inner corset

I am a 70-year-old woman. As a young woman I was tall (5’10"), slender, and active as I would ever be raising my six children.  For the most part, my body and I had a good relationship, but over time and with the demands of my life, something problematic happened. My body began talking to me: my knee, psoas, sacrum, and lower back hurt, and I also suffered a loss of balance. I mainly saw a chiropractor but also physical therapists, massage therapists, and acupuncturists…the list is long. When you want to function and feel halfway decent, you try everything.

SCIJ isn’t a very memorable acronym, but the shapes of the letters do accurately represent the four most common spinal shapes. In this blog post you will discover which SCIJ category you belong in, what changes you might want to make, and the first baby steps to improve your spinal shape.

We Gokhale Method teachers love our head cushions! I find there is nothing better than head-loading, even with a light weight, to evoke a taller stance, help straighten out excessive neck curvature, and strengthen the deepest of our neck muscles.  The realization that head-loading must have once been a ubiquitous activity hit home in my research travels to Burkina Faso in the 1990s. I began sharing the benefits of head-loading with my students, and devised the Gokhale™ Head Cushion to make it an accessible and convenient exercise. 

Neck and/or shoulder pain is a common ailment even experienced cyclists regularly encounter, but posture can help! It takes awareness and muscular engagement while cycling to not allow gravity to further pull the head forward and down and round or hunch the shoulders, a posture problem that is already prevalent in our modern culture. However, the payoff is worth it! You will be able to ride pain-free for longer, and will also be patterning a healthy upper body position regardless of your activities and movements. You will also strengthen and develop baseline tone in stabilizing muscles, and they will become more accustomed to doing the job of maintaining shoulders back, back of the neck tall and straight, and head lined up over the body.

Whether you are on the road, in a campground, or just stuck at home during quarantine, you can always exercise. 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. 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.

My mom had beautiful posture when she was young, as you can see in the photo above. Healthy posture has helped her age well. After working with some Gokhale Method techniques, her pain has subsided. She now sleeps better and has more energy. I recently took the opportunity to teach her a new technique to help with her housework. One is never too old to learn a few Gokhale Method tricks. And we never know what changes are possible until we try!

Harvesting rye with scythes in early twentieth-century Lithuania. Original photograph Balys Buročas, 1923.

The Gokhale Method has improved my understanding of how posture correlates to our health and physicality. The method is based on healthy body architecture and has been informed by movement patterns from populations without back pain, those shared by our ancestors worldwide. This inspired me to take a look at my own forefathers in Lithuania, especially their posture while laboring in the fields. 

Memories of my youth
I was born and raised in urban Soviet Lithuania. Yet, we had a little plot of land outside the city in “kolektyviniai sodai” (collective gardens) and most of our weekends and

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

Written by Lori Szalay, Gokhale Method Teacher

 

Here’s a little story I’d like to tell,

Some of you may know it well…..

 

Twas the day of the Foundations Course and all through the room,

Backs, necks, shoulders and much more were aching and there was a feeling of doom.

The stretchsit cushions were attached on the chairs with care,

A Posture Poised Teacher was there with knowledge to share.

 

The students knew they would learn to stretchlie to be comfortable in their beds,

As visions of a pain-free life continued to dance in their heads!

With compressed spines, slouchy shoulders and many with rounded backs,

Each had their own concern yet all eager to learn the posture modification facts.

 

When they

In our part 1 blog post on the topic of bikes, we went over how to find the right frame for you. The next important step is to find the right seat for your body and your bike, since without a decent seat you may be uncomfortable, or may find it challenging to have healthy posture. Your seat should distribute your weight across regions comfortably; it should have padding, but not so much that it lacks support and stability; it should be set at an angle that allows your pelvis to antevert (that is, tip forward relative to the angle of your spine.) A good seat is crucial whether you prefer to be upright and stacksit, or if you prefer a racing style with a hiphinge. Here’s what you need to know