Standing Taller Can Transform Your Body And Mood with Mark Morningstar

What if your slouch is quietly taxing your brain, draining your energy and dulling your mood? We sit down with clinical nutritionist and chiropractic rehabilitation specialist Mark Morningstar to unpack how posture is controlled by the brain’s “autopilot,” why long hours of sitting shift that autopilot into a slouch, and how small, realistic habits can rewire the system for lasting change. This is a practical, science-led tour of functional neurology, movement, and breath that anyone with a desk, a phone and a busy life can use.

Mark explains the energy economics most of us overlook: holding yourself up against gravity is one of the body’s biggest energy bills. When alignment collapses, the brain diverts even more energy to stay upright, leaving less for immune, digestive and hormonal balance. We talk through research on standing versus sitting, the surprising fat-loss implications of being on your feet, and why a short stand or stroll after meals raises energy expenditure and stabilises you through the afternoon.

Then we get tactical. You will learn dual-tasking drills that teach the nervous system a new default—think book-on-head walks, gentle ball tosses while standing tall, and simple counting challenges that distract the conscious mind so your autopilot records better posture. We dig into belly breathing to restore the lumbar curve and expand lung capacity, plus wobble chair or exercise ball routines that “brush your teeth for your back” in five minutes. Along the way, Mark shares the mindset piece—spoken daily affirmations—that helps these micro-habits stick.

If you spend hours at a screen, wrestle with “text neck,” or want more energy without adding another gym session, this conversation gives you clear steps that fit into real life. Subscribe to Barn to the Soul, share this episode with a friend who sits all day, and leave a quick review to tell us which habit you’ll start today.

Mark Morningstar

https://nwprc.com/

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My new novel The Red Magus has recently been published in conjunction with the Unbound Press.  An entralling mystical adventure set across time and space, where past and current lives converge.  Find it on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Mark Morningstar
• 5:58 From Chiropractic To Integrative Care
• 8:58 Posture, Mood, And Mental Health
• 13:28 Tech Neck, Sedentarism, And Movement
• 17:58 Energy Expenditure Of Sitting Vs Standing
• 25:33 Retraining The Brain’s Postural Autopilot
• 31:03 Small Daily Habits That Stick
• 34:33 Belly Breathing And Lung Capacity

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 2:30

So welcome everybody to another episode of Barn to the Soul. I'm your host, Natasha Joy Press, and I'm a lawyer, I'm an energy healer, I'm an author, and of course I'm a podcaster. And today um we have a lovely new guest with us, and his name is Mark Morningstar. So welcome, Mark. Thank you so much for joining us.

SPEAKER_00: 2:51

Thank you very much for having me, Natasha. It's a pleasure.

SPEAKER_01: 2:54

It's a pleasure. So, Mark, you are um clinical nutrition, nutritionalist. Is that the best way of saying it?

SPEAKER_00: 3:04

Yes, I have a board certification in clinical nutrition, yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01: 3:08

Okay, and you work particularly with um neurological and spine disorders, don't you? So spoliosis and fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome and Lyme disease. Is that right?

SPEAKER_00: 3:24

Yes, that is all right. I have a for gosh now, what is it? Uh we're in 2025. So 23 years I've had a very um a very specific type of a chiropractic rehabilitation practice.

SPEAKER_01: 3:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 3:38

And um over the course of time, that practice has morphed into a lot more of a well-rounded, integrative kind of an approach, uh, just out of necessity, quite frankly. Um and you know, clinical nutrition is one of the cornerstones of that. And even though, you know, in chiropractic school, we do get training on that, um, much similar to naturopathic medical school, um, you still only sort of get kind of foundational information in it. You don't necessarily get a lot of the the clinical pearls and a lot of the really, you know, the hidden things that it takes seasoned practitioners to learn over time. Sure. Um even in some ways, it's you know, trial and error, school of hard knocks kind of a thing to learn some of those things. But over the course of time, you you tend to pick up on a lot of things that work from a holistic kind of a perspective. Um and then in time, I have just begun applying a lot of those concepts to very specific patient populations.

SPEAKER_01: 4:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 4:42

To help very distinct issues.

