Built to Move Quotes

“We need to walk because walking gets everything flowing in our body. It’s how we nourish all our tissues, how we decongest, how we stimulate the body to release waste.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“Do what you can, but don’t do nothing.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“Women and men who sit more than six hours a day are, respectively, 37 percent and 18 percent more likely to die before people who sit less than three hours a day.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“Vital sign 2: breathe easy (page 52-53)

How well you breathe has a direct correlation to your body mechanics, helping you move more efficiently, avoid injury, and feel less musculoskeletal pain. In fact, when people come to us with persistent back and neck aches, the first thing we look at is how they're breathing.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“For all these reasons, Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey, MD, author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, has variously called physical activity “a little bit of Prozac and a little bit of Ritalin” and “Miracle-Gro” for the brain.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The 10 essential habits that will help you live a longer, healthier life

“Bohr’s discovery led to the practice of increasing CO2 tolerance. The longer you can hang on to carbon dioxide in your system, the more oxygen you’ll be able to utilize, and the more oxygen you’re able to utilize, the more energy you’ll have available for whatever it is you want to do.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“Mobility” is a kind of wonky term that refers to something quite beautiful: the harmonious convergence of all the elements that allow you to move freely and effortlessly through space and life. Everything is in sync—your joints, muscles, tendons, ligaments, fascia, nerves, brain, and the vasculature that runs through the body.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“thereadystate.com.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“BREATHING IS NOTHING new; we’ve always done it.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“Vital sign 1: getting up and down the floor (page 40)

When we talk about sitting on the floor, we're not just referring to sitting cross-legged. You can get benefits from sitting in all different kinds of positions. Kneeling, for instance. And, squatting, something we'll talk more about in Vital Sign 7. These are all positions that allow you to organize your body in ways that lessen the force on the spine and enable you to breathe fully. There's a reason that cross-legged sitting and kneeling are the postures of choice for meditation, the former most especially.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“There are also some other detrimental aspects of the C shape that are worth talking about. The shoulder/neck/T-spine area gets its functional integrity from three systems. One is the bony structures, like the shoulder blades and spinal column and their joints, that provide the framework of your body. Another is the muscular system, which includes not just the prime movers that the fitness world tends to focus on—the pecs, biceps, triceps, traps—but also small muscles between the vertebrae that contribute to spinal stability as well as to our awareness of where our body is in space. The third system is the connective tissue like fascia, which as it surrounds and holds muscles and organs in place helps us move.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“If you’re feeling stressed out, levels of cortisol and adrenaline in your blood will be high. But if you engage in some moderate physical activity, like a nice long walk, levels of those hormones will drop and you’ll likely feel better. The endorphins kicking in will lift your mood, too.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“Joyce Shulman, who created (with her husband, Eric) a company called 99 Walks (99walks.fit).”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“One of those chemicals is serotonin, the feel-good hormone that may have something to do with why physical activity improves mood and decreases depression. Another is a molecule called “brain-derived neurotrophic factor” (BDNF), which helps brain cells function fully and even grow.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, has variously called physical activity “a little bit of Prozac and a little bit of Ritalin” and “Miracle-Gro” for the brain.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain,”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“Unlike muscles, cartilage isn’t on the blood circulation route; it receives nutrients via the movement of the joint, which helps nourishing fluid flow in and out. When you take weight on and off your knees—as well as the joints in your spine—you are bathing them in beneficial stuff. This is important even if you’re not feeling pain; if you’re hurting, it’s imperative.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“You should always be able to take a full breath while doing any kind of mobilization. Breathing is a great built-in “intensity gauge.” Listen to your own body. That’s the best gauge of all.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“There is nothing wrong with stretching. It doesn’t do any harm, and sometimes it just feels really good to stretch. But as far as getting a lot of bang for your buck, stretching falls short because it doesn’t address all the aspects of the movement system. Stretching is fine; go ahead and stretch if you like it. But if you want to have less pain, move more fluidly, and be better able to recover from physical stress—whether it’s from hiking over grueling switchbacks or carrying the laundry up and down the stairs ten times in one day—mobilizations, not stretching, are your ticket to success.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“Movement is putting your body in motion by way of stepping, bending, crouching, shifting your weight, reaching, pushing, pulling, even fidgeting. It’s a combination of functional actions that keeps everything, joints to digestive system, in good working order. We all move in some way every day, yet most of us don’t move enough or in all the ways we need to.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“Mobility” is a kind of wonky term that refers to something quite beautiful: the harmonious convergence of all the elements that allow you to move freely and effortlessly through space and life. Everything”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“being able to sit and rise without support is a singular way to tell if you’ve got a body that’s dynamic and able to move in ways that will make you feel alive—and even help you stay alive longer.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“Benden’s research has shown that above and beyond the extra calorie expenditure (17 percent more than seated students, almost double that for overweight kids), standing students were more focused and less disruptive.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“In 2017, StandUp Kids was able to provide a $50,000 grant for standing desks in public schools.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“Because most people rarely go barefoot, primarily walk on smooth surfaces, and stuff their feet into cushy shoes—the human movement specialist Phillip Beach calls shoes “sensory deprivation chambers”;”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“Judging from how often toddlers get up and try again, it barely impacts them at all.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“Researchers observed that twelve- to nineteen-month-olds fell an average of seventeen times per hour. But falling when you weigh 25 pounds versus falling when you weigh 125 or 225 pounds is far less impactful. (That’s why we try to be really good at not falling.)”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“THE TEST Stand barefoot on the floor in an open, uncluttered space. Close your eyes, bend one leg, and raise your foot off the floor as high as comfortable (it doesn’t need to go high). Stay in this position for twenty seconds, counting the number of times you touch your foot down. Switch sides. If you feel uneasy, stand next to a wall or in front of a sink.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“Falls are the third leading cause of unintentional injuries for people ages eighteen to thirty-five years old.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully

“Of all the many physical competencies we possess, balance is the unsung hero, the attribute that’s on few people’s radars but affects just about every aspect of mobility.”
― Kelly Starrett, Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully