The Most Natural Human Position You've Completely Forgotten How to Do

A toddler squats perfectly. Knees tracking over toes, hips below parallel, back straight, completely at ease. Now try it yourself — heels flat, hips below knees, chest upright.

If you are like most adults who have spent years on chairs and sofas, you cannot do it. Your heels lift. Your knees cave. Your back rounds. You wobble.

You have forgotten one of the most fundamental human movements. And that forgetting is costing you your back, your hips, your posture, and your gut health.

For 99% of Human History, Humans Squatted

The flush toilet was invented in 1596. The sit-down pedestal toilet didn't become common until around 1851 — less than 200 years ago.

Before that, every culture, every civilisation, every continent — humans squatted to rest, to cook, to work, to socialise. The squat was not a gym exercise. It was a basic resting position as natural as standing or lying down.

In India, across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East — squat toilets are still the norm. These populations have measurably lower rates of the exact conditions the Western sitting toilet produces.

The squat position is not primitive. The chair is the experiment. And after 200 years, the experiment is producing mounting evidence of failure.

What Sitting on a Chair Does to Your Body

When you sit in a chair with back support, every major muscle in your lower body and core switches off. The glutes go completely inactive. Hip flexors shorten. The lumbar spine loses its natural curve.

Then you stay there for eight, nine, ten hours a day.

Research shows this decline accumulates rapidly. Just ten days of not using a muscle significantly weakens and shrinks it. Then when chair-weakened people bend to lift something, their body is brittle. It breaks.

The Muscles Squatting Wakes Up

A deep squat performed daily is a full lower body activation event.

Most adults cannot squat correctly even without added weight. The only way many can match a toddler's form is lying on their backs — proving that range of motion is not the problem. Under even bodyweight load, the deep stabilisers have been deactivated by decades of chair dependence.

Your Posture Is a Story Your Body Is Telling

Stand in front of a mirror. Rounded shoulders. Head jutting forward. Pelvis tilted. A slight hunch through the upper back.

This is not just aesthetics. This is the physical record of every hour spent in a chair.

By day, we unconsciously crane our necks forward and slope our shoulders to open obstructed airways. The weight of the head stresses back muscles, leading to pain. The kink in the neck adds pressure to the brain stem, triggering headaches.

The squat corrects many of these patterns simultaneously — forcing the pelvis neutral, demanding an open chest, engaging the posterior chain that posture depends on and that sitting switches off.

The Part Nobody Talks About

The modern sit-down toilet positions your body at approximately 90 degrees. It feels perfectly normal. It is also biomechanically completely wrong for the act it is designed for.

Running from the rectum to the anus is a muscle called the puborectalis. It acts as a kink — maintaining continence when standing or sitting. When you sit on a Western toilet, this kink remains partially in place, requiring you to strain against it.

Squatting relaxes the puborectalis muscle, straightening the anorectal angle and allowing the bowel to empty completely.

Four to fifteen minutes of daily straining versus one minute in a squat. Think about what that straining does to blood vessels in your anal canal — every single day, for decades.

How the Toilet Gave Millions Haemorrhoids

Haemorrhoids affect an estimated 75 percent of people at some point in Western countries. They are also almost entirely preventable.

The squatting posture reduces pressure on blood vessels in the anal area and minimises the risk of haemorrhoids. People in Asian and African countries where squat toilets remain common have lower rates of haemorrhoids and constipation.

Jimmy Carter's doctor said in Time magazine in 1978: "We were not meant to sit on toilets. We were meant to squat in the field." That was nearly 50 years ago. The haemorrhoid epidemic continues.

The Indian Connection

If you grew up in India, you know exactly what an Indian squat toilet is. You may have complained about it.

Here is the irony. The thing you complained about was actively protecting your colon health, pelvic floor, gut function, and lower back — while the Western toilet you envied was quietly causing problems now epidemic across the developed world.

The Indian squat toilet is not primitive. It is anatomically correct — designed around the human body rather than for comfort and marketing.

The migration pattern many Indians experience — moving to Western countries, switching to Western toilets, adopting Western diets and sedentary lifestyles — accelerates exactly the health problems documented across this entire blog series.

What to Do — Starting Today

You do not need to rip out your toilet. You need two things.

Your Squat Progression

If you cannot get your heels flat yet — that is normal for most adults in shoe-wearing societies. The ankles will adapt with consistent practice.

The Bigger Picture

The chair took away daily squatting from rest and work. The toilet took away squatting from the one daily act that remained. The shoe took away natural foot mechanics. The desk took away movement. The sofa took away the floor.

Each change seemed like an improvement. Together, they created a population that cannot perform the most basic movements of its own anatomy — then pays billions every year in back pain treatment, haemorrhoid surgery, and physiotherapy.

The solution is embarrassingly simple.

Get on the floor. Go low. Stay there a while.

Your body has been waiting.

— Shiva Malhotra, Barefoot Protocol

ACE Certified Personal Trainer | Sydney, Australia