sciatica

In surveys of what people find physically attractive in a partner, a shapely butt is often highly rated. Perhaps it’s no surprise, but if you want, there are even apps to help! So, are good-looking glutes all about sex appeal and filling out our clothing in a flattering fashion? While these concerns may be valid, it is also true that well-toned glutes have many other, profound, but less widely recognized attributes. 

This blog post takes a look at the bigger picture of glute function. You may be surprised to find out just how much your glutes can contribute to healthy posture and a pain-free body.  

Glorious glutes—not just a “nice to have”

Your glutes potentially form the largest muscle group and have the largest impact. Most of us realize at some point in our lives, perhaps due to overdone squats or steep hill climbing, that the glutes are major players in sports and exercise. But if we don’t need them for competitive sports or challenging hiking, is it still worth investing in them for better returns? Let’s take a look at the dividends.

Reduce stress on your lower back

Glutes have a crucial role in offloading stress from the lower back and sacroiliac joints. When the glutes are weak, the lower back muscles work harder to try and stabilize the pelvis and trunk, leading to overuse and pain. When the glutes are strong, along with the inner corset, they steady the pelvis and lower back. This reduces the risk of wear and tear to discs and bones, nerve pain, and muscle spasm in the area.

Vigorous and/or repetitive movement, without the gluteal strength and pelvic stability shown here, leaves the back and spine more vulnerable to damage. (Photographs by Eadweard Muybridge, 1872–​​1885)

Avoid sciatica and piriformis syndrome 

True sciatica occurs when there is pressure on the sciatic nerve, usually from a herniated disc or degenerative changes in the spinal joints. The symptoms may be numbness, tingling, burning and/or electrical shock-like pain. It usually extends from the buttock down the leg, and sometimes the foot, on one side. The Gokhale Method helps by restoring the anteverted position of the pelvis, and decompressing the lumbar spine where the sciatic nerve roots exit. We call the resulting natural alignment a J-spine.

Piriformis Syndrome is a condition characterized by pain, tingling, or numbness in the buttocks and often down the leg. It occurs when the piriformis muscle compresses or irritates the sciatic nerve. The sciatic nerve passes under (or, in some individuals, through) the piriformis muscle, and is particularly prone to overwork and disturb the sciatic nerve if its neighbor, gluteus medius, is not doing its duty. The Gokhale Method encourages healthy pelvic positioning and gluteal function to allow the sciatic nerve free passage through the area. 

The profile view (right) shows swayed, leaning back posture, which causes problematic tightening in the posterior chain muscles and compresses the lower spine, including its discs and nerves. 

Make your movement strong, flexible, and stable

Your glutes are the powerhouse muscles that propel you in climbing, squatting, running, jumping, and more. They also work to control those movements, and are key to maintaining your balance. But glutes are not just for vigorous exercise…

In walking, it is your glutes that enable you to correctly achieve forward motion, rather than relying overly on your psoas and quads, shuffling, or falling forward. Glute activation brings a natural smoothness and grace to walking that we call glidewalking. Glidewalking allows your front foot to meet the ground deliberately but lightly, which is gentle on your joints; it also stretches your psoas with every step. 

Long jumper Khaddi Sagnia of Sweden uses her glutes to power the run up and propel her amazing jumping…and also to glidewalk away.

Muscles support a healthy metabolism 

The muscular system plays an integral role in our body’s metabolism. Well-used muscles will be larger, helping to burn calories rather than store them. This can help to keep insulin levels low in the blood and can contribute to a healthy metabolism and weight range. 

Well-toned glutes contribute to a healthy muscular and metabolic system. Man at His Bath by Gustave Caillebotte, 1884.

The foremost antiaging strategy—beautiful buttocks!

Never mind face yoga, cosmetic lifts, or surgical implants. Rather than costly interventions that do nothing to stop you losing your balance, strength, and mobility, embrace the art and science of how to rejuvenate your body by learning to move as you are meant to. Healthy posture can greatly improve your body’s architecture, self-confidence, health span—and your appearance as a bonus!

 
As infants (left) we instinctively align ourselves well, making good use of our muscles. In our society, adopting poor postural habits as we go through life results in lack of healthy muscle tone, like “glute amnesia”—flat, wasted muscles that have forgotten how to work (right).

Best next action steps

We invite you to join us for a themed Free Online Workshop: Wake Up Your Glutes, They Snooze, You Lose, on Friday, September 6 at 12:30 pm PST, in which you will learn how to make every step a rep! A replay will be available over the weekend if you cannot join live. So sign up, and you will also receive a special offer.

This workshop launches our 21-day Strong Glutes, Strong Body Gokhale Fitness challenge, which will run from Sept 9–29, to help you continue to build strength and improve your posture.

This blog post explains how some common yoga injuries occur and how applying the principles of healthy posture to yoga postures replaces this scenario with movements that are good for your body.

Yoga postures and back pain

Growing up in Mumbai, India, my Dutch mother was a student of BKS Iyengar and the Satyananda yogis, and keen for me also to learn yoga asanas, or postures. I practiced, and, being reasonably athletic as a child and already trained in Indian classical dance (Bharata Natyam), did not find it particularly difficult to choreograph the back bends, forward bends, and twists that were asked of me. I became a yoga model, demonstrating postures alongside visiting swamis’ presentations to induce the audience to sign up for upcoming yoga courses.

This photograph shows me teaching yoga as best as I knew how in 1979, standing with a sway in my back (and putting excess flexion into my student's neck).

Aged 15, I came to the United States as an exchange student and proceeded to go to college here. It was while doing a yoga pose in college that I first experienced a significant back episode with severe spasms. A few years later I injured my back while windsurfing; this time it took five days of bed rest to recover. I did weight training to strengthen my back, and returned to normal activity. 

When nine months pregnant with my first child, my back problem resurfaced with an onset of sciatica. After my baby’s birth, it grew worse, leading to surgery for a large disc herniation at L5-S1 a year later. Within another year the pain had returned. I declined a second surgery, and instead deepened my quest to understand the causes of back pain and how best to resolve it. 

An MRI scan done in 1987 revealed the cause of my sciatica and severe back pain—a large herniation at L5-S1.

