Heavy lifting during this episode with Bam Lionheart. We discussed how movement connects to attention, pain, and long-term health. If sitting is the new smoking, why are we asking kids to sit for 6 hours every day? What might the ideal education space (school gym) look like? Does being able to squat lead to longevity?
Links:
Bam’s Mother works for ILead schools!
Transcript:
keevin bybee 0:01
Welcome to the one school podcast. My name is keevin Bybee. I’m a family physician exploring how we might turn our local schools into 24/7 365. Safe havens with wraparound care for our young learners. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with BAM Lionheart, he is a movement coach, I would probably butcher it by trying to reduce it to anything so simply but bam, would you please tell us a little bit about yourself kind of what you do and how you got to do what you’re doing.
Bam 0:32
keevin Thank you very much for having me on the podcast, I’m excited to talk about this. This is a very near and dear subject to my heart, in schools and protecting supporting the youth and next generation. I am a movement coach, and specifically a primal movement coach, I help people, mostly adults, right now regain their natural movement, oftentimes to reduce chronic pain from their life, reduce the chance of injury, and to gain more awareness and get more connected with their body. I, you know, we have had some some cool times in the past training jujitsu, you even helped start a training with me, when I first started opening my gym primal movement in Portland. And movement has been with me from a very early age. And I’ve spent a lot of time learning all the different ways that the human body can move, and have come to an understanding that there is a base and natural pattern for the human body in its musculoskeletal system, and how it moves, some very simple principles. And if we can understand those principles, follow them pretty loosely, then, for the most part, our musculoskeletal system can stay healthy for a lifetime. And we’re talking about avoiding chronic pain, back pain, knee pain, avoiding some unnecessary injuries, ACL tears, other things that are kind of right now very rampant in our society that haven’t been that way.
keevin bybee 2:07
Indeed, indeed, yeah, I see it every day in my clinic. And part of what like I’d like to do is gather a bunch of thinkers where if we could design a space or place or, you know, set of places where it was open 24/7 to keep kids safe. You know, what would an ideal movement space look like? Or what are the kinds of things that you think would be helpful and establishing those patterns?
Bam 2:39
Yeah, there’s a really important thing to think about is this environment. And there’s really two kind of broad topics on that, we know that the human body needs movement to thrive, every single system in our body requires movement to be able to function. So when movement stops, that’s when we start to become ill sick and death is, you know, closely down the way. So the more that we can move, the healthier we can be. So we want an environment that promotes a lot of movement, a lot of movement. Then the second thing is we want an environment that is not full of positions, environments that are going to be negative places of movement, very similar to diet, like we want good food, and we want a lot of good food. But we also that doesn’t mean we want a lot of bad food around to be able to make some bad decisions. So some things that our environments that we don’t necessarily want to be present in this movement environment are firm pieces of furniture that reduce movement, and keep us in a very structured and rigid form. The modern chair is going to be the biggest one that does that for us. It keeps us kind of sedentary, and it goes against the grain of the musculoskeletal system and puts us in a shape that is directly causing chronic back pain and sets us up for injury down the line.
keevin bybee 4:09
There was a study that came out within the last few years basically saying that Excessive sitting is on par with smoking for long term cardiovascular outcomes. So should be a stark awakening. I always imagined you know, now that I’ve been playing around in the grappling in gymnastic space, like why do children’s gyms just have like a linoleum floor? Like why are there not more ropes and why isn’t the whole thing padded?
Bam 4:40
Yeah, you want a big open space and you really want soft floor. That’s going to be like if that’s the only thing that you can afford is soft padded flooring, that would just immediately do so much. The first thing I would do is offer an unlimited amount of potential for movement. Just some floor space that stuff oft, so people aren’t going to get injured is going to allow people to feel safe to roll around, lay down, get up, sit down and just move more. And then the next thing that a software does, which is really important, is it offers a safe resting place. It’s very, like we know like, okay, sitting is very close to smoking, we hear that over and over again. And so we demonize sitting or we demonize resting, but it’s not necessarily sitting this a problem. But it’s how we’re sitting. That’s the problem sitting on the floor is going to be in line with a lot of the natural shapes that create healthy bodies and healthy joints. So if there were kids that were sitting all day, but they’re sitting on the floor, and they did that first grade to eighth grade, versus kids who are sitting all day in a chair, first grade to eighth grade, those two bodies at the end of the day when they go into high school are going to be completely different. One is going to be very durable, one is going to be strong is going to be able to move fluidly the other one is going to have a lot of mobility issues restrictions in difficulty moving as I go into high school.
keevin bybee 6:09
I’ve struggled with tight hip flexors, which I’m sure you’re very familiar with due to being a desk jockey for so long. And one of the major things that people come to their family doctor for is back pain. One thing I’ve been able to take away from my learnings from you is observing how people move so that I can at least attempt to offer the beginnings of some movement inside in the clinic. Rather than just throwing, you know Advil and steroids at people. My first question is, how did you develop your sense of came to your knowledge of human movement, and then how you can help relate it to other people.
