While "good posture" is considered a sign of good movement health, there are true and false teachings about how to achieve it.
The popular view of good posture is that it is something you have to maintain; it's a "good" holding pattern. The concepts, "neutral spine position" and "alignment", fall into this category. "Shoulders back, chest up, stomach in" are typical instructions for maintaining good posture.
The popular view and the typical instructions I have described constitutes a false teaching about good posture -- and by false, I mean detrimental.
Here's why: It adds strain to an already strained muscular system and unnaturally restrains movement.
The common teaching about good posture assumes that good posture is not the natural or free condition and that one must therefore do something to maintain it. This view may seem reasonable and inevitable; "If you don't do something to maintain good posture, you're left with the poor posture you had, already."
But an unrecognized truth underlies this assumption: Most people are beset by habitual muscular tension patterns that drag them down from good posture, tension patterns of which they are unaware because they are so used to them, tension patterns formed at the time of injuries or of emotional stress (i.e., nervous tension).
In actuality, good posture is the easiest condition to maintain -- if you are free of habitual tension patterns. If not, then you must do something to counteract those tension patterns, to restore good posture. That's the condition most people are in.
This assertion may be hard to accept until you have experienced the reality of what happens when you get free of your habitual tension state.
Massage and bodywork typically seek to alleviate habitual tension, but with rare exception, they do not alter a person's postural set because to do so would require a second step: to develop better coordination.
Coordinationis the basis of good movement, good posture, good alignment.
Posture, viewed another way, results from moving into a certain shape and holding it. It's a function of movement.
Most movements are developed by learning. So is posture.
The difference is that injuries and stress change movement patterns in lasting ways that are commonly beyond the ability of people to change; these movement patterns persist on automatic. That's why teachings about posture recommend counter-actions to those movement patterns.
So, what's the answer? Are we forever destined to poor and worsening posture as we grow older?
The answer is, no. But what is needed is a way to undo habitual muscular tensions formed by injuries and stress. "Undo" means to eliminate or reverse, not to counteract them by some sort of opposition or ongoing counter-action (either through "good posture" disciplines or through strengthening of muscles).
Such a way exists. The discipline of clinical somatic education teaches and employs exactly such a way.
PANDICULATION: The Action of Undoing
All animals with a backbone do a certain action instinctually upon arising from rest, as they become active. This action, commonly mistaken for stretching, involves a strong muscular contraction followed by a leisurely relaxation; it's called, pandiculation.
"Pandiculation", refreshes the brain's body image and purges accumulated tension. Different animals have different patterns, but all do it in some form. Birds do it by shrugging their wings back, reaching their legs back, one at a time, and then flapping their wings; cats and dogs do it by first bowing, arching their back, and then shaking. Humans do it in the natural "yawn and morning stretch" (different in performance from the calf or hamstring stretches athletes do).
Clinical somatic education uses techniques that activate this genetically-present action behavior methodically and in a magnified way to free people from the grip of tension patterns formed by injury and stress.
In the case of clinical somatic education, we apply the contraction/relaxation behavior to places where the person holds tension; with injuries and stress, these tensions always exist in patterns, so it's not a matter of "releasing muscles", but of releasing entire patterns via movements in those patterns.
The result is a lasting release of muscular tension. Then, we teach movement patterns that link muscle groups together in certain inherently well-organized patterns of coordination, to replace less well-organized, unhealthy, painful patterns.
No longer is the person dragged down from good posture by habitual muscular tension. (S)he is free to stand and move at her or his full stature and in the easy balance that free and well-coordinated movement permits.
The results of pandiculation distinguish the good posture of freedom from tension from the 'good posture' maintained by pitting one muscle group (used to maintain good posture) from other muscle groups (held tight by the lingering effects of injury and stress).
Easy balance is the natural state, whether at rest or in movement. Good posture isn't something you maintain; it's nearly effortless, the product of good balance and good coordination.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Lawrence Gold is a certified Hanna somatic educator who works to free clients from a variety of pain conditions that often have persisted despite therapy. He is one of the few practitioners who offers a money-back guarantee of satisfaction. Contact him at https://somatics.com/wordpress/contact.
