It’s not just the volume of sitting that kills us silently as we sit at a desk for 30 to 40 years, it is inactivity. If we sit for 30 minutes, our metabolism slows down by 90%. So it’s about how long we stay still in any one position without moving our large muscles and joints and revving our engine.

We need to insert short bursts of movement into our day to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

The Animal Movements^TM app is the solution.

The move out of the trees and into the shopping malls has not been good for us apes physically or mentally. Although the structure of our skeleton hasn’t changed over thousands of years since we were hunter-gathers on the African plains, the increase in the size of our brains has allowed us to create huge changes in our physical and mental environment.

If human evolution was put into the space of a week, in the last few seconds before midnight on Sunday night, we have suddenly shot indoors and stopped moving about. As a result, the way we live has changed dramatically. We live ‘in our heads’ more than ever before and we are less active than we have ever been. We are no longer active hunter-gatherers. We no longer roam. And with that we’ve lost something vitally important; we’ve lost our predisposition to move.

We are no longer moving around for our survival. We no longer physically labour 3 to 6 hours each day to obtain our food. We’ve become distanced from nature and, with our increasing technology and our big brains, we overthink things and have become anxious and stressed. Our fear, courage and aggression no longer come from moving about in the wilderness but rather from looking at blinking computer screens under florescent lights. Some of us can be spending up to 93 percent of our day sitting in an office or an enclosed vehicle.

With the industrial revolution and the shift to division of labour, we have divided our society into jobs with highly specialised but very narrow skillsets. Today we do highly repetitive tasks instead of the wide variety of activities we used to do when we were hunter-gatherers. Many of us who work in offices are suffering from disorders created by a highly sedentary lifestyle.

In this industrialised age, we have created our own perfect storm. We have caged ourselves in. Physical exercise is decreasing, and obesity is increasing at an alarming rate, and we have forgotten something vital. We have forgotten that we are an animal.

Consider this: If you saw an animal sitting in a cage looking stressed or depressed, staring into space, not moving for large parts of the day, you would think that animal was sick. Yet that is what a lot of us do.

The Animal Movements ^TM app is the simple, 60 second solution to this sedentary lifestyle health risk.

Fact. We need to move our big muscles and joints more regularly throughout the day.

Studies on longevity suggest that our lifestyle (where and how we live, move, eat, sleep and interact) has more than twice the effect on our health than our genes, and more than five times the impact on our health than all the pills and procedures administered in hospitals.

Doing intense 60-second bursts of exercise a few times a week has the same benefit as doing 45 minutes of slow exercise a few times per week. It’s so much better reward for our time –shorter and harder is just so much better reward for our time.

The best place to integrate movement and exercise into our busy lives is to do it where we spend 30 to 40 years of our lives – our workplace.

Let’s emphasise the significant health benefits of the Animal Movement ^TM app:

• Improves our mental health and state of mind.
• Improves our physical wellbeing and longevity – combating the effects of a sluggish sedentary metabolism.
• More creative – oxygenates our brain and increases our brainpower.
• More productive – wakes us up, making us more alert and productive.
• Easy Access – allows us to fit exercise into our busy day immediately
• Doesn’t require travel, specialised equipment, or an expensive gym membership.
• Strengthens our body, toughening and mobilising our muscles, tendons, bones and joints.
• Increases our cardiovascular endurance and fitness.
• Improves our body condition, co-ordination and postural awareness.
• Reduces neck, back, hip and knee pain by varying the direction of load on our tissues.
• Reduces lethargy and boredom.
• Easily achievable for everyone – especially those who are overweight or have low exercise tolerance. Well-paced, short and easy to tolerate.