Healthy as a Cat
Redesign your living space to influence movement. Cats use our furniture as a playground. What if we used a playground as our furniture?
Have you ever seen cats run around the house cutting 90 degree corners and jumping 5 times their height? They don’t go to sports performance coaches or personal trainers to learn this. These actions are instinctual to them. Their owners do not have to teach them how to climb a kitty tower or to perch on the back of a recliner. Cats nap, stretch, eat, play and repeat on their own.
We’ve all seen kitty towers like this.
Cats environments dictate their health.
As do human environments dictate our health.
Why are you reading about cats right now? Because they are a great example for humans. If we set up our homes to have relaxing furniture and huge televisions with superb surround sound, we may not move for hours on end. Imagine the opposite: large wooden boxes to climb over and under, cargo nets or hammocks that are constantly moving and even mini trampolines invite movement into our homes.
Conservative people are thinking about the safety issues right now. Yes, this type of home set up would involve more injuries over time. But, those people that do get injured playing on this type of equipment would be strong and versatile to bounce back quicker because they are more fit from using the equipment in the first place. This safety argument comes down to quality or quantity of years to live.
If you want to start being as healthy as a cat right now, try this. Make things more inconvenient for yourself at home. For strength, you can put your mattress on the ground and get rid of the frame. This will encourage you to use more muscles getting down and back up over the longterm. For flexibility, place targets around the house that you have to touch each time you pass. Some can be low and some can be overhead. For balance, have a piece of foam next to your sinks to stand on while doing dishes or brushing your teeth.
The purpose of this blog post is to encourage readers to make movement more instinctual in their homes. By switching traditional furniture for human-type cat towers, we could have less doctors visits, live more exciting lives and even have more energy for other things. Make your environment dictate your health level.
A Healthy Living Room Makes Movement Instinctual
Rebranding products that are already on the market could result in a new way that people stay fit. I like to call it instinctual movement. If the right product is in the right spot, you have no choice but to use it and get healthier.
Traditional living rooms showcase stationary furniture. This was fine when most people came home from working labor jobs in the fields and at factories. Modern jobs involve sitting at a desk for many hours. The original fix was health and fitness gyms about 5-15 minutes away from home. It is time for a more convenient and modern solution to being physically and mentally fit.
Without needing a Kinesiology degree, by simply switching out traditional furniture in our homes, anyone can become healthier. Take, for example, a swing that hangs from the ceiling. It should be common knowledge that leaning forward and backward, pumping your legs up and down while gripping the support ropes will burn more calories than sitting still on a couch.
What if we stacked and offset two couches so you had to climb up one couch to get to the second couch? There is strength, balance and coordination involved in climbing to a second level even if you are just going to sit up there. But, add rings to the ceiling above you and it can make for more strength gains or even just reaction time drills by hitting the rings like a cat toy.
Say you need more stimulation than this. By turning a trampoline 45 degrees, you can toss a tennis ball at it and the physics will rebound the ball right back to you. Instant hand-eye coordination and more calories burned! Don’t forget about your feet, either. Installing a piece of finished wood onto a wall creates a good rebounding surface for a soccer ball.
Flexibility is an important aspect of fitness but often forgotten about. With stall bars on your wall (think wide monkey bars that go vertical), it’s hard to walk by without reaching up to the top for a little cat stretch. Many stretches can be done with stall bars especially while you are talking on your handsfree device or streaming online. Flexibility is very important for injury prevention.
Your base of support are your feet. Much of our time is spent on flat surfaces which does not challenge our feet to stay strong and flexible. With cobblestone floors (companies make artificial mats) to walk on, we can maintain independence and continue our health journey much longer. This is the ultimate goal in redesigning our living space. You do not stop moving because you are old, you get old because. you stop moving.
A good marketing plan can sell this healthy living room to residential homes, commercial buildings, retirement communities and even resorts. Lets work this together and change the way humans stay active in 2025.
Could You Live In a Playground?
Is life too easy? What if we made things a little more difficult? Would this improve quality of life? Here is a perspective of living space design to mimic playground in your house. You might just love it, and it’s results!
