Regular readers will know I’m currently obsessed with natural movement theory.

Simply put, the idea is that there are lots of things in the modern world that stop us moving through it as nature intended. And I mean that term in the broadest sense possible.

• The ubiquity of processed foods mean we no longer eat the widest range of nutrients.
• Modern shoes squeeze our feet into unnatural positions and deny sensory feedback.
• Sitting in chairs our whole life slowly but surely turns our spines chair-shaped.
• Blue light from our phones disrupts our natural sleep cycles.

And, you know, good things as well:

• Vaccinations guard us against diseases we’d otherwise die from.
• Planes, trains and automobiles take us farther than we’d ever venture on foot.
• We keep in contact with a wider range of friends and acquaintances using telecommunications and social networks (ok, this one is double-edged).

Anyway, blah blah blah, the modern world has set us apart from traditions and practices that survived for tens of thousands of years before the modern era.

But an interesting thing starts happening when we recognise that all these disparate elements - food, movement, entertainment, clothing, medicine etc. - can be united under the lens of modern practice vs ancestral practice.

It means that the way we think about them can be somewhat interchangeable.

For instance, it’s pretty widely agreed that we need a varied diet to stay healthy. The food we eat needs to provide macro nutrients - protein, fats & carbohydrates - but you also need micronutrients - a dizzying array of vitamins and minerals - to stay healthy. Our body needs to encounter all these different types of nutrients regularly to thrive.

So food nutrition is well understood by the majority of the population but let’s apply this same idea to movement.

When walking, your macro nutrients could be things like distance, speed and duration but then we can also think about micronutrient variation - walking over uneven terrain, on grass and rocks and concrete, different gradients, carrying weights. In the same way we can add nuts and seeds and a rainbow of different coloured vegetables to a meal - we can add all of these wonderful variations to the same walk to make it more nutritionally dense.

Same with sitting - sit on the ground, sit in a squat, sit in a shin box or cross-legged or kneeling - there are multiple ways to get more variety and nutrition out of your regular everyday activities.

And yes, I’m aware this is an improv blog and we’re 450 words in without mentioning the art form but I wanted to lay this ground work so you’ll understand the very simple point I want to make.

If you want your improv to be nutritious - you need to find significant variation in the way you play.

Here’s a list of macro and micronutrients you could add to your improv diet: