Principles of Natural Posture for
Health and Pain Relief
September 27, 2015
Story at-a-glance
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Chronic sitting is a risk factor for poor health, pain,
and early death. But HOW you sit may have a significant
impact on the risks of sitting
By sitting with feet planted on the floor, with your
pelvis and spine properly stacked and aligned, you can
take the stress and tension out of sitting and make
sitting into a beneficial physical activity
Three simple exercises that help you engage your core
and correct your posture are described
By Dr. Mercola
Most of our parents drilled into our heads the importance of
proper posture; yet modern day life causes us to frequently ignore
these great recommendations. What's worse, many of the
posture-correcting strategies our parents taught us turn out to be
wrong anyway.
Kathleen Porter, author of
Natural Posture for Pain Free Living, is an expert in
teaching the principles of posture, and she believes the majority of
pain experienced in the world is posture related.
While working as a massage therapist and yoga teacher in 1994,
she came across an article written by Jean Couch, in which she
discussed and described the skeletal alignment in groups of
indigenous people.
Intrigued, Kathleen began studying with Jean, and eventually
traveled through Indonesia, Southeast Asia, South America, and
northern Portugal, studying the posture of native peoples for
herself.
"As I learned from studying them and from Jean, I started
incorporating these principles more and more into my own life,
and then started teaching this to others.
I've written a couple of books. It has just been
absolutely transformational," she says.
"I gave up stretching. I haven't stretched in close to 20
years, yet I am more flexible and pain-free than when I was
working so hard at trying to be that way."
Turning Sitting into a Physical Activity
Sitting is the new
smoking. About 10,000 studies have now established that chronic
sitting is an independent risk factor for poor health and early
death. It can also be a significant factor in back, neck, and
sciatic pain.
I personally suffered from
back pain for many years. None of the treatments I tried made
any significant difference — until I began to restrict my sitting to
less than an hour per day. Then the pain suddenly disappeared.
Below are two videos I did for our 18th anniversary exercise
update that show my solution to completely resolve my back pain, and
I do mean 100 percent. My stand-up desk is the first video and my
daily beach walks that help me log about 63 miles a week is the
second.
How You Sit Makes a Difference
Although I now limit my sitting to under one hour a day when not
on a plane, Kathleen believes HOW you sit can have a significant
impact on the
risks of sitting.
"Believe it or not, there is a way to sit and make it
into a physical activity," she says.
"I, sitting right now, have my feet planted on the floor.
I'm sitting on an aligned pelvis. There's nothing stressful in
the way that I'm sitting because my body is aligned.
Energy is flowing through my body. I'm not using muscles
other than the most basic muscles I would use. It's mostly my
core that's stabilizing my upright posture, but there's no
effort or strain here.
Now, I would run into trouble immediately if I started to
tuck my tailbone under. That's the problem with sitting."
Most people tend to either tuck their pelvis and collapse, or
they try to counteract the tendency to slouch by lifting their chest
and pulling their shoulders back, which results in tension.
"Often, if you have a sitting-kind of job, you're
spending much of your day swinging back and forth from one to
the other, not knowing that there is this beautiful, peaceful,
and relaxed middle place.
If you know how to align your bones and let them support
you, it's easy. There's no effort involved and it's not
stressful," she says.
I believe avoiding sitting is an important aspect of health and
can be key for reducing pain, but as Kathleen points out, standing
up may not improve your pain unless you also stand correctly.
I could not agree more strongly with Kathleen and her book helped
me learn how to stand properly. Most people don't know how to sit;
nor do they know how to stand with correct posture. Kathleen's book
illustrates proper posture quite well, providing many diagrams that
make it easy to understand the principles behind good posture, both
when sitting and standing.
Basic Principles of Proper Posture
Relearning proper posture is an unfolding process that requires a
commitment to learn the information and put it into practice.
"The word 'practice' is key, because you just have to
keep practicing it over and over until it becomes more natural
and more automatic," she says. "When I first learned
this I was pretty upset, because this information was so
opposite from what I had been trained to do and teach as a yoga
teacher.
One of the real silver linings of learning this is the
fact that it is a pathway. It's a touchstone to mindfulness,
because it requires a willingness to be mindful in order to put
it into practice. Mindfulness and alignment [go hand in hand].
You really need them both."
According to Kathleen, it all begins with the pelvis. It forms
the foundation for everything above it. Your sacrum is located in
the back between the two sides of your pelvis. At the top of the
sacrum is the sacral platform that your spine sits upon.
If you change the position of your pelvis, you change the angle
of that platform and the angle of your spine, and muscles go through
a number of adjustments to compensate for the fact that your spine
is no longer acting as a largely self-supporting structure.