Life is easy. Seriously. We get new technology and cool products advertised to us everyday that make our lives easier.
This easy lifestyle comes with a price. We move less, do less and even think less.
Imagine for a minute that you set up your living space to make life harder. Climbing, crawling, jumping and even swinging just to get into the next room. For most people, it’s like being a child again. Watch this video to get a better idea of this possibility:
How much more engaged would you be with some of these stations in your living space? Would you want them at work also? It is a reality is some instances. But now imagine if every home was designed with active lifestyle concepts. How much disease would be eliminated if people had to be more active during the day?
It might take a long time to convince people they need to install these stations or even build their new home like this. But until then, I’m going to keep playing from room to room.
Evolution of Active Living
Challenging that rate at which humans are falling out of shape, the new Metaverse looks to increase that pace. You can combat this certain trend with fun ninja style home designs today. Take a step back and look at your health. Are you getting enough activity to burn the cortisol your body produces from stress? Follow these easy steps.
Way before there were buildings, humans had to be active in order to survive. Of course, our lifespan at this time was not very long but for the most part everyone had to be “fit” as hunters or gatherers and running away from danger. When we created structures to protected us, life got a little easier. This means we did not have to be ready for a fight or flight scenario as often.
Evolving further as buildings got larger, more jobs were needed inside to maintain these structures. Again, making life a little easier for those few people. This repeated over time as more and more buildings were built. This seems like common sense, right? Why are we even discussing what everyone knows? Let’s see this timeline out a few more centuries.
Today, we are in the middle of the technology age. It is commonplace to sit in a chair for 8 hours per day making a living. When you analyze this evolution over time, it is clear where we are headed. Thousands of years built the human body to be active and durable. Over the last 100 years we made life easier without the NEED to use our bodies in ways which it is capable of performing.
Looking forward to virtual and augmented reality within the Metaverse, we are making life even easier with less need for physicality. It is certain that physical health is on the decline. There are fitness programs out there to combat this decline on an individual basis. However, to keep our human race progressing forward and evolving, a transformation in our lifestyle needs to take place.
As more and more humans will soon be sedentary in the addictive Metaverse, the best place to start this transformation is in our homes. We are looking globally at the future of the human race. Our lives right now are simple and low friction. Creating obstacles in our current homes to climb over, under or around will add more versatility to our physical (and possibly mental) well being.
The sport of Ninja is on to something interesting as they challenge balance, coordination, dexterity and in turn improve confidence, risk management skills and decision making. These obstacles in our homes can be dressers or couches pushed into our normal pathways. It is a start to bringing back activity into our lifestyle. The evolution after this step is to build new homes not for comfort and convenience but to challenge us in climbing up to the second floor or crawling out the back door.
Altering our homes in these ways is a lifestyle change. Soon, rooms will not be cubes of perfect space but open areas with climbable walls and unlevel floors. That is just the right amount of difficulty and friction we need in our lives right now. It will challenge us but not break us. Take a break and be active, my friends.
The Future of Home Design
Encourage movement in your home with a few tips. Why decorate with items that just sit there. We want to see the future of design include furniture that moves, making us want to move with it.
Some people call it Active Design.
The goal is to encourage movement in living spaces.
Think, “indoor playground meets comfortable functionality.”
What this video for some examples then read on…
Here are some guidelines we have created:
Wide open spaces should invite movement rather than be crowded with decorations.
A basketball hoop on the wall might encourage some to shoot balls at it.
A punching bag hung from the wall or ceiling might encourage some swings as you walk by.
What would you do if there were a carpeted gymnastic mat in the middle of the living room?
These all encourage play.
Imagine a swing attached to the ceiling in the middle of a room with a view.
A slide takes you down from the above loft (or take the ladder).
All of these ideas minimize time sitting still.
Always have options and the ability to change.
The underlying goal is to minimize stationary furniture.
Here are 3 Tips to Remember When Designing Your Home:
Furniture Should Move or be Climbable
Level Transitions Invite with creativity but Challenge with variety
Use Recovery Relaxation Stations for designated quiet space
Please share some of your ideas for an active zone at home.