It would be another seven years before he got his first clients, and another 11 before he opened his first clinic in San Diego. Today, he has 30 clinics across the world, millions of clients (including an impressive roster of professional athletes) functioning pain-free, and six best-selling books to his credit, with a seventh due out this week, a revised and updated version of his first, Pain Free.

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But it was 50 years ago that he figured out why, despite a year of medical treatment for wounds incurred in Vietnam, he was still in pain and, with that knowledge, began developing the Egoscue Method by which he has helped so many, including himself, become pain-free.

As he writes in this latest book, indeed in all of his books, “Humans are designed as symmetrical bipeds.” Which means we should be symmetrical from side to side, that is, one shoulder or hip should not be higher than the other. We should also be aligned vertically, which is to say that in profile, there should be a straight line from our ears to our ankle bones that runs through the center of our shoulders, hips, and knees.

That is not the case with most of us, and it wasn’t the case with Egoscue 50 years ago. We have eight load-bearing joints—shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles—and he realized that when one of those joints is out of position, some other part of the body has to compensate to enable us to function, which led him to a major discovery that too many medical professionals today still ignore: The source of the pain is rarely the source of the problem.

Related: The At-Home Workout That Will Help You Live Pain-Free

For an event like a car accident or broken bone, yes, the source and site of the pain are the same, but for the chronic musculoskeletal pain that more than 50 percent of all Americans suffer from, the source and site are different and are the result of one part of the body compensating for what another part can no longer do. For instance, if you have back pain, it’s probably because your hip is out of alignment. And yet, most remedies for back pain treat the back, perhaps alleviating the symptom of pain but never addressing the actual source, and therefore never fixing the original problem.

That’s what Egoscue spent years figuring out how exactly to do. Knowing that “bones do what muscles tell them to do,” he experimented with an array of stretches and exercises designed to get our muscles to move our joints back into their proper position. Egoscue had learned that when our hips are where they’re supposed to be, our back stops hurting. Or when our ankles are functioning the way they’re designed to, our knees stop hurting. Or when our shoulder can move as it was intended, we no longer get tennis elbow or carpal tunnel syndrome. It took time for him to learn how muscles move joints, but eventually he learned enough to develop the Egoscue Method, his revolutionary program to return our postures to their original design and thereby relieve ourselves of chronic pain.

Egoscue explores all of this anatomical and physiological information in his expansive new Pain Free, the revised and updated edition of his 1999 best-seller. The book is written in such engagingly accessible prose that one needn’t be a PhD in either field to readily grasp what he’s saying. But much of this information has been available since he wrote his first book decades ago. Why the revision?

“When I wrote my other six books,” he says, “we had a stronger tradition of self-reliance in our country. But we’ve lost a lot of that. We’re more isolated as individuals now than we’ve ever been before, and since the advent of social media, we’ve become more reliant upon the opinion of others in everything, including our pain. We’ve succumbed to this idea that somebody else knows more about our bodies than we do. That’s just not true. But we have to convince people now in ways we’ve never had to before that they really do have the capacity to relieve themselves of their pain.”

That gentle convincing explains, in part, the warmer tone in this updated version: less clinical, more consoling and encouraging.

But he also wrote this revision because, as a society, we are in a different place than we were when he first devised the Egoscue Method—and that place isn’t good. “Many Americans now are physically weak, and by weak, I mean they have lost the ability to remain upright,” Egoscue says. “It’s astonishing to me how many people cannot stand on one foot and, sadly, don’t even know they’re supposed to be able to. We have lost postural stability. Forty years ago, we could treat clients by focusing on strength because they were still stable. Now, we have to stabilize them first before we can strengthen them.” The culprit here is our sedentary lives.

Related: The Simplest Change You Can Make for Better Health

As Egoscue points out in the book, “In the 1920s, manual workers outnumbered knowledge workers by a ratio of 2:1. By 1980, that ratio was reversed.” All that sitting impacts our postures and leads to pain.

“Evolution didn’t stop once we got upright,” Egoscue explains. “It continues, and our evolving, or de-evolving, depends upon the stimulus of our environment.” Right now, for too many, that stimulus doesn’t involve movement. Sadly, that affects more than just our bodies, a mind-body relationship that Egoscue also explores in this book. “We know that exercise improves our endurance, strength, and cardiovascular health,” he writes, “but movement is also directly connected to feelings of hope, happiness, connection, and confidence.”

The book also contains testimonials from beneficiaries of the Egoscue Method, some famous, some not, including a wonderful foreword from NFL Hall-of-Famer John Lynch, who gives a share of the credit for his success to Egoscue. “Quite simply,” Lynch writes, “Egoscue is the most brilliant person I have ever encountered when it comes to the human body and unleashing its vast potential.” When Lynch was hired as general manager for the San Francisco 49ers, he immediately incorporated the Egoscue Method into the team’s fitness regimen.

And of course, the book incorporates menus of E-cises (Egoscue exercises) to address the issues in your feet, ankles, knees, hips, and shoulders that are causing pain elsewhere in your body or reducing its ability to function at its full potential. The menus come with pictures and detailed explanations to make sure you’re doing the E-cises correctly.

Egoscue is notoriously reluctant to discuss himself, but when asked to reflect on his accomplishments these past 50 years, he said that his favorite fact is that he’s created competition. “You can imagine the ridicule and scorn I endured when I started talking about posture as a source of most of our pain. But now that thinking permeates the healthcare world, and we have competitors, and I think that’s wonderful. We’re figuring it all out together, and in the end, that can only benefit us all.”

True enough. But it all started with Egoscue 50 years ago, and this newest edition of Pain Free (available on Amazon) is the ideal commemoration of how far we’ve come in our understanding of the relationship between our posture and our pain.

The post Pain-Free Reading: The (Updated) New Book from Pete Egoscue! appeared first on Sonima.

Nothing snapped, nothing tweaked, nothing I did out of the ordinary could be traced back to why my back began to act up. Hot to the touch, right above my iliac sacrum, overnight I couldn’t bend forward or backward without serious suffering. Staying in Mysore, India at the time and practicing yoga, which has been a normal routine of mine for over a decade, I engaged in a series of Ayurvedic treatments, but they didn’t make a dent in alleviating the pain.

As a former lawyer, I’d read countless medical malpractice depositions involving back surgeries that went wrong and had an appreciation that back problems had a high potential for serious longterm quality of life issues. The takeaway was to avoid any knife to my back, and so from the beginning, I knew I had to understand what was going on from a holistic point of view.

Continual questioning did not make the matter any better. My once-invincible yoga practice was now forever altered. I say that tongue-in-cheek, but the realization and process to physical downshifting overnight is to have a source of enjoyment be largely compromised. That news is never good. While I still had overall good health and all the good fortunes that I could be grateful for, the transition into attending to my back as a limitation (instead of a bendy thing of joy) had to be done with measure and calm. So I did what any modern human does, I took to the Internet.

Good grief. The more I read about the back, spine, L5s and S1s, the more pictures and diagrams and videos that I viewed, the more vertigo I got. The body is truly a code I can’t crack. Even most doctors can’t crack the back, and when reminded of my early legal beagle days and the harrowing back hacking that I read about in the medical malpractice depositions, a level of abject confusion overcame all noble intentions.

It crossed my mind a few times to blame the pain on something other than my physical limitations, and so, in these moments, the villain became yoga itself.

Never mind that up until the point of back arrest, I was still doing aggressive bending, grabbing my calves, sometimes a little higher up my leg, as I approached my fifth decade on this earth. Any rational person would tell you that’s simply unwise at that age, perhaps even reading this, you want to look away, like one would passing a car wreck on the highway. But so far, my body had played nicely and now I had to face that age could be a factor.

