circulation

Yesterday was midwinter day in the northern hemisphere. For many of us, this time of year means colder, shorter days, and a time when outdoor activities and social get-togethers can be more limited. 

Get out walking 

One thing we can do whatever the season is to get out on foot. Walking, done well, can significantly boost our circulation, burn calories, keep us warm, and assist our digestion—especially useful after rich and large festive meals! A good walk will also fill our lungs with fresh air and can boost our immune system to fight off winter bugs. 

Such exercise, especially in nature, is known to lift our mood. We can enjoy the company of friends and family—or go solo for some peace and introspection, as fits. All these potential benefits and more are summed up in the Latin phrase, Solvitur Ambulando, which translates as “walking solves everything.”¹

Daylight, fresh air, nature, companionship, and good posture all contribute to walking being a healthy and holistic activity. Pixabay

Walking—a primal activity for optimal health

It’s all too easy, especially on busy days, to go without any significant period of walking. We could be at our desk, or “on our feet” all day, without getting into the rhythm that comes with sustained walking. Walking for 30 minutes or more at a time would have been much more familiar to our ancestors—going to school, to the shops, or to work—than it is to many of us today. 

In many parts of the world this is still the case, and women in particular often walk many miles to fetch water, food, and fuel. I don’t want to romanticize hard labor, but I do think that the lack of sustained walking in much of the industrialized world, especially the US, means that we miss out on an activity that has been intrinsic to our evolution and healthy functioning. 

Glidewalking describes the natural gait of our ancestors and many people living in more traditional or nonindustrialized societies—where joint and back pain are rare.

Learning to glidewalk makes walking a pleasure

Walking with the healthy gait pattern that nature intended keeps the feet, legs, and glutes strong, and the joints mobile. The Gokhale Method calls this glidewalking, and it is explained in detail in my book, 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back. As the term suggests, it results in a smooth action which spares the joints, including the spinal discs and nerves.

The basics of glidewalking can be learned in our Gokhale Method® in-person Foundations and Pop-up courses, and our online Elements course. Students experience the most significant changes during sustained walking, as it takes some time and distance to ease any stiffness in the muscles and joints, find a harmonious rhythm with the breath, and “get into one’s stride.”

Students find that sustained walking embodies the changes they’ve learned to make in class.

Sustained walking also allows students to cycle through the cues they have learned, checking for details such as “back heel down,” and “land on a bent front knee.” By refining these cues with each pass, they become integrated as habits. With healthy biomechanics, students find their new walk becomes smoother, more powerful, and more pleasurable. 

The essence of glidewalking

For Alumni we offer an Essence of Glidewalking course, where you can deep dive to find out what’s possible for your walking by slowing a movement down, tracking the detail, and troubleshooting anything holding you back. You have two expert teachers, one demonstrating and the other watching you, plus the opportunity for Q&A both inside and outside the session. 

Essence of Glidewalking participant Elenore Wieler speaks about her experience of the course.

If you are one of our Alumni and would like to revisit and refine your walking, the Essence of Glidewalking is especially for you! Our next six-part course starts on January 16 at 8:00 a.m. PT time. You can sign up below:

If you would like personalized guidance on any aspect of your posture, consider scheduling an Initial Consultation, online or in person, with a Gokhale Method teacher. 

Find out more about how the Gokhale Method can help you with our range of upcoming FREE Online Workshops. . .… 

References

¹attributed to the Greek philosopher Diogenes or, alternatively, St. Augustine.

As winter approaches and the weather cools, we all have one thing on our minds: staying warm! One major benefit of learning the Gokhale Method (and good posture in general) is improved circulation. We’ve often heard from students about their warmer hands and feet, and we’ve even heard from people who have significantly reduced their heating bill now that their extremities aren’t always freezing! When you align your body well, your blood flows unimpeded throughout the body, passing nutrients to cells and maintaining homeostatic processes, like regulating temperature, glucose, and sodium levels. Imbalances in this process can lead to illness and prevent healing.

