For many of us, the couch is basically a beloved member of the family, but a growing number of people are choosing to live a furniture free life in the name of good health.
Katy Bowman – biomechanist, movement advocate and author of Move Your DNA – is one of them. She believes that scrapping your sofa can have impressive long term benefits by increasing incidental exercise and improving posture.
“Movement, for some reason, has become secondary,” she writes on her blog. “In the same way that a single whole-food meal doesn’t constitute a healthy diet, a daily bout of exercise does not constitute a healthy movement plan. You are what you eat. You are also ‘what you move.’”
Yep, your morning F45 sesh might not compensate for how sedentary you are for the rest of the day. Especially if you’re slouching behind a desk for eight hours and hitting Netflix as soon as you get home. Research has shown that a sedentary lifestyle can wreak havoc on your health, impacting everything from your mental clarity to mood, risk of disease to sex drive.
Katy says that eliminating furniture is a simple was to encourage all day, natural movement.
“Chairs restrict your movement, and we’ve been conditioned to think that they’re the only way to rest our bodies,” she says. “But rather, you can take a seat while still moving the parts of you that hardly ever get moved.”
In her home, meal are eaten at a low table with cushions for seats and the living room is arranged with rugs and pillows.
Plenty of people have used the hashtag #furniturefree to show what their sofa-less spaces look like.
Advocates say to start slow – try eating dinner on the floor a couple of times a week or watch your favourite show while stretching on a yoga mat.
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