exercises

You’ve tweaked your back. It may be a stabbing pain that catches with certain movements, it may be that you cannot straighten up, or maybe it’s an electrical, nervy sensation in your buttock.  

A back spasm is never welcome—but it is a signal we can act on—when we know how. Image by: Kampus Production

It’s true that time is a great healer—and that most back pain resolves itself without intervention—but there are also things we can do to accelerate the healing, that can help us feel better immediately, and protect us in the longer term. 

Should I take pain meds?

Pain meds (muscle relaxants, anti-inflammatories, and pain signal blockers) can be useful in allowing you to remain reasonably active, preserve your mental health, work, care for dependents, and more. They can also have negative side effects and create dependence. Using pain meds is a very individual decision to be made with your medical advisors, but if you do use meds, be sure you are using the relief they give you as a window of opportunity to address the root causes of your back pain.

Should I keep moving or rest up? 

There is research showing that for back pain, maintaining normal activities as tolerated gives a better outcome than bed rest. Maintaining gentle movement is nearly always advisable as it promotes healthy circulation and healing in the injured area. It also counters joint stiffness, muscle weakness, and loss of fitness. As the saying goes, “motion is lotion.” Maintaining regular activities as tolerated also helps you keep up with your friends, hobbies, and tasks, and staves off depression. 

In our experience doing normal activities with truly normal (healthy) posture gives an even better outcome.

Activities done with healthy posture are protective against back spasms and injuries.

Move like you are meant to

Unless it was a freak accident, think back to what caused this spasm. Going forward, what are you going to do differently to make sure it doesn’t happen again? Are there movements to avoid until you have learned what is truly healthy for your body, be that in bending, twisting, or reaching? Students have sometimes discovered that certain “healthy” exercises, such as cat-cow, or roll-downs, feel wonderful at the time, but that such alternating flexion and extension provokes their backs to stiffen up or spasm later. 

Poorly designed stretch and mobility exercises such as cat-cow actually push deeper into existing curves, provoking inflammation and stiffness. Images from Freepik 

Non-drug treatments 

Alternative or additional treatment for back spasms might include massage, physical therapy, acupuncture, chiropractic, and osteopathy. It would be fair to say that while many of our students find one or more of these modalities helpful, they are seldom sufficient to get to the root cause of their back flare-ups and prevent them from recurring. When I was a practicing acupuncturist, I found that my patients responded better to treatment for back pain when I also helped them with their posture. Their bodies could heal and strengthen better when they stopped unwittingly reverting to poor bending, lifting, walking, sitting, and sleeping positions after their treatments.

Gokhale Method® solutions

I would like to offer two key Gokhale Method techniques that can accelerate your journey out of pain, plus get you started on creating the baseline conditions to keep your back healthy into the future. 

You will use readily available surfaces—a mattress or an exercise mat, and the backrest of a chair—to put your back into mild traction. You will be able to use this surface to contact and gently stretch your skin, which stretches the flesh underneath and gently eases your vertebrae apart. This will gradually tease out tension and spasm, facilitate circulation and healing, and bring peace to the area. These techniques are useful for five minute “resets” during the day, or for hours at a time, as needed.

Caution: If your back pain is persistent or severe, we recommend you consult your medical team prior to using these techniques.

Technique 1: Stretchlying

Stretchlying can transform lying down into therapeutic traction and comfort—even as you sleep. You can get started with this video.

Technique 2: Stretchsitting

Stretchsitting can transform compressive sitting (and driving) into hours of therapeutic traction and comfort. You can get started with this video.

You can learn these techniques in greater detail, with modifications for your body, in our in-person Foundations Course and our online Gokhale Elements. My book, 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back, has illustrated, step-by-step instructions. Our stretchsit® cushion is a handy tool to make poorly designed chairs more comfortable and healthy. Here you can find a video on how to attach it to just about any chair. We’ve put it on sale until April 1 for $54.90, discounted from $59.90, plus free domestic shipping.

The stretchsit® cushion not only creates a healthier shape for your backrest, its soft “sticky” nubs are specially designed to give comfortable traction. 

Doing things differently

Pain is nature's biofeedback mechanism—one which alerts us to the threat or occurrence of injury, which we should act on. Unfortunately our culture has not equipped us well to interpret our pain signals, nor to understand the systematic errors we may be making in our body use. 

Once we recognize that poor postural habits are the root cause of our back pain, the process of change can begin. A teacher’s experienced eye can be invaluable in assessing your individual postural patterns and issues, helping you to steer out of trouble and into a healthier relationship with your body.