Bam 6:52
It came from both a very like a big curiosity as a kid, I was one of the kid who did not like sitting in a chair was the kid who wanted to go recess, go run, climb things I was, you know, shirtless and barefoot for a majority of my childhood when I could, whenever I could. I enjoyed engaging with the world on a physical sense and still to this day. So it’s been a great source of joy for me to learn and engage in physical ways that I can so curiosity and and feeling that joy, Curiosity has been brought me to jujitsu, mixed martial arts, try competitive Olympic weightlifting, endurance, swimming, running all of these things. This curiosity brought me into physical engagement with the world. And when you engage with the world, physically, you very rapidly come against your capacities, and you’re like, Oh, I cannot do this for or I cannot do this at a certain standard, or this is difficult for me. And counter to, you know, it might be hard for some people to believe who know me now, I didn’t, I don’t think I was born an athlete, I think I was born with not the best ability to naturally engage with the world. And I feel like I had to do a lot of self education and looking towards mentors, teachers and different coaches who had an expertise in different kinds of fields, all these different fields that I wanted to explore. As I started to engage more in this and especially like in the martial arts community, in all these different movement communities and and around what you will see is people that are moving and moving well, and then people who are engaging these communities who are injured and hurt. And I was always curious as to why people got hurt and couldn’t play anymore. Like we I want to play, I want to continue to do this thing. Why are you having to be sidelined? For this? Why am I having difficulty doing these? So these questions drove me to really find answers. And as I started to step into the coaching world, trying to coach people into the same joys that brought me into the body that I have now, I found that the biggest limiting factors were not people’s mental ability to grasp concepts or to train or their discipline, but rather their physical structure was lacking, like a neurological adaptation to perform certain tasks. And these were very basic tasks that every human should have. So now I teach people, the most basic task of all, which is walking, and walking, or running, or crawling, which is really all the same thing is not only the most basic and fundamental function of our movement, but it’s also the pinnacle, in a very weird sense. And in our inside of our ability to walk is every other movement that we could ever imagine. And so in somebody’s walk, if there’s something wrong in their gait, or you can see something off in their hip or their ankle, whether they go and do swimming, or fencing, or climbing, that same movement, air, so to speak, is going to show up in all those different ways. So by taking care of the basic fundamental purpose of our movement, which is to locomote, through our environment from A to B, and humans do that by walking, you give somebody the ability to have the keys of the castle of movement. So it’s my absolute pleasure. And I feel so, so grateful that I have the opportunity to teach other humans have to walk.
keevin bybee 10:35
Indeed, and you know, you’re touching on something here, where walking, it’s the most natural thing in the world, why would we need to learn how to do that? And just to play a quick devil’s advocate, being a primal movement coach, why do we need to learn how to move primally? Isn’t that something that instinct takes over? So I only asked this as a devil’s advocate, but, you know, I think we could talk about how it relates to, as you mentioned, sitting and other things. So why is it that we teach primal movement?
Bam 11:11
We are right now in a very big science experiment. And what I mean by that is we are living in a, quote unquote, unnatural way doesn’t mean that how we’re doing things is like wrong. But there are repercussions for the lifestyle we have, there are repercussions for growing up in a, in a city that that has concrete as the main foundation for where we put our feet, that’s going to cause us to put shoes on our feet. So there’s repercussions for wearing shoes, 90% of the time on our feet, when we’re engaging with the outside world, there are repercussions for spending six to eight hours in a chair in school, Monday to Friday, from kindergarten to high school, or even college. So there’s a ginormous kind of opposing way of lifestyle that we’re living right now versus how we did for millions of years as hunter gatherers, which was based basically barefoot but naked in the wilderness, on our feet walking for most of the day. So basically, we have, we have this natural instinct, and each one of us has the ability to teach ourselves to do the most complex movement which is walking. And that’s to me is like a miracle. That with before we know language, before we know mathematics, we have the ability to communicate and resonate with our nervous system and the environment around us to teach ourselves how to roll over to to crawl to balance on each foot, and then eventually how to walk this process that is very primal unnatural inside of us. It gets imposed on by external forces, whether it’s shoes, excessive chair sitting, or just not having the ability to engage with the environment, like we need to, if if, for instance, if you have tile floor at home, it’s going to be really difficult for your young ones to want to crawl for a long time, it’s going to be hard on their joints, they’re going to want to stand up immediately, they’re not going to want to be crawling for so long. And that’s going to be directly kind of getting in the way of this natural process of our education. So there’s a lot of ways that we can go over all those different ways that the external environment or the way that we’re living right now gets in the way of this process that is kind of our natural sovereign like right to have the ability to walk painfree for a lifetime. So just like with diet, and a lot of different things that we’re seeing right now, we have to reverse engineer back to natural way so that we can we can engage in a modern world in a primal way, and kind of mix those two worlds together.
