wearable

The phrase “it takes a village to raise a child” is thought to originate from an ancient African proverb. 

As I have grown into being a parent, uncle, and beyond, I have realized that this quote extends to any age. I have directly experienced this with my own posture journey—my own family “village” has helped me and others dear to me find a near pain-free life through the Gokhale Method®.

Annoying body pains were affecting my fun in life

In my late thirties, a stream of inflammatory pains permeated my body, including back pain, shoulder pain, knee pain, and—worst of all—plantar fasciitis in my foot. While these weren't absolutely crippling pains, they were painful enough to keep me from enjoying life as I gave up my favorite hobbies—tennis, golf, and playing the piano.

I visited numerous renowned doctors in California. They genuinely tried to help, but nothing resolved my pain. So I began searching for other solutions.

Finding Esther’s book, 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back

In 2012 I bought Esther’s book, 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back, as it was highly recommended on Amazon. 

 
The book that helped me, 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back.

In particular, what caught my attention was how traditional and tribal communities across the globe do not have the level of musculoskeletal pain that we are seeing in modern society. The book explained how their cultures have preserved our natural blueprint for healthy posture over the centuries, while industrialized societies have lost it. 

This made a lot of sense to me, because as an American with Indian heritage, I used to visit India a lot and noticed that many traditional communities there do not have body pains as modern cultures do. There were people in their sixties and seventies doing manual labor regularly without pain.   

As an Indian-American, I visited India often as a child, so I could relate immediately to the images like this one in Esther’s book that showed people with traditional posture performing physically challenging tasks with relative ease.

I then took the Gokhale Method Foundations Course. It took me a couple of months to meaningfully understand the core concepts. And then I felt significant pain relief for the first time in a long time and knew I was onto something. I began playing sports and music again! I was so happy. 

The Gokhale Method Foundations Course helped me stand, walk, sleep, and sit comfortably. Before the course (left)) I would sit with my pelvis tucked, back rounded, shoulders forward, and my neck compressed at the back. During the course I began to change this, learning to antevert my pelvis and stack my spine.

Helping each other out posture-wise

I shared my Gokhale Method story pretty regularly with family and friends. My family—perhaps knowing that I am a rather talkative person—would give me the “ol’ eye roll” when I talked too much about Gokhale posture!

That said, many of my family members nevertheless found the Gokhale principles intriguing. For example, my wife spent much of her childhood in India—and also learned the Bharata Natyam Indian dancing which Esther draws from—all of which gave her good posture and a relatively pain-free life. Equally importantly, it gave her a keen eye for good and bad posture. So she was able to provide excellent feedback to me as I kept trying to improve my posture with the Gokhale Method principles I was learning.

However, my sister Annissa grew up in America, and began experiencing hip and other arm pains as an adult, which was hard for her as she is a keen athlete. She realized that her posture might be the root cause. She learned the Gokhale Method with Esther’s younger daughter, Monisha, and started feeling meaningful relief. She is now a regular participant in Online Alumni Classes, which help her to keep healthy posture on her radar and continue refining it.

My sister Annissa (shown here with her PostureTracker) likes to use her Alumni membership most days—it makes checking in on and refining healthy posture comparatively effortless—and fun!

The next-gen

Interestingly, as my daughter Saya became a teenager, my wife noticed that her posture began to deteriorate. We were concerned that our daughter’s posture would worsen further when she went to college, leading sooner or later to inevitable pain and discomfort. Trying to offer advice and corrections to our daughter just caused a lot of frustration for both of them. 

When our daughter turned 16, we suggested that she learn the Gokhale Method before going to college. For her it was perfect to take the online Elements course. The fact that it was 18 compact 13-minute Zoom sessions worked perfectly for her busy high school life. Her posture markedly improved with Gokhale Method Teacher Kathleen O’Donohue.

We were so encouraged that we also asked our 15 year old niece Riya to take the course. She did the Elements course as well, and her posture improved too! 

Bringing different generations together with the Gokhale PostureTracker

In the last year, my daughter, sister, and I were really intrigued by the PostureTracker™ wearable, which gives real-time feedback on your posture by displaying the feedback from two highly accurate sensors on an app. My daughter and I did the first online Alumni PostureTracker class during the summer before my daughter headed to college. 