SPEAKER_01: 4:45

And I was really interested to see that you talk about um recovery and balance being about mind, body, and spirit. So not just focusing on the physical, it's focusing on other aspects as well to get the overall healing for the best. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00: 5:03

Absolutely. Because even if you put that into a concept like posture, you know, posture from a clinical perspective, of course, has a lot of impact on our energy output, uh, has a lot of impact on our energy requirements, depending on if it's good or bad posture. But also posture is well known, especially when you look at a lot of um psychiatric and neuroscience research involving posture, you find that posture is very intimately connected to um mental health and well-being.

SPEAKER_01: 5:37

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 5:38

And spiritual health and well-being. So, and if you don't have those, then your posture is ultimately going to be impacted by that. And they they sort of work hand in hand. And I think some of the easy day-to-day analogies that, you know, until you really think about them, you know, nobody ever really puts this together. But you know, when they ask as examples, people who have been put in jail for robbing somebody.

SPEAKER_01: 6:02

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 6:02

They they pick their targets based on that person's posture and how they look and how they carry themselves. Because there are things known as a victim's posture, and there are postures that look more confident. You know, if I'm if I'm picking a victim, quote unquote, I'm gonna pick somebody off the street who looks like they would be an easy target, right? I'm going to rob them, for example. Well, there's a posture and a mentality associated with that. For another example, in the military, drill sergeants, you know, they they tip their hat down to certain degrees and they they posture themselves in certain ways to look more intimidating and to look more confident and so forth.

SPEAKER_01: 6:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 6:41

And intuitively, we all know these things to be true. It's just nobody ever really sort of describes them outwardly. And um, and I always go back. So one of my favorite sort of editorial cartoons of all time was um one of the Charlie Brown cartoons. And him and Linus are talking. And of course, Charlie Brown always has this posture where his head's just kind of down, he's practically looking at the ground. And um Linus tells him, he's like, Why don't you just stand up straight? You know, your your posture looks really bad. And Charlie Brown starts to tell him, he's like, Well, when I bring my head up and I start to stand up tall and nice and straight, I start to feel better about myself. Yeah, and I and I he's like, and I don't want to do that today. So I'm I'm slouching. So everybody knows that posture is connected to mental health and mental output. It's just for a long time, nobody ever could really describe from a neuroscience perspective how that's done. And I think, you know, in my clinical practice and trying to help people who have postural issues or maybe symptoms associated with chronic postural poor habits. Yeah, sometimes it works the other way too. Sometimes their mental health is impacting that posture. And until you try to address those things, no amount of physically treating and trying to improve their posture is going to have any meaningful benefit because you haven't gotten rid of the original trigger.

SPEAKER_01: 8:09

Yeah. That's fascinating. You don't you don't particularly think of uh I wouldn't associate posture with mental health, but now that you say it, it makes perfect sense.

SPEAKER_00: 8:22

Absolutely. And I think what's what's getting worse, especially you know, all over the world today and the technology that we have around us, you know, everybody's down with this, you know, head flex, text neck, you know, kind of a thing that everybody's and a lot of people were sitting all day long for our jobs, or at least a a great many of us are, whether we're you know, at a desk job, computer job, you know, maybe we're at, you know, maybe we have a home-based job where we're still sitting for big chunks of the day. Maybe I'm a semi-truck driver, whatever it is, whatever the case may be, is we're sitting for hours and hours a day. And you know, to sort of translate posture into movement, you know, the the body and the brain, I should say, is I always tell my patients, the brain is awesome and terrible at the same time. Insofar as the brain tries to maintain a certain level of efficiency in the body. And from an energy perspective, it takes more energy output to maintain the integrity of a joint, say my knee joint, for example, um, versus just a um uh a singular muscle or a singular bone or something like that, because joints require movement and stability and you know, a lot of sensory information and things. So there's a lot of energy requirement. But what's interesting is if within two hours of being immobile, sedentary, my joints, especially my weight-bearing joints, start to deteriorate on a microscopic level. You know, especially in cartilage tissue, ligament tissue, tendon tissue, you already start to get degenerative effects just from two hours of immobility. Wow. So the body is designed to move. But obviously, there are ways to move that are more efficient. And one of the best ways to try to maintain that efficiency is to do everything with better posture.

SPEAKER_01: 10:19

Yeah. So that's one of the factors that you work with your clients with.

SPEAKER_00: 10:24

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01: 10:25

That's what's uh making them think about what they're doing.

