visual

Choose your remedies carefully

There are many approaches to stretching tight back muscles that involve rounding the back. Though these exercises give temporary relief, we recommend against them because they threaten the spinal discs, nerves, and ligaments. They can also result in the back muscles contracting even more tightly to stabilize the area. 

Rounded stretching exercises increase existing upper back curvature (hunching) while pulling aggressively on tight soft tissues and ligaments. Our tissues respond better to sustained, gentle realignment to make healthy changes. Pexels

By contrast, the Gokhale Method rib anchor maneuver brings relief from compression without any negative side effects. It restores your spine to a healthy J-shape, preserving the spinal discs, nerves, and ligaments. Over time, this alignment encourages a more natural, relaxed baseline tone in your back muscles as well as better abdominal tone.

How your rib anchor works

Rib anchor describes the pivot of the rib cage around a horizontal axis at about breast height, bringing the lower border of the front of the rib cage in and down thus sending the back of the rib cage up and out. Since the back of the ribs are attached to the vertebrae, this pulls the curvy “necklace” of the lumbar spine into a flatter, longer arrangement. This means of tractioning the lower spine is a fundamental Gokhale Method technique for removing sway. It restores healthy length in the lumbar area, alleviating compression of the discs, nerves, and vertebrae.  

a.                                                          b.             

A forward pivot of the rib cage at breast height (b.) corrects for a tight lower back (a.), restoring lumbar length. Maintaining this orientation requires the abdominal muscles that anchor the ribs down to develop a healthy baseline tone.

The art of transmission 

Over many years of hands-on work helping students with their rib anchor, I became increasingly aware of an intuitive sequence of moves in what I was doing. My hands could guide a student to a pleasing endpoint, but what exactly I was doing fell short of verbal description and a conceptual framework. The gap between what we were doing and articulating in words showed up especially when our teachers got together for continuing education offerings, when questions and case studies were discussed. There was a need for new language, fresh insights, and deeper understanding. While teaching posture is both an art and a science, it is also a hallmark of our method that there be kinesthetic, visual, and intellectual understanding of our process; this takes the right words and analogies.

A fresh analogy for the rib anchor

For a very long time, we’ve taught three things that need to happen to help most people find a healthy head position. It’s a combination of: 

1. Pivoting around an axis from ear to ear
2. Lengthening the neck through relaxing certain muscles and recruiting others (especially the longus colli)
3. Shearing the head and neck gently back               

1.                                         2.                                       3.

Gliding the rib cage home follows a similar pattern:

1. Pivoting around an axis that goes from side to side through the chest at about breast level (this being the main component of what I’ve described as rib anchor so far)
2. Relaxing the erector spinae and other muscles and recruiting the deep abdominal and back muscles (inner corset) to create additional length in the back, as described and included in our teachings
3. Shearing the ribcage backward relative to the pelvis. This is the movement that I’d been intuitively weaving into my hands-on ministrations that previously wasn’t well described

When students aligned their ribs by only pivoting the rib cage, I could see that it sometimes resulted in an awkward movement that did not integrate the rib cage into the torso quite right. Adding, and even better with practice, integrating this element of shear, transformed their outcome and experience. 

We can describe the shear element, for both the head and the rib cage, as analogous with backing your car into its garage: 

An analogy that is true and versatile

Neat and easy parallels can, of course, be seductive but false. However, here we have a really useful and accurate analogy of what needs to happen. Deploying your rib anchor to come into a healthier orientation usually feels somewhat strange at first—especially if you have spent years actually leaning backwards from your waist—but this new analogy is already helping our students to enjoy a more buoyant uprightness, and less of a leaning forward sensation. 

This “backing up” of the ribcage can be tailored to affect different levels of the spine, as appropriate for each person. And while every body is a unique landscape known only to its owner, a teacher’s guidance is always available to help you map it out sooner. 

a.                                                          b.             

 
This girl (a.) stands with her lower back swayed. Her rib cage is angled back, and she can feel her lower front ribs popping up under her hands. She gently but firmly presses on her ribcage to “back it into the garage” and into a healthy alignment (b.), removing the sway in her lower back as she does so. 

Best next action steps

If you are new to the Gokhale Method, are resuming your posture journey after a little while, or struggle with your rib anchor, book a consultation, online, or in person with one of our teachers, who will be happy to help.

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.