A common misconception exists about core exercises or core workouts -- even, or particularly, among some athletic trainers. The misunderstanding of which I speak is, "What is 'core'?"
Commonly the muscles of the abdominal wall are considered, "core". This is incorrect. Those muscles are surface, the way the skin of an apple is surface to the apple core.
The core muscles are the deepest muscles; they lie closest to the bone (or body center) and exert the greatest control of balance and coordination. Among them, the psoas muscles, the quadratus lumborum, the diaphragm, in the the trunk, and the scalene muscles of the neck and the muscles of swallowing in the throat, as examples -- all of which affect spinal alignment, and thereby, balance. Strength is not their primary contribution, and so the notion of "core strengthening" is inherently misguided.
What is sought through core strengthening is usually stability, but stability doesn't come from strength; it comes from balance.
Balance is a consequence of close coordination between opposing muscles and between muscles and their synergists (helpers).
When a person gets musclebound, as often happens in physical conditioning programs and in cases of injury, close coordination gets distorted, as one muscle or muscle group overpowers another.
Easy balance is impossible when one is in that condition; the person is inherently unstable and muscle tone must shift throughout the body to compensate for those imbalanced in a less-easy stability.
More than that, a person cannot strengthen what they cannot feel, and one can't feel the core if one muscle group overpowers the other. The core can be sensed only when muscles are closely coordinated in a condition of easy, dynamic balance.
Even if core strengthening exercises give equal attention to strengthening all muscles in the (supposed) core group, they don't necessarily give attention to both freeing musclebound muscles and developing balanced (i.e., equal) control/coordination of all of those muscles.
More than that, if muscles of the peripheries of the body, e.g., legs, arms, neck, are musclebound or poorly coordinated, they cause unbalancing pulls from the peripheries of the body to the core. They cause instability that cannot be corrected by core strengthening; they can be corrected only by restoring suppleness and balance among opposing muscles and among muscular synergists (mutual helpers).
So, approaches at core conditioning must have the following two elements present:
alleviating musclebound conditioning
developing balanced coordination
That said, I'd like to point you to an example of a core conditioning program that does just that: called, "The Five-Pointed Star", one of a number of programs people use to alleviate pain, to recover from injury, and to cultivate balance and suppleness.
Another program that has garnered special interest concerns the psoas muscles, Free Your Psoas, also has that effect. Recognizing that the peripheries affect the core, this program presents a whole-body approach to freeing and integrating the psoas muscles.
As it happens, it isn’t exactly rocket science to understand why the psoas muscles get tight. The answer is, "insults and injuries". When we get uptight, we get tight.
To free psoas muscles, see the end of this piece.
Insults and injuries form memory patterns. We never completely forget. Insults and injuries leave their mark in memory.
The memory patterns aren't just psychological; they are psycho-physical. Muscular tensions are involved. The term, "uptight" is literal. The memory of painful experiences is not just "inner" and "emotional", different from the body, but present as the felt state of the body: patterns of tension and other stress-induced changes -- the physical sensations of the memory, carried all the way through to the core and experienced to a greater or lesser degree as physical changes that affect not just how we feel, but also how we move. The psoas muscles are involved because they are constantly involved in movement and in balance. When they tighten, our movements and balance change -- and, as core muscles, they're involved with all other muscles and muscle groups to different degrees.
For that reason, single-muscle releases of the psoas muscles miss a lot of the tension pattern of which tight psoas muscles are a part.
(For the clinicians out there, the tension is part of a larger pattern of psychomotor/ neuromuscular tension activated by stress and maintained as an activated memory pattern, and that kind of tension involves the body-core.)
There’s more.
In "An Essential Understanding of the Psoas Muscles", I use the term, “open core”. I refer to a person’s “full stature”. I talk about the nervous system’s centralized role in regulating muscular tension in arising from rest to sitting, standing, and walking; for each of those movements, a corresponding state of mind exists. I’ll go into that shortly; as you’ll see, it’s pretty obvious, when pointed out.