Yoga postures require healthy posture

I learned from my life experience, as well as that of key teachers such as Noelle Perez, that in the industrialized world we do not use our bodies well. As our posture has deteriorated, traditional ways of performing everyday tasks in sitting, standing, and bending positions have become distorted. These damaging postural patterns are now deeply embedded in our culture and have even been unwittingly carried through into therapeutic activities such as yoga. 

How is it that yoga asanas, developed to bring strength, flexibility, and relaxation to the body, are now causing frequent injury? This question has been the subject of much media coverage in recent decades, including the provocative New York Times article in 2012, How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body¹. From a Gokhale Method® perspective, the primary problem is that poor posture in the population at large, including yoga students, combined with misguided conventional wisdom shared by yoga teachers about what constitutes good posture, has created a perfect storm. 

I came to realize that much of the flexibility I had as a young yoga model came from the wrong places—it was achieved at the expense of my lumbar discs and nerves as I compressed them to sway back, round forward, and twist. Let’s take a look at how yogis are likely to be causing themselves injuries and how using the Gokhale Method to apply the principles of healthy posture will avoid them:

Back bends

A large group of yoga postures are backbends. Bending backwards is something that is generally done extremely poorly in our culture, with most of the bend occuring around waist level. This puts a great deal of pressure on discs, nerves, and soft tissue in an area of the lumbar spine already compressed by tight erector spinae (long back muscles). This shortened baseline length is due to poor posture and furniture, part of our culture’s paradigm shift away from a healthy spine shape. You can read more about spine shape in my blog post What Shape is Your Spine? 

Many versions of Warrior pose, or Virabhadrasana in Sanskrit, are taught with a significant bend in the upper lumbar spine or thoraco-lumbar junction. This is especially a problem when one or both arms are lifted, encouraging the ribs to pop up. Pixabay

Even mild sways perpetuate tight muscles in the lumbar area and correspond with a lack of healthy articulation at L5-S1, the lumbosacral junction. Pexels

Gokhale Method teacher Lang Liu shows how anchoring your rib cage prevents swaying and encourages healthy articulation at L5-S1. You can read more about our approach to this pose in my blog post Why Keep the Body forward in Warrior I 

Forward bends

Many yoga postures contain some form of forward bend. This can be standing, sitting, symmetrical or asymmetrical, with the legs together or wide apart. Regardless of these permutations, from a Gokhale Method perspective, the key point is to make bending healthy and avoid the damage that comes with rounding the back, distending the spinal ligaments, and pinching the front of the discs.

Standing forward bends (Uttanasana) are often taught with legs straight. This leaves most students in our culture, who have tight hamstrings, straining towards the ground with their shoulders pulled forward. It also rounds the back, distending the spinal ligaments and pinching the front of the discs. Hanging off the lower back is also aggravating for the sacro-iliac joints and soft tissue in the area. Pexels

Bending the knees softens tight hamstrings allowing a lower bend to the floor—but this student is still rounding her torso to reach over her pelvis and legs to reach the floor. Pexels

This man is using blocks to reach the floor. He is still rounding his back, and severely compressing his neck to try and look ahead. Pexels

Unfortunately this well-meaning mother is teaching her daughter poor bending form. This is especially regrettable as young children naturally tend to bend healthily by hip-hinging. Pexels

In seated forward bends yoga students often hunch forward. This compounds any rounding already established in the upper back, and forward rounding of the shoulders. Her head also strains forward, chin up, compressing the back of the neck. Pexels

Gokhale Method teacher Cecily Frederick hip-hinges in a standing forward bend. Her pelvis rotates forward around the femoral heads (tops of the thigh bones that form part of the hip joints). Her spine remains long, rather than rounding. 

Twists

In twisting postures (Parivrtti), it is especially important that your movement is not concentrated at a particular level of the spine, but is well distributed. Levering into a twist by pushing or pulling with the arms or legs can cause a twist to concentrate at any vulnerable point. Typically people will twist most in the mid-spine at T12-L1. Here the more axially mobile thoracic spine meets the lumbar area, where the orientation of the facet joints limit rotation. This is likely to result in disc bulging or even herniation at this junction, pinching of the nerves, and undue stress on the bony spine.

This woman is twisting mostly at the waist. Pexels

This seated twist shows tucking of the pelvis. There is considerable rotation at the base of the shoulder blades as the yogini levers with her arms against a fixed pelvis and legs. Wikimedia

A lying twist with one knee reaching the floor and the opposite shoulder remaining there is an extreme rotation for most people. It will often compromise healthy posture. In this case the woman is using her forearm and tucking her pelvis slightly to get her knees down. It is better to prioritize  healthy movement over achieving the “correct” shape. Pexels

Gokhale Method teacher Clare Chapman in a lying twist. Allowing the pelvis to rest back and the thighs to separate avoids tucking and encourages more rotation in the hips. 

We recommend that you initiate twists using the muscles of the torso’s inner corset, especially the obliques. The inner corset is explained in detail in Lesson 5 of my book 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back. Using these muscles means that the lumbar spine is protected while the muscles originating in the thoracic area and connecting to the pelvis power the rotation. Engaging the inner corset also lengthens the spine avoiding the common pitfall of imposing rotation on top of flexion (rounding) or extension (swaying) or any other kind of compression. 

Twists should mainly occur and be appropriately distributed in the joints best designed for them—the ankles (standing twists), hips, the thoracic spine, and the neck. Small amounts of rotation can contribute from elsewhere, but pushing beyond natural limits anywhere by applying force is a recipe for injury and pain.

Before executing yoga bends or twists, we recommend that you first learn the basics of the Gokhale Method® in our in-person Foundations Course, Pop-Up courses, or online Elements. These courses teach you how to bend back without swaying, and how to bend forward in a way that profoundly benefits rather than damages your body. The Gokhale Method Online University has many offerings for Alumni which explore additional movements such as shearing and twisting in ways that are healthy.

If you are a yoga practitioner who suffers from recurrent bouts of back pain or strain, have stopped practicing due to injury, or have been put off even trying yoga, then a solution is at hand! 

It has long been my ambition to offer yoga classes with healthy posture. I am delighted that one of our most experienced and accomplished teachers, Lang Liu, will offer regular Tuesday and Thursday Gokhale Yoga classes, ​​7:00 am (Pacific Time), starting April 21, as part of our Alumni Gokhale Exercise program. 

We look forward to seeing you there.

Gokhale Method teacher Lang Liu looks forward to seeing you in the Gokhale Yoga class.

References:

¹ William Broad, “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body”, New York Times Magazine, Jan. 5, 2012,
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/magazine/how-yoga-can-wreck-your-body.html 

If you would like to find out more about how the Gokhale Method can help support you, sign up to join one of our upcoming FREE Online Workshops…

At the beginning of the pandemic, my tween daughter was the dancer in my house. When her in-person hip-hop class was canceled, she quickly turned online for inspiration, showering me with her 30-second Tik Toks.

I was amused, but resolute that dancing online was not for me. I had my own exercise regime, at the heart of which were a series of Pilates-based exercises that I had incorporated in the hopes of healing a nagging injury. 

But now, 16 months into the pandemic, I’m dancing online too, maybe even more than my 12-year-old. This is thanks to Esther Gokhale and her unbelievably fabulous community who, like me, wanted to find a safe, therapeutic, and fun way of exercising after injuring our backs.

I first heard Esther years ago on a podcast and subsequently checked her book 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back out of the library. I remember being especially interested in the pictures of women holding their babies so comfortably; I had recently given birth, and I tried my best to imitate the women pictured. 

Me with Baby Yael in 2013. I now see I had a very pronounced S-shape curve. 

From reviewing pictures of myself during that time, I see now that I did a poor imitation, but at the time I didn’t have any pain, so I returned the book to the library. 

However, last November while experiencing non-stop back pain, I purchased the book, which led me to Esther’s website and one-on-one coaching. Six weeks later, after completing the Elements course, this is what I wrote to friends and family in my 2021 New Year’s letter:

I’ve been relearning how to walk, stand, and sleep over the past six weeks. This is what one does when she becomes so desperate for relief from unrelenting sciatica, the kind that starts in the buttock and runs down to the calf. It all began with a yoga injury in May 2019, but the pain became unbearable after our move (hello, stress and grief, and, yes, more disc degeneration.)

An MRI from December 2020 had pinpointed “severe facet arthritis bilaterally” at L4-5, and mild to moderate facet damage elsewhere. I had tried everything from PT to Pilates, from massage to medical marijuana, but what seems to have made the biggest difference is the Gokhale Method, which attempts to reteach the body how to do the work of everyday life without further degrading our discs.

I was skeptical about how much I could actually learn online from a Gokhale coach, given that postural work benefits from hands-on adjustments and corrections. But with COVID-19 raging, this is not the time for in-person classes. Happily for me, my coach was terrific, and after completing the 18 introductory classes, I’m feeling so much better. It’s definitely not a magic bullet, but it’s the best thing I’ve tried so far, and I want to believe that if I keep it up, I’ll eventually be pain free. Here’s hoping I can report that next year.

Seven months later, I am thrilled to say that I am indeed pain-free and living a full life that enables me to care for my family, return to writing, and relaunch my health coaching practice that I had put on hold due to the pandemic and pain.

My recovery has been so complete that in May I undertook training to become a certified canoe instructor and am now teaching at the American Canoe Association’s Camp Sebago in New York. 

Now free from back pain and sciatica I am once again able to canoe.

Even though I feel great, I know that wellness takes regular work, and I’m grateful for the ongoing Gokhale Exercise program. Gokhale Fitness teacher Eric Fernandez has gotten me to enjoy strength training; teachers Kathleen O’Donohue and Roberta Cooks are responsible for me incorporating Moving Meditation into my morning routine, while Esther’s daily 1-2-3 Move program has rekindled my love of dance and taught me steps from traditions that include bharata natyam, samba, capoeira, 50s rock, and reggae. Joan Baez’s music is a fave—she is a student of Esther’s and will often be dancing on the screen with the rest of us. 

Head-loading is a fun way to practice many important posture principles, shown here on the 1-2-3 Move program. 

Esther will also occasionally focus on yoga asanas and offer modifications that have enabled me to safely return to a yoga practice. If you see me balancing boxes (or my canoe) on my head, it’s thanks to all the practice I’ve now had with the Gokhale™ Head Cushion, gently “head-loading” my way to a taller, healthier neck. Thanks to the Gokhale Pain-Free™ Chair and Gokhale Stretchsit® Cushion, I’m also able to sit well at my desk and to drive long distances without pain, something that was impossible seven months ago.

1-2-3 Move often features artefacts such as Greek statues, Indian deities, or photographs of people from different cultures going about their work. Esther points out that examples of healthy posture by Americans are more readily found some generations back, in works such as those by Grant Wood or Winslow Homer.  

A Basket of Clams, 1873, Winslow Homer

My favorite class was the one devoted to the Hindu deity Ganesh, who takes the form of an elephant with a pot belly. While dancing to the “Ballad of Ganesha” by Lil Darkie, we took a cue from Ganesh, who holds himself beautifully, despite his roly-poly largesse. Esther talked about how strong abs are something that everyone, no matter what size, can cultivate. If Ganesh can carry himself well, the rest of us can do so as well. She made a similar point using images of Japanese sumo wrestlers. I deeply appreciate that Esther, raised in India by her Dutch mother and Indian father, takes a global perspective on healing. 

Dancing Ganesh, India, 900–1000 AD, sandstone - Fitchburg Art Museum

As a Functional Nutrition and Lifestyle Practitioner, I’ve come to view the Gokhale Method as nonnegotiable, or what Andrea Nakayama, CEO of the Functional Nutrition Alliance, calls “Tier 1”—the basics that must be in place before supplementation (Tier 2) or any kind of medical intervention (Tier 3). 

Tier 1 includes community support, something that is available in any Gokhale Method group class. These social and emotional components of healing, and the importance of surrounding yourself with healthy posture cues from people, artwork, and music, are frequently discussed during the Q&A on the 1-2-3 Move program. 

In this 1-2-3 Move video, Esther shows how traditional artefacts such as shadow puppets from Java, Indonesia, inspire us to free our arms and open the chest.

The Gokhale Method is not against appropriate medication or procedures. Back in February when I was still having some pain upon waking every morning, I asked Esther what she thought of “injections” as a way to mitigate this. To my surprise she said that she sometimes suggests that her students consider this “Tier 3” approach, but only after they have tried “Tier 1” first. Medical interventions such as injections and painkillers can create a window of pain-relief that enables students to learn to improve their posture and address the root cause of their problem. 

I had already had an injection into my SI joint the previous September, which didn’t give me any relief. So I booked a one-on-one appointment with Esther, who pinpointed an excessive curve in my lumbar area. The transformation I brought about in my spine led to me being used as an example of progress in a blog post about spine shape. 

My “before” (above) and “after” (below) Elements photos show a considerable change from an S-spine towards a J-spine. You can read more about spine shape here.

With ongoing attention to creating more of a J-spine and less of an S-spine I no longer have pain. Perhaps even more importantly, I have greater trust that my body, with the right support, can heal.

Loren Edelson is a Functional Nutrition and Lifestyle Practitioner who writes Given the Givens, a bimonthly newsletter on reaching our full potential, even after receiving a life-changing diagnosis. To subscribe, visit https://loren6c2.substack.com/welcome

Learning and internalizing techniques doesn’t always happen immediately — or without assistance from a teacher.

I spent many years developing and perfecting the Gokhale Method Foundations Course. After years of crafting the language, honing the metaphors, and rearranging the order in which techniques are taught, I considered the course well-constructed and comprehensive. I was proud to empower students to be independent in taking their posture journey forward. I was proud to not be peddling products gratuitously, nor to insist students keep coming back for additional lessons. 

The results of this approach were not always stellar. Though some students functioned just fine after one go-round of a full 6-lesson Foundations Course, most students, not surprisingly, needed ongoing repetition to “get it” in their minds, their bodies, and their memory.

The example that brought this point home vividly involved a student who is a physician. She had undergone one back surgery and was scheduled for another. She had extreme sciatic pain that made her want to lie down as much as possible. Driving herself anywhere was impossible, so she hired someone to drive her to her private clinic, where she worked the few 2-3 hours her pain levels would allow, and then was driven home again.

Physicians are among the many groups whose work environments can predispose them to posture issues, especially when they tuck their pelvises or stoop over patients or computers. This doctor in Angola, likely because of healthy cultural modeling, demonstrates the lovely upright bearing that’s possible (and desirable) in this context. Image courtesy Francisco Venâncio on Unsplash.

After working on the basic techniques in a few private lessons, she was able to reduce her pain level to 0 and cancel her scheduled surgery. She followed up with some recommended maintenance lessons and then let the lessons come to a halt. 

A year later she made an appointment during which I was shocked to find her in approximately the same condition she first came in with. I probed gently to discover what had happened. It emerged that one of her patients, a fitness instructor, had invited her to a weekly fitness class. Over time, she had conformed to tucking her pelvis as instructed. In the process of relating the story to me, a realization dawned on her: “Oh yeah, that’s what caused my troubles last time…” Wow. In listening to her a parallel realization dawned on me. Here was a highly-trained medical professional who had gone from being in a dire situation to being completely pain-free, and still the teaching had not held.

Fitness instruction advocating a tucked pelvis ended up making things worse for my physician student who suffered from sciatica. Image courtesy Anupam Mahapatra on Unsplash.

That was when I realized we needed a maintenance program. It’s obvious in hindsight, of course. Adults especially can feel that new information doesn’t “stick” because it gets harder to learn as you get older. I suspect that we actually overlook just how much repetition we did to learn most things when we were younger! That’s why we took over a thousand lessons in school in Math and English! If you have learned to play golf or do certain dances, how many times have you practised that swing, or rehearsed those steps? Learning takes exposure and repetition. It works.

Like perfecting a golf swing or learning a new dance step, posture techniques need regular practice in order to “stick.” Image courtesy Andrew Lomas on Unsplash.

We see some students returning to our classes after gaps of many years, and, like the physician, in that time they have often been culturally “reprogrammed” to tuck the pelvis, to slump, or to sway. We also see clearly that the forgetting curve is very real, and how easy it is to backslide into old habits. When we teach these alumni alongside more recent graduates whom we advised better about the need for revision and follow-up classes, the difference is very obvious. Humans simply learn better with repetition, and the Gokhale Method is no exception to this rule.

A great benefit of the Gokhale Method is the sheer variety of mediums available to reinforce and diversify the learning process.

To meet this need, consider refreshing the material or switching up the format. For example, all of our qualified teachers offer private lessons to alumni. It's surprising how much can be learned in a single lesson once the basics have been covered. If you've taken a Pop-up Course, consider taking a 6-lesson Gokhale Method Foundations Course — or vice versa; if you've taken a group course, consider taking a private lesson. Retreat programs at locations like Esalen Institute, Omega Institute, Kripalu, and 1440 Multiversity are helpful for newcomers and alumni alike and offer the opportunity to learn in a restorative, memorable setting. And some of our teachers offer small-group continuing education classes. All of these are rewarding pathways for relearning and refining the basic techniques, and coming away with different takeaways.

Working with students and actively helping them learn is a great joy for me and our many other Gokhale Method teachers.

Regardless of which specific new tack you choose, we recommend taking your first refresher class within 1-2 months of graduating from the Gokhale Method Foundations Course or the Pop-up Course. The next refresher happens best within 3 months of the first one. From then on we recommend doing an in-person session —  private or group — at least every six months, and sooner if there are still significant challenges. Working in-person with a teacher is always best, but if that’s not possible, a session can be scheduled online, which is surprisingly helpful for troubleshooting and keeping your own known posture challenges on your radar. So if you are one of our Foundations Course or Pop-up Course alumni, schedule that session! Our experienced teachers are ready to help.

Hands-on learning with a Gokhale Method teacher helps students refine and refresh the techniques, whether they’re just beginning their posture journey or whether it’s been years since their first lesson.