So I retreated. I did what I thought was the responsible thing and stopped attempting any pose that required the slightest bend. For five months, I laid off, yet my back didn’t get any better. In the mornings, I couldn’t get out of bed without pain; I bent down to pick up my shoes like an octogenarian, and the simple act of laughing, sneezing or coughing came with a thundering crash of lightning around the sway of my back that felt like an electrical jolt.

My MRI didn’t show anything that was near equal to the pain that I was experiencing: a slight disc bulge and some arthritis. But the torment that I felt seemed as though the spine had been cemented and then bulldozed. My doctor said never to do that when I showed him a picture of kapotasana, a deep backbend pose. Yet, strangely, my desire to return to that pose was one of the things that eventually healed me the most. Of course, it didn’t happen over night.

Related: Can You Be Too Flexible? Hypermobility, Explained

Edging into the dark behavior of disregarding my pain with what the doctor said to avoid happened incrementally, mostly due to fear and hyper-vigilance to avoid additional pain. Yet, in kapotasana, as I bent backwards and pushed through the pain, the remarkable result was that afterwards, it didn’t create more pain. In fact, it felt better. Not a lot better, but there was some relief the more I did the pose. This led me down another avenue of research. No longer did I back off of poses that I had previously steered clear of. They were not pain-free, but they were definitely, and inexplicably, minimizing the overall agony.

This new phase of empirical research arrived on the beginning of a different trip to India working with my teacher, R. Sharath Jois. Sharathji’s studied, careful assists in back bending allowed me to feel completely safe. As I released my fears, I drifted backwards as he placed my hands on my ankles through what had previously been an impossible proposition. When I left these practice days and did not suffer the same amount of pain, this spoke loudly: The back did not need to be shuttered.

Working with Sharathji gave me the confidence to hear and heal my body. Soon, I was no longer inadvertently adding to the stiffness, but working with what I had to re-engage that muscle movement that had been eschewed due to fear. In fact, laying off did nothing positive for my physical condition. By re-engaging, my pain had minimized by perhaps 10 to 20 percent, but the important note directed me down a different path of research: the mind.

When I was growing up, a neighbor down the street had a father who had a “nervous breakdown,” whatever that hushed term meant exactly. That was some time in the 70s and then, in the 80s, it seemed that no one talked about breakdowns anymore. Adults and people on television complained about ulcers, which didn’t carry a stigma and, therefore, had a higher acceptable decimal level and healthier national discussions around relief ensued, like better diets and exercise. In the 90s and onwards, people talked less about ulcers mainly because pharmaceuticals were zapping them to bits, but unfortunately, stress has never been completely eradicated. In fact, modern medicine has yet to dominate the will of the human body.

When we experience stress, the body will absorb it and find an outlet of some sort, be that a skin condition, through the gastrointestinal track, to depressing the mind, to list a few. No matter how hard we try, if stress remains, it will morph into and appear in different physical forms, leaving sufferers and the medical profession to shift into, and away from, evolving remedies and placating techniques, like fashion trends.

The ingenuity of ridding stress from our everyday life has exploded into a profitable industry of stress reducing diets, lifestyles, teas, exercises, books, spas, body oils, you name it. Though I was too young to have brushes with nervous breakdowns or ulcers, I have had IBS, or irritable bowel syndrome, which is most likely a descendent of the ulcer, as it deals with inexplicable digestive issues. Not to mention, I’ve experienced back pain that does not equal the register of results found on an MRI; mysterious aches and pains, I’m now convinced were stress-related. Ultimately, I figured whatever attempts I made to rid the body of stress, the body had the last word.

Related: The Simple Solution to End Chronic Pain

Unbeknownst to me, this budding hypothesis came prepackaged and delivered on a plate following a dinner with New York friends who have high-stress professions. They told me about the late John Sarno, MD, a professor of Rehabilitation Medicine at New York University School of Medicine and physician who diagnosed “tension myositis syndrome” (TMS), a psychosomatic illness which caused chronic back, neck and limb pain.

During his nearly 50-year-career at NYU, Sarno’s mission was to educate patients on the psychological and emotional aspects of their pain and symptoms, which are an unconscious “distraction” that represses unconscious emotional issues. Sarno believed that the mind will try to repress emotions that the unconscious can’t, thus, funneling pain to the physical body. When the stress is seen as what it is, the symptoms serve no purpose and (miraculously) go away. It’s like a sneaky deal the body makes with the mind.

On a long plane ride home from London to LA, I read Sarno’s book Mind Over Back Pain and decided to test out some of his theories. Namely, I talked to my body differently. For example, I decided that when I coughed, I wouldn’t wince in pain. Miraculously, the pain went away. Similarly, I had been bending over in a protective stance and stopped doing that. These tricks were attempted and preformed successfully in one go. There was no doubt that my back pain was partly, if not mostly, due to some emotional pain that I was experiencing at the time.

Yoga as the villain did not last long either—although, would I have had the back problems if I didn’t do crazy backbends? I can’t answer that but I do know that the remedy was to not fear pain serving as a distractor and not add tension. The moment that I understood how to communicate with my body and how to value or discard certain tension causing thoughts, the pain lessened.

Two years later, I continue to feel tightness in my back, but on a scale of one to 10, it’s a one, whereas before it was a nine. I can live with a one, and I continue to work in the fashion Sarno wisely advocated. I also take care to live a balanced, low-stress life when possible and try not to hold onto tension. Mostly, stress cannot be avoided for me right now as I’m not a fully realized person, but I do hope that my research on this earth continues to lend itself to breakthroughs.

Yoga and bending backwards has led me down an unimaginable series of questions and answers. Working through the pain got me to the other side, and now my back is again more flexible. Age is another inevitable kink. How long can the back reverse its course away from gravity’s pull forward? I have no idea, but the combo platter of choice seems to be understanding where insidious stress hides in the body and not be an age denier. Somewhere in the middle is a full-meal deal where my body is stretched and strengthened and stress sustained and maintained as best as it can.

The spirit is undeniably strong and despite the common phrase “mind over matter,” in the long run, the mind does not triumph over body, but the indomitable spirit can. When we continue to do what we love and do it with care and consciousness, avoiding traps of fear by listening to the body, we can minimize creating a cycle of tension and fear.

The post My Life As an Ashtanga Student in Mysore: Healing Back Pain with Yoga appeared first on Sonima.

The Point of the Practice

Needle phobes are likely familiar with acupuncture’s main tool: fine, disposable needles no thicker than a few strands of hair. Practitioners use them to stimulate so-called acupoints all over the body, says Alexandra Vander Baan, a doctor of acupuncture, and owner of Yintuition Wellness in Boston, Massachusetts. These acupoints, which total 361 across the skin’s surface according to the WHO Standard Acupuncture Point Locations in the Western Pacific Region, are used to bring energy back throughout the body where it might be imbalanced.

Break a bone or burst an appendix, there’s no better choice than allopathic (or mainstream) medicine, says Vander Baan. But when it comes to some common conditions such as respiratory diseases, digestive diseases, and chronic pain, acupuncture is incredibly effective—and arguably more successful in delivering results, she says. A key difference between conventional medicine and a holistic treatment like acupuncture is that the latter addresses those interconnected systems of the body, plus the underlying causes of concerns, including inflammation or hormonal imbalances, she says. “Today, the overwhelming majority of symptoms we experience are systemic—affecting the whole body, not just a single organ or tissue,” she adds.

Related: The Magic of Dry Needling for Pain Relief

How does acupuncture work? In a typical session, a patient will discuss their concerns with the acupuncturist who will then insert needles in strategic areas of the body, depending on the patient’s needs. Once the needles are in place, the patient will continue to lie comfortably on the treatment table for anywhere from five minutes to an hour. Most people report to feel very relaxed during treatment, and generally experience no discomfort from the needles. Research suggests acupuncture encourages the body to release feel-good endorphins. Other studies find the practice improves circulation, which can help the body repair itself and mitigate both pain and perception of pain, says Vander Baan. More studies are needed on the topic.