My daughter Saya is a young Gokhale Alumna, and has taken her PostureTracker with her to college. She has real-time feedback on her posture wherever she wants it.  

We then bought the PostureTracker (which comes with one-to-one tech assistance) for my sister Annissa’s birthday. She loves it and uses it most days, including in her Alumni Classes. When we all get together, we often have fun correcting each other’s posture and also talking about our PostureTracker experiences.

The village beyond my family

Beyond my family, my “village” extends to the Gokhale Alumni community too. I have truly enjoyed and benefited from the collective curiosity and wisdom of the 1-2-3 Move classes. The teaching and follow-up questions and answers have been so helpful and insightful. I will never forget Gokhale Alumna Mary Walsh’s saying, “Good things come to those who ‘bean-shape’ [their feet],” which really captivated me and continues to help me in my own posture journey.

Here we are on the 1-2-3 Move class sometime in the COVID winter of 2020–21. The online community we forged back then has continued to thrive and be a great resource for everyone on their healthy posture journey. There is a 7-day free trial open to the public. 

Best next action steps for newcomers

If you would like insight on your posture, consider scheduling an Initial Consultation, online, or in person.

You can sign up below to join one of our upcoming FREE Online Workshops. . .

Our new and exciting SpineTracker wearable is available for use! Our participating teachers use this technology to help you:

1. Store baselines of the shape of your spine in sitting, standing, and bending

2. Understand the connection between your movements and changes in the shape of your spine

3. Establish a target shape for you to aim for in training your posture

4. Discover techniques, exercises, and activities to help you improve your target shape

5. Track your changes over time, using graphics and quantitative measurements of the curves in your lower back
    

Our test students love SpineTracker and have gotten great benefit from it—we’re now ready to share these benefits with all our students!

What drove you to create this device?

Kinesthetic learning is difficult for most of our students. We learn more easily with our heads than with our bodies. Students often express this by saying things like, “Can I take you home with me?” after we’ve placed them in new and strange configurations. Though the logic of the posture shifts is compelling, and the new positions look perfectly acceptable (and even elegant) in a mirror, they feel very foreign at first (a slight bend at the hips can feel Neanderthal or ape-like!) and are therefore difficult to accept and return to. SpineTracker lets people practice the new postures repeatedly with visual confirmation of their position, until it no longer feels strange. Being able to see with their own eyes that their spine is upright although it feels leaning helps students accept the ideals.

What were some of the difficulties in creating this device?

I would not have undertaken such an adventure without the expert support of an inventor.  I met Mark Leavitt at a Quantified Self conference where he expressed interest in creating a technological aid for Gokhale Method students. We explored many directions, such as a Smart Chair, and eventually settled on a device that would give a real-time read of the shape of a student's spine. We tried very hard to create a single flexible strip of sensors, but discovered that human skin, because it is so elastic, is extremely challenging to stick a long strip of electronics to. Also, the inaccuracies and climate sensitivities in the flex sensor readings undermined our efforts to create a precision instrument. We had much better results after switching to separated pods that stuck to the spine—each sensor has its own BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) module, battery, PCB board, and antenna, so the device is really a five-sensor device. What we gained from this is an incredibly accurate rendering of the shape of the wearer’s midline groove over the spine. Since there isn’t much muscle or fat on that part of the body (even on muscular or obese people), this approximates the shape of the vertebral column very well. It’s almost like having a mobile MRI unit!
 

How has SpienTracker been useful so far?

• Seeing one’s baseline shape. Students see the shape of their back, often realizing for the first time the contours that are with them daily. This is extremely useful information for someone who wants to improve his or her shape. Our teachers help capture baseline shapes on the student’s Gokhale Method account so future efforts can be compared against this baseline.

• Understanding tricky posture concepts. Some of what the Gokhale Method teaches is difficult to grasp, and even counterintuitive. For example, most people have been taught to stick out their chests via commands like “sit up straight” and “stand up straight,” so when we teach tucking the ribcage to eliminate a sway in the low back, this feels like the opposite of good posture. The SpineTracker app, especially the spine view, makes a compelling case for why this technique is crucial for good posture.

