Even if it feels foreign, you can and should incorporate the squat into your life even if just for one or two minutes per day. To start, keep your knees a little more than hip-distance apart and squat as far down as you can. If you’re a beginner and you can’t get your feet flat on the floor, prop up your heels on a rolled up blanket or yoga mat. Put your upper arms in between your inner thighs and think about lengthening your whole spine, from sacrum to neck, lowering your chin slightly. (For extra credit, buy a squatting toilet).

Embrace floor life

In addition to squatting, there are a number of ways that getting close to the floor can disrupt your linear movement patterns and ground you, both physically and mentally. Tracey Ellis, a London-based yoga instructor and founder of the yoga and wellness brand Shanti Sundays, says that a 10 to 20 minute practice in the morning or evening (or both) is enough. “Simply moving your body through its full range of movement, accompanied by some quiet attention on the breath is enough to put you on the right track for the day,” Ellis says. ”It should be energizing, not exhausting.”

For the morning, she suggests simple poses like a forward bend, runner’s lunge to awaken the hip flexors, and “reverse computer pose,” where you clasp your hands behind your back and stretch the arms away from the body, with the shoulders pressing down. For the evening, she suggests grounding and nervous system-settling poses like bridge pose, supine twists, inversions like supported shoulder stand, and chest opening poses such as laying down with your back draped over a yoga block. If you’re not a bendy yogi, that’s no excuse. Using props (like the soft blocks and yoga bolsters pictured above) are a great way to adjust your practice and meet yourself where you are.

Walk more

This is so easy, it’s almost a cliche—but it’s for a reason. Walk for all or part of your commute, go to the Starbucks that’s four blocks away instead of one, park in the spot that’s furthest from the shop entrance. Ellis also suggests walking barefoot where you can—such as a park, in your house, or backyard—as a way to physically connect to the earth and change up the physiology of how your feet hit the ground. Bowman also suggests wearing minimal shoes (weather permitting) for the same reason.

Change how you sit

Even if we become movement addicts, a certain amount of sitting is unavoidable. What is avoidable is sitting in the same 90 degree pose in a desk chair all day long. So switch things up. Remove your shoes and sit on a couch or office chair in a cross-legged pose. Or put your laptop on a low coffee table and sit cross-legged on a floor cushion. (For more ideas, check out Bowman’s “dynamic house tour” to see how to remove some sitting from your home life, too).

Carry that weight

When it comes to healthy forms of movement, it’s helpful to think of what our ancestors did in the days before Amazon, Google, and Apple. A lot of that movement involved carrying stuff—children, fire fuel, foraged food—from point A to B. While it’s possible to have absolutely everything delivered to your door these days (except, maybe, a child), resist the urge at least some of the time. Buy your perishable groceries on your walk home a couple times a week and carry them. Pick up your kid as much as they’ll allow you. Haul your wet laundry across the house and hang it up instead of outsourcing it to an app. These things might be boring, but they’re human. And guess what? So are we. Move accordingly.

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