Don't bankrupt your joints with your poor spending (movement) choices!

The way you move throughout the day has a big impact on the health of your joints and spine.  Think about things like picking up a sock, unloading the dryer, tying your shoe, washing the bathtub, sweeping the floor, putting a DVD in the DVD player (assuming it's lower than waist height), getting up off the toilet.  Think about all the things you do with your body in the run of a day that require you to go from being vertical to being bent in the middle, or at the knee.  There's are a multitude of ways to get closer to the ground,  but depending on how you do it you may be causing a lot of wear and tear on your joints.

Knee over toes, no lumbar curve, even some neck compression.  I also had to grip the floor with my toes to keep from falling forward on this one. It hurted!

Let's say you have a bazillion dollars in the bank.  But over the years you spend all of it on stupid stuff.  You bought a  pale blue diamond studded track suit, you bought a helicopter made of gold, you ate take out sushi for every meal instead of buying groceries and making your own food...  Now you have one dollar left, and you spend it on a chocolate bar.  You blew your last dollar on a chocolate bar.  Tell me, did you go broke buying a chocolate bar, or did you go broke because you made bad choices with your money, and had poor spending habits?

Your joints are kinda the same deal.  When you use them improperly, their health is finite.  FINITE!  If you're always bending at the spine, letting your lumbar curve do the work of your hips, it's like taking a big fat $50 bill out of the bank.  At some point, you're not gonna have anything left in the bank, and you're not gonna have any health left in the joint.  So when you bend over to pick up your newspaper and you put your back out, it's because you just took out the last dollar in the account.  You did not injure your back picking up a newspaper, you injured your back due to years of making bad choices with your movements, and having poor postural habits, then you blew your last bit of health picking up a newspaper.

We always work to put and keep money in the bank, likewise you need to work to maintain the health of your joints and spine.  You can start right now by changing those mundane actions you do day in day out.  All those damaging little movements add up over time, turning into pain and disease.  My three helpful hints to keep your joints and spine from going bankrupt are:

1.  Try not to let your knees track over your toes when you bend them.  That might mean really backing your weight into your heels and bending quite a bit at the hip, you may not be able to bend your knees very much at first if you're trying to keep your shins vertical.

Lumbar curve in tact!  My shins could stand to be a little more vertical.  Some practise in a mirror will help me learn how to feel when my shins are really vertical.

2.  When you bend at the middle, make sure you're hinging at the hip instead of from the lower back, keep your tailbone untucked and your lumbar curve intact. Try bending over while looking in a mirror at first, sometimes it's hard to tell if you're moving from the spine or the hip.  You can also put your hands on your lower back and feel for movement as you bend (hint: there shouldn't be ANY movement in your lower back).  If you're not used to it, you may not be able to get very close to the floor.  That's ok.  Keep at it.

Let your fat ass back up behind your heels to keep from falling forward.  Otherwise you have to grip the floor with your toes, and they weren't designed to be used like that.

3.  Switch it up!  Sometimes try bending with your legs straight, hinging at the hip.  Sometimes try bending at the hip and knee, with your shins vertical, like a squat.  (click for more squat how-to)

It's difficult at first, but just changing the way you move will help you loosen up, and before long you'll be touching the floor without having to worry about hurting yourself.  When you move this way, you actually increase the health of your joints.  Your hips, knees, and back will really feel like...a million bucks.  ha.  ha ha.  ha ha ha.

What difference does it make how I squat, as long as I'm trying?

Good day!  I'm teaching my first class tomorrow and I did these drawings to illustrate the difference between a good squat and a bad squat.  It really does make a difference which version you do, as one is really really good for you, and the other is really really NOT good for you.  Can you guess which one rules and which one sucks?

If you guessed the one on the left is the squat that sucks, then you're wrong and you suck.  haha.  No I'm kidding, you don't suck.  But prepare to get schooled, son.  The squat on the left is the one that you always hear about, how it's so good for your knees, hips, pelvic floor spine, etc.  If you're doing the squat on the right, you're never going to see any of these benefits.