SPEAKER_00: 10:29

Yep, absolutely. And I think just to even sort of give you kind of an outside perspective, um, is you know, I always have this um one of these sayings I learned in school from a uh an older MD, um, he always made the comment, and this quote always stuck with me, is he said, In God we trust, all others bring data. And so even from you know, on this point, I even printed out some recent studies coming out here showing this exact point. So, for example, the energy expenditure between sitting versus standing, what they showed is that if I if I change nothing about my dietary habits, and the only thing that I do differently is to make an effort to just remain standing or upright for six hours a day instead of sitting for those same six hours a day, I would actually lose about two and a half kilograms of body fat each year. Wow. Doing nothing differently. No. And I mean that's I mean, that very quickly adds up. Yeah. But that speaks to the difference in energy requirements. And, you know, obviously energy has to go somewhere. So if we're not spending it, we're just absorbing it. And then that energy gets, you know, stored as body fat and everything else. You know, same thing when people eat a meal. This is actually just published two years ago. Um, people who stood for two hours after a meal instead of sitting increased their energy output by about 15%.

unknown: 12:09

Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 12:10

Compared to people who ate and then just sat down for that two hours.

SPEAKER_01: 12:12

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 12:14

So, I mean, just again, I'm translating this in the energy expenditure on one hand, but this is still a postural related kind of an event. And um, so a lot of what we do is about teaching people not only to fix their posture, but how to create different habits so that this becomes maintained over the course of time as well.

SPEAKER_01: 12:37

Yeah, it becomes a habit itself.

SPEAKER_00: 12:39

Absolutely. And you know, posture, you know, to kind of again go back to this connection of brain control, everybody just thinks that posture is sort of easy to fix because I can just stand up taller or sit straight or, you know, do these things. But the reality is that posture is governed by two primary mechanisms. We have what I always refer to uh as your autopilot setting, which is, you know, while we're just even standing here having a conversation or sitting here having a conversation, we are sitting in our natural resting posture. Whether that posture is efficient or normal or abnormal, it's what our brain thinks is normal. That's what autopilot setting is currently tuned to.

SPEAKER_01: 13:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 13:22

But at any moment, we can engage the other postural control mechanism that I just refer to as the manual override, which is I'm gonna sit up nice and tall, pull my shoulders back, pull my chin back, you know, have this pristine looking posture. And that's my manual override because I'm consciously making the change. But the problem is, as soon as my conscious attention sort of goes away from that after a few minutes, I'm just gonna go right back to whatever my autopilot setting was. Yeah. Whether that's good or bad. So when you talk about trying to change posture, and this really translates into any type of spinal condition as well, you have to retrain that autopilot setting to help hold you in a better posture when you're not actively thinking about it.

SPEAKER_01: 14:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 14:12

And so, and and that's where a lot of the mental and neuroscience principles come into perspective, because those are really what you have to train and engage and produce new habits with, not just simply here, sit up straight. Yeah. In fairness, it's not a bad idea to always train both. Because I I think unfortunately nowadays, I think I sort of miss the times when you know moms would always yell at their kids to sit up straight, and teachers would always tell the kids to sit up straight. You know, that that's you know, kind of a bygone era, but I I wish we would bring that back because I do think that's very important. It seems to me anymore like the only time everybody ever says that is in like a you know a ballet class or something where the instructor is reinforcing talking.

SPEAKER_01: 14:55

Yeah. It makes me think that, you know, because I sit at a desk all day, so you have to then think about um moving and getting the getting the hours in moving. But my daughter has just um she sits at a desk all day, but she's just bought one of those desks where you walk.

SPEAKER_00: 15:15

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 15:16

And so now, from what you're saying, that's an excellent idea.

SPEAKER_00: 15:19

I think that's a fantastic idea.

SPEAKER_01: 15:21

Absolutely. Yeah, I might have to I might have to invest in one of those.

SPEAKER_00: 15:26

Yes, there you go. And then you can do a walking podcast.

SPEAKER_01: 15:29

Yes, absolutely. That would be good. So you also talk about um, you know, because this is all about healing, isn't it? But that cleaning and expanding your body's energy field is the foundation for sustainable healing.

SPEAKER_00: 15:46

Absolutely. I absolutely I think, and again, to use to sort of pivot to that topic, the in a normal scenario, right? I I what I try to, I suppose if I try to boil all of that down, it's really about trying to help the body use its energy uh production more efficiently.