While some science suggests acupuncture can fend off low back pain or headaches, other research shows that these outcomes are minimal—nothing more than a placebo effect. However, many current clinical guidelines for chronic pain, chemotherapy, anxiety and depression, and labor pain do feature acupuncture as a recommended treatment, and that means something, Vander Baan says. The World Health Organization even lists 28 different medical conditions that can be treated, at least in part, by acupuncture. The National Institutes of Health agrees, stating that the needles are a therapeutic intervention for everything from menstrual cramps to nausea brought about by pregnancy or chemotherapy.

Is Acupuncture Worth Trying?

Acupuncture’s devotees range from dedicated yogis and weekend warriors to athletes and stressed-out 9-to-5ers. The clientele is diverse because so, too, are the uses for acupuncture. Fatigue, anxiety, headaches, low back pain, constipation—all of these can be signs of an underlying imbalance in your body, Vander Baan says. “One of the advantages of the TCM is that we can detect and treat sub-clinical symptoms before they become full-blown medical conditions,” she says.

Being receptive to the medicine is key to success. “This isn’t to say those who ‘don’t believe in it’ won’t benefit,” says Vander Baan. But the placebo effect plays a role in all therapeutic interventions—not just acupuncture, she says. One 2014 study published in Science Translational Medicine found that half of a migraine drug’s power came from simply thinking it would work, even when people were taking a placebo. In addition to embracing positive results, it’s important to keep your overall well-being in check, too. Those who take an active role in their health will likely see the most boons from the practice. After all, a healthy diet and lifestyle help support and sustain progress, Vander Baan says.

Paying for the Pinch

Complementary treatments like acupuncture used to be far from complimentary. Data from the 2007 National Health Interview Survey found that 83 million Americans spent $33.9 million on alternative medicine in just one year. Ouch. But Vander Baan says that today she sees more insurance companies footing the bill for time on the table.

“The landscape of insurance coverage is changing because of an increasing demand for complementary therapies,” she says. In fact, research from consumer insights firm Nielson found millennials are more likely to use acupuncture and herbal remedies than other generations. An estimated 3 million Americans have signed up for acupuncture, especially since emerging research has demonstrated it’s safe and cost-effective. And more are welcome to try it: About 54 million Americans are eligible for acupuncture covered by the Affordable Care Act, reports the Journal of Integrative Medicine, published in 2014.

Not sure if you’re covered? Ask your insurance provider, and get the scoop (here’s a list of go-to questions to ask) before you book an appointment. Some companies may cover your session if you have a prescription and the treatment is pre-approved, or only if you go to a doctor in-network. If you’re not covered, you’re looking at fees from $60 to $120 per session, according to AcuFinder.com. Also worth noting: If the practice works for you, it could help you cut costs down the road if you can avoid other expensive and invasive interventions (i.e., surgeries or long-term prescriptions), Vander Baan says. Find a trained acupuncturist through the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine.

The post A Closer Look at How Acupuncture Works appeared first on Sonima.

“The rear-end should act as support for the entire body and as a shock absorber for stress during exercise, but if it’s too weak, other parts of the body take up the slack and it often causes injury,” says Chris Kolba, Ph.D., a physical therapist who specializes in orthopedic and sports medicine at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

Sitting is a great way to weaken those butt muscles, the gluteus maximus and gluteus medius. Kolba calls the condition that results “dormant butt syndrome.” Stuart McGill, Ph.D., the director of the Spine Biomechanics Laboratory at Waterloo University, describes it as “gluteal amnesia” because people afflicted with it seem to “forget” to use their glutes when they perform tasks like squatting or hinging at the hips. Whatever you want to call it, when the glutes are effectively out to lunch, a host of extra strain winds up on the hamstrings and lower back. That can kick off a vicious cycle that leads to chronic back pain.

Related: Understanding the Source of Back Pain

McGill’s research has conclusively shown that pain, whether it stems from the back or the hips (another common trouble spot), inhibits the glutes. When the glutes are restricted somehow, more stress winds up on the back. You end up in a chicken-or-egg situation where it’s no longer clear whether the back pain is shutting down the glutes or vice versa. What is clear is that the two issues often go together.

The good news? McGill’s work also shows that when someone manages to get his or her glutes back in working order, the pain they had experienced in their lower back subsides or disappears entirely. Follow his three steps below to unlock your buttocks’ full potential and live a more pain-free life.

Step 1: Rebuild the mind-muscle connection.

Try this simple technique to check whether you’re still in touch with your bottom half. Lie back on the floor and place your hands underneath each of your butt cheeks. Take turns contracting each of your glutes. Your hands are there to notice if those muscles are indeed firing. This may feel a bit silly, but it serves an important purpose. “It’s getting your brain to connect to the muscle,” McGill says.

McGill cautions that this is a self-exam and corrective exercise, not a new way of life. “Some people think that they should walk around with their bottoms clenched all the time. But that’s just silly,” McGill says. “Your glutes are a very phasic muscle, you should use them only as you need.”

Step 2: Get your glutes back in business.

During his more than three decades of research on back pain, McGill tested several many different exercises to see how they affected the glutes. Over and over again, the two moves he found to be the most effective at getting the glutes to work well within a person’s daily movement patterns were clamshells and glute bridges. He suggests performing 3 sets of 10 reps of each move at least once per day. (McGill compiled these exercises and dozens of others in his new book Back Mechanic, a guide to self-assessments you can use to identify and solve your own back pain.)

Clamshells

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Glute Bridge

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Lie on your back with your knees bent and your feet flat on the floor. Place your hands under your butt to feel its engagement, then squeeze the cheeks as if you were trying to hold a coin between them. Your goal is for the pelvis to remain neutral and not tilt in any way. From there, bridge up, using your butt to drive the movement. The bridge activates the gluteus maximus, the larger muscle that makes up the bulk of your rear.

Step 3: Keep your body—and your backside—more active throughout the day.

Sonima.com’s pain and anatomy advisor, Pete Egoscue, agrees that inhibited glutes can wreak havoc all over a person’s body. “The idea that a person’s glutes are going to suffer from all of that sitting is correct,” says the creator of the Egoscue Method. So while you’ve probably heard this before, remember you should try to avoid sitting for prolonged periods. When you’re at work, get up and take a break every 20 to 30 minutes. Consider a standing desk—they’ve become a lot more affordable in recent years. Egoscue also has two exercises he suggests people perform to give their booty an occasional wake-up call throughout the day.

Rear-Leg Knee Bends

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Stand up and take one step forward with your right foot. Make sure your feet are hip-width apart and pointing straight ahead (or as close to straight as you can manage). Keeping your torso vertical, bend the knee of your left (rear) leg , then straighten it. When you straighten your rear leg, focus on feeling the line of energy from your butt down to your heel on the ground. If you place your hand on your butt, you should be able to feel your glutes contract as you do this. Perform 10 reps on each side.

Three-Position Toe Raises

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Stand with your big toes touching, your right heel pointing at 5 o’clock and your left heel pointing at 7 o’clock. Engage your quadriceps (the big muscles in the front of your thighs) and rise up onto the balls of your feet then lower. Keep your toes pressed against the floor and focus on keeping the quads tight as you move up and down. You should be able to feel the muscles of your upper thighs and glutes flexing as you rise. Do 10 reps.

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Then switch it up so that your heels touch and your toes are pointing outward (toes pointing to 1 o’clock and 11 o’clock). You should feel even more glute engagement along with a bit more sensation in your quads as you perform 10 more reps in this second variation.

