of the book. I love it. 

I like the chapter about celebrations. I think that's my favorite. Anything can be a celebration. And how can you add movement to those celebrations?

Another one of the things that I loved with was of the pictures in the home. You talked about the home environment - having low tables, I saw pictures of a grandma and a little boy hanging on bars in the home. Can you talk about ways that you can facilitate movement for children and adults right within the home setting. A lot of families ask about that, especially in the colder months.

Katy: I organize a book by container. It's like what are we spending our time in? We're in our culture. We're in our clothes. We're in an activity. We're at home. We're in our homes. 

And also, what is nature exactly? Movement is an element of nature. And so just like a lot of times we bring natural materials, pine cones, rocks into a classroom. At least you can have your hands on nature when you are in otherwise indoor spaces. Movement is another one of those elements that you can bring into your home. You can do that indoors as well.

So what are some of the ways if we were to list what are kids getting when they're outside? They are getting to jump off things again and again and again. They're getting to hang from things. They're getting to climb things or they are practicing their balance. So they're getting to sit on the rug like how they're getting to sit on the ground.

So those are elements of nature. How do we bring them into the home? Why is the home discouraging them? What are the rules of the home? You're not allowed to jump. You’re not allowed to hang because we don't have anything that you can hang on safely. OK, then fix that. We have brachiation - which is hanging from your arm. 

Ginny: I wrote that word down. I like that word.

Katy: It's a very important movement for humans. If you think of jumping again and again and again as something that's going to build up the hips and the thigh bones. Without those movements, those bones are later going to be at a greater risk for fracture because of low bone density. Our shoulder formation is really quite the same.

It's a little different. Instead of being a compression, it's a tension. But the shoulder is being formed by being able to hang from and swing through. We come with the grasp reflex. We come seeking that out. There's a reason why kids want to climb and scale and why their hands are so strong compared to the rest of their body. Like we're built for this sort of movement. And it's the period of time that, again, you're shaping your shoulder girdle, your breathing, your thoracic container, your joints and connective tissue.

It is important that we have a place for them to be able to do that to the amount that their bodies really wanted, even though that amount isn't really required in today's society. It's like we feel good if we can get our kids outside for an hour or two hours a day. But imagine a genetic code, a DNA that's really built to be outside one hundred percent of the time. So I was like, “OK, well, I don't really know how to do that so much every single day in this particular society, but I know how to bring in a chin up bar or a hanging bar.” And so we did things like that.

We got rid of all of our seated furniture. Now, that's sort of the extreme. But as biomechanicst, I was like, you know, my back hurts, my hips hurt. I actually started it when I was pregnant. I gotta get out of these chairs. And I started sitting on the floor and found that just by doing that, putting in all those stretches were exercises that I needed to do for my pregnant body anyway. 

We have low tables where kids are able to move around without having to be in a chair to sort of be at adult height. So we thought about the physical environment as something that we could modify so that not just kids, but all of us, got the movement that we needed.

So that's why our house has been featured in a lot of different media. We have monkey bars in our house. We don't have any chairs. We have rugs and we have cushions and we have all sorts of other things. We're sort of an outlier with our furniture. You can go to many places in the world and the amount of furniture that we use is just not the norm for humans. It's outlying behavior goes, 

Ginny: We're in Michigan, so the winters get pretty cold. You can buy climbing furniture for kids and our kids liked the Pikler Triangle and the ramp. You’ve got the ramp and they're jumping off and they're trying these different things. So I love that.

I love the chapter about home - that the kids want to be where the adults want to be. I had read one time that there was a study that came out that no matter how large your home is, that primarily people stay within four hundred square feet. Kids want to be together. So you think you buy this big home and they're going to play in the basement or they're going to go play in this bonus room? But no, they just want to be with you.

Katy: Or in the kitchen with you. 

Ginny: One of the things you talked about was what can you take outside knowing that the kids want to be around you? So for me, for example, we've got a garden. I'm not a good gardener. It's new for us. But if I know that if I'm out in the garden, whether the kids are engaging in the garden or not, they're going to be outside with me and finding their own thing to do.

So you had even talked about taking the laundry outside. Think about that. Knowing  that the kids want to be where you are, how can you make where you are a place of movement? You have some really, really cool ideas.