Chronically tight psoas muscles indicate the existence of stuck movement-memory patterns. To free tight psoas muscles, we must release the trigger of the tension -- whether the memory of activity (movement), of a sensation (injury), or of emotional insult.
First, we release; then, we must integrate the movements of our psoas muscles into better coordination into the entire muscular system. That requirement also gets missed in common therapies -- which is one reason they work only as well as they do.
RELEASE
"Release" doesn't necessarily mean catharsis. It means getting unstuck. Catharsis is the explosive uncorking of pent-up emotion when we release resistance to doing so suddenly. Better, to regulate the resistance and the emotion, together, and do the releasing gracefully and essentially comfortably.
A person stuck in a habit pattern is enclosed in the habit and to that degree, closed to new experience. There’s no space. All there is, is the repetitive replay of memory. Noise. The closed (or hard-) core condition.
A deliberate, new action can modify a habit – but only if that new action first softens up the habit. Otherwise, the habit prevents change past a certain stage. That's another reason why common therapies work only as well as they do.
The key to softening up a habit is to recover the intention that created it.
One way to recover the intention that created it is to do, deliberately, what the habit does automatically until you can feel yourself doing it, rather than it happening to you.
The saying is, "Whatever you are doing wrong, do it more, and then less. That action (done enough) melts the mold of a habit so that it can be remolded.
To hear his experience, click above.
In that state of “melt”, you no longer feel trapped in (and by) that habit. Now, there's the space for change.
So, to free tight psoas muscles, deliberately to do the movement actions of the tight psoas pattern (which involves many muscles and movement elements), and add energy to them. When we do that, we feel those muscles "give in" and relax, as we relax.
Of course, you need to know what that tight psoas muscle pattern is.
Step-by-step instruction in a program such as Free Your Psoas, guides you into and through the tension/movement pattern, as it exists throughout the entire muscular system -- overcoming one of the shortcomings of common therapy.
HOW THE PSOAS MUSCLES ACT IN REST AND ACTIVITY
The different states of activity are common states of mind.
* REST/REPOSE: no intention, unreadiness for action, no engagement with experience
Although sleep may seem the very definition of rest, sleep is no necessarily restful. Ask anyone with insomnia. Dream sleep involves emotional, mental, and subtle physical activity (e.g., REM -- Rapid Eye Movement sleep). Deep, dreamless sleep is as close as most of us come, and generally, tense people stay tense even during sleep. Waking repose is generally not full rest.
* SITTING: coming to some higher degree of activity; mental and emotional engagement
* STANDING: coming to a still higher level of activity; active mental, emotional and physical engagement
* WALKING etc.: coming to a still higher level of activity and engagement
Any “hold” in any of these states is a limit on the responsiveness of the psoas/iliopsoas muscles, generally at some level of contraction that you can't affect by ordinary efforts.
If the psoas muscles are simply non-functional, they express a pattern of immaturity in which the person is either passive, relatively receptive like a child, without initiative, or without the capacity to formulate a deliberate intention and more concerned with outer appearances than with true intentions. It's an arrested (ar-"rested") state of development.
If the psoas muscles are equally tight, left and right, but very tight, they express the stuck pattern of sitting and the mood of sitting -- limited action and actually a restraint upon standing up for action (taking a stand). It's an arrested state of starting things.
If the psoas muscles are equally tight, but free enough to permit standing up without pain, they express a pattern of self-restriction (repressed action).
In this state, we see and feel an arched spine. The spinal muscles, which tighten as arousal level increases, arch the spine backward; the psoas muscles pull the top of the pelvis and lumbar spine forward, and contribute to the arching. The person exists in a state of co-contraction, which involves low grade low back pain from back muscle fatigue.
If the psoas muscles are asymmetrically tight, they usually express a stuck pattern of action, as if stopped mid-step in a walking action. It's an arrested state of follow-through and often the state of a prior leg or foot injury that triggered a cringe response and changed the walking pattern.
