IN THIS EPISODE OF THE HUMAN UPGRADE...

… Body movement expert Aaron Alexander joins the show to talk about how to integrate healthy movement practices into your daily life.

You’ve likely heard that sitting is the new smoking – well, good news: It’s not the sitting itself, but how you sit, that affects your well-being. In fact, all the ways you hold your body and move your body matters. Body language and how you move through space tells others how comfortable you are, how truthful and trustworthy you are, and more.

Most of you have built up body movement around a collapse state, which can lead to physical and emotional pain. Aaron spent years traveling the world, discovering how other cultures defined and measured health and studying movement behaviors. He found that the healthiest cultures incorporate aligned movement and sitting styles into their day-to-day activity.

Take walking for example. “When you're out taking a walk, it's like you are literally playing symphony of your physiology,” he says. “Walking is one of the healthiest things that a person can do–just going out and getting yourself into that contralateral motion, contralateral being just like walking pattern. As you're doing that, you're stimulating your brain function, you're also stimulating things like peristalsis and digestion and organ function.”

Aaron is a manual therapist, using movement techniques inspired by yoga, martial arts, chiropractic skills and more. He also hosts the popular Align Podcast, and wrote “The Align Method: A Modern Movement Guide for a Stronger Body, Sharper Mind, and Stress-Proof Life,” which shares the tools you need to reshape your environment for enhanced creativity and longevity.

Healthy movement incorporating play and adaptability enhances creativity, resilience and creates a healthy nervous system. During the show, Aaron goes over the five daily movements to integrate into your life and how to get started in a productive, gentle and playful way.

“Your body is so darn adaptable that if it's just a matter of you need to give it a baseline of the raw components to be healthy,” says Aaron. “If for a moment you're slouching over a chair, I love that. There's no problem with that, it's the repetition of that. If for a movement you're looking into a wall or into a blue light or whatever, you're not going to just explode.”

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