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Lastly, stand with your feet pointing straight ahead and roughly hip-distance apart. Repeat the toe-raise 10 more times, keeping your quads engaged and pelvis neutral (not tilted forward or backward).

The post The Surprising Muscle Weakness Linked to Back Pain appeared first on Sonima.

The greatest benefits of yoga lie in its ability to improve mental well-being. That said, it’s no coincidence that the practice also brings considerable physical benefit, and has been embraced in modern society as a calisthenic workout. In this video featuring John Campbell, Ph.D., an Ashtanga yoga teacher and associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, you’ll be taken through a series of standing postures as Campbell expresses the importance of each physical and subtle element of the pose. One of the central components of the body’s adaptation to healthier forms, and the shedding of habitual patterns that cause pain, lies in the power of the breath, which as Campbell says, becomes the axis point for the body.

Related: The Importance of Breathing in Yoga

The post The Powerful Ways Yoga Can Help with Posture appeared first on Sonima.

The following is a series of five exercises that work the entirety of the abdominal wall, including the transverse abdominis and obliques. These exercises are meant to be done one after another, building intense stamina in the core. This series can be included at any point during your exercise routine.

Single-Leg Stretch

Curl head, neck and shoulders off the mat, pull one knee into your chest extend the opposite leg.

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Double Leg Stretch

Curl head, neck, and shoulders off the mat. Hold onto your shins and pull legs into chest.

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Scissors

Curl head, neck, and shoulders off mat and extend both legs straight in a V shape. Hold the back of the front leg with both hands.

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Lower and Lift

Bring the hands behind the head. Extend the legs, and curl head, neck, and shoulders off the mat.

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Crisscross

Start with your legs in table top. Curl the head, neck, and shoulders off the mat.

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Switch sides. Keep the elbows wide, and make sure you are twisting from the waist. Repeat 20 times to both sides.

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Photos by Hailey Wist

The post A Pilates Sequence to Sculpt Your Abs from All Angles appeared first on Sonima.

Consider that for every step you take during a run—about 150 to 170 per minute on average—your body’s “internal active forces” (the sum of all your muscles contracting and expanding) are far greater than the force of the impact your body feels from striking the ground. How much greater? Nigg says those internal forces are 500 percent more powerful.

But Nigg also says that, for the most part, those forces fall within an “acceptable range.” They aren’t a problem unless they overload a particular structure. For example, your calves may work extra hard during an activity if your ankles are weak.

Related: A Yoga Sequence to Balance the Heart 

One way to think of it is to imagine your body is a car. There’s a strong, durable frame (your bones) supported by shock absorbers (your muscles, tendons and ligaments). If everything is working together, you can cover mile after mile without any problems. But if a shock fails, your car will rattle with every bump or pothole you hit. If this goes on long enough, you can seriously damage the vehicle, and may ultimately need to put it in park til it’s fixed.

If you want to keep your “car” running, test if your shock absorbers are working. Johnny Gillespie, a movement teacher and developer of the Balanced Athlete method, recommends doing a few small jumps up and down.

“If it hurts when I jump up and down, and I can’t do it,” Gillespie says, “that tells me that the springs in my feet don’t really work. When I’m running, then, all of those muscles aren’t doing their jobs. They’re basically just along for the ride.”

If your shock absorbers are out to lunch, Gillespie says you can get your body back into working order with a short maintenance routine consisting of a few simple moves. Perform the following six yoga-inspired exercises before your next run, aiming to hold each pose for 30 seconds unless otherwise marked. Doing them in front of a mirror will allow you to notice important form pointers, so you can make any necessary adjustments. With practice, you should notice that you’re able to run taller, breathe freer, and run more efficiently.

Heel Lifts

When your toes are pointing downward and your heels are up, the action is called plantar flexion. While you’d think that runners would be pretty good at this motion—after all, a runner’s foot does this on every step during a run—Gillespie says that many struggle with it for a simple reason.

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“When we run we plantar flex, but not to the degree you need to keep the ankle and other muscles below the knee strong enough to maintain structural integrity,” Gillespie says. “In many ways, the foot is almost relaxed when running, so you don’t wind up working through the full range of motion for those muscles.”

That’s bad news because even a little weakness below the knee can make your entire system less efficient. A recent study  of 26 people found that when people had weaker ankles, other bigger muscles in their lower legs had to work harder to compensate.

Do the move: Stand barefoot with your feet shoulder-width apart. Come up to your tiptoes, then back down. Repeat the up and down motion a few times until you feel stable at the top of the movement (when your heels are farthest from the ground), and then try to hold for 30 seconds.

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Watch out for: Your feet rolling to the outside, which is common among people with high arches. Try not cave inward or roll outward. Instead aim to carry your weight evenly across your feet—just like you would if you were coming up onto the balls of your feet in a Chair Pose.

Gentle Jumps

“People have this idea that impact is bad,” Gillespie says. “But in fact, without impact our bones get brittle. Our bones respond to impact by maintaining their strength.” Nigg agrees with Gillespie, who continues, “The problem is we need to learn how to handle impact. What you’re doing with this move is starting to learn how to absorb shock.”

Another point here is to work through the opposite of plantar flexion—the heel-down, toes-up action called dorsiflexion. This builds muscles in the feet and ankles that Gillespie likens to springs that both absorb shock and propel you forward. “If you allow your ankle to dorsiflex, it’s almost as if you’re allowing the springs in the lower part of your body to send energy back up the structure, and as a result run way more efficiently.”

Do the move: Stand barefoot with your feet shoulder-width apart. Jump up and down gently. When you land, allow your heels to gently touch the ground. This may not feel natural at first since many people try to run solely on the balls of their feet so their heels don’t feel the impact. Make sure your heels land softly with each hop, performing up to 10 total.

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Watch out for: Your knees caving inward and knocking together—a big no-no. Also, Gillespie emphasizes that your landing from these jumps should be gentle, as if your heels want to give the ground a light kiss.

Related: A Simple Solution to Heal Plantar Fasciitis

The Downhill Skier

Here the goal is to work on hinging the three major joints involved in running—the hips, knees and ankles—all at once. You’re teaching them to move in sync. “What you’re doing is getting those hinge joints to not only start mobilizing but stabilizing as they’re staying in line with one another,” Gillespie says. “It’s very linear, but running is a very linear activity.”

Do the move: Stand with your feet parallel and hip-width apart, and your toes pointing straight ahead. Bend at the knees while hinging backward at your hips, lowering your torso as far downward as you can while keeping your spine upright. Keep your knees in line with your toes, and hold the position.

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Watch out for: Check to see that your knees are tracking with your toes and not collapsing inward on one side or the other.

T-Pose with Arm Series

“After people do this one, they find that their whole upper spine feels extended,” Gillespie says. “They feel taller, their posture is better, and they can breathe deeper.”
Do the move: Bring your feet together and stand up straight. Straighten and lift your arms to the sides with your palms down, so that your body forms a “T.” Hold that position for 30 seconds up to a minute, stopping if you feel any numbness or tingling in your arms. (Gillespie says a lot of people find this position surprisingly difficult.)

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If you’re still feeling good after that time, turn your palms upward. Changing the position of your hands from facing downward to upward should help you differentiate between the muscles in your upper arm and your lower arm. Continue to hold. Now spread your fingers and keep holding. Notice how each adjustment changes the sensation in your body. You might find yourself feeling a bit taller, with your collarbones a bit broader. If at any point you experience a sensation akin to pain, release your arms downward.

Watch out for: Movement anywhere other than from your elbows downward during each adjustment in the series. When you rotate your hands, the whole motion should be contained within your lower arms. The rest of your body should be stable.

