tension

In our culture a loss of up to 50% of the height of the discs as we age from our twenties to our fifties is considered normal. It follows that the herniations, nerve pain, and arthritic change that accompanies this chronic degeneration of our discs is also not seen as unusual. Pain and reduced ability to function is normalized.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In the Bhil tribe in central India, the average disc height of the discs of people in their fifties was discovered to be the same as those in people in their twenties¹, as detailed in Esther’s book, 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back. It is their habit to actively maintain the length of their spines whenever they do anything that might otherwise compress their discs.

The human spine is able to carry considerable loads without damage—when length is actively maintained.

Maintaining healthy discs requires a healthy J-spine and the engagement of a matrix of muscles—which we refer to in the Gokhale Method as the inner corset. This muscle recruitment and more is taught in our in-person Foundations course, one-day Pop-up course, our online Elements course, plus our Gokhale Active program. The inner corset performs two main actions: a strong engagement of the deepest spinal muscles, and a strong engagement of the deeper layers of abdominal muscles. Together they create length and stability in and around the spine, thus preserving the height of each disc and protecting them against wear and tear. When we make recruitment of our inner corset a habit, every time the spine would otherwise be challenged and damaged, the spine is strengthened and made more resilient.

The effect of engaging the deep abdominal muscles is easy to understand. It’s similar to wearing an external corset, or weightlifting belt, that makes our torso a thinner cylinder. We are mostly made of water, which does not compress easily, so as we squeeze our torso it gets thinner and that fluid has to go somewhere—so it makes us taller, increasing or at least maintaining disc height.

As your torso gets more slender, it must get taller because its volume stays the same.

The action of the deep spinal muscles along the spine is however somewhat counter intuitive. When muscles engage, they contract, becoming shorter. How can that lengthen the spine?

The answer is tensegrity, a word coined from the phrase “tensional integrity”. This is a new word for something very old. If you have ever pitched a tent, that is, almost, a tensegrity structure. The poles are compressed and kept stable by a general tautness, or tension, of the tent fabric. If you leave the tent fabric loose, or leave a guy rope slack, the tent will easily fall down or blow over. But with good all-round tension the tent can resist gravity and additional forces.

In a true tensegrity structure the poles, or bones—whatever is being compressed—do not touch each other. They float as islands of compression in a sea of tension. The simplest example of this is the tower of string, demonstrated below in a short video.

Tensegrity offers an alternative model of structural support. The string is compressing the semicircular strips of plastic which are trying to straighten, putting the string under tension—now even a piece of string can stand up straight! 

 
This striking structure, Kenneth Snelson’s Rainbow Arch, is made from metal poles—islands of compression—and wire—the sea of tension. None of the poles touch each other, as with the bones in our bodies (in their natural healthy state).

 
The roof of the Denver airport uses fiberglass and steel cables in a tensegrity design to create a striking structure that is strong and lightweight, covers 300 x 1000 ft, and is evocative of First Nation teepees. It is modern, but native Americans have been pitching teepees using this principle for millennia.

The human spine is a sophisticated tensegrity structure, or more accurately, a biotensegrity structure, part of a living organism. The wood and fine string model in the video below shows how the bones and deepest muscles use the biotensegrity effect. Engaging the muscles increases the biotensegrity effect and the bones actively “float” apart, increasing space for each disc, the overall length of the spine, and its ability to bear load.

This simple wood and string model demonstrates the tensegrity principle, showing how the tendons and muscles can suspend the bones of the spine.

An electromyographic study of the rotatores muscles, the deepest on the spine, confirms this. The rotatores run the length of the spine connecting each vertebra to the next on both sides of the spine. If you engage the rotatores on one side, they assist in spinal rotation. Engage the rotatores on both sides, and the spine lengthens.

The rotatores muscles—small, deep muscles which attach each vertebra to the next—
were thought to be the main rotators of the spine. Their larger role in fine movement, stabilization, and extending the spine is now better understood. 

Our bodies have many fluid-filled spaces contained in “bags” or pockets of elastic material, fascia, where fluid pressure works with healthy tension in the tissues. We also have various “guy ropes” among our fascia, muscles, and tendons, and some are self-tensioning. This makes biotensegrity very elegant and dynamic.

Though it can be difficult to imagine biotensegrity, instruction from a Gokhale Method® teacher makes learning the inner corset very doable. You can lengthen and protect your spine in any number of situations: carrying shopping, running, cycling on rough ground, high-diving, being on a bumpy car ride—the list is almost endless—as are the benefits for your body.