I also thought about, too, with the shoulders - we talk about writing posture and when kids get to school age, they’ve got to be able to really use their fingers. But they've got to be able to use all of their arm to have good writing posture. So the hanging, I would imagine, really helps with all that as well. 

Katy: Yeah, we tend to focus a lot on fine motor. OTs will often give screenings to a five year old, like a kindergarten readiness test for kids. And the scores are going down. And, you know, it's really related to like how well are they able to control their whole body.

Can you put a balance beam in your house or a line of tape? There's just ways of exposing kids to some physical complexity so that they're not entering school age without any sort of movement skill.

We've definitely focused on reading skills as of late. Like reading books to kids. Get books into their life. I would say the same thing goes for physical literacy where our physical literacy is declining. 

This is not just their need. This is your need. And when you're collectively reaching it together, everyone feels better for reaching it that way.

It doesn't need to be a point of stress. It's really just going back a little bit to where we came from, humanity-wise. You can often just move things out of the way and change the rules. Yes, please cartwheel in the living room, you know what I mean? It doesn't have to be a big burden.

Ginny: That's how I feel. With 1000 Hours Outside sometimes the parent looks at a thousand hours outside in a year and that seems insurmountable. Where am I supposed to find the time for that? But it's like what you're talking about. This is the baseline. And if this helps everything else, it helps everything else work better. It helps their brains work better and so then their academics are better. It's like this foundation, you know, that makes everything else work in tandem. We're missing that foundation piece, and so then everything else is harder.

Katy: I mean, it seems like a lot and I think it's a lot if you view it as I have to do a thousand hours outside, that's like packing for a thousand hours and figuring out a thousand tasks and cool things to do outside.

But soup night, for example, that's just dinner with friends in a park. You are going to have dinner anyway. Soup night makes it easier. You're taking turns, making a pot of soup. You just bring it like there's no clean up. Everyone ended up being outside for three hours and everyone ate without complaining. Like once you get into it and really look at this, you're going to see it makes everything easier. You're going to do less work. It's not more you're doing, it’s changing the habit. It’s going to be easier.

Ginny:  Right. And the more you're out of the home, the less messy the home is. And cleaning takes time.

We did a we did a soup lunch. I've only done it once. We are in Michigan and the colors change so beautifully in the fall. So we did this fall colors hike and brought along a little camping stove. You can dip the leaves into wax and it preserves the color.

So we had this whole cart loaded down with stuff. We had the camping stove. We brought soup. It was really memorable with all these kids and families. And we're dipping the leaves in wax and everybody's having warm soup.

And, like you said, it's hitting all sorts of needs. It's helping their social skills and they're learning things about color and change. And so the idea of stacking is just such a fabulous one.

One of the other containers you talk about is the clothing container. I like how you say “if they're not play clothes, what are they?” You also said our culture tends to be hand dominant, which was an interesting little phrase to use. Let's talk about clothing that facilitates movement. 

Katy:  Well, so we say we put on our clothes but we’re really getting into an outfit. Kids are getting inside yet another thing and we don't necessarily think that, that the thing that they're inside of could have any impact on how their body is moving. So the book includes ways to start evaluating clothing for the movements they facilitate or prevent.

So, if we just did one example, think about a pair of pants that you have and then you would repeat this exercise for your kids - Can you bend over and touch your toes in it? Is it so tight around the waist line that you can't bend unless you have a jacket or a shirt? Does it let your arms go overhead or are you sort of limited when you're wearing something?

Stretch. Stretch is a big thing. Then there's also sometimes when clothes are too baggy. If you watch kids go up into trees and they've got something billowy or flowy, it can get in their face. It can get caught on twigs and they have to remove some of their safety holds in order to deal with clothing that is not really suited for that particular activity. 

I've done a lot of work with our local nature school and kids would show up in winter boots. But winter boots are extremely stiff and they often have laces over the ankle. So that means that they don't have the ability to dorsiflexion or flex. And I just kept hearing again and again, “My kids are just so clumsy, like they don't really have good balance.” And here they are trying to cross logs maybe for the first time, but they're wearing shoes in which they can't really perceive the sensory information coming up from what they are on. And they can't make micro adjustments.

Hand dominant means, you know, like think about a piano player, all these little motions that are we can control on our hands. But we have that same capacity for our feet. But our feet tend to go boom into gloves and into something stiff and then remain that way forever. This affects eventually our gait, our knees, our hips, our balance, our pelvis or spine. A big hunk of motor control is thwarted.

