Hi, guys. It's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it.

Hey, friends, you're listening to Fitness Friday on the Habits and Hustle podcast, where myself and my friends share quick and very actionable advice for you becoming your healthiest self. So stay tuned and let me know how you leveled Before we dive into today's episode, I first want to thank our sponsor, Therasage.

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You're sitting on the floor as we do this podcast.

Yeah, I'm sitting on the floor, which I don't think is very strange. It's like, welcome to the whole world.

Yeah, that's true.

Most of the world, before just complete transition to becoming a chair-based culture, spending time on the ground is very, very normal. Spending time on the ground actually is the normal thing. So as I'm on the ground, and normal is a dumb word, it's a subjective word, but as far as like, if my definition of normal would be like most conducive for cellular health, like musculoskeletal well-being. I said a British person. So if we were just to put normal as something that's like, okay, just what makes your cells function best? We'll just call that normal, just for lack of... Just to find a definition. And so that's very normal. Our body, there's actually a book called Muscles and Meridians by Philip Beach that's been quite impactful for me. And in that book, he refers to spending time on the ground, which, again, most all healthy cultures around the world do that. Cultures that have minimal incidents of osteoarthritis in the hips and the knees have minimal issues around incontinence, pelvic floor issues. Just spine pathologies, things of the sort. Just going through those ranges of motion, it heals the joints. It brings new fluids to the joints.

It's good for them. Circulates lymphatic fluid, better for digestion because your legs are closer to your viscera, your your heart, your organs, so you don't have all this blood pooling up in your lower compartments. Think like cankels when you're on a plane. It's gross. It doesn't look good, doesn't feel good. It makes you feel drained. Standing in a museum for too long, you're just like...

So sitting on the floor, is there a position that we should be sitting in or just our legs crossed? Or what's the ideal position to be sitting on the floor?

There's no best position. I have a whole chapter in the Align Method book about just spending time on the ground. It feels so stupid to talk about. It feels dumb because it's like, childish.

But it actually is not because I think that people... It's the most basic things in life, I feel and find that we don't think about, right? And we just We just don't, we forget. And now what's our normal, quote, unquote, is sitting in a chair like I am. But you're saying that there's so many more extra... There's so many benefits to actually being on the ground, which is why... And what I want to get to, I want you to talk about, you have been, what are the benefits of sitting on the ground versus being in a chair? Where I'm sitting right now in a chair, you're saying it's not great for my back, my hips. It helps with it. If I just sat on the floor, let's just put it this way, if I sat on the floor versus sitting in a chair, what would the benefits be? What would I get from that? Or not just me, but everybody.

So a bunch. All right, so a few things. One, there's been various different research around this, studying different cultures that happen to spend more time on the ground. So like, Northern Africa, Southeastern Asia, Eastern Mediterranean. These places, there's also other things, at least, Northern Africa and Eastern Mediterranean, they tend to eat pretty good, eat a lot of olive oil, which is also good for the joints. But very low incidence of osteoarthritis in the hips and the knees. And a part of their culture is they're just taking their hips and their knees through a full range of motion. It's very simple. That would be one thing that's pretty interesting. Another thing is, like I already mentioned, digestion. So if you're eating and you're... In order for you to digest food, you're going to pull... Why you get sleepy when you're eating food is you're pulling a bunch of blood from your periphery and it's going into your viscera and your organs and your stomach to break that stuff down and then recirculate it and carry those nutrients through the rest of the body. So when your legs are closer to your heart, think if you ever injured your ankle, if you ever sprained an ankle, everybody's sprained an ankle at some point in their lives, your physical therapist, first thing, they're going to say, compression and elevation.

It used to be rice, rest, ice, compression, elevation. And then Merlin, the doctor fellow that created that in the late '70s, he recently recalled that, I think, in the early 2000s. So it's like, Oh, my bad. Ice is actually a bummer. You don't want to slow down the inflammatory response and stop that action. You want to actually support it. You just want to keep it circulating. Actually, warmth, elevation, movement, stay out of pain, but elevation and compression. That's essentially what you're doing when you're sitting in any of those childish positions when you're on the ground. If you're laying on your back, that's be, obviously, it's just going to be more advantageous for better circulation. The way that you circulate lymphatic fluid is through muscular contraction. If you are just sitting on a sofa, just pulling your fluids, it's not bad. It's not like a moralistic thing. It's just disadvantage for the circulation of the vital fluids throughout your body. So if you are sitting on the ground, like any A kid would do, or a person in a culture that does this, you'll just naturally move your body around. That's a healthy body, a body that just wiggles a little bit.