keevin bybee 13:53
Very much. So I think we’re kind of in a new era where we’re really beginning to understand what we are from the evolutionary sense both biological, social and psychological, evolutionary sense, instead of some prior assumptions about what the human is based off of people who made a guess, prior to the invention of chemistry, right. And so we’re kind of at the beginnings of being able to answer those questions empirically and counteract some of the ways modernity for all its benefits, like you said, ended up having costs because we weren’t recognizing what we were fundamentally correct. Yeah. Yeah. I often say that we have to wear shoes to fix fix problems caused by wearing shoes. You know, you mentioned the soft space with crawling I I’m a firm believer in spending the $500 to get a 10 by 10 wrestling mat in your house is the best investment your kids will ever You get, and you write, being able to have a safe place to fall means you’re more likely to take just that little bit of extra risk, but learn how your body then interacts with the world and be more confident the next time. And I’m just curious how, if you feel like that has carry over into other aspects of life?
Bam 15:22
Yeah, I really feel like it does. And I think that’s going to come later. During the years, I feel like I’m going to be doing this work for a whole lifetime. But the way that we engage with the world, from a movement standpoint, because it is like a mirror for our nervous system, for instance, when we’re crawling, and when we’re learning how to move forward, the hip is the main thing that drives that. And the hip like really drives us forward drives us forward drives us forward. And so when we stand up, like if you can imagine a toddler or an infant, when they first go to stand up, their hips are way far behind them, and they’re kind of like leaning forward and have this baby water walk. And this baby water walk is because that forward lean of the chest is where they feel safe. If they ever feel like they’re going to be off balance, they’re going to put their hands on the ground, which means that they are but back hip driven beings dominant all the time. Then if we take, you know, fast forward a couple of years, and sitting in chairs and shoes and not having the ability to crawl or walk for long periods of time, eventually that hip, because of the chair especially starts to drift forward in front of the body. So when that person now is walking to the world, and feels like there might be a little bit off balance, they no longer go to but back hands on the floor, they go hips forward, hands going back, in that banana shaped body has a direct response to our nervous system, that banana shaped body is a sympathetic response. It’s Wow, this response versus more of a parasympathetic response, hips back, hands on the floor, kind of like low. So there’s a very much so a direct correlation, especially if you start going down like the vagus nerve route, versus how, how much of the parasympathetic nervous system or do we have access to in our daily movement behaviors, versus how many of us are locked in this sympathetically driven state? Simply because we’ve kind of lost this natural hip back? It’s okay to put my hands on the floor kind of way of living.
keevin bybee 17:32
Yeah, yeah, I did. It’s interesting how you connected the sympathetic and parasympathetic. I think it’s all tied together, even though it seems like a tangent at first. But I have a daily mindfulness practice. And most of the traditions or ways of doing it typically start with learning how to just pay attention to your body, which seems kind of weird at first until you start doing it, and then acknowledge that, I guess I really haven’t been paying attention to my body with active reflection. And so I lament my younger years being like, wow, if somebody had shown me, this is how you pay attention from toes through knees, hips, and shoulders, all of the sudden, I know where when I am leaning back, or leaning forward, physically and metaphorically.
Bam 18:30
Knowing our body is knowing where we are in time and space, and that is kinesthetic awareness, one on one. It is a type of intelligence, just like there’s mathematical intelligence, musical intelligence, kinesthetic awareness, and kinesthetic intelligence is very much an intelligence. And that’s one that is is completely overlooked in our modern society, and especially our education system. You could also make an argument that the way that we educate the environments that we put young children are diminish our kinesthetic intelligence so that when we do leave our school environment on a daily basis, or when we do exit high school, we are kinesthetically less prepared to engage in the world than before. We’ve got a very strong rational brain our ability to perceive, to project ourselves into the future and to consider our past, but the present where I am time and space locality that is we need to have a kinesthetic awareness to have that abilities, our senses, you could say that that is not something that is promoted or it’s even not given the opportunity to kind of develop in the human body.
keevin bybee 19:41
One thing I want to be sensitive to, especially working in the medical field is the different, you know, bodies that people come into the world with, and also acknowledging kind of a toxic way that people have done being a jock or fantasizing In a lot of athletics, you know, how do we think about the, like, promoting healthy movement while being sensitive to all of the ways that people have bodies and not fetishizing? The 50s 1950s, you know, football player, if that makes sense as a question, right?