So of course, we have to wear shoes in many environments. We don't always have to wear them, but they're required sort of for life in most cases. So I start to evaluate footwear that allows for more toe and more ankle movement. There are shoes that do that and there are pants that flex better at the knees and the hips.

We're just used to, I think, using style. And also with gear, there's things like weather, you know, especially if you're going to nature school or outside. You're looking at how well this gear protects me from the weather? But if it really hinders movement (like I'm thinking winter gear right now), remember that one of the best ways to create heat is by moving around a lot. So if you trade off movement for your winter gear, especially for little kids, it's going to make being outside a miserable experience.

Ginny: That's interesting. My midwife taught me about wool. We use merino wool. It's soft, it's not scratchy. And then I've learned over the years all these interesting things about wool, but basically that it generates heat. Somehow the chemical components of what wool is composed of and mixing with your sweat, creates heat. I read somewhere that two pounds of wool can generate as much heat as an electric blanket. And then it holds the heat because the wool hairs are curled and it creates all these pockets that trap heat. And it also pulls the moisture from you and moisture is what makes you feel cold. When you're wet, you're cold.

So kids that are wearing cotton, they're cold. You know, if that's the thing that's against their skin, they're cold. But what was interesting to me when we switched to wool was that my kids, even in pretty cold temperatures, would be taking off their layers because they're hot.

So I like what you say there about how we talk to people. What about winter? Probably one of the most important things is that you're moving and that you're not wet and that that's what you're trying to facilitate there. That's what’s ultimately going to help kids be more comfortable.

But like you said, if you've got the big snow suit, you've got these big chunky boots, they're too thick and then they're cold and they're miserable. And so you had a practical tip in there I'd never seen before about wool socks with water shoes,. For parents, there are really good ideas in here about the clothing container and things to think about. I really love that chapter.

You had a cooking container, which we kind of talked about - agritainment. But you said this word, snacktivities. I loved that right away. 

Katy: You know, just by finding the movement in your food, it's like we’re humans again. Eating is the most important thing to our survival. We've transitioned from a culture that was all about handing down food knowledge, and we now call it plant identification and wilderness school. But that was just eating. That was just a straight up eating. It wasn't specialized. It's the most sort of general information for a human. It's only now become sort of specialized.

So to really restore what information is more essential that we pass down to our kids and it's like, “This is the food on the planet that you have. Here's how to work with it and how to process it.” You can go to gardening. Here's how plants grow and what they need. And then you can also go to cooking. Here's how you take raw ingredients and put them together into something else, because I think that we've definitely lost food knowledge as a culture, which makes us particularly vulnerable. We are in a pretty vulnerable spot when we don't really hand down how to eat - like we've we've replaced dietary nutrition. Make sure you have enough protein, make sure you have enough fat. We replaced that from actually how do you source, find and prepare food? Where does it come from? Who's doing that work? You know what I mean. Like it's the whole. It's the biggest system that we depend on.

Yet most of us don't really know that much about it and certainly not enough to produce enough for ourselves. So that's a great source for movement is my point. My point is you're going to need to eat. This is essential knowledge. It's again, it's literacy. It's literacy in food. I don't want to use the word nutrition because it's more than just calories. It's like, it's simply getting enough to eat. So it's a great sport, like, you agritainment. But it also puts you more in touch with this age-old, never-going-away system that we need to be aware of.

Ginny: I saw in your book you had a picture of someone harvesting potatoes. We're new to gardening. This is our second year. And I just feel like I've been missing out my whole life. You know, this is so fascinating. It provides so much joy and so many textures, all sorts of things.

But potatoes are beyond easy. Like you have old potatoes that you're not going to eat. You literally drop them in the ground and they grow. And I didn't know they have beautiful flowers. It's a beautiful process. So last summer we went out with our daughter who was four at the time. And we're going to go try and harvest these potatoes. Somebody told us when to harvest them and we were just beyond enthralled. My husband and I were having to stop ourselves from digging to let the four year old do it. Because it’s so exciting. What are you going to find in there? I love the pictures in your book about that. It's like this hide and seek game for kids and adults, something that sort of innate in you. You just like to look and see what's going to be there. And then you're squatting down and using all of those different types of movement. And then, I don't know if it’s in your mind, but you think it tastes better. I'm not sure if it does or not, but it seems to. So it's magical. It's snack-tivity. 

Katy: You know, there used to be those games I would play in Highlights magazine where you're trying to find the hidden picture. Yeah, I still can't see artichokes growing an artichoke plant any other way. Every time I see what I found when I spotted one because they're just sort of blending in. Somany of our games and things that we play now I think are trying to replace the wonder they came from. 

Discovering essentials outside, we've replaced it with play things that aren’t as rich. They don't have a payoff beyond just the play when you could be getting the play and the discovery and be meeting many more needs at the same time. So we're not just sitting inside with a game book and meanwhile stressing because all we do is play games and we don't know how to do the essentials anymore. So I think we are at the point now where we need to reconnect to this. The time is now. It's never going to get easier. 

Ginny: There's this book called Glow Kids, and it's about screens. And in that book, the author talks about how our brains are wired for novelty, for new things. And so obviously, the tech companies are taking that hardwired need that we have and capitalizing on that. So all of these things are novel, the way the video games work and getting an email and all the sort of things.

But then when you go out in the garden or you go to the farm or these different places, and “Oh, look at this apple I found! Look at the shape of this one. I found a huge one. Is there potato under there?” And like you said, some of the things really blend in, right? So you're having to really search through. Where's the pumpkin? And you're looking under the leaves. And so that reminds me of the stacking.

It's like you're hitting that need for novelty and you're learning about food. And all these things are happening at once. So I like that concept of snacktivities. 

Let's see what else I'd written down here. Another one of the containers. Well, one of the things you said in your book is that nobody is teaching kids about the places movement belongs outside of exercise. I thought that was a really powerful statement. Can you talk to that? 

Katy: So a lot of my grown up work, which is a funny thing to say, my work for grown ups has a lot to do with reframing - like the difference between exercise, physical activity and movement. So for humans, the concept of exercise has recently emerged, you know, because there used to be so much more movement in life. 

We've gotten rid of the movement that occurs in day to day life, forgetting the things that we need. But we haven't physically gotten rid of our need for it. We've just gotten rid of how it happens naturally, how we were able to get in the process of the day. So then we have to create something.

It's like, OK, well, I need to take vitamins, vitamin exercise, vitamins then because my movement diet is so sparse, I'm going to need to supplement these essential pieces. So we're handing that down to our kids, you know.

I'm trying to really break down the difference between something structured, structured movement and unstructured movement. And so unstructured movement, which is often called play and play, might have some other elements. But it's this idea that you're physically dynamic. There are no rules about what is actually happening during that period of time.

It’s child-led movement where they get deep into something else and then something else emerges and balances out with something else. And they've got sticks and they're running around and now they're all laying on their backs and bouncing their sticks on their legs. It’s just unscripted.

So we've replaced that. Like we used to just play pickup games of soccer or whatever ballgame. But then eventually it just became tag and you make your own rules and there's no grown ups around. 

We've really transitioned to very structured activities and I think what we've noticed in this last year is what happened when everyone was really structure activity dependent. So if you're like, you need to be outside moving around, OK, because that's what it takes to get you healthy. That's going to be more exercise centric than just general well-being. You're going to go play this sport for one hour. That's more exercise. So kids are not really aware of what I would call the category of movement called labor, which is being human takes a lot of work. That's always been the trade. You are here and you have to do a lot of physical work to be here. You have to build a shelter, maintain a shelter. That's the work that it takes to do your home and your life. You have to be able to find and source food, grow food, harvest food, and prepare food. You have to be able to source water. You have to be able to physically carry things around. That's what it's taken.

But as we've gotten rid of all of that, as we've gone for the movement-free versions of everything in our life, exercise sports classes really seem to be the only place that movement happens. So if you're a child born into this and you look around, you're like, you have no idea that moment occurs outside of this category. Adults all over are struggling because we have gotten rid of the movement everywhere. So I'm talking about kids, but also thinking about it on the adult level that I already deal with, where the problem is emerging on a public health level. We have so many diseases of inactivity that are billions of dollars that everyone's trying to sort solve.

