Hip-hinges: 4 exercises in 1. Time spent: 0 seconds
I sometimes tell my students that if you bend well you are unlikely to have a back problem, and if you bend poorly you are almost certainly going to have a back problem. It’s almost that simple. Of course there are other important techniques to learn, like how to sit, stand, sleep, and walk, but bending is a particularly important technique, and learning to bend well constitutes a major milestone in our Gokhale Method Foundations course.
Most of us do many bends a day — each bend is an opportunity to benefit your structure, or destroy it. Turn each bend into a hip-hinge! You will preserve your discs, spinal ligaments, and knees instead of wearing and tearing them. You also get the following exercises taken care of:
Stretch your hamstrings
Stretch your external hip rotators
Strengthen your rhomboids
Strengthen your erector spinae muscles.
Time spent: 0! It doesn’t take a second longer to bend well than it does to bend poorly!
Hi Esther, and thanks for yet
Hi Esther, and thanks for yet another great blog post!
Could you please help me understand your comment above, "Round-back bending loads the discs posteriorly...." This is confusing to me because intuitively it seems that rounding the back would put pressure or "load" on the anterior portion of the discs. I realize that pressure on the anterior disc does lead to deformation of the posterior disc -- but isn't the actual "load" anterior?
This probably relates to my long-standing perplexity around figure 1.1 in your book: Why are the only areas highlighted in red (suggesting pain) posterior? Wouldn't the compression itself also cause disc degeneration and pain on the anterior side of discs? The figure caption seems to suggest this, but the illustration itself suggests otherwise.
Thank you very much!
Laura~~
Thanks for catching this - I
Thanks for catching this - I edited the passage above.
Regarding the reddened area of the disks shown in the book, I think it's right to show the posterior portion of the disc to be most affected / threatened. That's the part that gets worn and damagedfrom the nucleosus pulposum pressing outward against the fibrous layers that constitute the outer portion of the disc. It's true everything is affected in these scenarios, but the loading that happens on the anterior portion of the disc is not what cause the most damage.