Single-Leg Balance

“Whenever I give a presentation to a group of people, I ask them to lift one leg and just stand there,” Gillespie says. “The number of people who can’t just balance on one leg is absolutely catastrophic.”

While that might sound dramatic, consider that one of the leading killers  of people aged 65 and older is falling. More than 2.5 million people wind up in emergency rooms every year due to falls, and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a large number of these falls are simply due to lower body weakness or poor balance. To Gillespie, being unable to stand on one leg is a glimpse into this unfortunate future.

In regards to running, all of the weight of your body plus the impact forces of the ground must be supported by a single leg. How roadworthy is that leg if it can’t even keep your bodyweight stable for half of a minute?

Do the move: Lift one leg off the ground and elevate it until your knee reaches hip height. Now just stand there, balancing on one leg, aiming for 30 seconds, working your way up to a minute. Then lower the leg and repeat on the other side.

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Watch out for: Your knee drifting downward. Try to keep it elevated enough so that it’s in line with your hip. The mirror will be helpful throughout this pose—it should be easier to find your balance when you’re getting immediate feedback from your reflection. If you really have the hang of things, you can close your eyes as you hold.

Modified Dancer Pose

The quad stretch is of course helpful, but Gillespie says a lot of the benefit of this pose comes in the standing leg. “By placing the arm behind the back, it allows you to more easily work on broadening the hip in your supporting leg, improving it’s mobility and stability,” Gillespie says. “For a lot of runners, this pose will be tough because they aren’t all that stabile or mobile in their hips. And it shows up in the form of IT Band issues and Piriformis Syndrome,” two common runner afflictions.

Do the move: Lift your right leg behind you and grab ahold of your foot with your right hand. Take your left hand and wrap it behind you, so that your left forearm sits behind your lower back, keeping it and your hips square. Kick up and back with your right foot against your hand, and fold forward by hinging at the hips. You should feel a stretch throughout your right quad, and also get a lot of sensation in the hip and hamstring on your supporting leg. Hold for 30 seconds, then switch sides.

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Watch out for: The hip of your elevated leg drifting backward. Having your forearm behind your low back should keep you square, but if you see something fall out of alignment, use that arm to give your hips a gentle nudge.

Photos by Hailey Wist

The post 6 Yoga-Inspired Moves to Help You Run Injury-Free appeared first on Sonima.

I turned to Rolfing hoping to find relief, not knowing much about the practice, except that the process might be as emotionally painful as it would be physically. For nearly two hours, Teah Field, a longtime Rolfer and Acro Yoga practitioner, used hands-on techniques I’d never felt before to work out terribly uncomfortable kinks in my calves and back—many of which I had no knowledge of prior to her touch. Surprisingly, she didn’t even contact my hip. She did, however, make me cry. And two days later, my hip felt better than it had in years; apparently stored trauma in my calves and feet from my dance days was affecting my hips, and pain continued to emanate from there.

Rolfing is a bodywork modality created between the 1940s and 70s, by Ida Rolf, a groundbreaking biochemist who devoted her life to understanding one fundamental question: “What conditions must be fulfilled in order for the human body-structure to be organized and integrated in gravity so that the whole person can function in the most optimal and economical way?”

The method involves a technique called structural integration, which is according to Eric Jacobson, Ph.D., a certified advanced Rolfer, “a system of manual therapy and sensorimotor education that aims to improve human biomechanical functioning as a whole rather than to treat particular symptoms.” In other words, it’s a hands-on treatment that is distinct from massage in its focus on releasing fascia—the soft tissue surrounding muscles—with the aims to improve postural alignment and reduce pain. In the tradition of Ida Rolf, the main question that Jacobson and other practitioners seek to address is: How well is the body working in relationship to gravity?

Related: A Simple Solution to Heal Plantar Fasciitis

All bodies, of course, exist under the force of gravity, while they also operate according to individual energy fields. The essential goal of Rolfing says Jacobson in his 2011 article on Rolfing, is achieved by “aligning their physical structure around the vertical vector that gravity defines.” The physical manipulation techniques help realign the body—down to the fascia and joints—in a way that “flows” in tandem with gravity’s pull. According to Jacobson, “Dr. Rolf did also speculate that when the physical body was aligned with gravity there might be an integration of the individual’s ‘energy field’ with gravity,” but that notion, he continues, “was speculative. She never put that forth as an essential element of her theory or method.” Still, many contemporary Rolfers integrate that theory into their work and hold it as belief.

Ida Rolf was heavily influenced by osteopathic medicine, a bodywork modality that sees restrictions of the musculoskeletal system as the root of most disease. This non-invasive form of medicine is drug-free and relies on manipulations that seek to strengthen and treat the framework of the body. Osteopathy is a holistic therapy established in the late 19^th century that not only addresses the ‘problem’ area, but seeks to create overall body balance and free circulation. The practice of osteopathy uses manipulation of the tissue layers to release the bones, whereas in Rolfing, says Jacobson, “we manipulate the fascia instead of the bones, and change the alignment of the bones by changing the tension in the fascia.” Osteopathy, says Jacobson, “is a medical treatment for specific problems, with medical professionals licensed to practice specific methods. Rolfing is not a medical treatment.”

The typical Rolfing protocol involves a series of sessions in which the therapist works to fix the body’s various misalignments as well as the particular pain problem the client wants addressed. When the body is experiencing pain, says Field, “we recognize that the body is going to be full of compensatory misalignments.” Indeed, that’s what I experienced in the days after my session: as if by some miraculous stroke, I could attain yogic postures and use parts of my feet and legs that had previously eluded me.

Related: How to Fix Chronic Knee Pain

Rolfing is meant to produce long-term changes in the biomechanics of the body. “In order to do that we have to work with people at least ten times. It doesn’t do everything possible, but that’s the minimum. If there is anything chronic, it’s probably part of the whole body system,” says Jacobson.

Research on Rolfing is on the rise, though still relatively sparse. A recent study conducted in Sao Paulo, suggested that both acupuncture and Rolfing used both in tandem and individually proved beneficial in the treatment of fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. Though Paula Stall’s article seems to concur with these findings, the limitations of the study deem these findings merely suggestive.

There are still gaps in understanding contraindications to getting Rolfed. In a recent study conducted at Stanford School of Medicine on the effects of Rolfing for children with Cerebral Palsy, the average outcome was net positive, though, the understanding of long term risk in development of certain motor skills is still inconclusive. The study shows essentially no objective effects, though parents reported improvements. It seems that in the Rolfing community the only red flags are osteoporosis and rheumatoid arthritis, though neither are complete contraindications, merely conditions that need to be tended to with care. Research is urgently needed to determine “severe” cases, and to further understand what objective effects structural integration can have on various other conditions. Marcelo Coutinho, an advanced certified Rolfer at Village Rolfing in NYC told me that he’s had clients “who are over 90 years old and I had babies of 8 months.”

In spite of its profound ability to notice and realign even slight imbalances in the biomechanics of the body, Field said that she often encounters clients who have had longtime aversion to Rolfing due to its reputation for being severely painful. In Eastern practices, Field said, “there is an understanding that if somebody palpates your body or pushes on an area of trauma or stagnation it’s just going to be painful, and that’s just how it is.” Field is one of many practitioners who relates to the bodywork as not only deeply physical but an energetic healing practice like Reiki and Thai massage. For her, the practice of realigning the body is a deeply inspiring one: “It’s so beautiful to understand that we have the potential, even at 70 years old, to feel like a new person because we are correcting a misalignment that’s causing tremendous discomfort, or so many blockages in the body.”