Alternately, there may have been a hard fall or other pelvic injury that knocked the sacrum (central pelvic bone, in back) off center and triggered a psoas muscle response, in which the psoas is incorrectly identified as the center of the problem.
All cases of chronically tight psoas muscles prevent the ability to come to complete rest.
Both physical and emotional trauma can create a memory impression sufficiently gripping to create chronic muscular tensions of this type.
These memory impressions function as if the situation is still happening in present time – with the attendant emotional flavor and arousal state.
As I said in the other article, as a generality, people never experience deep rest; they/we are stuck at some level of activity, some level of tension, stuck in some pattern of memory, of arousal, of reactivity, of resistance to outer things and to things inside ourselves.
As the psoas muscles are involved in every state of arousal from rest to full activity, a person stuck at some state of activity has psoas muscles (and actually, the entire musculature, to some degree) stuck at some level of activity. This statement is, of course, an oversimplification, but as a generalization, it holds good.
To the degree that we are stuck in a memory at the physical level (memory of repetitive action, memory of injury), at the emotional level (memory of experience, memory of insult), or at the mental level (memory of worldview, memory of limitation), we are stuck in a closed/hard-core condition, unavailable to new information, new experience, change.
In general, we are held in a pattern and prevented from coming to our full stature, our best balance, our self-assurance, our freedom.
That means that psoas muscles don’t lengthen freely when coming from sitting to standing. We never get completely out of the crouch; we never elongate fully unless we apply extra effort (generally as an automatic action). We never come to our full stature.
And we are always held in a pattern. It’s just that the pattern may be long-term dysfunctional or short-term functional.
If it’s long-term dysfunctional, we are responding out of habit, maintaining our pattern with a sense of friction against some outer experience or in a state of conflict with our inner experience or preference, in a kind of chronic state of emergency.
If it’s a short-term functional pattern, it's emerging and changing in the moment, playing out freely as a stream of experiences: sensations, emotions, ideas arising without an effort to prevent or force them, a creative stream of new emergence by which we may bring something new (not memory-based or conforming to an existing memory mold). Psoas muscle tension in this case is, generally, subconscious, but can be felt from manual pressure on the psoas muscles or tendons.
IN THE ABSTRACT
In the abstract, an awakening or filling out of somatic awareness involves recognizing when we are stuck in stress-patterns (memories) and then progressively melting the mold of memory.
The mold of memory keeps us in patterns of tension, formed some time ago. To melt the mold of memory permits us to continue to dissolve, and evolve, to reshape all the way through to the core.
As “melt” progresses (as in somatic education techniques), we elongate and straighten into looser movement and a more comfortable balance. By melting, we surrender both to staying the same and changing. We let ourselves stay the same, and also let ourselves change -- the psychological dimension of physical changes.
Without that “melt”, attempts to free the psoas muscles and the core are limited.
AND CONCRETELY
Clinical Somatic education is a good place to start. Here's where I present practical means for freeing tight psoas muscles
Put yourself together, better. Know distinctly the difference between getting better and getting such small improvements that you have to take it on faith that improvements are happening.
The self-relief program linked below guides you through the process.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Lawrence Gold is a certified Hanna somatic educator providing lasting relief for a range of pain conditions, including tight psoas muscles. He offers a money-back guarantee. Contact him at https://somatics.com/wordpress/contact.
If you have back pain, then the first thing to consider is that you don't "have" back pain; back pain "has you" in its grip. That way of describing it would seem to be more true to your experience, wouldn't it? This video, below, shows how you can get control of the back pain that has you in its grip and then get rid of it, while recovering the comfortable and secure use of your back.
Although some people believe that standard procedures are "time-tested" and inherently more reliable, in this case, the opposite is true. Faster, more complete, and longer-lasting relief can be obtained with a less invasive, "high-touch" procedure that hits "the mark" than by standard procedures that miss "the mark". What is "the mark"? What to do, right now?