SPEAKER_01: 16:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 16:10

And that speaks to a wide range of health issues because you know, in a given day, let's say I'm eating the normal, you know, I don't know, 2,000 calorie a day diet. Okay. Out of the my dietary consumption, I'm producing a certain, let's say, block of energy per day. Well, interestingly, in a what is considered a normal posture, when they do a lot of biomechanical modeling, it's been estimated that the average person of that 2,000 calories of energy, 90% of it is allotted simply for postural control, meaning all of the muscles that fire and coordinate and all and all the brain work that goes involved with making sure everything is coordinated. Out the door, about 90% of our daily energy is on postural control, which is very cool. That means, of course, that only 10% is going to my immune system, my digestive system, my endocrine system, my respiratory system, cardiovascular system, and they're all vying for that 10%. Well, here's the problem. What if now my posture has become so bad relative to gravity over time that now instead of needing 90% of that energy, because of course, as I as my posture becomes more off of vertical, you know, kind of think of like the leaning tower of Pisa. Yeah, my back muscles have to work that much harder if my posture is not good. Yeah. And so now instead of requiring 90% to maintain posture, maybe now my brain says, hey, look, we have added requirements, so I'm gonna divert an extra four percent of energy expenditure to this postural control because it's so un undesirable.

SPEAKER_01: 19:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 19:03

And so now I've literally just cut the energy to all of my other body systems by 40%. Right? Because now they only have 6% left instead of 10. So obviously now if my immune system is not getting its energy that it needs to work right, well, it's not going to work right. Same thing with my digestive system and my respiratory system and so on. So posture is has feelers and and tentacles into so many other things, not just physically, but just mentally at the same time, that if your posture is not good, you can't you can't be mentally healthy. I mean, frankly, I think it's just impossible.

SPEAKER_01: 19:49

Brista, that 90%, that's a huge, that's a huge percentage of our energy. Absolutely standing up straight, basically.

SPEAKER_00: 19:58

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 19:59

Now, of course that's incredible.

SPEAKER_00: 20:02

What's funny is if you know we could shoot everybody up to the moon, you know, where we're at like one thirteenth of the gravity or whatever it is on the moon, of course, now that 90% will be a lot less.

SPEAKER_01: 20:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 20:11

Um, so it's really when we talk about energy, it's it's fighting gravity. And of course, gravity never takes a break. So anytime we're sitting or standing, our back muscles have to fight gravity in order to allow us to remain standing and sitting and so forth. Yeah. So that 90% makes sense when you think about it.

SPEAKER_01: 20:27

Yeah. Yeah. But it seems an awful lot. Um, like you say, there's less energy for everything else, isn't there? So that's incredible. So tell us um when you work with your clients, what are um some of the listeners? Um, what is there things that they can start doing that is gonna help them now um, you know, maintain their posture or it doesn't deteriorate over the next years?

SPEAKER_00: 20:57

Yes, absolutely. I I think from a neurological perspective or a neuroscience perspective, so a lot of a lot of the treatments or activities that I give my patients are really rooted in what they call functional neurology. Okay. And what and what that means is just taking advantage of the pathways that the brain uses to affect different uh movements, different postures, different thoughts, different actions. And so, as easy examples, again to kind of go back to the idea of the autopilot setting for postural control versus the manual override, there are ways and easy things to give people to do at home to engage the autopilot setting. And now, of course, you've probably heard of the term uh the proverbial walk and chew gum at the same time, right? Well, for as basic as that is, that's actually a very powerful exercise. In neuroscience, we call it dual tasking. So if I have you, if let's say, for example, you know, you looked at me from the side and my head was really forward in my standing posture, obviously my goal becomes to bring my head back, right? But it's not enough to just consciously bring my head back. What I need to do is bring my head back, but then distract my manual override system and my conscious side of my brain with a different activity that I'm doing simultaneously. And in doing so, or what we call dual tasking now, now the autopilot setting is retraining this positioning instead of the head forward positioning. That might be as easy as just taking a tennis ball and just throwing it back and forth between my hands while I'm back like this.

SPEAKER_01: 22:47

And then that resets your automatic position.