First lets compare the form.  In a good squat, the shin bone will be vertical, the feet will be wide and flat and the outside edges will be parallel.  The tailbone will be untucked, the torso fits between the knees, and the entire spine extends, right up to the crown of your head.  This lengthens the hamstrings and calves, and requires you to use your glutes to hold yourself up (it's a great butt "work out"). It helps tone the pelvic floor, and maintains hip mobility.  It doesn't overload the knees, and it doesn't open the spine in a dangerous way.

The bad squat allows the heels to lift, the knees to track over the toes (non-vertical shin) the tailbone tucks under (like the dog you yelled at on your lawn that time) and the spine curves forward, causing the neck to compensate by curving in the opposite direction.  This overloads the knees, doesn't do a damn thing for your pelvic floor, doesn't really work on hip mobility, it opens the spine dangerously (especially for all those people who sit a lot) and it causes unhealthy disc compression in the neck.  boo!!

So there you have it.  That's why one is good and one is bad.  Someone once asked me "but, isn't it better to squat rather than not squat, no matter what your form looks like?"  My answer would be no.  A squat is not really an exercise that you should do, but rather a movement you should be capable of doing, and one that you use multiple times throughout the day when you need to get down to the ground for something (maybe to pick up the present the dog left on your lawn).  When you can do a proper squat, you are in REALLY good shape, alignment-wise :)  Instead of saying "well, this is the squat that I can get into, so I'll just keep doing it this way" you need to pull back and do some stretches that will help you be able to do a full squat.  Start here, with this awesome tropical squatting video by our favorite Katy Bowman.

Then head on over to her blog to check out some other sweet squat stuff that you can do to get your body back to where it needs to be  :)

What alignment is to me.

As a result of a conversation I read online between my teacher and some other students, I decided to stop and really think about the bigger picture behind what it really means to be in alignment.  Here's what I feel like I've learned so far. 

First, it's about more than exercising to maintain a healthy weight, or to develop a specific muscle or area that you think would look better bigger.  It's not really an "exercise" program at all, in the standard interpretation of the word (like t-tapp, or zumba, or tai bo).  It's also about more than doing a particular move to reduce arterial plaque, or some other move so you can reduce your risk of a lower leg amputation. 

Though I think it's things like the above mentioned (healthy weight, strong, keep all your limbs) which give the program it's initial appeal, it's nice to dig a bit deeper and realise that there's more to it.  For me at this moment in time, it's about cultivating the connection and amplifying the communication between body and mind, and becoming aware that the two are more than linked...they are parts of the same entity.  Feeling an emotion can contract a muscle, and cell death in the body can cause the feeling of anxiety.

It starts by getting your muscles at the right length, and then you start to really become in tune with your body.  The communication becomes crystal clear just because you choose to pay attention (learning how to stand on one foot with your eyes closed is my favorite example of this).   You realize that you have been in control of yourself since the start, and you begin to make better choices for your body.  You realize that by choosing to use your body the way it was designed, you are both respecting yourself, and the incredible evolutionary design of the human machine.

After you apply all this stuff to your body, you realize you can apply it to your mind as well.  You can stop repeating behaviors, and holding your mind in positions that are harmful.  You learn to let go of thought patterns that aren't working like you consciously stop flexing a muscle that's pulling your skeleton out of alignment. 

The concept can also be applied to your whole life in general.  You choose to engage in behaviors and activities (including work) that benefit you and make you feel good.  You refuse to sit on your tailbone because it's bad for your skeletal alignment, you refuse to work at a job you don't believe in because it's bad for your overall alignment. 

In the process of learning to self evaluate, and self correct, to let go of habits and re-write motor programs, by learning to respect yourself by making better choices, you can live up to your human potential.  To me, that's what it really means to be in alignment.

A post pertaining to the problem with passive positioning.

It seems to be common knowledge that there are certain positions that our bodies, or our body parts, function best in.  We know that there is a specific curve that the spine needs to take.  We know that the foot is supposed to have an arch.  Some of us know that being vertical is better than sitting down.  As a result, all kinds of products and gadgets have been developed to help us maintain these proper positions.  Ergonomic chairs with lumbar support, orthotic inserts for your shoes, there's even this crazy "Plasma2 System Health Postures" standing work station which lets you be vertical-ish without really having to support your own weight.  In the past, there were some aesthetic postures and shapes that people wanted to get their bodies into, like the hourglass shape, which is why things like girdles and corsets came onto the scene.