Bam 20:21
I think that’s a really, really powerful question. And what that encourages us to do is to ask ourselves, what is the movement or what are the movements that are important is getting that touchdown pass, and you know, making that you know, that winning games three pointer are those the movements that all humans should do, or those just some very extreme, really cool to be celebrated 100%. But as people that are looking at the base, human, what are the movements that are based human should be able to perform and do because those definitely need to be celebrated more than anything, because when they aren’t, then when we don’t have the ability to do those basic movements, then there’s issue trouble on the other side of that. Yeah, the base movements that we want to have are the squat or the deep squat, we want to have the ability to rest in a deep squat. This might be hard for people to understand right now. But back in the day, if you needed to eliminate from your body if you needed to eat or if you needed to rest, you would want you and you need to have the ability to be in a resting squat, very, very accessible to almost all people, it’s rare to see an infant or a child not have this ability is something that is kind of programmed out of us so to speak. The second movement that is really important is the for full hands on the ground, full palm hint. And this is important for if we need to gather things, and I’m talking about straight legs, but in the air hands completely on the ground. And being able to work in this position play in this position for hours at a day without any consequence to the human body. So just those two shapes are extremely important. But as you get later in third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade, you see so many kids who aren’t able to hit those basic shapes. And then the third one was just the ability, the ability to walk for, let’s say somewhere between three to four miles a day, without experiencing any pain, or having any repercussions the next following day. And just being able to do those three activities 365 days a year, hang out in a deep squat, touch the ground with your hands and be able to play down there and go on a walk for three plus miles every single day, just fine. I see
keevin bybee 22:44
it with the teenage hamstrings, when my 13 and 14 year old boys come in for their physical and already getting tight, it makes me sad,
Bam 22:54
the hamstring and that’s like the big if I could make any kind of point to that the hamstring, which is just the back side muscles, the back chain, the posterior chain, all the muscles from the bottom or foot to the top of our head. When we sit for long periods of time in a chair, when we stop reaching down and putting our hands on the floor, the entire backside, structure, muscles tissue become shortened. And when that becomes shortened, we are so far away from having that butt back position that we talked about that is given to us in an early age. And so if we could just focus on one thing that we’re lacking, you know, in modern society right now, it’s the length and strength of the backside of our body. That alone if we could start to address that systemically would have humongous effects on all kinds of people. Yeah,
keevin bybee 23:48
I’m sure there’s some poetic connection between what we ignore, you know, systemically and socially with what we ignore with our own bodies. You know, chronic pain is is another big one and thinking about the sensation of pain on all of its spectrum and its relationship to possible tissue damage. And you know how nervous systems get trained to either anticipate or respond to the painful signals can set somebody up for a lifetime of unfortunate events. You know, something like fibromyalgia I don’t know if you work with people who have some of those kind of pain syndromes where the central nervous system has become hyper sensitized to what are most likely normal information from the bodies, but somehow get interpreted as threat and I’m just curious how you think about pain from preventing it and from a treating it standpoint. Outside of like in the moment tissue destruction,
Bam 24:56
right. I think that my first thought is going back into this kinesthetic awareness spectrum. And it’s something that I have to do with a lot of my clients is a conversation between the communication that our body gave us and has with us all the time. This communication, like I talked about before, allowed us to figure out how to crawl around, stand up and run, which is one of the most complex biomechanical movements that we see today. Like, if we saw a cow, on its two feet running, everyone would pull out their phones, and it would be all over the internet. So there’s this underlying understanding that we know that walking on two feet running on two feet is like the golden ticket of movement. And we all have the ability to teach ourselves with our nervous system, how to do this. And the way that our nervous system teaches us is through a spectrum of pain and pleasure, or what I like to call green lights, paying pleasure, and red lights, pain. And these are just the spectrum of your body saying, this is better, more beneficial for us. And this is kind of cautionary, please stay away from this. So if we have a really good environment, a good relationship with our body from an early age, this communication net is like very strong in us in our subconscious. But let’s say you had a situation where somebody was put in a chair for a long periods of day, and they’re kinesthetic intelligence was really reduced, when they did have a pain or pleasure signal, they weren’t sure what this signal means and how they