How Losing Command of Our Own Body Weight Has Made it Impossible to Sit, Stand & Walk Efficiently
We all sit back in chairs. Hours every day. We don’t do this by choice.
Our fate was sealed as infants, seeing everyone around us, people of all ages, throwing their body weight backwards into chairs and sofas. Everywhere. All the time. What we saw made an indelible impression. Without realizing it, we were learning that throwing body weight backwards is, simply, what human beings do. Utterly normal. No problem whatsoever. Really?
As infants, highly motivated to sit-up, we used the only means available to us at the time: our highly efficient innate ability. This had us sitting easily, beautifully. We hadn’t yet developed the musculature required to handle throwing our body weight backwards. But around 3 or 4, we developed this musculature and joined our elders in sitting-back. And we did it with staggering repetition. And we’ve never stopped.
This is a society wide problem. All of us experienced this same conditioning. We all lost touch with our bodies in the same way. We didn’t feel the muscular strain or skeletal distortion that comes automatically with throwing our body weight backwards as we sit. As children, our bodies were like rubber. We had no awareness of the adjustments that were being made for us by our subconscious brain, adjustments essential to keeping us functional.
We often attribute our body problems to our sedentary lifestyle. But the problem isn’t that we sit. The problem is how we sit. Isn’t it curious that, with all the scientific advancements in the last 100+ years, ‘science’ hasn’t identified the problem and prescribed a healthy way to sit? Blinded by habit just like the rest of us, science is stuck in the “posture paradigm” – the well-accepted viewpoint that sees human beings as organisms that come with a certain upright skeletal arrangement (the kind you see on the wall in a doctor’s office) that is sustained through muscular activity referred to as “postural support.”
In my view, seeing sitting through the lens of “posture” has led us astray. We think exclusively of body position and believe that the only reason we don’t achieve the proper position is that we lack the discipline or willpower. This is baloney. We have bad posture because we lack the skill to sit well. At a very young age, through no choice of our own, lured by the example of everyone around us, we trashed the highly evolved ability we were all born with, in favor of an alternative hazardous to our health.
The posture paradigm fails to recognize sitting as an act of lifting. Without an act of lifting, we’d have no posture at all. We’d just be a pile of flesh and bones on the ground. Any position we find ourselves in is simply a consequence of how we are lifting. I call this act of lifting, “uprighting.” All of our sitting, standing and locomotive activities have uprighting at their heart.
The power of own body weight is the engine that drives uprighting, for better or for worse.
When we allow our body mass to drop straight down to earth – as we did as infants and toddlers – we capture and employ the full power of our weight, enabling us to lift ourselves with minimal effort. And to sustain it over time. We basically bounce ourselves up – and keep bouncing – flexing and extending all of our support joints, just a tiny bit, in an ongoing cycle. This ability is in our DNA.
When we sit in a chair or slump on a stool or on the floor, however, we send the center of body mass down to earth on a backwards trajectory. This turns the power of our body weight into a destructive force. As we commit body weight backwards while at the same time maintaining the intention to see and relate to the world out in front of us, our subconscious brain reacts instantly to enable us to achieve this intention:
1. To secure the pelvis and lower spine so that we don’t fall backwards too far too fast, we use our powerful ilio-psoas muscles. Running from the top of the thigh bone through the pelvis, attaching at the ilium and at the lumbar vertebrae, the ilio-psoas muscles lower us gradually to the chair-back, keeping us from slamming into it. And when we sit slumped without a back support, they hold us securely in place, stopping our backwards topple before we build up enough speed to put our skulls at risk. The ilio-psoas are survival muscles, not meant to be engaged constantly. Their overworking, I believe, is the main source of chronic low-back pain and sciatica.
2. As the pelvis and lower torso drop backwards, the upper spine needs to bend forward. Without this forward bending, we’d be going back on a diagonal, looking up at the ceiling. Because of this bending, significant muscular effort in the neck and upper back is required to hold it all up. No wonder our necks hurt.
My work is about helping people regain command of their body weight, to learn how to let it drop straight down, as we all did as infants and toddlers. Essential to the learning process is becoming ever more mindful of the impact that our body weight is having on us – moment by moment – as we go about our daily activities. By actively witnessing ourselves in the act of sitting-back – something we’ve been doing virtually our entire lives without witnessing – we begin to learn how to put the power of our weight to good use. This changes everything.
I teach private lessons at the Hope Wellness Center, Hope NJ and in Greenwich Village, NYC. For those outside the metropolitan area, Innate Uprighting Restoration courses are available online at www.uprighting.com. Videos are available on YouTube, @Uprighting101. I can be reached at michael@uprighting.com. (570) 844-0332.