SPEAKER_00: 22:50

Exactly. Exactly. And so because most of our posture is so hardwired in that sense, you have to retrain the hard wiring. It's not enough to just say, well, you know, I have a head forward posture, so my ligaments are tight or my joints are stiff, and I need to do stretching. Well, stretching really doesn't help. And I wish it were that easy because you could help a lot of people a lot easier and probably wouldn't need people like me if stretching did really work. Um, because the problem is at the end of the day, it's your brain and nervous system. That are controlling those postures because they're just learned behaviors over time. They're just habits. So you have to train a different habit if you want the new habit to stick. Like everything else. But I I think the the easiest thing is that you want to help people build those habits in a way that doesn't impact their daily lifestyle too much. Right. As an example, and I always use this analogy, is that we have a lack of exercise problem probably all over the world, but especially in the United States. And the they they beg people, look, just just walk for 20 minutes a day three times a week. And people don't even do that hardly. Now, on the on the opposite end of that, everybody, or pretty much everybody, is very good about brushing their teeth every day. And I and of course, what's the difference? When I brush my teeth, it only takes a few minutes to do it. It doesn't take me 20 minutes or a half hour to brush my teeth. If we did, everybody probably would have false teeth. But the the advantage is because it only takes a few minutes a day, everybody can build it into the routine and keep it as a habit. Well, what we try to do with a lot of the exercises that we teach for postural rehabilitation and things, even in scoliosis treatment, it's about ultimately giving the person things to do at home similar to brushing their teeth but for their back. That might only take them, you know, five, six, eight minutes a day to accomplish. But now, if they can build that into a routine repetitively, the benefits of those things become cumulative. And now I can start changing my posture for the better and doing all these other things and feeling better and getting out of pain and having better function of my joints and so forth. Um, expanding my energy field in that regard, because now when I have, you know, it's kind of like going back to the book, The Body Electric. And the more I the more I have my neurochemistry in such ratios that help me maintain a good outlook, my natural aura expands anyway as a result. And so, yeah, I mean, obviously I'm mixing up tangible versus less tangible concepts, but it they're still all the same thing. And um and none of that has to be done in a way that is difficult to fit into the day because I know everybody's busy, especially moms at home who are trying to do a thousand things at the same time. It's much easier for them to find five, six minutes a day every day, compared to saying, okay, now you got to go to the gym for 20 minutes to work on your posture. And I get it, nobody has time for that.

SPEAKER_01: 26:15

So are there certain groups of people like you know, doing pilates or perhaps dancers or athletes that have good posture because of what they do on a regular basis?

SPEAKER_00: 26:29

Absolutely, absolutely. But the the problem is that those groups of people I think are the minority. Yeah. You know, there aren't that many people that do ballet and other, you know, similar dance styles. I mean, they might when they're kids. But then they yeah, and then they grow up and they'd go into the world and you know, they go into the workforce and and now they're just, oh, now I'm a computer design, web designer, and so now I'm at a computer all day long. Um, or the people who happen to do Pilates, you know, I I think I credit fitness people who are able to continue to do those kinds of things on a regular basis because I do think it they tend to do better. But again, I think those people are also unfortunately in the minority.

SPEAKER_01: 27:08

Yeah. Yeah. So what is the best? What is sort of like an exercise that people can do that will only take them a short period of time to improve their posture?

SPEAKER_00: 27:21

Yeah, absolutely. I I think one of the absolute best things for posture, especially if you're somebody who's been sitting all day. So I'm going to speak more towards kind of like the slouching posture and help with that. I think one of the best things to do every day is to get back into learning how to belly breathe.

unknown: 27:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 27:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 27:41

And the reason I say that is because when people think about the idea of slouching, you know, everybody thinks of like rounded shoulders and such. But really, the the reason why we start to slouch is because it's our mid and low back that sort of becomes flexed. And by belly breathing, you have to be able to stick your belly out and forward to be able to expand your belly front to back. Right. So you have to be able to do that. Absolutely. Now, as babies and young children, we belly breathe. But over the course of time, we become chest breathers. And now we're breathing up this way, and we're doing it this way because we're slouching and well, we have all these other things that impact it. Even from a mental perspective, you know, you get a uh somebody who's added a little bit of abdominal weight, so now they chest breathe to hide their abdominal size.

SPEAKER_01: 28:30

Yes.

SPEAKER_00: 28:31

There are a lot of factors that come into that.

SPEAKER_01: 28:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 28:34

Um, and absolutely one of the best things to do is belly breathe because it forces you to come up from your low back to put that nice arch into your low back while you're sitting. And of course, then when you're belly breathing, you're actually oxygenating about a third better compared to chest breathing.

SPEAKER_01: 28:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 28:55

In a bad posture. And not coincidentally, that head forward posture that I was referring to before is responsible for decreasing your lung capacity by a full third. Wow. So just by virtue of the fact that you're coming up and back and bringing the head back helps you use your full lung capacity better.