We have also created an Online University which includes 2 Live Chats with me every month and unlimited access to our on-demand library of over 60 instructional videos. Each lesson focuses on a specific posture topic, such as Beyond Stacksitting, Cooking with Healthy Posture, Foot Health, Yoga with Healthy Posture, dance, exercise routines, and so on. You are then able to revise and extend your posture expertise at any time for an entire year.  Now wouldn’t that be a great idea for 2020?

If you are one of our Foundations Course or Pop-up Course alumni, you can sample a free session of Online University content here. And from now through December 20, 2019, all of our alumni can save $100 on a year-long Online University membership! You must call our support team at 1-888-557-6788 to receive this special rate.

We wish you a peaceful holiday season filled with good posture!

Mother and son in a tribal Orissan village demonstrating excellent walking form. Notice that their heels remain on the floor well into their stride.

Do you have tight psoas muscles? Do you suspect the cause is too much time spent sitting in your daily life? There’s a complementary activity that helps counterbalance the time we spend sitting: walking — or, more specifically, glidewalking. Glidewalking helps balance our sitting in numerous ways — walking is dynamic versus sitting which is static. Yang balances Yin, viewed in the framework of traditional Chinese medicine. One underappreciated way in which walking can balance sitting pertains to the psoas muscle.

The psoas muscle originates on the front of the sides of all the lumbar vertebrae and discs, and ends on the lesser trochanter of the femur.

This pathway is quite circuitous and runs adjacent to several pelvic organs. With long hours of sitting, the psoas can adapt to a short resting length. Original image courtesy Anatomography on Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 2.1 JP.

A short psoas pulls forward on the lumbar spine any time the legs are outstretched. This is why many people are uncomfortable lying on the back with outstretched legs, and why some people feel sciatic twinges when they stand and walk. The natural antidote for this tendency of the psoas muscle to shorten in sustained sitting is glidewalking. Glidewalking is really natural or primal walking given a special name because it is a rare thing in modern times and deserves to be celebrated with a special name! Every step done with proper form naturally stretches the psoas. That amounts to 5,000 mini psoas stretches on each side if you are glidewalking the recommended 10K steps a day. This will keep your psoas in a healthy, stretched out, pliable state!

This Orissan woman demonstrates beautiful walking form with her body in line with her back leg, her back leg straightened but not locked, and her back heel staying close the ground well into her stride.

The best way to get your psoas stretches, or resets, is to punctuate your day with glidewalking. No instance of glidewalking is insignificant: glidewalking to the bathroom, glidewalking to get a glass of water, and glidewalking in kinhin (walking meditation) all help. So are the longer, more obvious instances of glidewalking such as the daily constitutional and the weekend hike.

Orissan women carrying water on their heads. Notice how the woman in front propels herself off her rear heel. This additionally gives her a healthy psoas stretch with every step she takes.

It has become popular to consider that “sitting is the new smoking.” Poor form and long stretches of uninterrupted sitting do indeed have a deleterious effect on health, but I believe that a significant unknown contributor is that most people do not walk in a way that resets the psoas muscle after it shortens during extended sitting.

Apart from responding to extended sitting, the psoas muscle is also very responsive to psychological stress. We see this in the Moro reflex in babies when they respond to loud noises and traumatic stimuli such as real or perceived falling. Addressing psoas tension is at the core of certain body modalities, such as Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE), and innovative developments in psychotherapy involving polyvagal theory.

This Rodin sculpture shows its subject well into a stride with the rear heel still down on the ground. This stance is a natural part of gait and stretches the psoas muscle.

It’s a tad complex to learn to stretch the psoas in glidewalking, but well worth the effort. It takes a combination of the following actions to do the job.

1. The rib cage needs to be anchored to stabilize the lumbar spine. Without this step, any other effort to stretch the psoas will result in arching the lower back. 

2. The back heel needs to stay on the ground a long time into a stride. Most people lift their heel up from the ground prematurely, losing the full extent of the psoas stretch that nature designed to be built into every step.

3. The gluteal muscles of the rear leg engage appropriately, further augmenting the psoas stretch.

Proper technique can help you avoid the cycle of tight psoas muscles, reduced activity, tighter psoas muscles, further-reduced activity…

How much have you succeeded in putting these pieces together? What helped the techniques coalesce? The book? The DVD? One of our courses? A topical workshop on glidewalking for our Gokhale Method Alumni? I’d love to hear from you in the comment section below.

Photo courtesy Norman Crawford.

Norm, a hydrologic analyst and author now 82 years of age, originally hails from Alberta, Canada. When Norm was 16 years old, he accepted a summer job in Lake Louise (also known as Lake of the Little Fishes by the local Stoney Nakoda people), a location in the Canadian Rockies so known for its rugged beauty that it is frequently included on lists of “Wonders of the World.” This breathtaking landscape formed the backdrop for Norm’s lifelong love affair with the outdoors. Decades later, Norm still speaks of Lake Louise with understated reverence.

Lake Louise, Alberta, Canada, where Norm first fell in love with hiking. Photo courtesy Kevin Noble on Unsplash.

These days, Norm still loves spending time being active outdoors. When he’s home and not working on flood research or his novel, a favorite activity of Norm’s is walking the Stanford hills and campus. His family also owns a small cabin in the mountains near a lake he enjoys circumambulating daily. Perhaps it was his early exposure to the wilderness of Lake Louise which planted the seed of his passion for outdoor activity, a healthy and restorative passion he continues to feed.

Norm has been fortunate to enjoy “quite a bit” of mountain hiking in his life: here he is summiting Mt. McArthur. Photo courtesy Norman Crawford.

Challenges to walking and hiking

Not long ago, however, Norm’s treasured outdoor activity began to be interrupted by lower back and leg pain. After only 30 minutes of walking, he would be in enough pain to have to stop and stretch out his legs. He’d then be able to continue for another 5-10 minutes before needing to stop again. The pain was significant enough that he was starting to avoid walking even his usual Stanford route. At the mountain cabin, he noticed himself avoiding the routine, 2-hour “rocky walk” around the lake, fearing pain. To be suddenly unable to take this routine walk was quite a disruption. Norm was afraid he’d have to give up the mountain hiking he’d enjoyed since his teenage years. More than that: he was also afraid of consigning himself to a shorter life of poorer quality. He’d seen similar effects firsthand after his father experienced a severe pole-vaulting leg fracture at age 45, and didn’t want that for himself. Norm decided to do something about his pain, rather than settle for a life like his father’s had become after his injury. He also wanted to strengthen his core, behind, and legs.