These devices use what's called passive positioning to get your body into a certain position.  It means that your body doesn't have to actually do any work to maintain said position.  A girdle holds your waist in, an arch support holds up your arch, a lump in your chair keeps your lumbar spine curved.  Another device that uses passive positioning is a cast.  I've never had a broken bone, but I know a few things about casts.

One: they are itchy.
Two: they are smelly.
Three: when the cast comes off, the body part it was holding in place has become very weak.

It's really the third point that I'm concerned with for this discussion, because it has a lot in common with all these orthotic ergonomic devices that people use (Unless your ergonomic chair is itchy and smelly...in which case perhaps you should throw it out).  To keep functioning properly, a muscle requires regular use.  When you don't use a muscle, it will atrophy, or waste away.  Women in the past who used to wear corsets all the time ended up with atrophied core muscles, and many weren't able to eat or even sit up on their own without their corset after years of wearing one. Guess what that means for people using supports in their shoes?  It means their foot muscles are atrophied.  Actually, any stiff shoe, with or without arch support, is a lot like a cast.  Shoes that lack flexibility restrict the movement of the toes and intrinsic foot muscles (which help hold up the arch in your foot).  Most people are actually walking around on feet that are atrophied (hense the chronic food pain everyone has).  And what happens when you sit in a chair with lumbar support all day, but then you have to stand up to go somewhere?  Those mucles which you should have been using to maintain your own spinal curve are turned off.  Having your body held in a position is not the same as using your own muscles to maintain a position. 

So now you're moving around in space with all these critical support systems totally turned off.  You've got back pain, foot pain, knee pain, and maybe core pain if you're in the habit of strapping on a corset.  However, I've come up with an awesome solution.  We should replace the lumbar support in chairs with a row of razor blades.  Now you'll maintain your own curve.  Instead of an arch support in your shoe, put a thumbtack there.  Maybe now you'll stop letting your arch collapse.  Am I right?  Ok, maybe that's not a good solution.  But what you can do for real is to be aware that when you're not using a muscle, you are losing it.  Pay attention to your position, and start using your own muscles to hold you up.  Ditch the chair and stiff shoes as much as possible and scoot around on your naked feets for a while.  Your whole body will thank you.

A heart to muscle conversation.

h- Hi!  I'm your heart.

m- And I'm a muscle.  Well, technically you are too...

h- Yes, but I'm a different kind of muscle.  You do stuff like bend an arm, or wiggle an ear.  I pump blood around the body.

m-  What most people dont' know is that I can actually help with that.  A LOT.  I ust have to be told to do it.  It's in my nature to follow orders.

h-  Where as I get'er done.  I'm a hard worker.  I start my job like, 2 weeks after a person is formed and I dont' take any breaks (usually) until my job is done.

h-  I'm cool with that.  Honestly.  i don't know what I'd do if I didn't work.  Not like this one over here...What pisses me off is that people are always trying to get me to work harder, get stronger and such.  Newsflash, dinguses, I'm already doing everything!  Get someone else to do it.

m-  Seriously, right?!  What pisses ME off is that no one will let me help!!  I just sit there, waiting for an order, and one never comes.

m- Then, if an order finally does come, usually it's been so long I don't have the strength to do it anymore.  Or it hurts.  Or I'm not long enough to reach where I need to reach.  After that, who knows when I'll be asked to do soemthing again.  I do a crappy job due to lack of practise, and I don't get any practise because I do a crappy job.  Doesn't seem fair, does it?

h-  No, my friend, it's not fair to you, and it's not fair to me.  See, if you were being used all the time, you'd just contract, vasodilate, and pull blood through you.

h- When you're NOT being used, and I know you can't help this, but when you're not being used you act like such a jerk!!  You tighten up, you get all short and you close up all your blood vessels.

h-  do you understand how hard I have to work to get blood flowing around when you aren't helping?  When you're actually working AGAINST me?  Then when there's a work out, you know, aerobics or whatever, everyone's all "Oh, Heart, it's for your own good.  You need to be stronger".

