Posturally! Your Online Creative Body Therapist

I am pleased to hear that Michelle Obama is taking on childhood obesity as an initiative. I was a heavy kid. As an adult, this is an ongoing challenge.

Recently, I learned (in my dance class) that carrying weight alters body posture in a way that shuts down my desire to be active. It also de-shapes the hip and backside area – an effect I do not need. The extra weight, especially in my belly, has me leaning forward.

Ideal alignment is about balancing through the bones. In a well-aligned body, weight is transferred from top to bottom through the center of the joints. (It’s a gravity thing.) This engages posture muscles such as the hamstrings (back of leg). I feel ready for action, and movement is delicious.

But by leaning forward, I am no longer balancing my weight through the bones. Instead I arch my back (which tightens the muscles) and my hips tighten up. I get stuck at the pelvis, but its not fun. No, this is movement stoppage! Sadly, I lose track of the feeling of my body, and I begin to identify with being overweight.

I found that key is to gently lean back. At first it feels weird because habit has me used to the forward position. But the idea is to get to a place where the pelvis drops down easily, releasing unnecessary muscle tension as it does. I practice this every day now, and it’s freeing.

How often does your upper back or your mid back hurt? If you’re like me and probably millions of your fellow humans, the answer is something along the lines of “often”. Mid and upper back pain is one of those things that seems to elude the “people in the know”, ie medical researchers and conventional physicians. They’ve done some studies on it but not nearly as many as for neck pain or lower back pain. Yet, one of the few things they do know about thoracic spine pain is that it’s about as common as lower back pain, which affects 80% of people at some point in their lives. It is also just as troubling.

My take on this dearth of information on upper-mid back pain is that it will be a while before there will be evidence based treatments for thoracic spine pain. So we non-medical people are left to our own devices to deal with it.

(more…)

If you are going to be proactive about getting and staying comfortable, you most likely need an expert to help you. A workplace study, published in the October 2009 Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, and involving about 1500 people, found that just buying an ergonomic desk set up isn’t enough to address the posture related pain due to work positions.

Non-Neutral Work Positions can Cause Muscle Tension and Pain.

Work related pain often comes from holding yourself in what ergonomists call non-neutral positions. These positions are ones in which the joints are not centered, i.e., the two bones that make up a joint are not aligned with one another. The fit just isn’t right. This reduces how much support you can get for the position you are in. Non-neutral positions create a tremendous amount of tension (and pain!) in the body, because the muscles become like bones in order to scaffold the joint’s position.

After 18 months, improvement was seen in those who not only received new desks and chairs, but also received the benefit of professional help in setting them up. These workers had less muscuolskeletal pain and less eyestrain than the comparison group. Results from this study apply only to workers who began the study with pain. Those who started pain free didn’t seem to benefit from the ergonomic perks provided by the study.

“Just providing new office furniture and written instructions is not sufficient to achieve proper accommodation,” the authors conclude. “Good office equipment is a poor substitute for good working positions.”

Sources:
Laestadius, Jasminka Goldoni; Ye, Jian; Cai, Xiaodong; Ross, Sandra; Dimberg, Lennart; Klekner, Meg.
The Proactive Approach-Is It Worthwhile? A Prospective Controlled Ergonomic Intervention Study in Office Workers. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. 51(10):1116-1124, October 2009. Date Accessed. Jan 12 10. doi: 10.1097/JOM.0b013e3181bae19d.

Newswise. Press Release. The Proactive Approach-Is It Worthwhile? A Prospective Controlled Ergonomic Intervention Study in Office Workers. Oct 21 09. Date Accessed. Jan 12 10. http://newswise.com/articles/proactive-approach-to-ergonomics-reduces-pain-in-office-workers.

For a while now, science has been gathering evidence that inflammation in the body raises the risk for some preventable diseases such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

Good news for yoga practitioners: If you practice regularly, you may be reducing the amount of inflammation you have. A new study out of Ohio State University and published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, compared women who practice twice weekly with those who are more sporadic about it. They gave them things to do that were intended to up the participants’ stress levels, and then followed that up with yoga, a walk on a treadmill or something boring to do. Then they took blood samples. By taking the blood sample, the researchers were looking for a chemical called IL-6 (pro-inflammatory cytokine), which both stimulates and inhibits inflammatory action in the body.

Yoga May Reduce Inflammation and Risk of Disease

The women who practiced yoga regularly had 41% less IL-6 than their not-so-dedicated counterparts, suggesting that yoga may be an easy and rewarding thing to add to a disease prevention lifestyle plan. The Ohio state researchers are planning more studies on this topic.

Sources:
Faculty of the Harvard Medical School. Inflammation: A unifying theory of disease. Health Encylopedia. AOL Health. Last Updated Sept 5 08. Accessed Jan 12 10. http://www.aolhealth.com/conditions/inflammation-a-unifying-theory-of-disease

Press Release. Ohio State University. Yoga Reduces Cytokine Levels Known to Promote Inflammation Released Jan 11 10. Accessed Jan 12 10. http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/560214/?sc=dwtr;xy=5040587