As Norm puts it, “it’s troubling to get old,” but he also sees aging, in part, as a state of mind. “It’s not true to say that I’m still 20,” he says by way of example, but “there’s a way to do things that you have not done before and to expand what you know.” Norm’s willingness “to try out other things” than what might be strictly familiar speaks to his adventurous approach to life and clearly benefits his mindset. As a hydrologic researcher, he’s enjoyed visiting countries where he couldn’t even begin to read the language, let alone speak it. More recently, since he’s begun Gokhale Method lessons and Continuing Education, Norm’s interest in retooling habitual behavior has benefitted not only his posture, but his enjoyment of life.

One of the important lessons Norm learned was the sequence of muscular contractions and relaxations that constitute walking. The Orissan man above shows the beginning of the relaxation phase of a stride — his left posterior chain muscles relax as his right leg takes on a more active role. His left foot’s shape continues to hold its own at this instant.

The Gokhale Method supplies Norm with very specific ways to strengthen his back and other muscles, as well as new ways of moving and walking. These techniques are drawn from nonindustrialized, indigenous cultures —  cultures which Norm considers “less stressed” than ours. The specificity of the Gokhale Method techniques contrast with Norm’s earlier experience with the Alexander Technique, which he does not recall being as methodical and technique-oriented.

Our founder Esther Gokhale lives and teaches close to Norm, so he’s been “fortunate enough to take classes with the source,” and Norm holds her teaching expertise in high regard. Norm considers the lessons reasonably priced, particularly compared to the costs of MRIs and conventional medicine. He began lessons with Esther nearly a year and a half ago. Initially, Norm attended the lessons, listened to the instruction, and started working on the techniques, but admits he “didn’t really do things daily.” Eventually, he heard Esther say that if he wanted to gain more robust benefits, he’d have to perform the techniques daily. That shift from occasional to daily practice was when he began to see “major results.”

These before-and-after images and SpineTracker™ readings of Norm's hip-hinging indicate one way he has learned to protect his posture.

The benefits of adaptability

Since taking a Gokhale Method Foundations Course and Continuing Education, “what used to happen” to Norm in terms of pain “just doesn’t happen” anymore. That treasured 2-hour walk around the lake at the mountain cabin is something he wouldn’t hesitate to do now. Closer to home, he walks the same hour-plus Stanford routes he used to walk and doesn’t need to stop and doesn’t even feel uncomfortable. With a grin, Norm jokes that the results of treating his pain through posture seem to him like “black magic!”

Norm is living proof that, at any age, humans can learn and adapt to new situations, and can do things we’ve never done before. Rather than allowing himself to become “self-contained and narrow” in the way he does things as he ages, Norm prefers to change course and branch out, much like water does as it flows tirelessly around obstacles.

Like the water he’s researched for decades, Norm has found ways to respond and adapt to changing circumstances. Photo courtesy Ezra Comeau-Jeffrey on Unsplash.

In Norm’s own words:

When asked to say something about myself, my first impulse is self-aggrandizement, e.g. claiming I was born in a cabin I built myself. This impulse can’t survive the light of day, but if this text decamps and merges with late night camp-fire talk, beware. My work is hydrologic analysis and I have been fortunate to travel and work in many places in the world, including villages in the Amazon that have limited contact with the outside world.

I want to talk about teachers, and what we learn and don’t learn, and whether or not this changes with age. We do learn at an extraordinary rate between birth and age four; if you see a newborn and a four-year-old together, how could that transformation happen? College freshmen and graduates are different, but not that different. If you do reach seventy, or eighty, what then? Have you learned all that there is to learn?

People like these Orissan potters were the models for Norm’s posture transformation.

Specifics, my inner editor demands. OK. I’ve had the good fortune to meet teachers over my eighty-plus years and retain some of what they had to say; in high-school an English and a physics teacher. In college, still more – a mathematics professor (whose name I don’t remember) who said the increase in computational speed (then about five orders of magnitude) would change human life. The teachers I remember had discovered or realized truths and wanted to make these truths known.

So, what happens with age? Things I could do at sixty-five, eighteen-hour mountain climbs, become problematic. I would love to do those climbs but my body says, “You can’t be serious.” I have to deal with loss. My mother-in-law, who lived to 102, said, “Old age is not for wimps.”

This elderly Orissan woman’s presence in the marketplace communicates a peaceful approach to aging. She actively participates in everyday life — her biceps tone tells that story — even as she sits out the most arduous tasks.

Dylan Thomas wrote, “Do not go gentle into that good night-” How can that be done? Esther Gokhale is a teacher. Listening to Esther, and learning finally that I had to work at the Gokhale Method, I found I could defeat sciatica. My expectation that ‘things get worse with age’ proved false.

Eighteen-hour mountain climbs? Not yet. Maybe next year.

     From the Argentine romantic composing a tango to the K-pop star strumming for an audience of thousands, guitars are a favorite instrument around the world. In fact, the guitar is the second most played instrument after the piano. (source). Amateur and professional players use a variety of playing positions - some are significantly more ergonomic than others. 

    In the classical position, the guitar is sharply angled up so that the wide end of the instrument’s body sits against one leg and the neck is held aloft with the opposite hand. This position allows the musician’s shoulders to be square and resting more posteriorly in line with the back instead of rolled forward as  in the modern style of playing with a horizontally aligned guitar.

Andre Segovia playing classical guitar with excellent form

The picture of Andres Segovia above shows the classical guitar-playing style. We can see that his shoulders remain home - they are open and back even while his arms reach forward to hold the frets and pluck the strings. In addition, his shoulders are relaxed and slope downward. His eyes look down at the instrument but his neck remains vertically aligned with his torso. While not overtly visible, his pelvis seems to be slightly rotated (anteverted), which  allows his back to stack upright. His positioning allows him to play for long periods with ease in spite of his advanced age. Segovia uses a footstool to help keep his guitar at a 45 degree angle. 