• Ideals set by the teacher allow the student to practice good posture over and over. It’s hard for students to know where they are in space once they’ve departed from their habitual posture. With the visual provided by the app, students can practice returning to exactly the right position, and continue to “recalibrate” their own sense of what is right. It can help overcome frequent comments and questions such as “Is this right,” “Am I doing the same thing you showed me,” and “I have no idea how I'll get back to this position if I move.”

• Quantifying subjective data. Gokhale Method teachers frequently talk about sways and tucks, but SpineTracker records hard data on the angle between every pair of sensors on your spine. This is useful for knowing how you stack up (pun intended). In fact, we hope our data will find its way into medical literature over time.

• Tracking progress over time. Since all ideals as well as snapshots along the way are stored in a student’s account, it allows students to track their progress over time. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for a student and their teacher to remember how exactly the student's back was months or years ago. SpineTracker keeps a tab on this in the student's account. This feature has already created lots of aha moments for our many test students.

• Comparisons across positions. The spine changes shape as we go from sitting to standing to bending. Some of the changes are normal and healthy; others indicated tight muscles, rigid joints, or other unhealthy situations. Within every student’s account it is easy to select several spine snaps for comparison, and identify patterns or problem areas that are more challenging for teachers to spot, such as swaying only during the act of standing up or sitting down.
   

How does SpienTracker differ from other posture training electronics for consumers?

• Healthy versus unhealthy targets / ideals. The ideals used in other posture training devices are set by the user. Since conventional wisdom about posture is misguided, the result is people training themselves to “sit up straight” and “stand up straight” with tense, counterproductive posture. With SpineTracker, the targets / ideals are set by a qualified Gokhale Method teacher—they help students grow beyond their mistaken or incomplete view of what constitutes healthy posture.

• A package that includes education and training. SpineTracker comes with education and training. It is currently only available for students working with a Gokhale Method teacher, and is specifically designed to complement our teachings.

• Positive versus negative feedback. SpineTracker use comes with a supportive, encouraging teacher, delighted by every bit of progress you make. The consumer devices on the market beep and buzz at you, often in frustrating, unproductive ways.

• Accuracy. Other products on the market cannot differentiate between you stooping and you leaning forward in a healthy position, such as resting on your elbows. With SpineTracker, what you see is what you have. There are no false positives and you never get inaccurate feedback.

• No hassle. All the hassles associated with charging units, applying sticky tape, removing sticky tape, positioning accurately, losing parts, returns, and more are managed by your friendly, hard-working teacher. You simply benefit from the technology and allow your teacher and our company to take care of the technology.

How can students have a chance to use SpineTracker?

Private lessons with participating teachers, all lessons with founder Esther Gokhale, and corporate offerings are the primary ways to be able to use SpineTracker yourself. Visit our SpineTracker page for complete information on our wearable, including a full list of participating teachers.

Note: Sending thanks to Clare Chapman, Gokhale Method teacher in Bristol, England, who helped research and write this blog post.

In today’s hi-tech world, people are quick to turn to technology, wearables, and apps to help fix their back pain—and yes, they are right to treat poor posture as the major culprit! But modern ideas about good posture are part of the problem—so do wearable devices actually improve on the bad habits we’ve been taught since we were children?

Our Gokhale Method teachers are sometimes asked by their students about various posture wearables, especially the new generation of bio-feedback sensors. Do wearables really help people get comfortable and become pain-free? Have you tried using one? Do you recommend trying any?

As you can imagine, in order to design a product that encourages good posture, you need to understand the basics of good posture first. Even at this first step, most of these products fail, either by misunderstanding what constitutes good posture, or by leaving it up to the consumer to understand and find good posture. This is why wearables cannot be standalone solutions, but must accompany a good posture education—the kind that can only be achieved from hands-on training that works with you as an individual with a unique starting point, and teaches you how to reposition your body and find healthy posture.

Let’s take a step back from modern ideas of posture and look to ancient models, before industrialization and various fashions pushed us away from healthy habits.

We are going to take a look at some of the wearable products which are intended, designed, and marketed to correct posture, and exclude any medical devices from this analysis. These posture wearables most often target slumpy shoulders and slouchy spines. Some work through physically shaping and restraining your body, for example with straps that pull your shoulders back. Some work through haptic feedback, for example buzzing whenever your start to slouch.