Even for the less spiritually inclined, Rolfing provides some profound effects. As research increases, we’re becoming more and more aware of how, objectively, Rolfing might change the way the medical world treats physical misalignments in patients, and what all possible benefits are. And while I still have work to do in the realignment of my femur and my anklebones, I now look down at the bruises on my calves and smile; the body’s architecture is beautiful, and now my work is to find flow between my energy and the earth’s gravitational pull.

The post How Does Rolfing Work to Relieve Pain? appeared first on Sonima.

“It’s our most important skeletal muscle,” says Jo Ann Staugaard-Jones, an advanced Pilates and Hatha yoga instructor and author of The Vital Psoas Muscle: Connecting Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Well-Being. “The psoas is the only muscle connecting the spine to the legs, so it serves as the sole link between the upper and lower extremities.” Even though you’ve never seen it, the psoas muscle creates movement and flow throughout the body, constantly contracting and releasing.

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Just like other muscles, the psoas can grow stronger or weaker, depending on your lifestyle. Sitting all day is a killer, as one might expect. In today’s sedentary society, Staugaard-Jones says the average person spends five to 11 hours a day sitting, hastening muscle atrophy. Between computer use, driving, flying, reading, watching TV, and sitting at a table to eat or write, we are constantly placing our bodies in a relaxed hip flexion position, with the full weight of the torso hovering on top and the lower extremities inactive. Such a position can inhibit circulation, muscle conditioning, and nerve response, leading to lower back pain, sciatica, and poor posture.

“If you sit for a good portion of the day,” Staugaard-Jones warns, “chances are your psoas is tight.” Pain isn’t always a symptom, but it can be. “If a patient complains of chronic, dull, bilateral pain in their lower back and groin, that’s a big clue that their psoas needs relaxing and stretching.” They may also feel discomfort in their hip sockets, glutes, or sacroiliac joints in the back of the pelvis.

Another, more surprising, cause of psoas pain may be emotional trauma. The psoas is known as “the fight or flight muscle” because when the body or mind become stressed, the psoas tightens and contracts in a primal response designed to protect us from harm. Thousands of years ago, an approaching predator would cause our psoas to instinctively shrink and contract, reducing us to as small a target as possible. Today, the trigger could be a divorce, job loss, losing a friend or family member, or just the general stress of life.

Related: 4 Strategies for Staying Calm in Stressful Moments

In some situations, strengthening moves like lunges, windmills, and Boat Pose can help, but often a painful psoas first needs stretching and rest, not exercise. The following three moves will help relax and stabilize the psoas, promote proper posture, ease pain and help break the fight or flight cycle.

Constructive rest position, or CRP, is an incredibly effective, and relatively easy, way of releasing a tight psoas; you essentially lie down and let gravity do the work. (If you like Corpse Pose, you’ll love CRP.) Mental imagery intensifies the process. Begin by lying face-up on a yoga mat on the floor or another firm, flat surface. Knees should be bent and resting against each other; feet are flat on the floor, hip-width apart (or slightly wider if that’s more comfortable). Arms can be relaxed alongside you in classic Savasana pose. Then, have someone read the following prompts to you (or visit Staugaard-Jones’ website, where she narrates the CRP):

Close your eyes and imagine a current of energy traveling down your spine, looping up between your legs, traveling up the front of the body and back down the spine again. Inhale as the energy flows downward; exhale as it moves up. Feel your head melting into the ground. Imagine your knees are draped over a hanger suspended from above, thighs hanging on one side, lower legs on the other. Next, picture a small waterfall trickling down your thigh, first from the knees into the hip sockets, and then down the skins to the ankles. Feel as if your eye, hips, and feet are relaxing in calm pools of water.

Slowly repeat this imagery for 10 minutes. By the end, your femurs will relax in their corresponding hip sockets, free from the hip flexors’ grip, and your spine will follow its natural curves. Both improvements are excellent for releasing the psoas. Roll to one side and bring yourself to a sitting position (rather than sitting straight up, which will compromise your new alignment.)

Half Bridge Pose stretches out the hips and low back. Begin in the same position as with CRP, feet hip-width apart. Position both arms along the sides of your body, palms down, fingers reaching toward heels. Press your arms and feet into the floor, exhale and lift your pelvis, pushing it towards the ceiling. Keep your thighs parallel to one another and your pelvis in line with your knees. (If this position hurts your neck or upper back, place a folded towel underneath.) If your hips are high enough, you may be able to clasp your hands underneath and bring the shoulder blades closer together. Hold for 30 seconds to one minute, then slowly release as you exhale.

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Hint: If this pose feels too challenging, place a yoga block beneath the base of your spine for added support and stress relief.

Warrior I and II poses strengthen, stretch, and stabilize the psoas; like all standing poses, they teach correct alignment and improve circulation and joint mobility. Watch this video tutorial to learn the foundations of Warrior postures. To practice, begin standing up, facing forward. Take a large step back (three to four feet) with your right leg, keeping hips facing forward. Your right foot will be turned out slightly. Pressing the outer edge of your right foot into the ground, bend the front (left) knee directly over the left ankle. Your weight should be evenly distributed between both legs. Hands can rest on your hips, or you can raise your arms overhead. (Individuals with untreated high blood pressure should not raise their arms in this pose.). Breathe in and out for 30 seconds to a minute. Return to standing and repeat on the other side.

Transition to Warrior II: While in Warrior I (bent left leg in front and right leg in back), keep your gaze forward while your body turns to the right. Your right arm will reach straight behind you, parallel to the floor, palm down; left arm extends straight ahead. Your back toes may naturally move out a bit to help open the hips. Breathe in and out for 30 seconds to a minute. Return to standing and repeat on the other side.

Hint: Concentrate on breathing; holding your breath will create tension and limit the stretch.

The post The Muscle You’ve Never Heard of But Need to Know appeared first on Sonima.

Draping yourself over a roller and rocking away tension in your glutes, traps, or wherever feels good in the moment and long after, according to Hitzmann. By gently applying pressure, such as your own body weight, to target areas through rolling, you increase circulation to those body parts. Old cells are flushed out and the body becomes more hydrated. The fascia—a cobweb-like material wrapping around and connecting all muscles—becomes more pliant, causing muscles to glide past one another rather than tighten and knot up. Any tension you’ve been feeling (like tight quads after a run or stiff shoulders after a long workweek) can disappear. Suddenly, you have a lot more range of motion, which scientific research supports, including a 2014 study published in the Journal of Sport Rehabilitation and this 2013 report in the International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy.

Hitzmann suggests the following four exercises for anyone looking for full-body relief. She advises her Melt students to use a softer foam roller and to ease up if there is any pain. When rolling, spend no more than 10 minutes on any one body part and drink plenty of water to help get rid of toxins being released. Use your roller three times a week for best results.

1. Roll Your Spine
Sit on one end of the roller with knees bent, feet flat on the floor. Slowly lie back on the roller so it’s under your hips, spine, and the back of your head. Rest your forearms on the ground. Gently rock side to side, for 30 seconds, keeping your spine on the roller.

Reach your arms up to the ceiling. Keeping your arms straight, let the weight of your arms sink your shoulder blades around the roller. From this position, move your arms in a scissor-like motion (as your right arm moves up by your ear, your left swings down by your hip) in front of your body. Switch arms for one rep. Keep your core engaged and don’t let your ribs lift up. Do 3 reps.

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2. Stretch Your Spine and Chest
Sit on the floor with your knees bent and your feet flat. Lie back and rest your shoulder blades on the roller, holding your head with your hands, elbows wide to the side. Tuck your pelvis so the top of the pelvis and the bottom of the rib cage are heavy. Take a deep breath. As you exhale, keep your tuck and extend your ribs over the roller, moving only your upper back. Take 2 deep breaths. As you exhale, slowly side bend to the right, drawing your right elbow toward your right hip. Take 2 deep breaths. Repeat on the other side.