h- Uh, NO, I need help!!! Sweet Jesus, I work non-stop, and it's always more, more more,...blood pressure goes up, adn then it's like "oh, get MORE exercise."  And I'm all "LOOK!!  I'm just the heart!!  I can't fix the pressure that well!!  But there's over 600 other things that can...they're called MUSCLES!!  TRY USING THEM ONCE IN A WHILE!!

m-  yea, maybe you should calm down...you're looking a little stressed...
h- I AM stressed.  That's all "cardio exercise" is to me, stress.

m-  I know, I know, I'm sorry.  I'd help if I could.  You know how much I love a drop of blood flow.  It's what keeps me in such good shape.
h-  You and I are a dream team when we work together, aren't we.  You feel healthier, I'm not under so much strain all the time...
m- yup.  You push, I pull.  You get to decrease your workload, I get to not starve to death from lack of blood and wither away like an unwatered plant.

h- It would make me SO SAD if you withered away.  I'd break in half.  I'd miss you so much.  I really appreciate you, you know?  ALL of you.  Even you, muscle that lifts up the pinky toe...I love you...so....much.

m- alright, alright.  Don't get all sentimental on me...
h- can't help it.  It's in my nature.



( Frequent, all day movement and using all your muscles every day is required to have the happiest, healthiest heart.  Lots and lots of stretching and lots of walking with minimal sitting is better for your heart than exercising at the gym a few times a week after work.  The more you sit, the more your muscles atrophy and shorten, and the more they resist the blood flow, causing your heart undue stress.  )

I thought this stretching crap was supposed to be good for me, so why does it hurt??

I got a really great question from someone on my last post, and I decided to put my answer a separate blog post.  Here's the shorthand version:  "You mention yoga and pilates in opposition to alignment, please comment further.  Also, I am strong and flexible, but classical yoga poses hurt me. What's up with that?" 

First of all, it's not that I see anything in opposition to alignment, but rather lacking in alignment.  In fact, some of the stretches and movements we learn from the insitute are very similar to some yoga poses.  The difference is form.  You can do the same pose in alignment and out of alignment and get totally different results.  Take downward dog.  It's a great pose to stretch the backs of the legs and open up the shoulders, but if you're doing it with your quadriceps contracted (legs straight with knees flexed) and your elbow pits facing each other instead of pointing straight ahead, you either a.) dont' stretch what you think you're stretching (shoulders) or b.) do damage to a joint while you're stretching (knees).  So it's not that there's anything inherently wrong with the stuff you do in yoga, but how you align your body while you do it can be wrong and potentially damaging. 

Another thing to remember is that the poses in yoga were developed a very long time ago when people used their bodies in different ways.  People walked to get where they were going, squat to go to the bathroom, and used their bodies all day in many different positions.  The poses in yoga were appropriate movements for the population they were developed for. In a population that spends too much time in a chair, in the car, on a bike, on the couch, and that doesn't use their body in various different positions throughout the day, their muscles may be too short to properly execute a pose so it gets done in a way that puts strain on other parts of the body.

Lets use a forward bend as an example.  For a population not constantly in hip and knee flexion, the hamstrings would be long enough to allow a person to hinge at the hips and maintain an aligned spine (with lumbar curve).  When you do the pose, you want your hands to touch the floor, or you want to get your head as close to your knees as you can.  So you tilt your pelvis, bend your knees ever so slightly, and sacrifice your lumbar curve to get the "right" position.  If you weren't already doing this all.the.time (while sitting, or while walking) then it might not be quite as stressful on your joints.  But when you already have unhealthy habits or muscles that are at the wrong length or joints that are already being over used (knees) then this pose can be really painful, even harmful to you.  Doing an exercise like this is just doing more of the same damaging joint loading that you already do, only you're probably pushing yourself a lot harder in the "exercise" context, so it begins to hurt.