SHAPING DEVICES

Let’s start with the simplest devices, the braces and correctors which work rather like corsets in that they physically mold and hold you in a different position. There are three main problems that we see with shaping devices:

1. encouraging a poor ideal, such as an S-spine or a tucked pelvis

2. not teaching to any ideal, but pulling on the body and leaving the user to try and guess how to rearrange their body with this new limitation

3. targeting just one area instead of working holistically (usually while marketing that the device will fix all your postural pain)

With the first problem, you would likely be trading one unhealthy position for another, with a whole new set of pains.

In the case of the second, if a device simply prevents a negative posture like lumbar curve or slumped shoulders, it could actually be beneficial to someone who understands how to achieve good posture but hasn’t solidified their new habits yet; with a good posture education, the best use of the device is as a secondary aid.

With number three, it’s important to remember that truly good posture requires participation of the pelvis, spine, shoulders, head, ribs, knees, and feet! There is no practical device that can nudge all of these different regions into the right alignment.

CerebralBody Premium Comfortable Adjustable Posture Corrector

In this first example we see both a positioning back of the shoulders and flattening of the upper back. However, the model sways at her waist, bringing compression to the mid back. It is unclear whether the shape of the device encourages an S-spine or if it simply does not prevent it; but nowhere do we see an ideal J-spine.

Pelham and Strutt Postural Shapewear

In addition to physical braces there is Shapewear, which again molds the body but acts directly against the skin using sculpting, elasticated fabrics. Again, these clothing items are designed to reinforce the S-shaped spine. The upper lumbar curve is mistakenly identified as the place where you want to have the most curve, rather than at L5/S1.

Compare the difference between an S-spine and J-spine:

S-shaped spine                      J-shaped spine

Notice that the S-shaped spine has much deeper waist, upper back and neck curves, resulting in more pressure on the front or back of the discs, over-tight or lax muscles, and compression on nerves. The J-shaped spine, by contrast, allows the spine to lengthen and stack without these physical stresses.

These two products serve as a good representation for the range of shaping devices, most of which are variations on shoulder/back restraints, and are almost exclusively aimed at pulling the shoulders back at the expense of a sway in the lumbar spine, perpetuating the common S-spine model that actually causes harmful compression of the discs.

FEEDBACK DEVICES

So are the new generation of Biofeedback Devices doing any better? They certainly use more varied and sophisticated technologically, containing sensors that read our position and let us know (usually with a beep or vibration) when our posture is off track so that we can correct it. An important step forward with this innovation is that it actually aims to train, not merely restrain the body, so the habits you develop last even after you take the device off.

Feedback devices suffer from similar problems as shaping devices:

1. The device is often not aimed to a good postural model. If you are encouraged to stick a sensor on your lumbar spine that is only happy when you are swaying, or to place a sensor in a place that isn’t actually effective for picking up on bad habits, then there is no way at all users can benefit.

2. Many of these feedback devices require the user to set their own ‘ideal’ from which the device will judge deviation. Yet if you do not know how to comfortably sit or stand in the first place, the ideal you set will likely be unnatural and harmful, achieved with tense muscles and a poorly stacked skeleton. In this case, your device will be pestering you to constantly strain your body in this unnatural position, and reinforcing new bad habits. To get good results, you need to already have a thorough understanding of good posture.
   
   Note that these products do have the benefit of some flexibility in how you use them and in setting and updating your ideal. If you have had posture training and know how to find a healthy position, you could indeed use a buzzer as a trainer. We are all guilty of slipping into old habits and positions, and having a wearable that notifies you when you start to backslide can be a good way to build up your stamina and ingrain your new healthy habits.

3. As with shaping products, feedback wearables can only address one region at a time. So unless you plan to cover yourself in small vibrating devices, you must focus on one problem area. If you plan to use one of these devices as a training tool, this could be a benefit to target a region you struggle with, like slumping shoulders.

Ergo Posture Transformer

The Ergo Posture Transformer promises ‘Perfect Posture Instantly’, and combines physical molding of the body with biofeedback that mysteriously ‘triggers an automatic reflex in your thoracic vertebrae.’ It is one of many posture products looking for crowdfunding to bring it to market, and certainly includes a host of more advanced features by virtue of its comprehensive app. The app offers notifications, videos and a rather gung-ho stretch routine, which includes rolling the head (ouch!) and bending with a rounded spine (not recommended).

