Enliven Your Spine, Part 1

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Enliven Your Spine, Part 1

When you think about your spine, it’s likely your awareness goes to your back.  Perhaps you visualize the bumpy projections of the vertebrae you feel if you lie down on a hard surface. But your spine has a front surface too. It’s composed of the bodies of your vertebrae. These are round and thick, each one cushioned above and below by discs. Your spine has depth–the front surfaces of the vertebral bodies project 1/4 to 1/3 of the way forward into your trunk (2/3 of the way inside your body from the front surface). Located just behind your vital organs, the front of your spine can be an emotionally vulnerable area…

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Lifting a Box

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Lifting a Box

Recently, coming home from a walk, I was confronted with eight heavy boxes stacked up at the base of  the steps to my house.  They were not my boxes, not my responsibility, and without going into all the details, carrying them up the steps was not my idea of fun.  I had walked a long time and was ready to rest.  It was beginning to rain, and these boxes that were not mine  would become a far worse inconvenience  were they to become drenched. So I schlepped them up the stairs, one by one…
 

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Posture, Joint Pain and Panettone

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Posture, Joint Pain and Panettone

Envision your body as a chemistry set enveloped in a casing (skin and fascia), supported by an internal scaffold (bones), and enlivened by a motor system (nerves and muscles).  Everything is interrelated through tubes and labyrinths of cobweb-like fascia. Bone, sinew and digestive juices all work together to make your day.  Or not. To further this idea, I’ll share an example from my own embarrassing recent history…

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Help for a swayback

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Help for a swayback

Recently a reader asked for help understanding her “swayback”, AKA lumbar hyperlordosis. She had been taught–as have many of you, I suspect—that the correction for exaggerated lumbar curve is to tuck the tailbone down as if aiming it at a point between the heels…

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Poor Posture: Arms Akimbo

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Poor Posture: Arms Akimbo

This post is a reply to a reader who expressed concern about her habit of standing with hands on hips.  Since the term, "arms akimbo," has been around since Chaucer’s day, I’m sure my correspondent is not alone in her curiosity about it. You can assume this posture in a variety of ways:  with the elbows thrust back and chest forward. or with the shoulders rolled forward and chest resting down and in.  Either of these positions can be varied further depending on the position of the neck and head.  The chin can be thrust forward or pulled back. Fingers may be spread, or fists closed.  Try on some of these options yourself and marvel at how expressive your body can be!

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Coughing and Your Core

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Coughing and Your Core

On page 110 my book, The New Rules of Posture, there’s a sidebar about coughing. I’ll quote it here, to save you the trouble of looking it up. “The relationship between your diaphragm, pelvic floor, and core support is graphically demonstrated in the act of coughing (or laughing for that matter). If you cough with your pelvis rolled back, you’ll feel a tendency to puff out your belly and bear down into your pelvic floor. If you cough while sitting in a slight forward pelvic tilt, you won’t feel the same pressure on your bladder…

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On Pilates and Core Strength

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On Pilates and Core Strength

As the author of The New Rules of Posture, you might think I’d be a paragon of deep abdominal core strength. Sadly, not true. In fact, shortly after the book was published I was beset by an embarrassing bout of low back pain—a sure sign of low toned abs. And this wasn’t the first such episode—I’d been plagued by a back that “went out” pretty regularly for 15 years. Because I’ve been a proponent and practitioner of Rolfing© Structural Integration, I continued to assume that the pain was due to misalignment, and that more structural bodywork was what I needed. But I also saw the occasional chiropractor…

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Finding Support from Your Sacrum

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Finding Support from Your Sacrum

Today’s blog entry attempts to answer a reader’s question about sitting support while also sharing something from my current class.

Shawn’s question was about lumbar support for sitting and why I recommend the Zackback sitting strategy that advocates sacral support instead. My reply to Shawn went something like this: For sitting in the car I like to work my sacrum back into the corner between the seat and backrest and then place the Bucky “Baxter” just behind my diaphragm

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