SPEAKER_01: 29:16

And presumably getting more oxygen, you are going to feel better mentally, more clarity, you know, positive.

SPEAKER_00: 29:24

Absolutely. 100%. And then at the same time, um, one of the things that we do very, and again, it sounds quite trivial and sort of fun, but is just walking around your house for five minutes a day and balancing a book on your head.

SPEAKER_01: 29:40

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 29:41

You know, they that used to be a thing that models used to do and dancers did, and so forth. And we've gotten away from a lot of these old-time concepts that have proved very beneficial. And nobody does that anymore. Of course, hardly anybody has books anymore. Everything read everybody reads it on a tablet or uh, you know, on their phone. Um, but to just have to balance now, I have to, my conscious mind is about not letting the book fall off my head. But the automatic, the autopilot side is now automatically fixing my posture to minimize the chance that the book falls off. So it's an example of a dual-tasking exercise in functional neurology.

SPEAKER_01: 30:19

Yeah. Fascinating.

SPEAKER_00: 30:21

And those are two very basic, easy things that anybody can do to help themselves for the better, no matter what postural faults they might have.

SPEAKER_01: 30:29

Yeah. Fascinating. It's it's really, really interesting. We don't normally think about our pop posture um, you know, in relation to mental health and positivity, and so it's really interesting. Absolutely. Um last question, Mark. Um, something that I ask all my guests really what is one thing that you do every day that really helps you, whether that be to do with your posture, or maybe it's spiritual, or but is there something that you do that just really helps you function?

SPEAKER_00: 31:08

Actually, I'll I'll give you two quick things that I do every day because I think they're both equally important. One of them is a daily affirmation. Looking at myself in the mirror and actually verbalizing it out loud what I want to accomplish that day or what I'm hoping to achieve. Because I'm I'm a very big person in manifesting what you want.

SPEAKER_01: 31:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 31:29

I love that.

SPEAKER_01: 31:30

I love the affirmation.

SPEAKER_00: 31:32

Uh absolutely. So I think that's huge. And it's not enough, in my opinion, to just you know write it down. It has to be said out loud.

SPEAKER_01: 31:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 31:39

It's like it's like the secret. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01: 31:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 31:42

Um, it has it has to be said out loud. Um, even in old-time business books, you know, Napoleon Hill, all that, I mean, that's what it is. Saying it out loud, putting it out into the ether. Um, the second one that I do is actually something called a wobble chair exercise. And basically what that is, is it's a you can do it on an exercise ball. It doesn't have to be a wobble chair, but it's uh something that's a very unstable surface so that I can take my back, again, brushing my teeth for my back, so that I can take my back through all of its normal full ranges of motion so that all the joints sort of get loosened up and lubricated every day, every morning, uh, when I first get to my office.

SPEAKER_01: 32:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 32:22

And it's an easy thing to do, takes about five minutes to do, so it's very simple. Um, and now I've brushed my teeth for my back that day.

SPEAKER_01: 32:30

Fabulous. I like that idea. I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_00: 32:33

And you can go, and any any of your listeners or watchers could go on to um uh anything on Google and just look up wobble chair exercises and just get themselves an exercise ball.

SPEAKER_01: 32:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 32:43

Um you probably want a bigger ball, like more like a uh probably a 50 to 55 to 65 centimeter ball.

SPEAKER_01: 32:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 32:50

Uh but you can go through all those kinds of wobble chair exercises. Very, very healthy for the back.

SPEAKER_01: 32:55

Yeah. Lots of pregnant women sit on those balls, don't they? Yes. Yeah. Yep, absolutely for the same reason. Yep. Yeah. Amazing. I might have to invest in one of those. Just talking to you has made me think about my posture. You can put your shoulders back, Stan. I might have to do the block exercise. It all helps though, doesn't it? It all helps. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Mark. It's been fascinating to talk to you. I've really enjoyed hearing about that connection. Um, so thank you very much indeed for joining us and supporting the podcast.

SPEAKER_00: 33:31

Absolutely. Thank you very much, Natasha, for having me.

SPEAKER_01: 33:34

It's been an absolute pleasure, and I will put Mark's details below the episode. So if you want to learn more, you can do. And if you've enjoyed listening to me chatting with Mark, please like the podcast and share it as much as possible. You can also support, and you can subscribe. So thank you for listening, and I'll subscribe.