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3. Roll Your Hamstrings
Lie on the floor face-up with the roller under your upper thighs. Straighten your legs, keeping them relaxed. Slowly drag your legs together and apart like you’re doing jumping jacks. Do 5 reps. Straighten and relax your legs again, taking 2 deep breaths. Move the roller halfway down your thighs and repeat the technique. Then move it just above your knees and repeat.

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4. Roll Your Hips and Stretch Your Hip Flexors
Lie on the floor face-up with the roller under your hips (make sure that the roller isn’t in your lower back). Bring your knees in toward your chest so they are over your belly button. Keeping your knees together, slowly rock them to the right and to the left. Pause on the right side (about 1 o’clock) and make small circles with your knees. Make 3 clockwise and 3 counter-clockwise circles. Hold the position and take 2 deep breaths, then switch sides.

Return to center and interlace your hands over your left shin. Keeping your right knee bent, slowly lower the right foot to the floor, just under your knee. Make sure the right knee stays over your right foot. Press the right foot into the floor as you tuck your pelvis. This will stretch your hip flexors and the fronts of your thighs. Hold for 3 breaths. Switch sides and repeat.

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The post 4 Ways to Use a Foam Roller for Full-Body Relief appeared first on Sonima.

Whenever we are off balance and not vertically loaded, gravity works against us. The first law of my 8 Laws of Physical Health states: “Gravity is necessary for health. In order for gravity to exert a positive and dynamic influence on the body it must be vertically aligned in its postures.” When the body is not vertically aligned, it will be unbalanced, and gravity will exacerbate that imbalance. For instance, a right knee might get sore after jogging not because of the pounding or even because of the knee but rather because the hips are misaligned, putting more weight on the right side than the left.

Static back is a great way to use gravity to our advantage when we are off balance. This exercise, pictured above, involves laying on the floor with the feet and calves elevated on a chair, ottoman, or block. The backs of the knees should be flush with the edge of the block so the legs are supported and the muscles can release.

The first great aspect of static back is that it gets us down on the floor. I addressed the importance of this in my last article.

Many of you will notice that the first several times you get on the floor to do static back, you will feel stiff when you get back up. This stiffness is nothing to fear. Muscles naturally get stiff when they’ve been worked to some form of fatigue, and in getting up and down off the floor, you are exercising muscles you’ve not used in some while, and you’re engaging muscles that are newly symmetric. Keep going. Getting up and down will get easier, and eventually you’ll even find yourself looking for excuses to get up and down on the floor because it’s fun to do and no longer hurts.

But the main feat static back accomplishes is that it allows gravity to work with us to begin the balancing process. When you lie on your back and put your legs up on a block or chair, it causes a symmetrical right angle posture at the knee joint.

The position of the ankles, knees, hips, and shoulders (load joints) coupled with gravity at work on our torso causes the pelvis to rotate to a right angle. When that happens, the muscles of the back become bilaterally engaged. The back muscles can work unilaterally or bilaterally. When we’re off balance, they work unilaterally, which means that the muscles on one side of the spine are working harder than the muscles on the other side. That’s not optimal, but muscles have that capability and then position the joints accordingly. The goal is to get the body to where it’s working bilaterally, to where the muscles on either side of the spine are working equally hard. That’s what lying in static back does. The pelvis and knee rotate themselves using gravity and the stimulus of block, and that rotation causes those back muscles to bilaterally engage.

Incidentally, there is nothing static or passive about static back, even though it looks like folks are just lying on the ground. The truth is that static back is an incredibly active maneuver. Contrary to what some people might believe, achieving symmetry in our bodies does not require motion alone. It requires a symmetrical demand on the body, and that’s what static back is—a symmetrical stimulus that is engaging all the muscles of the muscular-skeletal system in a process of redistribution. There’s a lot more going on than just getting off your feet.

I encourage doing static back on a relatively hard surface. Your first few times, don’t lie down for more than 10 minutes, but how many times you want to do it a day is up to you. Trust your instincts and your body: It will let you know what feels good. By feeling good, I mean how the body feels during the settling process while you’re in static back. Initially, you’re going to feel stiffness when you get up and maybe even as you walk around the first few days, but that stiffness is the result of reengaging long dormant muscles. It can be alleviated with pelvic tilts or cats and dogs.

When you’re lying on your back, you will be inclined to put your arms in different positions because your body is asymmetrical, so one arm will have more range of motion than the other. That’s natural, but it’s important that you place both of your arms in the same position, and you should respond to the one with restricted range. If you can put your right arm out straight, but you can’t move your left arm too far from your hip, then bring that right arm in toward the hip. This imbalance will change relatively soon, and eventually you’ll have both arms out straight to the side, palms up.

Lastly, breathe. When our body is off balance, the nerve that activates our diaphragm, the phrenic nerve, gets impinged, and so the diaphragm doesn’t have enough room to work. We end up breathing with our shoulders. However, as you lie on your back, and the body lengthens out and the torso becomes symmetrical, the phrenic nerve opens up, allowing room in the abdominal cavity for the diaphragm to work. When you breathe in, your stomach will expand, and when you breathe out, it will collapse, which is exactly what it’s supposed to do.

Breathing and balance. So much of our health comes down to those two things. And there are few ways better to optimize both than lying in static back.

Known as the Father of Postural Therapy, Pete Egoscue has helped relieve thousands of people from their chronic pain, including many of the world’s leading athletes. For more information on Pete and any of his 25 clinics worldwide, go to egoscue.com.

The post The #1 Move to Do for a Pain-Free Body appeared first on Sonima.

“Comfort” as a noun can be a slippery word. One definition has it as “a condition of pleasurable physical ease or release from pain or stress,” but a second definition calls it “a condition of well-being.” But physical ease doesn’t necessarily correlate to well-being, and nowhere is this truer than in our modern world of sitting down.

The human organism is a developmental motion machine. That means even when growth plates are closed and the human is fully grown, growth still occurs. For a basic example of that, look no further than cell activity, which is in a constant state of birth, decay, death, and rebirth (also known as cellular division). All of this growth is predicated on movement, and the engine of that movement is the muscular-skeletal system. It provides the energy for all continued growth, and how we move determines how we continue to grow.

Enter sitting.

We are a sitting society. We sit to get from here to there (planes, trains, automobiles, bicycles); many of us sit for many hours at work; and when work is done and we go for a little entertainment, well, we usually sit some more, either for a movie, a sporting event, or a good book or TV show at home. Almost all of that sitting is done in a couch or chair that rarely goes lower than twenty-four inches.

This is where we get into the confusion on the definition of “comfort.” When we sit in chairs all day long, we do provide a pleasurable physical ease and relief from stress. But we don’t provide comfort in the sense of well-being. In fact, just the opposite is true.

Because most of us never sit on the floor, most of us gradually lose our range of motion. Again, how we continue to grow is determined by the movement of our muscular-skeletal system, and if our muscles never tell our shoulder, hip, knee and ankle joints to go lower than those couches and chairs, those joints lose the ability to do just that, or at least lose the ability to do it easily and well. The muscles were designed to perform a full range of motion, with the four limbs moving in many directions. By limiting their motion, we limit their ability, and the initial sense of “comfort” we feel from sitting in a chair ultimately leads to a harmful discomfort in the sense of well-being.

We not only lose the ability to get up and down off the floor. Life, in many ways, becomes limited. The muscular-skeletal system is also the engine of all metabolic processes and rates. So when we limit our body’s ability to move, we also ultimately limit its ability to rapidly digest, we limit the strength of the immunity system, we limit the cognitive system to become as effective, and we hamper other bio-mechanical processes, such as bowel movements and menstrual cycles, all because of postural incongruity.