"There is this quality, this natural phenomenon, [the]
ground reaction force," Kathleen explains. "You can
experience it right now if you're sitting or standing. Take your
right foot and start pushing it down into the floor. As you push
your foot a little harder, you'll notice that it generates this
action and sensations in your leg.
If you push down hard enough, you'll feel there are sensations
coming all the way up into your hip and beyond. This is ground
reaction force. It relates to Newton's Third Law of Motion,
which says that for every action, there is an opposite and equal
reaction.
If you wanted to, say, jump, you wouldn't just jump,
you'd crouch down, you'd generate this connection, and then
you'd push off. If you wanted to jump higher, you'd crouch lower
and push off harder. This is how our bodies are designed to
work.
What has happened to modern people with much more
sedentary lives and a disconnection from knowing how our bodies
work naturally, we tend to just shuffle along on top of the
surface of the earth. We haul ourselves up out of a chair. We
drop ourselves down onto a chair.
We have this sort of cascading effect of embedding
unhelpful, unnatural movement patterns, which degenerates our
physical structure over time. That's why people, as they age,
start to often look so collapsed. That's not an inevitable
feature of aging."
'Sad Dog, Happy Dog' Postures
The descriptions for "sad dog" and "happy dog" came about as a
result of working with children, who are easily embarrassed or
amused by words like "pelvis" or "pubic bone." Similarly, many
adults have trouble with more technical terms like anteverted or
retroverted. Kids understand the "sad dog" posture though, because a
sad dog will tuck its tail between its legs. As you "tuck your
tail," i.e. tuck your pelvis forward, you'll notice your spine
starts to collapse down into your pelvis. This stance also tends to
trigger the reaction to pull your chest up and your shoulders back.
"This is somewhat militaristic, but it's also the way I
was practicing and teaching yoga. It's what is taught in a lot
of dance programs and in a lot of athletics. It's sort of the
American way of opening up the front of the body, without
realizing that when we do that, we close, narrow, and shorten
the back," she says.
What you're aiming for is to have your front and back equally
wide and equally extended, and it all begins with the position of
your pelvis. If you rotate your pelvis toward the back, so your
pubic bone is down and your sit bones are wide and behind you, it's
sort of like you're wagging your tail. This is the "happy dog"
posture.
"The pelvis comes into play in the same way in standing.
In my book, I have illustrations of how to move the pelvis like
a church bell so that it brings the legs into a vertical line,
because that's where our legs need to be. From there, you want
to start to learn how to isolate the movement of your rib cage,
so you discover that your ribcage can actually move independent
of your pelvis, and you can learn how to rotate your ribcage
forward rather than lifting it. When you lift up your chest,
you're actually tipping your ribcage back.
Kathleen notes that while collapsing in the front is known as
slouching, lifting your chest and arching your back is actually
slouching in the other direction, because it has the same effect on
your spine. It's just a question of which side of the spine — the
front or the back — is being compressed.
Simple Posture Exercises
Three helpful exercises that bring home this point and help
engage your core are as follows:
Pretend you're holding a shawl behind you and you're about
to wrap the shawl around your shoulders, but just before the
shawl comes into contact with your back, move your back into the
shawl. In other words, your breastbone or your sternum slides
backwards towards your back. As you do that, you will feel an
action through your abdomen. These are your core muscles,
primarily your transversus abdominis (TVA) muscle coming into
action. This is your real core. The TVA is the deepest abdominal
muscle, which acts like an internal corset.
Next, wiggle the back of your armpits up towards the ceiling,
and feel your spine lengthening. Also notice the position of
your chin. By bringing you chin down, the back of your neck
lengthens and the cervical spine that goes through in the middle
of your neck opens up. When you lift your chin up, you shorten
your cervical spine.
"This is one of the most essential basic movements
that helps retrain the body back to where it started,"
Kathleen says.
Note that the fibers of the TVA are horizontal while most
skeletal muscles are vertical or diagonal. As you work with this
core muscle, you'll feel its contraction as a horizontal
squeezing; as your sternum moves toward the back, you'll feel
your waist narrowing as this muscle engages.
As noted by Kathleen:
"[Y]ou want to engage this muscle all day long. You
can do it in a car. You can do it when you're working at
your computer. You can do it while having a conversation...
As many times a day as you can, be mindful of your body as
an aligned being. Not only are your bones aligned but you
are aligning yourself with your true nature as a part of
this earth. Let that be an awareness that is continuous and
without interruption."
Some find mindfulness reminders helpful. One app called
Mindful Mynah will allow you to set a chime or bell to go off at
regular intervals, reminding you to tune into your body and
correct your posture.