Its strong elastic construction aims to deliver:

• Head balanced over shoulders

• Shoulders back and down

• Chest expanded

• Abdominals engaged

This points all sound good, yet the end result, or ‘ideal’ shown on the website, is strangely stiff and tense:

If you have taken the Gokhale Method Foundations Course or read Esther’s book, 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back, you will know the difference between forced sitting up, and relaxed sitting well. You will also know that this man’s back and neck tension is due to sitting upright (trying to stack his spine) with a tucked pelvis, made worse by the extreme negative slant of his chair seat— an angle we do not recommend for stacksitting! This means his back muscles are tense trying to maintain an upright position.

Upright Pro/Upright Go

Upright Pro is an attractively designed unit that adheres to the skin using disposable pads with hypoallergenic adhesive on one side, velcro with the device on the other side. It is placed along the spine either at waist height to detect rounding of the mid lumbar vertebrae when you slump, or between your shoulder blades to detect rounding of the thoracic area. It alerts you to posture that deviates from your set ideal by vibrating; wearers are sensibly advised to build up their practice gradually, starting with 5 minutes a day.

This version of upright includes a severe sway and forward-neck—not at all an example of good posture!

You can take a look at the Upright Pro in action on YouTube. Unfortunately, in the videos you will see the models alternating between the classic relaxed/slumped and upright/tense sitting positions, each of which over time do different kinds of damage.

The UpRight Go, a new product from the same company as Upright Pro, is designed to be worn just on the upper back and is marketed as ‘the effortless way to correct your ‘screen-slouch’.’ As you can see from the more lifted front ribs and increased rucking on the back of the model’s top, this uprightness is still being obtained from a sway and tension in the back.

We agree that slumped sitting is not good for the spine, but when calibrating their ideal position for these two devices, people will almost inevitably train themselves to arch and tense if they have no understanding of the natural J-spine. Warning users not to hyperextend is good advice, but remains wishful thinking without pelvic anteversion. It takes learning the Gokhale Method to systematically address all the underlying causes of problematic sitting—the wrong pelvic position, the S-shaped spine ideal, badly designed furniture, poor role models, tight and weak muscles etc. With that important proviso, in-app support is comprehensive, with features such as a sensitivity slider and re-calibration options, and its dashboard also takes you to daily goals, tracks progress, and offers a library of help tutorials.

Lumo Lift

The Lumo Lift is a small, discrete unit. Little more than a chip, this one attaches via a magnet near to your collarbone on your top or lapel. It vibrates when you slouch to remind you to sit tall and stand straight and its motion sensors track your posture and activity levels throughout the day for progress tracking via the app.

Again, if you set your target posture wrong, or crucially, don’t know how to get straight without tension, you will train yourself into further bad habits.

One problem with all devices that buzz every time the spine deviates from vertical is that it may dissuade people from hip-hinging correctly. Rather than upset the sensor, people may be tempted to crane the head forward—or to bend with the knees and keep the back upright. If a sensor were to allow for hip-hinging but alert you when you sway or round your back, this could be really useful.

CONCLUSION

These devices demonstrate why piecemeal solutions that are not grounded in solid posture research and years of teaching experience, do not work well—you could be buying yourself a whole lot of new back trouble if you don’t know solid technique before using them. Just because you can force your shoulders back and tighten the slouch from your spine doesn’t mean you are actually repositioning your body to achieve healthy posture—the missing ingredient in all these devices so far.

To relieve our back pain and the epidemic of related health problems, we must rediscover our ancient body wisdom and educate ourselves on how to emulate the posture of peoples and ancestors who don’t have back pain. Here is the gold standard that will save us from replacing one st of problems with another. After getting a thorough posture education and training, however, some of these devices could be used as helpful training tools; we also see the potential for more advanced devices to deliver useful data that can point us to problem areas or problematic activities we haven’t been able to spot on our own.

The Gokhale Institute is dedicated to embracing new ways of supporting our students to relearn their primal, pain-free posture, and our approach has always combined the best of ‘high tech’ with ‘high touch’. These are exciting times and our culture is only just beginning to harness the possibilities of wearable technology and biofeedback devices. So, we would love to hear about any posture devices you have tried. What helped, what didn’t? We invite you to post below.