A "spacer" helping facilitate good playing form

In the image above, we see a rest placed between the instrument and the thigh to support the guitar. The support allows the player to keep her right shoulder farther back while playing.  

Generally, when standing, a strap is used to keep the guitar elevated. Regardless of the support used, the goal is the same - to maintain healthy posture while playing one’s instrument.

In the image below, we see the opposite - the guitar is played in a way that compromises the player’s posture. This very common playing position used is likely to cause her pain and injury despite her young age. Her right shoulder is rounded forward as she reaches for the strings and her head and neck are jutting forward for a better view of her playing. In addition, her pelvis is tucked, which causes her spine to round forward instead of stacking.  

Unfortunately it is not uncommon for musicians to develop sciatica, tendonitis, nerve damage, and arthritis, and careers can be cut short because of bad playing habits. It is critical to the health of the life-long guitarist that the instrument be held to accommodate healthy posture instead of distorting the posture to accommodate a poorly held guitar. This distinction is important. In the modern era we are quick to change positions to accommodate cellphones, computers, desks, and heavy bags. However, we need our bodies to last us nearly a century, so it is imperative that we endeavor to live our lives in ways that maintain our postural integrity. 

Join us in an upcoming Free Workshop (online or in person).  

Find a Foundations Course in your area to get the full training on the Gokhale Method!  

We also offer in person or online Initial Consultations with any of our qualified Gokhale Method teachers.

At the end of his rope after chiropractic, physical therapy, massage and surgery, a Transportation Planning Consultant finds relief with Gokhale Method Foundations Course.

Travis Dunn, PhD, remembers clearly the onset of his excruciating back pain. He was all of 24 years old.

“It first appeared while I was on vacation in June 2005,” he recalls. “There was no specific, major incident that precipitated the pain, but it grew sharper and more debilitating over the course of a week or so, including occasional sciatica.”

He would start each day with his back pain registering “one or two” on a scale of ten, he recalls. As soon as he sat, the pain would grow worse. “If I were to remain seated, I’d be at seven or eight within a half hour. When I stood up, I would be like a hunchback,” he says, bending over to show how contorted his body was. “Then I would have to stretch to reset my muscles before I could sit down.”

He survived his workday by taking walking breaks—some were part of his regular routine of walking to meetings or lunch. Others were add-ons to a fully loaded workday. All told, he’d spend an hour or so walking each day, just so he could sit and work. When the pain became unbearable, he would rearrange his desk and stand at his computer, which helped only slightly.

Dunn opted for a conservative approach to treatment, starting with chiropractic care. “The chiropractor took x-rays, then put them up on the wall and showed me where everything was wrong in my spine. He said I’d see him three or four times a week at first, and then we’d taper off after that as I got better.” That lasted two months. “I wanted to believe it would work, and he told me it would. But I saw no difference.”

Over the following two years Dunn tried therapeutic massage—“short-term relief measured in hours, not days.” Next came six months of physical therapy, which provided some help if he maintained a strict regimen. Dunn had cortisone injections twice, with no benefit. 

“Long road trips and air travel were nightmares,” he recalls. Over-the-counter pain killers had no effect, he says, and he studiously avoided prescription pain relievers or muscle relaxants. “I knew of people with back pain similar to mine, who had become prescription pain killer addicts; I didn’t want to go down that trail.”

Dunn finally went to an orthopedic surgeon who, unlike the chiropractor, saw nothing of concern on the x-rays. “He looked at the same x-rays as my chiropractor and said, “You can’t see anything from these.” The orthopedist ordered an MRI, which showed a herniated L4-L5 disc.

After exhausting what he thought were all of his alternatives, he had surgery in December 2006, an L4-L5 discectomy to remove the herniation. It relieved his occasional sciatic pain, but the low back pain continued. “I followed up with routine physical therapy for the next 6 months which helped me to manage the pain, but if I skipped even one day of stretches and exercises I was miserable,” he says. 

At this point Dunn estimates he was out of pocket about $7,000 and that his health insurance company had absorbed at least another $20,000. He also missed work for a month while recovering from the surgery.

For the next several years he managed his pain with a strict regimen of stretching and exercise, but still struggled at work where he spent long hours sitting at a desk. The pain was constant, he remembers, with its severity tempered only modestly by stretching and back exercises.

The ordeal was at least as taxing emotionally as it was physically and financially. “I was never clinically depressed, but over time it took a toll on me emotionally,” Dunn recalls. “I’m an engineer by training. I solve problems, and I couldn’t figure this one out. I was going to all the medical professionals you’re supposed to go to, and they couldn’t fix it."

“The despair part of it is this fear that you’re going to have to live with this for the rest of your life. The longer it went on, especially after the surgery didn’t resolve the underlying back pain, the more I was left wondering if this was going to be a chronic lifelong cross to bear. I never stopped looking for answers, but I had five years of very limited success. And when a problem lasts that long, you can lose hope.”

In April 2010, nearly five years after the pain began, he took the three-day intensive Gokhale Method Foundation course. 

“It was intuitive, in a way that was revealing, or eye opening,” he recalls. He had seen Gokhale Method creator Esther Gokhale’s book, and the class came naturally to him. “I remember sitting down for the opening session, and listening to her explanation of posture. It was very intuitive, and I felt very comfortable. I saw results almost immediately."

“I quickly realized that many of the stretches and sitting positions I had been using to find relief were, according to the Gokhale Method, counterproductive. For example, arching or swaying my back and using a lot of lumbar cushioning—that was a big one—were actually making things worse. I had no guidance or foundation for the geometry and physics of a healthy back, so I used countless positions and exercises, many of which were ill-advised. Esther’s method was a very logical philosophy, easy to follow.”

Dunn shared an email he wrote to Gokhale six months after taking her course. "My low-back pain is, for the most part, a memory. I have applied your methods principally to my sitting, which was always the most uncomfortable position for me. The results are striking. Whereas in the past it was a struggle to get through a day (complete with standing / stretching / walking breaks every 10 minutes or so), I can now sit uninterrupted and pain free for long stretches."