How do we get adults who move more? We don't know. You have to start with kids who move more. We have to look at what we are teaching children of this culture so that they can have a leg up, so to speak, when it comes to being able to maintain the activity in adulthood because it needs to be more than exercise. Exercise is such a narrow task, you could never get enough of it, you know, in a way that your body really needs. And so it's just about bringing in some of those joyful labor practices that involve movement and exploration and fun. 

Ginny: It makes me think of as a child we had in our neighborhood a rundown baseball field. There was like a little park and a baseball field. You think about how much more you move when kids show up at the baseball field and want to do a pickup game with only six kids. You know, as opposed to, there's 12 on this team and 12 on that team. Well, how often do you get to bat? And you're only  in this part of the outfield.

But when there were four kids, you're constantly running because you've got the whole outfield or, you know, you're constantly batting because. And then there's all the social interaction. Kids are having to cooperate and negotiate and all those sorts of things intrinsically because they want to keep playing and they want everyone to be happy. That’s where the stacking comes in.

I think if you look at sports as we're trying to get kids into college and, you know, that maybe seems like one of the only goals. But when we do it in this more simplistic way, there's all these other things that are happening and they’re moving more. And they're happy and they're negotiating and they're working on all these different things.

I saw this little section in your book about different games that caught my eye, different nature games, because I didn't know some of them. Hoop and Spear.  Captured the flag (which I've played). Jays and Junko. Hungry Bear. Drum Stalk. There’s just a lot in this book that I think is really cool. There's a lot in here, a lot to get out of this book, a lot of specific information.

I came out with an activity book earlier this year and I thought it would really just be read by parents. I thought this is just going to be for parents and they're going to take these ideas and use them with their kids. But the feedback I got is that the kids love the book because they really like to look at pictures of people doing real things. And so I really love that about your book. What you're saying here is that then kids will see things and these photos will spark some ideas, like I'm going to go grab a shovel, now, and then that's going to be good work. And, you know, I'm going to bend down. I can hold the chicken. And there's the potato harvesting picture. And I loved the one of two people hanging inside the home. They're hanging on the bars. It's phenomenal. There are two hundred photos in here. 

This is a great book for parents, but it is also a great book for kids to peruse through and I think they will become inspired. That's a way that they learn that movement happens all the time or can happen in all sorts of different capacities. 

Katy, if people are looking for more information about you, about your book, about your ten books, where are some good places for them to go to find you? 

Katy: Nutritious Movement. So that's www.nutritiousmovement.com. And then on social media. Instagram is probably my most regular place where it's just me and I try to share things from my life. Like this is me doing the things that I talk about in these books. What does this example look like? What's the application of a principle? It’s Nutritious Movement for everything.

Ginny: OK, that's great. Your books are all on Amazon. I saw it. I typed in your name and they all popped up. They all look super interesting. Let's end with this. Can you tell us a favorite outdoor childhood memory of yours? 

Katy: OK, my favorite outdoor childhood memory is when I was in fourth grade so I would have been nine. Halley's Comet came around and my fourth grade teacher organized a four a.m. field trip. I'm going to cry even talking about it. My mom volunteered to drive a group up there. And so we went up and we were on Mount Madonna, which is the mountain behind my house, and they had the telescope set up and the fourth graders got to look at the star.

It was maybe the first time I had been out in the stars. Someone had set up a telescope and we watched it in a mountainous area. There were beautiful trees. And it was just about the novelty of being up so early. It was so special.

The fact that my mom, who was a full time single mom who never could really do anything like that, but she could go at four am. She could never volunteer otherwise. So when you're thinking about things like who gets to come and chaperone and be there for the kids, just remember the single working parent out there who never can say yes. But she could because she could do it before work.

And then the teacher threw a breakfast afterwards. So we drove back to class and now we're now at six a.m. and I remember there were donuts. I don't remember anything else the rest of that day, but I remember that experience.

And so just don't forget the celestial nature events and don't forget about dark time. The early morning and the after hours is such magic time that you can get in those hours. Like for me, I’m not a single parent, but a working 80 to 100 hour working parent. A lot of the times when my kids were younger, that five a.m. walk or that seven to eight p.m. walk is how we get hours in together because we explore during the night time and the early morning time. Take breakfast and dinner to go. It's totally worth it. It’s so much more than sitting down around a family table. 

Ginny: Thank you, Katy. Really appreciate having you on and excited for everyone to hear all these things that you had to say.

Katy: Thank you. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed the interview.