Here are three simple ways to immediately improve your circulation:

1. The shoulder roll

Situate your shoulders in a relaxed and open position to ensure healthy circulation to and from your arms. This will repair damaged tissues and prevent future ailments, such as carpal tunnel and repetitive stress syndrome.

Activities like typing, writing, texting, and playing an instrument increase your hands’ demand for blood, so it is important to restore normal architecture around the axillary artery that runs under your pectoral region, the major thoroughfare for circulation to and from your arms.

To roll your shoulders back:

1. Hunch one shoulder forward, causing it to round slightly.

2. Lift the shoulder up toward your ear.

3. Roll the shoulder far back, and bring the elbow behind your hips or your body’s midpoint, toward the spine, rather than letting it hang forward of the hips.

4. Gently slide the shoulder blade down along your spine.

5. Repeat with the other side.

Watch this Gokhale Moments video for a quick demonstration of the shoulder roll technique.

2. Stand with unlocked legs

When you stand, make sure the groin areas (the two creases at the junction of the torso with the legs) are soft and not locked. The softness there should feel similar to the crease of an unlocked elbow. This position allows ample room for the femoral artery and vein, makes standing more comfortable, and allows you to exercise longer without pain or injury. Healthy blood flow to your legs and feet heals little injuries fast and can prevent cold feet, varicose veins, blood clots, and Raynaud’s syndrome.

To soften the groin area:

1. While standing, sink your body downward, bending equally at the knees and hip joints, but keeping your back straight (think of preparing to receive a serve in tennis, or of bending to sit on the toilet). Your pelvis should “nest” between your legs.    

2. Leaving your weight primarily on your heels, slowly straighten just short of locking the groin (and the knees).

3. Check the groin crease for softness by placing your fingers where the top of the legs hinge at the hip. You should feel some “give” in the soft tissue before feeling bone.

3. Stacksit

Stacking your spine on an anteverted pelvis while sitting provides you with a healthy way to relax at your desk, on public transit, or at the dining table. Your spine stacks naturally because of the architecture of the bones, but even a small hunch or pelvic tuck can unbalance a stacked spine.

Anterverted pelvis versus tucked pelvis

Because of this, many of us sit with tensed muscles, expending a lot more energy to sit less comfortably. When you stacksit, your back muscles relax, facilitating a healthy breathing pattern that moves the back with every breath. This movement provides a constant massage around your spine, optimizing circulation around the spine and keeping your tissues healthy.

To stacksit:

1. Form a wedge by folding a blanket or towel, or even a sweatshirt, so that one end of the folded material is thicker than the other end.

2. Place the wedge on a chair, with the higher side to the back of the chair. Alternatively, you can sit on the edge of the chair.

3. Sit on the wedge or edge of the chair. Your pelvis should tip forward—you may need to extend your legs farther outward or tuck your feet under the chair to allow your thighs to angle toward the ground as well.

4. Feel the way your spine stacks naturally and notice the easy expansion of your lungs with each breath. (If your pelvis still wants to roll into a tucked position when you try to relax, increase the anteverted tilt of your pelvis by making the wedge beneath you steeper.)

Once you are stacked, check that you do not have a sway (or arch) in your lower back. You can check this by feeling your spinal groove with your fingertips. A shallow groove that remains even all the way up your back is good; a deep groove in your lower back means you are swaying. To fix, place your fingers gently on the bottom edges of your rib cage, several inches above your belly button. If you can feel the edge of your rib cage through the flesh of your torso, use your hands to tuck your rib cage down and in, which will straighten out the spine. You can also remove a curve from your back by lengthening the torso as if you want to touch the crown of your head to the ceiling (a weight on the head is an excellent way to practice this).

Now feel your spine again to check that you have a shallow, even groove; above your sacrum, it should feel straight, rather than gently curving. You can practice this position with the aid of a mirror, or a partner who can give you feedback on your position, until you have a good sense for what a straight spine and a swayed spine feel like.

Check out this video on stacksitting to see the technique in action.

If you have a story about improving your circulation or temperature after correcting your posture, please share in the comments below!