The problem with being strong or fit is that it can be arbitrary.  Sure you can ride a bike for an hour, or do a really impressive bicep curl, but are you able to hang on a bar and pull your weight up?  Are you able to do a pushup without bringing your shoulder blades together? Do you know how to use the back of your leg to hold your body weight instead of the front? It's cool to be strong, but of you aren't strong in the right places then it doesn't really matter.  What's more important is that your muscles are the right length, and you have a one to one strength to weight ratio in your body parts.  When your muscles are the right length they are better able to stabilize and keep space in your joints, so they don't start to hurt and wear out half way through your life. 

See why I didn't want to just put that in the comments section?  And this is the nutshell version.  I'm probably leaving out a lot, and I didnt' even put in any pictures, but there you have it: Why stretching hurts. 

Die Gestalt.

The key difference between alignment theory and other exercise/stretching practises (yoga, pilates, etc.) is that alignment not only focuses on where your body is in space, but also evaluates the position of your parts relative to your other parts. Like when we evaluate someone's spine, we also look at the ribs and pelvis and legs.  Or when we look at someone's feet, we also have to look at their knees and pelvis and torso...and also shoulders...and the head.  The body is really one unit that depends on all its parts to work together properly.  You'll never get to the root cause of problems if you don't look at all parts of the body.  Cervical disk degeneration can originate in the foot and calf, and if you aren't looking at the body as a whole, you're going to miss the root cause of the problem. 

Take this shoulder stretch.  In the first picture, sure, my arm is on the door frame and my body is going past the door frame.  But in actuality, I'm NOT stretching my shoulder.  I'm just collapsing through the back to make it look like I'm stretching my shoulder.  There isn't much regard for the position of the upper arm relative to the actual shoulder joint, and the fact that half my back is displaced is a big clue that this stretch isn't doing what it's supposed to. 

In this second picture, you can see that my shoulder blade is stabilized, and I'm not allowing my body to hinge in the center to allow my arm to come back further than it actually can.  Here I am actually opening the shoulder joint and getting a good stretch.  It might not seem like a big difference, but if someone is supposed to be doing physio for their shoulder (to heal an injury or something) and they're doing the stretch by collapsing their back instead of just moving the arm, they're not going to get the results they could get if they did the stretch properly.  It's the difference between a full recovery and a life long "bad shoulder".  This applies to every stretch you do.  The position of other parts, besides the part you're stretching, can make a difference to what you're actually doing, vs. what you look like you're doing.

Ok, ok, so what.  It looks like I'm stretching, but really I'm not.  Call an ambulance, right?  Well, this concept can actually be applied to a much more dangerous situation.  An example of this is when people are told they are swaybacked when really they are thrusting their ribs into the air to make it look like they are swaybacked.  That's because the diagnosis is often made looking only at the the spine, ignoring the position of the ribs relative to the spine, and the pelvis relative to the spine, and the position of the femurs relative to the pelvis.  Even the way you carry your weight (either on the front of your foot vs. the heel) can add to the illusion and make things appear like something they're not.

So you go to a doctor or a physiotherapist who gives you the wrong diagnosis because they miss this critical concept of evaluating your parts (spine) to your other parts (pelvis, ribs).  With this wrong diagnosis comes the wrong advice to fix the problem.  Usually a "sway backed" person will be told to tuck their pelvis under to decrease the amount of curve.  When you tuck your pelvis you can expect a drastic decline in the health of your knees, hips, and feet.  You can start stocking up on adult diapers now, because you're going to end up with pelvic floor disorder.  You can expect your back pain that sent you to the doctor in the first place to stick around (oh cool!) because you HAVEN'T FIXED THE PROBLEM, which is a rib thrust.  The scariest part is that thrusting your ribs out/up is asking cardiovascular disease to be your bff 4 evr.  So you think you've taken care of this problem, but really you still have the problem and you've created even more problems to keep your other problem company.  Now THAT'S a problem.  :(

It's really important to understand the difference between the way things look or seem and the way things are.  It's like katy says about fixing a flower pot on a crooked table.  The flowers on the crooked stand LOOK crooked, but really it's the table that's the problem.  Until you fix the crooked table, nothing you do with the flowers is going to help.  So if you have a bad back, it's time you started looking at other parts of your body to fix the problem.  You're not Astar the robot with all these separate functioning parts.  You are one unit, and what you do with one part affects all the others.