Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and explore them from different perspectives and disciplines and, in doing so, come up with unique insights and solutions. Fundamentally, a Polymath is a type of thinker who spans diverse specialties and weaves together insights that the domain experts often don’t see.
Today's topic is an exploration of poor biomechanics and probes the way we poop. I know, this is not what most consider polite conversation but bear with me. We already covered how we breathe wrong and how we walk wrong. This wrongness suffers the same first-world problems of technological convenience. Yet it actually has some serious implications as we grow older. This essay plumbs the nuance of the problem so that we can improve one more aspect of our health.
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Introduction
Biomechanics are an interesting topic especially when analyzed against our evolutionary development and their collision with modern technology. What we find as we peel back our generally accepted lifestyles are that there are three things we do every day in life that are, by and large, wrong.
Not just wrong but actually quite damaging to our ability to be active, healthy, and well-aged. By now, if you’ve been reading these, it shouldn’t surprise you, but we breathe wrong, we walk wrong, and we even poop wrong all mostly thanks to technology.
Pooping wrong cracks me up because it’s so obvious when you poke into it, but we are so prudish about even talking about it. Regardless, pooping is the last of our trifecta of poor biomechanics that we’ll look at in this series. This is probably the oddest for most people to get their minds around, but our bodies evolved to squat while pooing, not to sit.
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