This video shows what you can do to relieve your own back pain and restore freedom of movement. The procedure has helped thousands of people who have already had back surgery or other invasive procedures.
For a clear understanding of a new, more effective approach to back pain than stretching, strengthening, adjustments or massage, please see this page.
For chronic back pain, please see this page, which also contrasts conventional back pain methods (including spinal decompression devices) with an entirely new, more effective approach.
This entry is for you if you have bruxism, orofacial pain, earaches, TMJ headaches, or clench your teeth at night.
Oscar W. in Session for TMJ Dysfunction
Once again, I am drawn to address common practices used to alleviate common health conditions. In this case, it's TMJ Dysfunction (or "TMD" or "TMJ Syndrome"), a condition that people commonly expect to take months or years to clear up, but which can be cleared up in weeks by oneself or faster with clinical somatic education sessions.
The Root of TMJ Dysfunction
Common dental practices overlook the root of the condition: neuro-muscular conditioning caused by trauma (injury, previous dental work) or long-term emotional stress (particularly, anger). "Neuro-muscular" means, muscles controlled by the brain. Another name for "neuro-muscular" is "muscle/movement memory" -- the state of tension we return to, automatically.
Even "neuromuscular dentistry" approaches the situation indirectly, by changing such things as a person's bite pattern, rather than changing muscular tension habits; the "neuromuscular" part exists in their minds, but not in their way of approaching the situation.
The common therapeutic means for addressing the condition address symptoms, rather than causes.
As a clinical somatic education practitioner, I've developed an effective and reliable self-relief program, which addresses exactly the underlying cause of TMJ Syndrome: the reflexive muscular action in the muscles of biting a chewing that causes the complex array of symptoms associated with TMJ Syndrome.
MORE: Free Preview of Self-Relief Program -- 5 Well-designed Somatic Exercises That You Can Use
to Make Your Jaws Feel Better
and Make Your Bite Better
-- in about 2 Weeks
We all respond similarly to injury: we tighten up (involuntarily cringe).
Stress (in life and relationships) and repetitive motions (e.g., in our occupation) have similar effects: we tighten or get tight so often or for so long that our brain -- the master-control organ of our muscular system -- learns to hold muscles tight indefinitely, automatically, habitually, and ultimately, beyond our ability to relax them.
For example, a car mechanic may develop back spasms or neck pain; a haircutter may develop wrist, hand or shoulder pain; a massage therapist may develop low back pain, and and wrist pain, or leg pain; someone with a stressful job or home life may develop headaches -- and of course, joint pain due to overcompression by tight muscles is common among the general population; they call it, "arthritis".
A person going through a life crisis may emerge with new tensions, restricted breathing, and low energy.
We forget how we used to be and get stuck in a strange new condition. The burn of muscle fatigue and stiffness become permanent. Inflammation, chronic fatigue, and joint degeneration commonly occur as long-term side-effects of that tension. Stress-related symptoms such as headaches or sciatica or other symptoms occur, seemingly inexplicably.
Not Aging, Genetics, or Mechanical Causes
Most often, when symptoms become chronic, people (and professionals) attribute the condition to aging, genetics, or mechanical causes -- erroneously.
Despite these symptoms, including pain, we may have no injury, in the sense of damaged flesh or bone. The damage may have healed, long ago; the life crisis may have passed, but we may remain stuck with the residue of injury and/or stress because of memory-caused tension or stress-reaction.
Because tight muscles cause pain and stiffness, because your brain controls your muscles, any therapy, to be effective, must address muscular activity at the brain (i.e., memory) level.
Clinical somatic education has advantages over drugs or therapy applied to soft tissue and joints: much less pain during therapy and faster improvement.
For most cases of chronic musculo-skeletal pain, methods that use the brained-based pandicular response, such as Hanna Somatic Education® and possibly, others, is sufficient as a stand-alone rehabilitation method.
This page is to enable people with back pain to help themselves, whether or not they have already sought professional help. In fact, it may render professional help unnecessary.