"Doing it cultivates your capacity for mindfulness,"
Kathleen says. "My own personal capacity for
mindfulness has just exploded with this focusing on my bones
as my basic support."
A simplified version of that exercise is to simply imagine
your sternum moving back towards your spine. As you do so, you
will feel your core engage, stabilizing, and elongating your
spine. When I do it, my chin also tends to fall into place
automatically. When your spine is elongated in this way, it
helps prevent and may even help reverse kyphosis, lordosis, and
other distortions of your spine that occur as a result of a
collapsed posture.
A similar exercise is to bring your arms overhead but in
front of your head, clasping your hands together. Avoid bringing
your arms back behind your ears as that will cause your back to
arch. Remember to rotate your pubic bone downward into "happy
dog" pose. When your pubic bone is aiming down, your pelvis is
naturally rotated forward. From there, put your arms out in
front and lengthen your spine so you feel your ribcage lifting
up out of your pelvis. Remember, the lengthening you seek is of
the spine in your back, not along your front.
Bend Like a Baby
The best exercises focus on natural ways of moving, and toddlers
are the "gurus" of proper movement. Bending is an excellent
exercise, provided you do it correctly. If you observe a toddler,
you'll notice they always bend by sticking their butt out behind
them, with the knees bending outward toward the pinky toes. As
Kathleen notes:
"[B]ending is not in the spine, either rounding the spine
or arching the spine. The spine stays stable as the pelvis
rotates over the heads of the femur bones in the thighs."
As you bend this way, not only does it protect your spine and
tone your leg muscles, it also strengthens the arches in your feet.
Many have foot problems that can contribute to pain, including
pronated ankles and flat arches. Bending this way helps to
strengthen the muscles that lift and hold your arches up, and
engages the toes.
"For a lot of us, toes are just these appendages that we
don't do anything with because they're in shoes all the time.
But if you look at the toes of young children, their toes are
grabbing at the ground. They help you balance. They're there to
help you propel yourself forward and to help distribute the
weight that doesn't come down through the heels," Kathleen
explains.
When Bones Are Aligned, Your Muscles Become Elastic and Supple
The basic
kettlebell swing is an excellent exercise that brings bending
and strength training together. It's crucial to do them with correct
posture though. Unless you already have good posture, you'd be
better off focusing on learning how to move naturally — things like
bending to pick something up or to tie your shoelace, getting up and
down out of a chair, or lifting a laundry basket off the floor.
Other daily activities that offer plenty of opportunity to practice
natural movement posture include weeding your garden or cleaning
your house.
As a general rule, it's important to remember that your
musculoskeletal system involves both muscles and bones. So
while many focus on building stronger core muscles in the hopes of
improving posture, you also need to properly align your bones.
Kathleen used to have to do a lot of stretching to remain pain
free and supple despite teaching
yoga, and the tendency to have tight muscles is actually a side
effect of poor skeletal alignment, she discovered. Once she
addressed her posture, she didn't have to stretch anymore.
"One of the jobs of the skeleton is to provide the
structural framework of support... Our organs are often smashed
together, pulled, and distorted in various ways because our
skeleton is misplaced. If I am strengthening some muscles too
much, the tightness, contraction, and the shortening of the
fibers of those muscles will pull and hold my bones out of
alignment. By the same token, if I have muscles that are too
weak and stretched out, they won't support the bones in that
alignment," Kathleen explains.
"It helps to know that because the muscles attached to
the bones, if you change the position of your bones, then
certain muscles are going to be too tight and certain muscles
are going to be too long and stretched out. [But] when your
bones are aligned, muscles become elastic. All the muscles in
your body take on their intended configuration."
More Information
To learn more, I highly recommend Kathleen's book,
Natural Posture for Pain Free Living: The Practice of Mindful
Alignment, which goes into far greater depth and covers
many other aspects of posture not covered in this interview. As the
subtitle reveals, one of the keys of success is the integration of
mindfulness and posture — to become aware of where your pelvis,
spine, head, neck, and shoulders and all the rest of your body is
positioned in any given moment. You may also find more information
on her website,
NaturalPostureSolutions.com.
In closing, Kathleen offers the following down-to-earth
suggestion:
"Go to the playground; watch children and how they
move... Start moving naturally, and bring this back into how you
work out at the gym. There is a lot of stuff that people do that
is just not a good idea, period. But we've just been so
conditioned into believing that we're supposed to be exercising
and working out instead of just simply climbing a ladder to
clean the gutters, and doing it in such a way that reinforces
the way we move. So much of the exercise that is done is done as
a way to release the tension that we have in our bodies from the
misalignment that we have in the first place."