There's a fancy term for those wiggles called NEET. What is it called? Non-exercise activity thermogenesis is the unnecessary definition of the acronym. And so what that is, is non-exercise. So it's not like... The idea of exercise, I think, is cute. You think you're going to work yourself out into some new form. It's like, what about... That's one hour, three or four days a week. What are you even talking about? It's so minuscule.

Yeah, yes.

It's like the rest of the day, that's the aligned method. All I care about is, what are you doing with the rest of it? You have so many coaches and magazines and muscle and fitness and everything to do the perfect Thaibo workout or Plyometrics or knees over toes or whatever you do, the rest of the day is all I'm really interested in as far as working with. Well, I like both, honestly, because I do enjoy learning out about training. But the rest of the daytime, that neat, that non-exercise activity thermogenesis time, you'll be burning upwards of 2,000 extra, in quotations, calories just from living a little bit more of a wiggly lifestyle. And if you were to take yourself into, so you'd say to go like Northern Tanzania, where there's been a ton of research, like gut biome stuff, also with movement. Researchers from Southern California, from your part of the world, my old part, they went out there in the last few years, and they attached these sensory systems, bio, something, motor, whatever, to the tribal folks' hips, hips and knees, to track the range of motion they're going through the day. And what they found was that these hunter-gatherer, ancestral, the romanticized people that the whole world is like, Oh, whatever they're doing is the right thing.

They are in resting positions about as much as industrialized cultures. So on average, the exact number was 9.82 hours per day, if I remember correctly. And so that's like, okay, they're not just running all day or climbing trees all day or doing like, Capueta dancing and playing drums. They're resting a lot. They're trying to preserve energy. So they're resting about as much as we are. We representing industrialized Western culture, whatever. So the difference is, how are they resting? The way they're resting is they're in kneeling positions, they're in squatting positions, they're in various different floor sitting positions, that I've pretty much outlined in the book, everywhere. Right. And they're actively engaging in their resting positions. It's not just outsourcing all of their mechanical efficiency to a device, in this case, the device being the chair. When you outsource what your body would naturally do, then you begin to atrophy. When you atrophy, you start to become trapped. If you have to be too much, then you're in a tight spot.

That's right. Does that mean, by the way, the wigglies? Are you wiggling because you're uncomfortable on the floor, and so therefore, you're trying to get You're adjusting yourself constantly to find a comfortable position? Because right now, if you're in an uncomfortable chair, you can wiggle a lot. I'm wiggling a ton right now. That's great.

That's how a kid would sit in a chair until they were advised that they're sick and they need medication. That's how a healthy kid would sit in a chair. They'd rock back on the chair. They'd go on the left side. They'd go on the right side. They're working their whole proprioceptive system. That's neurology. That's education.

So does that mean I'm getting the same benefits in this chair as you are on the floor because I'm moving around. Yeah, it's the same thing.

I'm not on the chair. Chair is just a thing. It doesn't matter. It's just who are you in the chair? Who are you on the floor? Who am I in the chair?

Can you sit on a cushion on the chair? On the Oh, yeah.

I'm on a cushion. My whole setup.

Okay, let me look at your setup. I'm just curious.

All right, so I got this cute little cushion situation about that wine. Okay. My hips are semi-flexible.

I would say they're more than semi. They would be very flexible.

I'm just saying that cushion is small for a lot of folks. For most people, I'd say make your cushion at least, I don't know, a foot high, 10 inches high or something like that. The big thing, if you want to have biomechanical efficiency within your sacrum, just your spine, your hips, you want to make sure your hips are up above the height of your knees. If your hips are up above the height of your knees, that will put your lower back, particularly the L5, S1 vertebra. They are in a bit of a shape of a wedge with the wide angle of the wedge facing out towards your belly button. And so what that suggests is that you want to have the hips ever so slightly tilting forward. And that is a ready position. So if you roll your hips backward and you sit down on the ground without having your hips up above the height of your knees, then you're going to be in that sad puppy dog, rolled forward position. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's just putting a little undue stress on the disks in your spine and such. So you can really relax into the architecture of your spine when you set your hips up above the height of your knees.

That in and of itself, whether you're on a chair or on the floor or whatever, if you just take away that tip, if those of you still engaged in this conversation or monolog, if you just take away that one tip, this whole thing was worth it. You could stop listening. Just do that, and it will make a massive difference in your life.

Wow, that's amazing.