The way we make every movement determines whether our back has length and support, or is vulnerable to damaging stress. Here I am guiding a student in glidewalking. 

Best next action steps 

If you would like to know how changing your posture can prevent your back pain, get started by booking a consultation, online, or in person with one of our teachers. 

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

This is our second blog post in the series where we put popular exercises under scrutiny to examine how they stack up—or not—against the principles of healthy posture. Here we are looking at crunches, a common abdominal exercise.

Crunches are often seen as a better targeted and safer 
abdominal exercise than sit-ups—but there is still a downside.

Crunches are done lying down on the floor, face up, knees bent with feet on the floor, and with the hands placed behind or to the side of the head. They involve using the muscles of the rectus abdominis and the obliques to repeatedly raise and lower the upper body. 

Crunches are well named—they crunch your discs and crunch your nerves. Lifting the weight of the head—which at around 11 lb. or 5 kg is the weight of an average bowling ball—can put considerable strain on your neck and threaten its delicate structures. It also encourages rounding of the back and shoulders, as you can see in the above photo. We recommend against this exercise.

Doing poorly designed exercises and overtraining the “six-pack” muscles will encourage a tucked pelvis
and a rounded upper spine. Freepik

Why are crunches so popular?

People in our culture are conditioned to feel more attractive when they have a flat stomach and an impressive six-pack, and so may turn to all manner of treatments, diet regimens, and abdominal exercises to target this area. People who have experienced an episode of debilitating back pain also want, quite understandably, to strengthen their abs and core in order to protect their back. 

Do most people need to strengthen their abs?

   
Parking the pelvis forward is a common postural habit that pushes into the groins and compresses the lower back. It indicates that the deep abdominal muscles are not engaged and prevents them from fulfilling their postural role. Freepik

Most people in our culture sit, stand, bend, and walk in ways that actually discourage their abdominal muscles from working in their day-to-day lives. Those who either arch or round their backs are holding themselves upright with their back muscles or stressing their joints. With these poor posture habits the “inner corset” (deep muscles of the abdomen and lower back) is not recruited to perform its natural role and becomes progressively weaker. 

This woman in Burkina Faso and man in Brazil use their inner corset in their everyday tasks.

Learning healthy posture as taught in our online Elements course and in-person Gokhale [Go-clay]Method Foundations Course holistically addresses this problem. In the courses we teach specific, well-chosen exercises designed to jump-start weak muscles and awaken your inner corset. Some of these are illustrated in Appendix 1 of my book 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back. 

Are crunches a safer exercise than sit-ups?

Crunches are often regarded as a safer and better choice of abdominal exercise than sit-ups. And they are. The Canadian Armed Forces discontinued the use of sit-ups in training and physical-fitness tests due to the large numbers of injuries caused to their personnel. The U.S. military also has a plan to phase them out by 2021. Stuart McGill, Professor of Spine Biomechanics at the University of Waterloo in Canada and a leading researcher on the subject, points to numerous studies that show that repeated sit-ups, which load the discs in a particularly dangerous direction, cause bulging, sequestrated, and herniated discs as well as spinal nerve damage. 

Neither of these people doing crunches have healthy form. Their necks are doing too much, and the man is also tucking his pelvis. Crello

Gym instructors often prefer crunches over sit-ups because they are safer and result in less tension in the psoas (hip flexors). But are they safe enough? 

In our view, classic rounded crunches are still a risky, disc-compressing exercise which encourage tension in the groin, while also training the body in poor postural form (tucking the pelvis and rounding the upper back and neck).

Doing a crunch twisting the head towards the knee encourages the neck to do too much and the pelvis to tuck. Crello

Rounded crunches are sometimes done with a twist at the waist to work the abs more obliquely. This is often done by bringing up the entire upper body and reaching one elbow towards the knee of the opposite leg. 

Effective ab exercises that are healthy for your posture

There are healthy alternatives to crunches that give your abdominal muscles a good workout! 

Our healthy and posture-positive version of this exercise keeps the head supported in the hands. The arm on the side to which you are turning continues to be supported on the ground. You can watch Gokhale Method Fitness teacher Eric Fernandez performing the exercise in this video. You will see that he maintains his spinal alignment throughout the exercise, rather than tucking and rounding his torso. 

When doing this exercise:

• Support your head in your hands and relax your neck 
• Rest your upper arm on the floor as you turn towards it, lifting the opposite arm and shoulder from the floor
• Do not pull your head forward
• Do not tuck your pelvis
• Aim for small, smooth, accurate movements

If your abdominal muscles are weak or you are currently or intermittently experiencing back pain, then we recommend that you start with a less challenging exercise. To correctly identify and safely bring your abdominal obliques and other upper abdominal muscles to a healthy baseline tone, we recommend first watching this Gokhale Method rib anchor exercise video, and then learning to use your inner corset. The inner corset is explained in detail in 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back. 

Free Chapter of 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back

As a special gift to newsletter subscribers who have confirmed their subscription, we would like to send you the Inner Corset chapter from Esther's book, 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back.

Please enter your email address in the field below and you will be sent an email with your Inner Corset chapter. You may receive a confirmation email to sign up to the Positive Stance newsletter first.

If you are looking for a way to exercise regularly that is healthy for your back and improves your posture, sign up for our Gokhale Exercise Free Trial:

1-2-3 Move happens daily with Esther at 9:45 a.m. (Pacific Time)
Gokhale Fitness with Eric runs Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays from 7–7:25 a.m.
(Pacific Time), and Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays from 3–3:25 p.m. (Pacific Time)

Read our Home Exercises Part 1 blog post on Cobra here.

This is the first post in our series on home exercise during shelter-in. For Part 2 on Toning the Gluteus Medius, click here!

Making the most of shelter-in by practicing chair pose Gokhale-style in my backyard garden.

Whether you are on the road, in a campground, or just stuck at home during quarantine, you can always exercise. In the daily lead-up to our ongoing Posture 1-2-3 Challenge for alumni subscribers, I often turn to dance as a way to process whatever baggage might have set foot in my psyche that particular morning, and also to get the group moving and warmed up for the main program. I’ve been dancing since I was a young child, so I have a very strong bias for dance as a way of exercising, but I also like to change it up with other types of exercise. It turns out that we have a lot of options, even when we can’t access the gym.

First up is Chair Pose, from yoga. Chair Pose (Utkatasana in Sanskrit) is a great example of an at-home, equipment-free exercise which can strengthen a variety of muscles in very little time. You don’t have to spend forever and a day in Chair Pose to reap its benefits. This makes it a perfect fit for our busy lives.

In the image above, Cecily's behind is well behind, and her J-spine visible — both good details from a Gokhale Method perspective. The overlaid graphic conveys her Gokhale SpineTracker™ readings. Note on foot placement: in the Gokhale Method, we teach placing the feet about hip width apart and facing slightly outwards as a way of optimally supporting primal leg architecture.

Chair pose with a Gokhale Method filter:

1. Prepare your lower body. Start with kidney bean-shaped feet, and do a little squat, to let gravity assist in settling your pelvis between your legs. Then come back up, but not to a parked position (that is, avoid locking your hips forward and knees backward). A parked position allows the muscles to “check out” (that’s why we find ourselves drifting to this position repeatedly!), but is damaging to the joints. Rather than parking in your joints, get your body into a “ready position:” that is, a position with a little spring in it that is easy on the joints and also enables you to move on a dime.
2. Prepare your upper body. Use the rib anchor technique, with your shoulders rolled and the back of the neck tall. Now we’re ready to begin with Chair Pose.
3. Bending the knees slowly, go down-down-down, keeping the knees from crossing over the toes. Yes, this detail makes it harder, and you may have to grip on the floor with your feet.  This is good for your feet! The main reason for this is to minimize stress to the knees and maximize challenge to various leg muscles.
4. Add in the inner corset. If you are able, raise your arms ahead of you or, even better, up above your head. In this case, be super-attentive to ramping up your rib anchor to not allow your back to sway. Now, you just stay there. It’s challenging, and that’s the point. Visit your boundaries, but stay on the healthy side of them.

Let’s review: Chair Pose actively recruits your inner corset. The action of raising the arms above the head can be used to recruit the inner corset especially strongly. If you were to look at your belly (in a mirror) while in Chair Pose, you may come out looking a bit like a greyhound with a slenderized, sleeker abdomen below your full ribcage. To finish, return to a ready position with a little spring in it (again, not parked).

This practitioner demonstrates the “greyhound look” of an activated inner corset. Note on foot placement: In the Gokhale Method, we teach placing the feet about hip width apart and facing slightly outwards as a way of optimally supporting primal leg architecture. Image courtesy Elly Fairytale on Pexels.

