The Gokhale Method

As a society, we have lost touch with our blueprint. Our modern lifestyles have led to detrimental changes in the ways we sit, stand, walk, bend, and more. These changes in activities we do all day, every day, are at the root of most of the musculoskeletal pain we see around us.

Changes in the way we sit, stand, walk, and bend are at the root of most of the musculoskeletal pain we see today.

Modern conventional wisdom is based on the incorrect assumption that the human spine is S-shaped. Everything in modern culture is built around this S-spine paradigm—from protruding head rests in our car seats to lumbar support in our ergonomic chairs to the way spinal fusion surgeries are done.

Many “ergonomic” chairs are designed to support pronounced curvature in the spine.

The Gokhale Method teaches that the natural shape of the human spine is closer to a J than an S. This is what we see in ancestral populations, non-industrialized cultures, and young children the world over.

Our great-grandparents sported J-spines.

People in non-industrialized societies sport J-spines. Indonesia (left), Burkina Faso (center), Brazil (right).

These are very different populations—why would they all share a spinal shape? The simplest explanation is that it is, in fact, the natural shape for human spines.

Furthermore, when we consider the biomechanical stresses on the nuts and bolts of the spine, the soundness of the J-spine is compelling, see “An S-shaped Spine Is A Compressed Spine”.

You may well wonder how a society’s understanding of something as fundamental as spine shape could drift over just a few decades. Here it’s helpful to consider our natural human tendency to mistake average for normal. At the Gokhale Method, we invite you to consider that the S-spine paradigm that is ubiquitous in modern culture and medicine is only a description of the average human spine shape today, not the truly natural human spine shape.

Your next question may be why the average human spine shape as depicted in modern anatomy books is so different from what we see from the early 20th century. One likely contributor to this posture drift is the fashion industry. Around World War I, fashions in clothing and furniture began to change, reinforcing a trend towards slouching as being “casual” and “cool”.

Optimal architecture facilitates optimal function; our everyday movements then become constructive rather than destructive.

If you lived a hundred years ago or in a village in rural Southeast Asia or Africa today, you would have a good sense of what healthy body architecture looks like. Living in modern industrialized societies, we’ve lost sight of how our bodies are supposed to function. Some principles we would like to put back in place include:

1. Every bone in its home

Our bones fit together in a precise way that is the product of the demands of upright living and the constant force of gravity over the span of human existence. Our weight-bearing bones need stress to remain strong. Without this stress, calcium leaches from the bones or is inadequately deposited, leading to osteopenia and osteoporosis. Weight-bearing exercise provides the healthy stress that keeps bones strong. However, stress on the wrong part of the bone, caused by misalignment, can lead to arthritic changes such as bone spurs (osteophytes).

The Gokhale Method shows you how to take each of your bones “home”. This reduces harmful stress and restores healthy stress to the bones.

In this “before” photograph (left), the legs, hips, and spine are misaligned and therefore lacking healthy weight-bearing stress. In the “after” photograph (right), the healthy stacking of these bones results in healthy weight-bearing stress.

2. Muscles fully relaxed when not working

Many of us spend hours tensing our muscles unnecessarily. In fact, in modern societies it is a common notion that sitting and standing up straight require significant and sustained effort. This tension is usually a compensation for poor alignment and often becomes habitual. Our students are surprised to find that they can sit upright with as little effort as it takes to slouch.

No muscle is meant to be on all the time. The Gokhale Method teaches you to use only the muscles needed for a certain action and relax the rest. This relaxation facilitates vigorous action when it is actually needed.

Sitting and standing the way we are meant to is surprisingly relaxed and effortless

3. Use the muscles, spare the joints

The man on the left lands with a straight knee and underuses his glute muscles. This leads to a heavy landing, putting stress on all the weight-bearing joints of the body. The woman on the right uses strong gluteal muscle action to land gently and gracefully. She also lands on a bent front knee that cushions the impact of landing.

