Tigers Don't Do Sit-ups: Rethinking Strength, Mobility, Posture, and Pain-Free Human Movement

Tigers Don’t Do Sit-ups is a personal exploration of biomechanics, fascia, and our center of gravity—how the human body organizes itself to move, adapt, and stay resilient.

This obsession didn’t begin in a lab or classroom. It began with pain. After years as a weekend athlete and white collar work, my body began breaking down. A herniated disc, chronic setbacks, and years of searching followed—physical therapy, chiropractic care, injections, and exercises that never quite addressed what was actually going on. Some people have called my response obsessive. They’re probably right. I went deep, especially into the feet, trying everything under the sun and paying close attention to what helped, what didn’t, and why.

As I began losing hope that anyone out there truly knew how to solve my problems, I used my own broken body as a case study.

By shifting away from isolated anatomy and toward math, physics, and systems thinking, I slowly found a new lens for defining my problems and testing solutions. I began treating the body as a set of variables—viewed in space and informed by real sensation—rather than a collection of parts. I describe how a single action, like throwing a ball, can involve the orchestration of more than forty interacting movement variables. Along the way, I explore the ideas that shaped my thinking: counter-rotation, the windlass mechanism, ipsilateral movement, and other concepts I wish I had understood ten years earlier.

The book reflects that progression.

Early sections explore foundational movement variables from the ground up—feet, ankles, knees, hips, ribs, spine, shoulders, jaw, and breath—not as isolated parts, but as contributors to a single coordinated system. Later sections introduce the mental models that most shaped my thinking: spiral and vertical fascial chains, tensegrity and the floating skeleton, counter-rotation, reciprocal inhibition, and left-right integration—frameworks meant to make sense of complex movement rather than reduce it to rules. I then step back to examine outcomes, looking at how elite movers functioned in their prime and the patterns that separate those who age well from those who end up in chronic pain. An appendix offers exploratory exercises designed to help you feel some of these ideas in your own body.

I’ve worked with professional athletes across sports, older adults in pain, and coaches and educators searching for durability over quick fixes. The common thread has been longevity—distilling the essence of movement rather than chasing short-term solutions.