I’ll be describing other favorite exercises in future blog posts — in the meantime, try “sitting” it out in Chair Pose during work breaks and as part of your exercise regimen. Consider setting your timer to go off every 20 minutes to remind you to do Chair Pose (or some other future pose) for about a minute. In this way you will make rapid progress in tone, form, and your experience of life! I look forward to teaching you Gokhale Yoga 101 and Strengthening Exercises - The Gokhale Way. Let’s make the most of our ongoing situation!

The abdominal crunch, though ubiquitous, is actually quite detrimental to the spinal discs and nerves. Better to find an abdominal exercise which respects and protects the spine! Image courtesy Jonathan Borba on Unsplash.

Happy Holidays! The dawning of a new year is a time when many people make efforts to establish new habits, many of them body-related. With the desire to improve ourselves often comes a (sometimes unhealthy) heightened awareness of how our bodies and their shapes appear to others. This is particularly true of abdominal muscles. Photoshopped, unrealistic images of sculpted torsos plaster newsstand covers every January. Crunches are the most commonly recommended exercise for increasing ab strength, often with six-packs as the goal. But do six-packs actually indicate broad-spectrum ab strength? What is actually the best ab exercise —  something protective of our backs rather than detrimental to our spinal health? How can we balance form with function?

The Gokhale Method describes two important sets of abdominal muscles that keep us healthy: the “rib anchor” and the “inner corset.” The rib anchor helps prevent the lower back from arching. The inner corset protects the back from a variety of compressive threats — weight-bearing, impact, and vibration, as well as any distortion in shape like arching, rounding, or twisting. The inner corset includes the rib anchor plus a more extensive set of deep abdominal and back muscles.  

Well-designed ab exercises would:

• tone the deeper layers of the abdominal wall that constitute the rib anchor and inner corset muscles, while de-emphasizing the shallower rectus abdominis (six-pack) muscle 

• put no unhealthy stress on your neck, spinal discs, or spinal nerves

• take as little time out of your day as possible

Here, my daughter Monisha, a high-level athlete, demonstrates how rib anchor and inner corset activation can make all the difference in pull-up form.

Now for some specific measures to strengthen the rib anchor and inner corset muscles. Based on how much time they take out of your day, we will divide them into 3 tiers: 

Tier 1: Everyday activities
These strengthening measures are fully integrated into your everyday activities. They don’t take any time at all out of your day. Your daily activities need to be vigorous enough that they would ordinarily stress your spine. However, by activating the rib anchor and/or the inner corset every time your spine would get stressed, you not only prevent damage — you get your ab exercise as well. Think about this approach like “on-the-job training.” The advantages are numerous:

• You strengthen the various components of your “brace” or “inner corset” in exactly the proportion they need to be strong. No overdevelopment of the six-pack (this is common and tucks the pelvis); no neglecting the deeper abdominal and back muscles (this is also common and leaves the area weak and unprotected).

• There’s no threat or damage to your spinal discs, nerves, or neck in this approach. Compare this with the threat and damage caused by crunches, which unfortunately remain the most popular ab workout in gym routines. 

• It takes no time! It takes no longer to lift well (with the inner corset engaged) than it takes to lift poorly. It takes no longer to twist well (with the inner corset engaged) than it takes to twist poorly. And it takes no longer to run well (with the inner corset engaged) than it takes to bounce around willy nilly and destroy your discs and nerves.

Proper abdominal engagement is crucial for safe running technique — and it doesn’t necessarily look like a six-pack. Image courtesy nappy on Pexels.

Tier 2: Modified activities
These ab strengthening measures are slightly contrived (but not awkward) ways of modifying everyday postures and ways of moving to get our ab exercise needs taken care of. This is the next best choice if your everyday activities don’t quite cover your exercise needs.  As many of us sit behind computers for larger and larger fractions of the day, I’ve begun recommending engaging the inner corset 10% whenever a student can remember to do so. This is the extent to which these muscles would have been recruited in sitting were they primed by carrying weights as much as our hunter-gatherer ancestors clearly did.

Laptops and other computers are wonderful tools, but they also encourage us to be passive and increasingly sink into ourselves over the course of a work day. Inner corset and rib anchor activation, even 10%, can help us learn to “wake up” our deeper abdominal muscles. Image courtesy Brooke Cagle on Unsplash.

Tier 3: Supplemental exercises
Doing supplemental exercises and therapies to strengthen the abs. These take time. To be efficient, I recommend whole-body exercises, yoga poses, or dance sequences that enable you to do several exercises in parallel. Some of my faves are chair pose, samba, and TRX planks.