Round-backed bending is ubiquitous in modern urban culture. It damages the back. Recognizing this, many health advocates recommend bending at the knees. Done to excess or with poor form, this damages the hips, knees, ankles, and feet.

Surprisingly, poor bending form abounds even in fitness and wellness classes.

An insistence on touching the toes can be counterproductive and result in damage

People sometimes equate being able to touch the toes with flexibility. An imprecise  and insistent pursuit of this kind of “flexibility” causes disc damage, hyper-extended spinal ligaments, and a lot of pain. Let’s examine do’s and don’t’s in bending more closely.

DO

1. Come close in to your tasks and don’t bend if you don’t need to.
    

   
   If you can accomplish your task without bending, don’t bend.

   
    
2. Be sure your legs are externally rotated so there’s room for your pelvis when you bend.
   If your thigh bones (femurs) are in the way of the pelvis settling between the legs in a forward bend, there’s no healthy workaround for bending. Widening your stance can help some, but a healthy bend needs external leg rotation no matter where your legs are positioned. 
    

   
   
   This Burkina baby has his legs externally rotated, making room for his pelvis and substantial belly!
    

3. Maintain the shape of your back when bending
   The spine carries precious cargo - like all the nerves and nerve roots that exit between the vertebrae - and these are threatened by major distortions of the spine.
   
   In activities other than bending, some movement around a healthy baseline is healthy and desirable. Such movement stimulates circulation and helps maintain healthy spinal tissues.  
   
   For bending, I recommend strictly maintaining the baseline shape of the spine. Distorting the spine when bending loads the discs and can cause damage. It also sets a risky pattern for bends that involve weight-bearing. I recommend pure hip-hinging for all bends, whether in daily life or exercise. With practice, good form, and strengthened inner corset muscles, you will be able to move into sustained bending and lifting weights.  
    

   
   Women in the marketplace in village Orissa demonstrating excellent hip-hinging form.

   
    
4. Maintain (or increase) the length of your spine when bending
   You don’t want to load your discs when bending. This happens when rounding or swaying the back, or from additional muscle engagement while maintaining your baseline spinal shape. Using the inner corset (go here for a free download of Chapter 5 from 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back) while bending is excellent insurance against loading the discs unwittingly. 
    
5. Practice bending with a teacher and with mirrors
   If you are accustomed to tucking your pelvis, it can be a real challenge to find the correct movement in the hips.  Practice bending in front of a mirror, or, better yet, with a Gokhale Method teacher, so you get the feel of healthy hip rotation with a straight back.  
    

   
   Working with a teacher helps set a healthy hip-hinging pattern

   
   
   Start off with small bends - pay attention when you are at the sink or making your bed. Keep your feet and knees pointed out 10-15 degrees, have your knees soft and only bend at the hips as far as you can before you start to round.  At that point, enjoy the gentle stretch in your hamstrings and external hip rotators. Bend your knees if you want to go any further. For more complete hip-hinging instructions and images, refer to Chapter 7 of  8 Steps to a Pain Free Back or Back Pain: The Primal Posture Solution (DVD).

DON’T

1. Don’t Round the Lower Back. 
   The most common mistake in bending is to round the back, either distributing curvature throughout the spine or concentrating most of it in one spot. If your pattern of bending includes rounding the lower back, this is a particularly risky mistake. Being at the bottom of the heap, the lumbar discs are already particularly vulnerable to wear and tear, bulging, herniation, and sequestration. Rounding the lower back while bending puts additional strain on them. The amount of loading is high because our upper bodies are heavy (especially our heads) and the lever arm is long (Torque = weight X distance.)
    
   You may know people who bent to tie their shoelaces or perform some other seemingly innocuous task on the ground, and then couldn’t straighten back up. Those people were probably rounding their lower backs, possibly with the additional danger of a twist added in. The brain reacts to the threat / damage by seizing up muscles in the area. Ouch! In my classes I go so far as to say that people who bend well will probably never have a back problem, while people who bend poorly almost certainly will. It's very important to get bending right!
    