The Gokhale Method also teaches how to bend in a way that uses your muscles more and your joints less. Rounding the back when bending compresses the spinal discs and leaves the muscles of the back largely unchallenged. On the other hand, bending with a straight back (what we call “hip-hinging”) engages the long muscles of the back and spares the spinal discs and ligaments. Again, muscles gain strength while joints remain healthy.

Your “inner corset” is another blueprint we can help you get back in touch with. If you were going to jump off a ladder, a precise combination of muscles would automatically engage to protect your discs, nerves, and bones from the impact of landing.

In the face of smaller threats of spinal compression or distortion—for instance carrying a heavy handbag or bags of groceries—we tend not to recruit this protection. The cumulative low-level wear and tear that results can be debilitating. Like glidewalking and hip-hinging, inner corset is a technique that takes stress off the joints (spinal vertebrae) where it would be harmful, and puts it on the muscles (abdominal and intrinsic back muscles) where it is beneficial.

Something approximating the inner corset technique is likely why an X-ray study of the Bhil tribe in Central India revealed that the disc heights of the 50-year-olds looked very similar to those of the 20-year-olds. In our culture, by contrast, it is considered normal to have significant disc degeneration by age 50.

This graph²³ shows a large difference in disc narrowing with age in three different populations. Very little disc narrowing occurs in the Bhil tribal people of Central India²⁴. Substantial disc narrowing correlates with older age among Western workers, in both industrial and forestry jobs²⁵ and sedentary jobs²⁶

The Gokhale Method invites you to raise your expectations of what your body is capable of achieving without pain or damage.

4. Take advantage of “life exercise”

The Gokhale Method is unlike any other approach in that we focus on “life exercise.” There is little need to take extra time out of your day to perform conventional strengthening or stretching exercises. Instead, you learn to incorporate stretching and strengthening into the life activities you do every day.

Our bodies evolved to automatically satisfy our stretch and strength requirements as part of everyday living. When you reinstate your natural blueprint, these laws of nature take care of maintaining balance between different parts of your body.

When you walk, bend, and carry in the ways these activities are meant to be done, you will be “exercising” all day long.

Scientific principles underlie and inform the Gokhale Method. Our founder, Esther Gokhale, studied at Harvard University and has a biochemistry degree from Princeton University, and was inspired by Aplomb® and other anthropological approaches. Our methodology is grounded in biophysics and evidence-based body mechanics.

The Gokhale Method has been well received by medical professionals and is currently the subject of a randomized controlled trial by researchers at Stanford University. You can learn more about the trial and the science behind the Gokhale Method here.

Here are a few comments from prominent physicians and scientists about the efficacy of the Gokhale Method:

“The patients I have referred to the Gokhale Method have, without exception, found it to be life-changing.”
- Dr Salwan Abi Ezzi, M.D.

“The greatest contribution ever made to non-surgical back pain treatment.”
- Dr Helen Barkan, M.D., Ph.D., Mayo Clinic

“Every year, tens of thousands of patients undergo major back surgery, without any benefits. Using Gokhale’s novel techniques, many of these patients can quickly return to a pain-free life.”
- Dr John Adler, M.D., Stanford University Medical Clinic

“Esther Gokhale’s approach to preventing and treating back pain deserves the attention of the medical profession.”
- Dr Harvey Cohen, M.D., Ph.D., Stanford University

“I need to do things that make sense and that I can see results from. Esther Gokhale’s work is like that.”
- Susan Wojcicki, CEO, YouTube

“I think Esther Gokhale could single-handedly cut the healthcare budget in half if given the chance.”
- Eric Schoenfeld, Staff Data Scientist, Google

Many methods that address pain and dysfunction are grounded in theory—how the body should function. But the human body is incredibly complex; we believe that no one understands the workings of the human musculoskeletal system well enough to approach it in an abstract way. The Gokhale Method looks at populations that have highly functional body mechanics. Hence our techniques emulate the modes of movement that humans have been testing and refining for millenia. The proof that these techniques work is in the very low rates of pain present in populations who still use these modes^1-9.

You can read about the experiences of people who have learned the Gokhale Method at Google Reviews.