Samba is a fun, social, sensual way to actively engage and strengthen the inner corset. It’s never too soon to start getting ready for Carnaval! Original image courtesy PlidaoUrbenia on Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 2.5.

Helping it stick
Do you find it difficult to fit posture work into your daily schedule, or struggle to form new habits? (This is part of being human!) I’m excited to announce our new Gokhale Exercise Challenge, a live-streamed, daily 15-minute exercise session I’ll be leading personally at 7:00am Pacific / 10:00am Eastern every morning from January 1, 2020 through January 21, 2020. This enrichment of our Online University content is free for all Online University members.

If you are an alum of our Foundations Course or Pop-up Course and haven’t yet enrolled in our Online University, join today by calling 1-888-557-6788 to receive a special discount on your annual membership between now and January 8, 2020.

Q. What if I miss a session or live in a completely different time zone — can I still participate?
A. Yes! If this time slot doesn’t suit you, you can watch each session at your convenience for up to 24 hours after the live session.

Q. I’m not in great shape. Is this accessible to me?
A. Absolutely! All Gokhale Method alumni at any level of fitness will benefit from these exercises.

I look forward to starting the New Year with you!

This is the second post in our series on shoulder positioning. Read Part 1 here!

Typing with shoulders too far forward.

Often, in industrialized cultures, the shoulders are slumped or held forward. There are so many daily tasks in the modern world that make it all too easy for these bad habits to set in: holding our arms out front for hours with poor shoulder placement while we are typing, gaming, driving, and so on. Over the years this is likely to cause various problems:

• Impingement, bursitis, wear-and-tear

• Reduced circulation to the arms 

• Compromised breathing patterns

• Reduced athletic performance, increased injuries

• Hunched upper back and forward head

Common pitfalls in getting the shoulders back
Unfortunately, well-intentioned advice such as “pull your shoulders back” often has negative consequences. When we try and correct our shoulder position by pulling back, we are likely to either tense and sway our lower backs, or tighten the rhomboid muscles between our shoulder blades —  or both! Neither of these responses are healthy or comfortable for very long.

Meet the rhomboids
The rhomboids, which pull the shoulder blades together, are not designed to be squeezed tightly for long periods. If you consistently rely on them to pull your shoulders back, they can become sore, knotted, and inflamed

The rhomboids are not designed to be squeezed tightly for long periods. Original image courtesy Wikimedia user Anatomography under CC BY-SA 2.1 jp.

Those of you familiar with the Gokhale Method are probably already practicing the shoulder roll. This gentle movement brings the shoulders home to a naturally sustainable position.  For detailed tips on refining your shoulder roll, please see my recent blog post on shoulder positioning.

Though the rhomboids should not be continuously contracted when you are upright, they exist for good reason. The rhomboids play an important role in keeping the shoulder joint stable, especially when you bend forward, carry heavy objects, or reach for something in front of you. These actions would otherwise displace the shoulders forward. 

Inactive or weak rhomboids allow the shoulders to be pulled forward when carrying loads in front of the body.

Changing lifestyles

This farmer doesn’t bring his shoulder forward to carry his watering can.
 

This Burkinabé teenager pounds millet with her shoulders staying far back.

Our ancestors, like people in traditional and non-industrialized cultures today, had many more opportunities in daily life to use their rhomboids and upper back muscles: drawing water, clearing land, sweeping the yard, and harvesting crops. We can get much of this conditioning from sport such as rock climbing, games such as tug-o’-war, and chores such as gardening or vacuuming, but suitable activity may not continue into a more sedentary adult life. Without regular challenges, the muscles of the upper back can become weak and lax, allowing the shoulders to drift forward and the upper back to round.

Rhomboid toner exercise
Exercises are useful to isolate and strengthen muscles that have been systematically under-used. I find the rhomboid toning exercise below to be effective.

1. Hold a physical therapy band or strap. Keep your wrists straight, palms facing up.
2. Begin by performing a shoulder roll. This healthy shoulder position places your rhomboids in a position of mechanical advantage.
3. Pin elbows to your sides at a 90º angle. The position is similar to when you’re carrying a tray.
4. Draw your shoulder blades as close together as you can. Your hands will move away from each other. The band or strap provides resistance to this motion, challenging the rhomboids. Be sure not to tense the shoulders or neck.
5. Hold for a few seconds. Repeat 5 to 10 times.

Getting your rhomboids to work for you when you need them will benefit both your shoulder health and your posture. Next time you are carrying heavy bags or pulling a door towards you, notice how these muscles help to preserve your shoulder position. Sometimes a little pulling back goes a long way!