Alignment Matters: The First Five Years of Katy Says

If you are sitting because you don’t have the strength to stand, then standing is the exact exercise you need in order to improve!

I go on and on about alignment, but I don’t want you to think it’s about aesthetics, or appearance, or even the macromechanics like muscle function and joint health. Even though it is about those things too. It’s really about the micromechanics. The fact is, if you are not aligned correctly, you are creating damage on the cellular level.

Originally, the term gait meant a manner of walking, but has since become used more generally, referencing any pattern of limb (arm and leg) movement while moving on foot. Everyone has a particular gait pattern, or way of moving. It comes

Working on opening areas that have been shut for years is extremely rewarding and calming to the brain (your brain kind of panics when you have a lot of tight muscles. Your brain knows that you need long muscles to keep your body from degenerating fast!). Realllllllly tight muscles that have “always been that way” are going to require lots of dilig

Although it may feel like tightness is your “natural” state, the reasons for tight muscles can go back all the way to your time in utero, which is why many people have always felt tight! When your body goes through oxygen deprivation, the brain begins shutting down different parts of its function. Motor function (communication between nerve and mus

Even though fitness can have a short-term benefit of weight loss, some types of exercises (mostly gym-type activities with bouts of accelerated heart rates) have a fairly significant negative impact on the long-term health of joints and the long-term function of the adrenal glands. So where to start? Begin with the most important component to cardi

“Compensatory mechanism: An action taken by the body to continue physiological function despite an alteration in natural function.”

Within the arteries, non-laminar flow results in blood flowing all different directions. Turbulent flow creates a white-water wall that creates a temporary narrowing, similar to your finger over the opening of the hose. Even though water is a fluid, it can still act kind of like a solid in that it can change the direction of other fluids hitting it

Berkeley architecture professor Galen Cranz wrote a book called The Chair: Rethinking Body, Culture and Design. (You could walk to the library to pick it up!) It is a great, thorough history of the structure of the chair, the role the class system has had on chair design, and the impact sitting has had on the body.