should respond to this signal. So now there’s like a disconnect between what my body’s telling me and my interpretation of these two things. So like, for instance, when I am teaching somebody to go back into walking or crawling, you’ll be amazed how many pain signals come up in the low back and the front of the hips, and we re educate somebody on how to make pressure or joint changes or manipulations, and then boom, pain signals reduce, and these green signals, feelings of strength, ease, pleasure, whatever, start to skyrocket, and we say feed into the green, and use the red to start to understand how to move your body. And trust that when your body is saying, I’ve got a pain signal, that it’s asking you to do something different. And then when it’s giving you that pleasure signal, that means this is a strong pattern, let’s continue to go in this way. So I think it comes down to reconnecting ourselves with our nervous systems, and making that communication like very clear, and for some of us who have been had some resistance on that communication, whether environmentally, or just, we haven’t had the opportunity to really use our own body to learn skills, then it we have to re establish that communication at a really strong way and start to trust each other. My body has to trust that I can make good decisions and understand what I’m saying. And I have to trust my body is telling me some very clear signals and to navigate those waters. If you are in a place of like pain, or there’s red alarm signals, it can be very, very difficult to understand what are these signals, and it’s just so noisy. And so it’s great to have a coach or someone who’s been down the road and say, Okay, this is what’s happening. Let’s make X y&z choices on how to proceed forward.
keevin bybee 28:30
Yeah, indeed, it’s a it’s a team sport. And you know, no one, no one gets through this alone, or at least not well. And, exactly. So how do we find the people who can give us the feedback to keep us moving in a healthy way? Yeah, on that note, I don’t want to eat up too much of your afternoon. So if people did want to learn how they can get more in touch with their body and learn how to move a little bit better, how would they how would they find you
Bam 29:02
can find me on my website, which is going to be primal movement.org, or on YouTube you to primal movement. And if you go to problem movement.org, there’s going to be a lot of free and good information where you can start to learn the very basic movements of a human. And if you’re kind of on that level, or if you’re missing anything and start to incorporate some of these things in your life. YouTube is also a great place where I’ve got anything from educational content to work out to podcasts like this.
keevin bybee 29:35
Fantastic yeah, I’ve definitely put some of the links that you’ve got in my patients after visit summaries when they’ve when they’re coming in for some back pain. So appreciate all the material that I’ve been able to leech from you.
Bam 29:48
Yeah, 100% and back pain is currently my absolute favorite one to help somebody overcome and solve because I think it is very something that we can do. 100% overcome. And the studies around back pain being I don’t know if you know, but is the number one reason that humans are handicapped around the entire world. And it has been the wave since early 90s is low back pain, and we still don’t have an actual understanding, or this is a reason why we’re experiencing low back pain at this astonishing and exponentially growing rate.
keevin bybee 30:26
I mean, I went into family medicine to try to get into preventative care. And unfortunately, I’m already seeing people in their 50s 60s and 70s, who’ve been working manual labor that, you know, in some, some degree exploited them. But also we as a country, and as a society didn’t provide them, or even as children or adults, like the resources to learn about their body and keep their core strong and mobile. If you were insurance coverable I would I be giving out a lot less narcotics, I guess, is what I’m trying to say.
Bam 31:02
Yeah. And then empowering other practitioners like yourself on some very concrete ways of, you know, dealing with situations like chronic low back pain, knee pain, neck, shoulder pain, which are very without don’t need a lot. You don’t need a gym equipment you don’t need. You don’t need to have pain medications or a lot of different things to start to solve and overcome, overcome these chronic illnesses that we’re facing. It’s a it’s more of an education piece than anything.
keevin bybee 31:36
It absolutely is. I leave you with this quote. I’ve over quoted it a bunch. But in case you haven’t heard it, there’s this educational philosopher, I really like Zack Stein, and he he goes, if you think about what is civilization, what is the human superpower? Civilization is the intergenerational transmission of information. Right? What is education? It’s the intergenerational transmission of information, right? So civilization is education, if we’re going to be honest, and if we want civilization to persist, I would hope we can start making strong investments in that direction.
Bam 32:22
Extremely powerful, that really connected to worlds for me and really solidify the importance of even just this conversation and the work you’re doing. keevin. So thank you so much for the time and forgive me a little platform to share my thoughts.
keevin bybee 32:37
Oh, well, thank you for coming on. Like I said, I’ve leached off of your information, and I’m trying to leverage it at scale. So we’ll be in touch.
Bam 32:47
Okay. keevin Thanks a lot.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai