Rethink Your Position
Rethink Your Position: Reshape Your Exercise, Yoga, and Everyday Movement, One Part at a Time
We make hundreds of movement choices all day long, whether we know it or not: Sit or stand? Hip to the right or to the left? Heels or flats? So how can we make the choices that leave us feeling and moving our best? It starts with alignment – how our body is positioned throughout the day, whether working, exercising, or resting.
Rethink Your Position is every body’s guide to everyday alignment.
Daily aches and pains can feel unavoidable, but we can start feeling better by moving better.
And moving better starts with the positioning of our individual body parts, and the relationship between and among those parts and the forces or loads they experience.
Professionals, experienced exercisers and new-to-movement newbies alike will discover the big and little ways our body parts move. Rethink Your Position explains how to check the way different areas are moving now, includes precision exercises to get important parts moving better, and shows how making small changes can increase your physical activity all day long—not only at the gym, but at the office, in the kitchen, on a walk with friends….even while you’re sleeping.
Biomechanist, movement teacher, and bestselling author Katy Bowman provides simple and funny instructions that will have you rethinking your position everywhere!
- Align your head while looking at your phone to avoid a “tech neck”
- Find more rib cage flexibility for better breathing
- Open tight shoulders by positioning your elbows when driving or at a computer
- Vary your carrying style for a stronger core
- Lower the heels of your shoes for strong, supple ankles
- Switch up the way you walk for happier knees and hips
- Care for your hips and psoas muscles by sitting differently
- Stand in a way that keeps your feet and lower back happy
- Change your sleep-shape to wake up feeling refreshed
- Find even better form in your yoga, Pilates, or fitness workout
Transform how you think about movement so you can move more all day!
Praise
When it comes to your body, Katy Bowman is the nerdy best friend you’ve been looking for your whole life. Having Katy in your life is like having a superpower.
Katy Bowman has been reminding us for years that, just as food is medicine, a nutritious movement diet is essential for optimal health and well-being. This book contains all the ingredients we need to improve our alignment and make our daily movement more nutritive.
Let this book be your field guide to greater physical and psychological flexibility, and enjoy the peace of mind, physical health, creativity and connection that moving more has to offer you.
Rethink Your Position is a stellar guide to moving and living well today. It altered how I live my life and I’m better for it.
Katy Bowman’s work always fires both my imagination and my admiration. In Rethink Your Position, Katy again unrolls her uncommonly sensible common sense approach to living in a body in the 21st century. Refined through her practice, her parenting (so important), and her unwavering use of herself as an experiment, Katy’s whole body of work is pointing toward an updated physical education for the coming challenges.…The self-care contained in this book is not designed to make you more comfortable where you are, like a sauna. This self-care can literally change your ‘position’ in life to a deeper, more realistic feeling of comfort in the world.
Movement is so much more than exercise. Our posture when we sit and stand, how we walk, bend over to pick something up, and even the micro-movements we make when at rest are vital to our health and well-being. In this important book, Katy Bowman helps us to reshape our everyday movement and find comfort and ease in our bodies. I consider it essential reading for all humans!
A sea change is occurring in exercise and rehabilitation. There is a movement to microdose your movement, with the understanding that each moment of the day provides an opportunity to make your health a little better. In this work, Katy provides a comprehensive map of how to use those moments—exactly how to do it. This is such an easy recommendation for everyone seeking health.
Rethink Your Position shows how to add healthy movement into even the busiest, most deskbound life, using nothing more complicated than your body, the floor, and the nearest wall or chair. With an infectious enthusiasm for all things biomechanical, and easy moves to do at home, Bowman shows how easy it can be to access a healthier body, brain and life.
If you’ve ever wondered why your back, knee, shoulder, neck—you name it—hurts, or wished you had more time to exercise, or wanted to feel more at home in your body, your search is over. Katy Bowman helps you take better care of yourself by helping you understand how your body works and the simple adjustments it needs to be its best. Her advice is easy to understand, practical, and effective, whether you’re in a wheelchair or an elite athlete or anywhere in between. Perhaps best of all, she helps you see opportunities to get the movements your body needs everywhere you go.
Rethink your Position is a book to motivate, educate and inspire. Bowman is peerless at both understanding and interpreting human habits as well as finding new ways for us all to mindfully move. Told with typical humor, intelligence and brio, its practical, no-nonsense approach to innovative movement will have you head-ramping in no time. I loved it.
Katy Bowman invites you to easily meet and greet body areas that may have departed from inclusive movement over the course of your life, while making you feel at home inside yourself. The pages rekindle connection from body to brain and back into action again. A must read no matter what your age or stage of health or fitness.
This book contains the foundational principles to transform your daily life activities into opportunities to move and feel better.
Katy Bowman’s message, no matter your fitness level, is incredibly powerful and easy to apply to our daily lives. It’s a simple, yet transformative prescription for living longer, better.
About the Author
Bestselling author, speaker, and a leader in the Movement movement, biomechanist Katy Bowman, M.S., is changing the way we move and think about our need for movement. Bowman teaches movement globally and speaks about sedentarism and movement ecology to academic and scientific audiences. Her work has been featured in diverse media including The Today Show, CBC Radio One, The Seattle Times, and Good Housekeeping.
Connect more with Katy Bowman on her website.