That’s right. So much of our basic health comes down to our posture. When researchers talk about a shortened life as is indicated by an inability to get up easily from the floor, what they’re really talking about is a reduction of the body’s metabolic rate and its loss of comfort in the “well-being” sense. Some attribute it to a loss of strength, but it’s not that at all. It’s a loss of the capability of the basic metabolism of the human organism because of habitually compromised posture.

And that loss of capability is a reflection of our habits. Our posture is simply a reflection of what we do each day, and if we have a habit of sitting only in couches and chairs and not working to realign our body, what we will see in the mirror is a compromised posture—a head that does not rest squarely atop the shoulders but rather juts forward, hips and knees that are not aligned above the ankles.

Aligned posture is about the shoulder joints, hip joints, knee joints and ankle joints correlating in a straight line, each set of joints directly above or below the others. That’s true comfort.

It is important to note that the body does not view stimulus as good or bad; it merely adapts to the stimulus it is provided and grows according to the habitual patterns of the host, many of which are formed unwittingly. Most of us sit in couches and chairs for years, simply unaware of the cumulative impact. There’s nothing wrong with couches and chairs, per se, and there’s nothing wrong with sitting in them, provided they’re not the only place we’re ever sitting, and provided that sitting in them is not all that we’re doing. We need to be mindful of all the human organism can do, which is significant and astounding, and we need to be doing it, often and regularly.

As stimulus is neither good nor bad, so, too, bodies are neither good nor bad. They’re just limited to varying degrees, depending on our habits, and the good news is those limits can be lifted rather quickly. As I said earlier, all growth is predicated on movement. So if our current movement is limiting our growth, then we need to change our movement to expand that growth. The body will respond. It always does. It’s smart. So any inability you have in getting up and down on the floor can be easily remedied. Thus, any diagnosis made from your ability to do so is, at best, impermanent; at worst, it is incomplete and even irresponsible.

For what you can do to start realigning your posture from all those couches and chairs, check out the video above.

There are some other quick things you can do every day. Before you stand up from a couch or chair, make sure your feet are parallel and pointing straight forward, not in or out. Then stand. Also, whenever you are moving, remind yourself to breathe. You may think you already do, but you’d be surprised how often people don’t breathe when they move; they usually breathe afterward. Lastly, here’s an exercise you can do easily twice a day. Go stand against a door or wall, making sure your feet and buttocks are pressed against the wall. Point your feet straight in front of you. That will feel odd because most of the time our feet are not pointed straight but rather to the side; it will probably feel like you’re pigeon-toed. Next, flex your thigh muscles, relax your abdomen, pull your shoulder blades back toward your spine, then lean your head against the wall. Hold that position for a couple of minutes, remembering to breathe. You’ll be amazed by the effect it has.

The more your body responds to its new range of motion, the more comfortable you will be in every sense of the word. In fact, begin today by expanding your range of motion, and you’ll be surprised at how quickly and dramatically all your function will improve.

And how comfortable you will feel.

Known as the father of postural therapy, Pete Egoscue has helped relieve thousands of people from their chronic pain, including many of the world’s leading athletes. For more information on Pete and any of his 25 clinics worldwide, go to egoscue.com.

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For years people have been trying to redesign workspaces to help alleviate pain associated with sitting for long hours at a desk. In spite of new chairs, desks, shoes, and keyboards, most 9-to-5 workers will suffer from back pain, carpal tunnel, stress, and/or headaches as a result of their workspace fatigue. In this video, join alignment expert Pete Egoscue in some simple stretches and techniques to avoid pain at the office.

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The causes of lower back pain can be elusive. Often pain is the result of years of improper movement due to postural misalignments in the body. In this video Pete Egoscue, founder of the Egoscue Method for stopping chronic pain and author of the book Pain Free, assesses one man’s lower back pain and shows how shoulder alignment and a concave curvature of the spine contribute to the issue. He then goes on to demonstrate a few simple movements that can help correct the spinal positioning and restore comfort in the body. Watch and see how the body adjusts instantly to this gentle conditioning.

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This gentle humor points to the fact that we talk smack about our bodies a lot, calling them messed up, not flexible, or falling apart. And then there are the “toos”: too short, too tall, too wide, too narrow, and so on. The problems with this are many. But mainly, it’s because evidence shows that your body is actually listening to you—and taking notes in the form of increased pain and stress.

Though once considered controversial, most physicians now acknowledge that the body and the brain are linked. Studies show that stress may make you more vulnerable to illness by increasing inflammation; good social relationships can promote cardiovascular health; and that the placebo effect—when inert “medicine” heals as much as active meds—is absolutely real. Physical pain is especially affected by our mindset. One meta-analysis published in the British Journal of Anesthesia, notes that studies have found that many things influence how we experience pain—from age to gender to cultural background. Another major determining factor is psychological negativity, including fear, anger, avoidance, and “catastrophizing,” thinking the worst is upon you. The research cites one doctor who told a patient his spine was “crumbling” to describe a degenerative disk; not a very healing image given what is known about the body-mind connection.

Slapping a negative label on a body part also means you’re dismissing it without really understanding it. Plus, “bad” implies it deserves punishment. Similar to when we harshly judge the people who bug us, we lose the subtleties in this dismissal and, often in that, the hope for improvement. “Note where you see parts of your body as being bad, and ask yourself if you’ve given up on that part, seeing no possibility of it getting better,” says Baxter Bell, M.D., a yoga teacher, acupuncturist, and physician.

We might shift how we perceive and experience our physical limitations and injuries simply by becoming more mindful.

We might shift how we perceive and experience our physical limitations and injuries simply by becoming more mindful. When Bell’s students use the B-word, he asks questions. “‘What do you mean by bad?’ ‘What’s going on?’ ‘When do you notice it?’ ‘What makes it feel better?'” he says. “Then we have something to work with.” He then often has students attune their awareness by focusing on that body part and asking themselves two questions: 1) “What does it really feel like—in a raw, naked, scientific way?” Maybe it’s restricted, tingling, or buzzing more than a blanket pain. And then: 2) “What are my additional thoughts and feelings about that?” What you notice about your body may surface emotions or beliefs about what those sensations mean about you as a person. He’s seen this process alone help people dramatically. “There’s the perception of pain and then thinking about pain—judgments and projections—they can happen very quickly,” Bell says. “When you observe pain without a story it’s usually not as bad as it seemed.”

We can also work on the language itself while still being authentic—no “My limber lumbar!” incantations needed. For example, Bell likes to say of his right knee, “It doesn’t operate the way I would like it to.” This, he says, “leaves it open to positive change.” It also allows more patience for, and acceptance of, the usually slow, sometimes frustrating journey to getting better. “When we declare and label things with our words, we often do not describe the process or allow for the potential of change,” says Devarshi Steven Hartman, founder of Pranotthan Yoga and the former dean of Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health’s School of Yoga. “I lived in an ashram for almost a decade. We never said anyone was ‘sick.’ We said we were ‘cleansing,’” he says. “As ridiculous as it may seem, ‘cleansing’ is more descriptive of the process and describes someone who is healing. ‘Sick’ is a declaration that’s final. So, to call our shoulder ‘bad,’ like it did something wrong and needs to be punished, is not accurate. To say we have a shoulder that is healing, or that requires special awareness at this time, is more accurate.”

Being conscious of the language you use to describe your body can even lead to something more profound than being more accepting of your elbow—or even possibly having it hurt less. “Putting negative labels on your body is just an overactive mind that has lost track of how to see things with heart,” says Judith Orloff, M.D., author of The Ecstasy of Surrender. “Saying wonderful things to your body is more than a linguistic issue. It is a deeply spiritual issue and the point is to learn to love your physical form and revere it.” Naughty knees, rebellious ankles, and all.

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