BodyWright, LLC

… Don’t believe me?  Read on.  By the end you won’t be tackling coworkers on the way to the copy machine or cleaning and jerking 5 gallon refills in front of the water cooler, but you may have a fresh perspective on how you use your body at work, and how you can train for an injury free career.

If we consider that professional athletes are folks paid to perform consistently in situations that demand flexibility, strength, and stamina, then every employed and embodied person is an athlete.  Whether you spend your time sitting, standing, reaching, typing, loading, operating heavy machinery or massaging and teaching exercise like me - we are each using our body to perform at work.  And just like the professional athletes on TV, we’d be wise to condition ourselves to ensure years of problem free performance and smooth functioning.

It would be foolish to expect to be free of pain and discomfort year after year in the absence of a sound physical development program.  I’m not talking about conventional weight lifting and cardio with a little obligatory hamstring stretching on top.  General fitness is a good place to start, but don’t make the mistake of stopping there!  General fitness is a baseline, and it should be the ‘given’.  Specific training for the postures and tasks you endure at work is what is needed.

Somewhere a few years ago I read the following quote by a pro coach “An injury is a mistake in the training program.”*  He was talking about poorly designed training programs that neglect some important aspects of fitness and develop others to the point of over training (receiving paradoxical returns).  Flexibility, strength, and stamina should be matched with equal attention to skills such as balance, coordination, and economy of movement.  Being strong does not guarantee being pain free.  Neither does being flexible.  At the time of this writing, I’m working with clients from both of those camps who are in varying levels of chronic discomfort.  Equally notable are folks who have graceful, refined posture and carriage, and yet are also in pain.  A comprehensive approach that involves all of the elements mentioned above is what is needed.

So now the question is: where to begin?  Paul Chek’s How to Eat, Move, and Be Healthy is a good basic book.  For lots of detailed information on exercise I recommend The New Rules of Lifting books by Lou Schuler and Alwyn Cosgrove.  Finally, for body use skills I recommend Mary Bond’s The New Rules of Posture.  (Unfortunately these books only cover basic physical health and body use – but they’re a great place to start your training, athlete!)

Oh, one more thing: you are a very unique type of athlete – and not just because you don’t look like one and aren’t being paid like one – you don’t have an off season.  If you’re body fails you, you will get benched on the injured roster, and if you stay there too long you’ll get kicked off the team.  You do not have the benefit of an off season to begin training.  You need to start now.

Cheers!

*A thousand points to the reader who can tell me who said this!  It’s been driving me nuts.  Please leave it in the comments.

My friend Randall Lightbown shared a link to this great video with me a few months ago.  I’ve since had a number of my clients, friends, and family watch it.  In this short, informative, and refreshingly entertaining clip Dr. Mike Evans makes a case for what he says is the single, best thing we can all do for our health, and presents it with a clever twist.  I could go on and on about it – but I won’t make you fish through a lengthy review to find the link!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUaInS6HIGo

Cheers!

Randall Lightbown’s website

Dr. Mike Evans’s website

Freeze.  Don’t change how you’re sitting as you read this.  How are you sitting as you read this?  Is your weight more settled into one cheek than the other?  Is your torso leaning to one side, propped up by an elbow?  Are you reaching towards the screen from your neck and through your eyes?  Perhaps your legs are stretched out and crossed, or pulled up underneath your chair with just the toe-tips on the floor.   Now take stock of how you feel while sitting this way.  Energetic?  Focused?  Tired?  Would your mom allow this posture at the dinner table?

Posture is a pretty deep topic, and a lot has already been said and written of it.  There are legions of health and fitness experts armed with books, services, and self-help courses that define postures (good and bad) and how to attain them.  What more can I hope to add?  In fact I have nothing to add, but something to clarify; there is a common misconception about posture that makes good posture bad and bad posture worse.  But don’t worry, I won’t bore you with detailed models of good posture and lengthy descriptions of how to hold and carry yourself in theoretical scenarios.  In fact, for the impatient readers out there in internet land I will sum up my message in one quote from the Norwegian furniture designer Peter Opsvik: “The best posture is always the next one.”

My macbook’s Dictionary app tells me that posture is the position one stands or sits in.  This is precisely the misconception I am hoping to dispel: that one should assume a “good posture” and remain in it.  The problem with this idea is that we are never actually still, and certainly “not designed to hold any single posture for long periods of time”, as Galen Cranz wrote in The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design.  We are constantly in motion.  The rise and fall of the breath and the beating of the heart are obvious examples, as are the movements in the digestive organs after a meal.  Less obvious motions are the subtle ebb and flow of fluids in between cells, movements of the cells themselves, and fluctuations in our electromagnetic fields.  Even standing still seems impossible when we try.  Give it a shot right now.  Take your time.

The phenomenon of rocking back and forth over one’s stance is called postural sway.  It’s usually two centimeters forward and backward when measuring the head’s movement, and increases quite a bit when the eyes are closed.  After specific training, and with great focus and the expenditure of serious effort it can be briefly suppressed, as in standing in military attention.  Postural sway, the movements of breathing and organ activity, the tiny movements of cells and the molecules buzzing around inside of them prevent us from ever really being still.  So why would one try?

There are certain postures that are less stressful for a totally flexible and in all other ways structurally healthy body.  I personally haven’t seen such a body come into my practice, but in theory for such a body these postures would cause the least expenditure of energy, give all the organs and tissues room to do their life supporting and house cleaning functions, and probably look good too.  But for a person who has tightness here and weakness there, a curve in the spine and perhaps a visual or aural acuity discrepancy holding one of these “ideal postures” may be painfully difficult.  Perhaps you have had this experience yourself.

The same ‘posture’ entry lists a third definition, that posture as a particular way of dealing with or considering something; an approach or attitude.  This is exactly what I hope to convey to you: that your posture is the physical embodiment of your approach – to life, to situations at work and at home, to challenges of occupational tasks, repetitive motions and leisure-time activities.  This approach should be flexible, not rigid.  It should allow adaptation and variation so that forces of stress and strain are distributed throughout the body in more than one way.  We are not still on the inside, and being still on the outside has serious stressful effects on the body (which is one way a sedentary lifestyle is so devastating to our health).  Movement keeps our structural tissues loose and our internal ocean circulating.  Postural fixity – as Cranz defines it –  is what makes a good posture bad and a bad posture worse.  The physical ability and spontaneous inclination to shift around is far more important than shaping one’s body into a position and maintaining it, no matter how mechanically efficient that position is.  So get up and down, shift from one side to the other, sit forwards on the edge of your seat and then lean into its back.  Vary your posture when you must be sitting or standing for long periods of time, and go from sitting to standing frequently.

My wish for my clients is that they become more skilled and diverse in their body use, not to turn them into posture robots with only a handful of positions from which to live out there lives.  Being mindful of the physical aspect of how one approaches situations and tasks is key, and in my practice it is more important than gaining flexibility and strength.  Galen Cranz’s The Chair, mentioned above, and Mary Bond’s The New Rules of Posture: How to Sit, Stand, and Move in the Modern World are two books to which I would refer the interested reader.  Both are very accessible and contain practical self-help exercises and solutions to real life postural issues.

Cheers!