Skip to main content

Dynamic Aging by Katy Bowman

Targeted primarily towards women, and targeted more toward the non-athletic reader, but still contains plenty of useful insights and meta-insights for anyone wanting to maintain or improve their mobility and physical robustness at any age. 

Chief among these insights is the book's fundamental philosophy of managing our health through natural movement and activity, rather than modernity's philosophy of symptom control via healthcare intervention with meds, painkillers, or even surgical interventions.

Further, adopting this philosophy will mean developing awareness and mindfulness of your "movement habits" and put you on a road to investing in future physical function now, before you age, in order to maintain those functions. The book is filled with inspiring examples from women who have recovered physical capacities they long thought they had lost by adopting and living this philosophy of working on healthy movement.

This book is a fast read, and the last third of the book is an appendix/summary covering stretches, exercises and movements already discussed earlier in the text. An attentive reader would find this wastefully repetitive, a less attentive reader would find it a convenient review. Note also: many of these stretches and exercises can be found in any basic yoga routine (e.g.: twists, many of the flexibility and range of motion exercises, etc.), and so might be too basic or obvious for some readers.

See also for further reading: "Whole Body Barefoot: Transitioning Well to Minimal Footwear" by Katy Bowman. 

Notes: 

Chapter 1: Feet 
Barefoot instead of walking on a "clump" inside "good shoes" (DK: I can't help but think of the phrase "you need good good shoes" in the same way as "breakfast is the most important meal of the day"... both are lies told to us so often that we collectively, passively, end up believing them).

The immobility cycle

Top of the foot stretch, bottom of the foot stretch

As we get older we avoid uneven terrain more and more.

Toe spreading exercises, toe lifts ("eventually, your toes will start listening") in order to recover balance, toe mobility and strength in our feet that we've totally lost by wearing modern footwear. 

2: Balance, Stability
"The moves we do with confidence are simply the moves that we do multiple times a day."

Instability due to not challenging your balance. The fear of falling, which changes the way we move.

Shuffling, "fearful" gait, an old person's gait.

3: Strong hips and balance
"Pelvic list" balance exercise: lift one side of hip, and pull other side down to balance (just lightly, barely) on one leg, observe your movements, is your ankle quivering, is your foot gripping the ground, do you feel unsteady, etc. 

4: Walking
Good walking form
Stairs are not hills
Walking on uneven and textured ground
Obstacle training
Take off your shoes
Recognize and relax common "fear of falling" reflexes

5: Reaching, carrying, lifting, and other functional movements
Many people are varying ages have lost the ability to rise from the floor with comfort.
Make mindful form a part of your life.
Comfy or cozy chairs as a "dessert" form of furniture, not good for you in excess
Start paying attention to how you're getting up.
Carrying things with good form
Swallowing is movement too, mind your posture while swallowing. 
The importance of reaching your toes.

6: Fit to drive
"Most frequently accidents were not the result of the driver mixing up, cognitively, the brake pedal for the gas pedal. They mistakenly sensed they had moved their foot over when they hadn't." (!!!)

Proprioception
Driver movements

7: Movement is part of life
Integrating movement throughout our day, by setting your life up in a way that requires more movement.

Telomeres (chromosomal protective caps) and your "biological age"

*******
Tips for moving more
As you dress, be aware of how you are moving. Use it as an opportunity to test your awareness
Mix up the furniture you sit on, heights hardness etc, also, sit on the floor!
Make your home movement-friendly: more space/less stuff.
Use the car less, walk more
More socializing/community
Active toe spreading, passive toe spreading (with fingers), toe lifts, big toe then each toe.
Finger stretches.

More Posts

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre [fictionalized bio of Jesse Livermore]

"History repeats itself all the time in Wall Street." A fictionalized biography of Jesse Livermore, one of history's most famous speculators. This is an enriching book, worth reading every decade or so across your investment career. And it's a genuinely fun read, conveying the free-wheeling investment culture of the days before the Securities and Exchange Act. When you're young and beginning to invest, this book thrills you with all the bravado of speculating. When you're older, after you've seen a few things and learned many of the manipulations and other techniques the investment industry uses to extract money from you, the book becomes more of a cautionary tale of things not to do, traps not to step in, things to avoid. This is the third time I've read this book (I'm now in my fourth decade as an investor, so I guess that makes me one reading behind schedule), and what struck me most this time around was Livermore's self-admitted weaknesses:...
Read more

The Retirement Myth by Craig S. Karpel

A 1995-era book for Boomers by a pre-Boomer (the author is technically a tail-end Silent, but he writes and thinks like a Boomer) who is dismayed at the Boomers' complete unpreparedness as they Boom their way towards an imaginary retirement in a system the author thinks is about to collapse.  Let's get the bottom line out of the way. This is a bad and boring book with incontinent logic.  Then why read it? You  don't have to, and shouldn't. But I often review bad books as an intellectual exercise: to think about what is wrong with a book, what should and should not have been done in writing it, where the errors (of, say, conception, of structure, of logic, of rhetoric) are, and so on. And with books that make predictions, it's a glorious opportunity to practice epistemic humility to read that book after its predictions should have (but didn't) come true. Finally, you can mine even the worst books for useful insights--or in this case contra-insights, since the in...
Read more

Confessions of a Medical Heretic by Robert S. Mendelsohn, MD

"I have written this book precisely to scare and to radicalize people before they are hurt. Let this book be your radicalizing experience." The more I come into contact with modern medicine, the more I've watched my elders' lives intersect with it, the more I've observed the field's neomania and accompanying iatrogenic harms, the more I realize that everyone--everyone!--should read the following four books: H. Gilbert Welch: Less Medicine, More Health Ivan Illich: Medical Nemesis Dr. John Sarno: The Divided Mind Robert S. Mendelsohn: Confessions of a Medical Heretic While reading these works, it will be worth noting your internal reaction to them. Do you agree? Do you strongly reject? Why? And what might this indicate about your attachment to your existing beliefs about medicine? In Confession of a Medical Heretic , author Dr. Robert Mendelsohn frames up modern medicine as a type of religion, complete with priests (read: doctors), sacraments, rituals, and even...
Read more