References: 

1.   Fahrni, W. Harry and Trueman, Gordon E. (1965): Comparative Radiological Study of the Spines of a Primitive Population with North Americans and Northern Europeans, The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, 47-B (3): 552. 

Best next action steps 

If you would like help integrating your structure through healthy posture, 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 can be a challenging time of the year. Some parts of the world have had extreme conditions in recent months. The Eastern US has had extreme snowfall. Across much of Europe and the northern temperate zone, this time of year brings cold, and daylight hours are short. After the celebration, lights, and parties of Christmas, or the ancient festivals of the Winter Solstice, plunging back into the gray chill of winter is notorious for inflicting the “winter blues,” sometimes giving rise to a depressive seasonal affective disorder, aka SAD.

Travelers in a snowstorm round forward against a harsh wind. Francisco Goya, La Nevada c.1786.

Some parts of the world have had unusual challenges, even devastation. An example is the unprecedented wildfires around Los Angeles, which have made thousands of people homeless. 

With these extreme events impacting us, I have been thinking a good deal about how our posture reflects—and in turn affects—our own emotional weather. That is not to say that you can posture your way out of extreme situations, but rather that how we feel in any given moment, and especially in sustained situations, gets reflected in our posture. Posture is part and parcel of a strong mind-body connection, and can be used in reverse to improve our state of mind.

Our postural stance can reflect wellness and an uplifted mood, as Gokhale Method teacher Doreen Giles is embodying here… or show that we are experiencing physical or emotional adversity, like the travelers in the snowstorm image.

We explored this mind-body connection deeply in last year's Women’s Empowerment course. Many of our students and teachers report feeling better not only physically, but also emotionally, for finding healthier posture. Gokhale^® Method teacher Doreen Giles describes her experience here:

“I’ve been happily surprised to find that using the Gokhale Method techniques has lifted my day-to-day baseline mood. In thinking about why this has happened, I’ve concluded that our ‘body language,’ whether conscious or unconscious, not only communicates to other people, but also to our own mind.”

The result that Doreen reports on will be familiar to those of us who observe animals. In fact, the way we tell how an animal is feeling is via its posture. A few years ago I did some research into the posture–emotional health connection. Emily Hatfield’s book Emotional Contagion was very important in helping my understanding of the pathway of “emotional contagion”:

1. One’s emotional state gets reflected in one’s posture
2. We copy each other (we’re a monkey see, monkey do kind of species)
3. Our brain scans our body for clues on how we are feeling—when our brain “finds” our mimicked posture, it concludes that we have the corresponding mood.

As Doreen says:

“When I try on my old unconscious habit of shoulders rounded and head forward with a rather sunken chest, and then feel into what this posture communicates to myself, it’s a message of, ‘Uh-oh, I need to protect myself, something bad is coming.’

When I make simple changes I learned from the Gokhale Method—mainly the shoulder roll and adjustment to head/neck position, along with the rib anchor—what’s the new message?  ‘I belong here. All is well. I have everything I need. I am safe!’ No wonder I feel better!”

Another account of how posture connects to wellness comes from our student Madeleine Picozzi in Scotland.

After finishing her Gokhale Foundations course, Madeleine’s pain had improved significantly, but she said “For me, the acid test will be the winter; I am prone to hunching over in the cold weather in an attempt to keep warm. It’s certainly cooling down a lot already and I’m still making progress, which bodes well but we’ll see how things are in a couple of months."

Gokhale student Madeleine Picozzi used to hunch her shoulders against the Scottish chill.

Here’s Madeleine’s update from midwinter:

“I was just thinking, while I was at church on Saturday that, this time last year, my back was causing me a lot of grief. Now it's great!

I realized that, as well as hunching forward, there is a tendency to bunch up the shoulders and bend the neck, in an attempt to keep that wind out. The cold can definitely be the enemy of good posture!

I'm now better equipped to avoid hunching, since I know to keep my pelvis anteverted and my neck as long and straight as possible.

I'm also prone to SAD. However, the improvement in my back is cause for me to feel relief and gratitude.”

No matter where you are in the world, and whatever weather you’re experiencing—outdoors, indoors, or in your mind—improving your posture is likely to give you a welcome and uplifting boost. In our next blog post, we’ll explore how gait can reflect and cue our emotional state.