   
   Hugh Jackman rounding his back while bending

   
    
2. Don’t Round the Upper Back. 
   Rounding the upper back is problematic for an entirely different reason. The discs in the upper back don’t generally herniate or get severely damaged. This is partly  because the rib attachments to the thoracic vertebrae help fortify that portion of the spine. The problem that results from repeatedly rounding the upper back while bending is that the spinal ligaments gets distended. 
   
    

   
   Avoid rounding your back and letting your shoulders come forward while bending

   
   
   Ligaments are like band-aids that go from bone to bone and whose function is primarily structural support. They are a backup system for our muscular support. In situations when there is more challenge and distortion than our muscles are strong enough to handle, or when muscles don’t have time to fire, such as in a jolting accident or jump, then the ligaments keep our joints safe. 
   
   Ligaments are supposed to have some degree of stiffness. Ligaments aren’t an elastic kind of tissue.  Once stretched too far, they are permanently distended, and no longer serve their role as the backup system to support the spine. Extreme forward bends that come from the back and not the hips cultivate ligamentous laxity more than muscular flexibility. It is counterproductive and results in losing important structural insurance. This is what we see happening in the backs, hips, and knees of athletes and yogis who push too far in poorly executed forward bends as well as other distortions.  
   
   Charlotte Bell, an Iyengar yoga teacher and author of Mindful Yoga, Mindful Life, had a hip replacement in 2015. She warns us “I know a number of serious practitioners who are now in their 50s—including myself—who regret having overstretched our joints back in the day. All too many longtime practitioners now own artificial joints to replace the ones they overused.” 
    
3. Don’t bend with your legs internally rotated and/or tail tucked 
   When the legs are internally rotated (toes and knees pointed inwards), the head of the femur grinds inappropriately against the hip socket (acetabulum), wearing down the cartilage and causing arthritic change.
   
   In 2013, Lady Gaga canceled her “Born this Way” tour due to chronic pain from a severe cartilage tear in her hip. Lady Gaga is known for being health conscious and a yoga enthusiast. Though dancing in high heels night after night certainly puts wear and tear on the body, a yoga practice should support, not exacerbate the problem. “My injury was actually a lot worse than just a labral tear,” she told reporters. “...The surgeon told me that if I had done another show I might have needed a full hip replacement. It took over two years after my surgery to be able to correct my alignment and continue working.”
    

   
   Lady Gaga internally rotating her legs while standing
   
   
   Lady Gaga bends forward in the yoga pose with toes pointed in and a tucked pelvis.

   
   
   These pictures of Lady Gaga show that a) she has a tendency to internally rotate her legs while standing and b) she bends forward in the yoga pose with toes pointed in and a tucked pelvis.  This puts stress on the hip joint, pushes the ball of the femur into the cartilage of the hip socket, and can overstretch the ligaments of her spine, sacroiliac joint, hip, knee, and foot.  
    
4. Don’t push beyond your range of motion in the hips 
   If you run into resistance in your hip joints when bending, don’t force past it. Dr. Chris Woollam, a Toronto sports medicine physician, says he started seeing “an inordinate number of hip problems” among women aged 30 to 50 who were practicing yoga. “Maybe these extreme ranges of motion were causing the joint to get jammed and some to wear,” Woollam says. “If you start wearing a joint down, then it becomes arthritic. So you’re seeing these little patches of arthritis in an otherwise normal hip that seems to be related to these extremes of motion or impingement or both.”
   
   I suspect that some of the hip problems that get chalked up to extreme range of motion, are actually due to alignment problems. Most yoga classes, Pilates training, and gym routines teach students to stand with parallel feet. By Gokhale Method standards, this constitutes internal leg rotation. Indigenous people have their feet facing outward in the range of 5-15 degrees, and their legs are correspondingly externally rotated. It is our opinion that instructions to have parallel feet contribute to stress and arthritic changes in the hip joints, especially when combined with forward bends and other hip motions.
    

How well do you stack up when bending in your daily life and when exercising? How far along are you in your hip-hinging journey?

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