“As evidence of that, I have traveled from Boston in the past three months twice to Portugal (that's four flights of seven+ hours each), twice to Texas (four flights of three+ hours), and once to Mexico (two flights of four+ hours). Each time, I flew comfortably and pain free!"

Dunn—now a 32-year-old transportation planning consultant—travels regularly overseas and has driven twice across the country—all pain free. And his advice to others in back pain? 

“This method is something everyone should be doing, regardless of whether they’re in pain. I notice posture now. I notice how people are sitting. For those in pain, it’s easy, low cost, and a low-hanging fruit. I wish I had done it first.”

Why Samba?

Apart from the fun, the exercise, and the infectious music that's central to this Brazilian dance form, I endorse Samba as a way to promote healthy posture. Among the many benefits, dancing Samba:

• Involves a lot of lateral motion and hip mobility, something especially needed in our culture, where so many of us tend to move mostly forward and backward and not so much from side to side.
• Engages the gluteal muscles, including the gluteus medius, which--though vitally important to so many kinds of natural movements--are underdeveloped or even "fast asleep" in too many people throughout the developed world.

If  you're still not persuaded to join our online Samba workshop, watch even just a couple of minutes of this 4-minute video, and I'll wager that many of you will accept my invitation to dance.

Samba de Roda

What you just saw was a marvelous demonstration of Samba de Roda, or "Samba in the round," which features solo dancers surrounded by musicians and other dancers, singing and clapping and sequentially inviting others to take their turn. An aspect of this form of Samba that holds special appeal as the basis for a training workshop is that learning involves a great deal of observation and imitation, and that those with relatively less skill are among those in the circle invited to join in. Also appealing is the fact that not only are the dancers' feet, calves, legs, hips, and abdomens constantly working, their gluteus medius muscles are also fully engaged. So much so, that before we start dancing I'd like to highlight this important pair of muscles.

To engage, or not to engage (the gluteus medius)...

...can there be any question?

Even when considered from the pure-vanity standpoint of having an attractive, perky derriere, my guess is that most of us would favor the Ubong tribesmen's gluteus medius muscles, which can easily be seen in the upper, outer quadrant of their buttocks just below their cloth belts, to the less distinctive gluteus medius muscles in the photo below.

What accounts for this "flat butt" look is the fact that these important muscles are underdeveloped and have not been adequately used.

What are the gluteus medius and why develop them?

The gluteus medius play an essential role in all kinds of natural movement, including walking, glidewalking, running, and samba dancing. In particular, these muscles:

• Help keep the pelvis level on the hip joint of the weight-bearing leg. (Without the gluteus medius, we would take a step and your pelvis would sink to one side.)
• Are essential to holding the pelvis in the anteverted, or tipped forward, position. (This is essential because the pelvis serves as our architectural foundation; when it is inappropriately tucked in, the rest of the body cannot properly stack, and pain problems may ensue.)
• Are essential to gait and facilitate "soft landings" when we walk. (Unlike our hunter-gatherer ancestors who lightly, quietly tread when hunting prey, too many of us thump around causing damage to our structures.)

The gluteus medius are shown in red

A couple of other reasons, which we will only touch on here, but will explore in future posts, relate to two painful disorders that arise, at least in part, out of underdeveloped or suboptimally performing gluteus medius muscles:

• Patellar femoral pain syndrome (PFPS) 
• Pyriformis syndrome

In a nutshell, a growing body of evidence indicates that gluteal medius health strongly correlates to knee health. If you have good strength in your gluteus medius, your knees will be in better shape, and PFPS is less likely to afflict you. Similarly, if your pelvis is appropriately oriented and your gluteus medius muscles are doing their job, the pyriformis muscles, which lie directly beneath gluteus medius, won't have to pick up inappropriate load and, due to suboptimal orientation and / or hypertrophy, impinge on the sciatic nerve, which exits the pelvis just underneath.

One technique to locate the gluteus medius is to raise your leg back and up and turned out

How to locate and engage your gluteus medius and practice basic Samba steps

1. Identify your gluteus medius as shown in the above photo. Once you feel where this muscle is, step away from the chair.
2. Now, take a small step back with your right leg, press your heel into the ground, straighten your right leg, and squeeze the gluteus medius muscle in the upper, outer quadrant of your buttock until you can feel with your hand how hard it is.
3. When your right gluteus medius is engaged, hold this position for a beat.
4. Return to your starting position by moving your right leg forward.
5. Now, go through the same motions with your left leg.
6. Practice these steps, alternating right and left legs, until the squeezing of your gluteus medius becomes natural and familiar.

Samba steps teleseminar

A fun and helpful way to prepare for the teleseminar on Monday, October 21, 2013, is to watch one or more of the following Samba YouTubes, each highlighting slightly different aspects and methods. What's really helpful about this first video is that the dancer starts with pre-Samba steps, emphasizing the side to side movement of the hips. Keep in mind that there are many varieties of Samba, and that this dancer demonstrates just one style. My only cautionary note about this demonstration and the one that immediately follows is that the dancers slightly arch their upper lumbar regions in a way that's not ideal.

Apart from the occasional sound of wind in the microphone, the second video is worth watching because it offers another lesson in the basic Samba step--this time with music.

The third video also highlights a very basic Samba step very similar to the one just above, but the dancer does so without swaying her back. Another nice feature of this video is that the dancer varies the speed of the Samba steps, starting slowly and then picking up the pace to the point where the Samba becomes attractive.

Because some of you might be inspired by pure music, I also suggest that if time permits you check out some of my favorite Sambistas:

• Jorge Aragão
• Olodum (percussion group from Bahia)
• Zeca Pagodinho

And if you join me for our Samba steps teleseminar, I'll share some of these favorites with you.

Photo and Video Credits: Samba de Roda YouTube: pousadamorrodesaopaulo.net Ubong Tribesmen: Esther Gokhale Gluteus Medius Anatomical Drawing: Wikimedia Commons Esther Engages Her Gluteus Medius: Gokhale Method Institute Samba Dancer: Wikimedia Commons Samba Steps Youtube: sambabody.com Learn Samba with Gianne Abbot: Bella Moda Brazil Basic Samba Footwork: Michele Bastos