Pain Relief

I have never quite understood why psychology and physical medicine are separate branches of healthcare. It’s not as though the brain were a separate entity floating out there in the ether, merely tethered to a lumpy, unintelligent body like some supercomputer chained irrevocably to a vehicle that carts it around.

No, in fact, your brain and body aren’t distinct. They’re the same freaking thing. Your brain is your body, and your body is your brain. That’s basic anatomy.

The gray matter of your brain condenses down to a ropy cord of neural material that runs through the core of your spine, branching out along the way into millions of nerves that terminate in muscles, bones, and organs.

It is impossible to have a thought or feeling without a corresponding physical reaction. Impossible.

When you have an experience — any experience — every cell in your body mobilizes to support that. Fear does not exist merely in your mind. It resides also in the tension of your muscles, the clenching of your jaw, and the shallowness of your breathing.

All emotions are the same. Joy, grief, anger, love…they manifest in your movement.

And while you’re probably familiar with the concept of “mind over matter” where your brain can influence the state of your body, the opposite is equally as possible. The set of your body — your posture, if you will — influences the state of your mind.

Just as smiling when you feel down can lift your spirits, so too can standing tall elevate your mood and even improve focus, productivity, and your capacity for solving complex problems.

The Software in Your Muscles

The generally accepted view on muscles is that if they’re tight, you must stretch, roll, and pull them like taffy until they agree to lengthen. Muscles are more or less considered to be a sort of rubber band that has, for some reason or other, become mechanically too short.

Muscles aren’t inanimate objects that spring back into place of their own accord like elastic, though. In fact, a muscle in and of itself has no ability to maintain tone. It requires a signal from your nervous system in order to contract.

Tension isn’t a muscle problem — it’s a software problem. Yes, there are mechanical influences on your tissue. At the site of an injury, the body lays down dense layers of fascia to “bandage” the area. This is what we refer to as scar tissue. It can effectively restrict mobility because the fibers tend not to follow the original grain of the muscle and instead run in every direction, thus fortifying the integrity of the muscle or tendon but restricting mobility.

However, barring any actual scar tissue, muscles become tight because the nervous system tells them to contract. There are many reasons that your nervous system sends these signals, including to perform basic movements like sitting, standing, walking across a room, or reaching for a mug of coffee.

But tension is also a readiness response. Your body tightens muscles to prepare for action, and perpetual readiness, which accompanies chronic stress, results in perennial tension.

Living in Fight or Flight

Everyone is busy. That’s a function of modern, urban life. We all have too many places to be, too many tasks on our to-do lists, and a slew of things that never even get attempted because, priorities.

This kind of modern frenzy results in chronic activation of your sympathetic nervous system — your stress response. This is the branch of your autonomic (meaning, beneath conscious control) nervous system that deals with threat.

The sympathetic branch has a correlate that helps you relax, rest, and replenish your energy: the parasympathetic branch.

In a balanced nervous system, these two have an inverse relationship, meaning they’re not both active at the same time. The sympathetic branches readies you for action while the parasympathetic branch helps you to relax and recover.

Sympathetic:

• Increases heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure
• Mobilizes blood away from digestive function into skeletal muscle to prepare for quick movement
• Constricts blood vessels
• Dilates pupils and focuses eyes

Parasympathetic:

• Reduces muscle tension
• Lowers heart rate and blood pressure
• Aids in digestion
• Slows and deepens respiration
• Supports immune system function
• Aids in the secretion of bodily fluids

Your sympathetic nervous system is like your gas pedal, mobilizing you for action, while your parasympathetic branch is the brake that allows your body to slow down and rest. A healthy nervous system swings, as a pendulum would, between activation and relaxation, never getting stuck to one side or the other.

Sympathetic Lockdown

This pendulum dance is how we maintain what’s called in fancy-schmancy science talk homeostasis. Homeostasis is a balance. Your body is constantly working to preserve it.

But, just like standing on one foot, it’s not a static place. There are millions of tiny micro-adjustments happening in every moment to keep you upright. Balance—or homeostasis—is actually a process of coming into and out of your center, over and over again.

But here’s the thing… when you’re chronically stressed, and thus living in perpetual fight or flight, you don’t get that natural, normal pendulum swing from activation to deactivation. You just stay charged all the time.

And because your body cannot physiologically exist in perpetual activation, it uses your parasympathetic nervous system like a lid to hold down your escalating fight or flight response. It’s a bit like a pressure cooker where the steam is your neural activation and the lid is keeping it in.

When that lid comes off, the whole system blows up.

There are a few side effects of living in chronic activation with your parasympathetic nervous system “covering up” all this stress. One is a type of numbness — officially called dissociation — where you feel sort of disconnected from yourself and lost, or floating.

People who are dissociated often don’t really feel truly alive. Nothing really touches them, and they’ll require ever increasing levels of stimulation to have any sensory experience at all.

In my observation, our whole society is living in this state, which explains why we keep reaching for ever higher levels of extremity — deep, deep tissue massages; extreme sports; bio-hacking; etc.

What I believe we’re reaching for is not higher levels of achievement, but a sensory experience of being alive.

Another common side effect of dual autonomic neural activation is having a hair trigger — sometimes called moodiness or explosiveness. Have you ever met someone who seemed super chill, but randomly flew off the handle at the smallest thing?

That’s a symptom of this kind of dysregulation. You may have heard of really extreme cases, such as the kind of PTSD that soldiers returning from war exhibit, but it exists on micro-levels, too.

Living in a perpetual state of activation—which you probably just call being stressed—is what I term Sympathetic Lockdown. It’s a state where you’re just getting through, moment to moment, without actually discharging the stored tension and neural activation in your body.

Burnout and the Brain

Nobody wants to be stressed, angry, explosive, and emotionally absent from their life. This is not a pleasant place to live.

So, what do we do about it?

We’re just not set up for mental relaxation in our daily lives. There’s constant stimulation from smartphones buzzing and beeping, televisions in every restaurant, and little face to face contact with other humans.

With no built-in triggers for slowing down and dropping into peace, our world is fraught with catalysts for activation, all of it driving us further into burnout.

Burnout is a frightening place to be. Participants in studies on burnout have demonstrated measurable changes to their brains, showing an enlarged amygdala — the fear center¹.

In short, burnout doesn’t just make you feel like crap, it also destroys the very structure of your brain.

Most approaches to dealing with stress and fixing burnout focus on controlling either your thoughts or your external circumstances. You either need to think and feel differently about the life you have, or you need to change your reality.

But in a modern world fraught with perpetual triggers, it can be next to impossible to escape the hamster wheel of stress. There’s always one more near-disaster waiting in the wings to give your nervous system a good solid zing.

There is a third strategy that pretty much everyone overlooks: reducing physical stress to calm your mind.

Stress — especially the chronic, perpetual stress that results in burnout — is a form of micro-trauma. In fact, the brains of people diagnosed with burnout mirror those of people who have experienced severe childhood trauma when examined with fMRI¹.

The interesting thing about trauma is that it isn’t traumatizing, so long as an organism (person or animal) has sufficient time and resources to release the resulting charge in their nervous system — i.e. to down-regulate the fight or flight response in the sympathetic branch and activate its correlate, the parasympathetic branch.

This is according to the research of Dr. Peter Levine, author and founder of Somatic Experiencing, an embodied trauma healing approach. His research focuses on the ability of wild animals to process trauma. He has found that when the sympathetic charge is released after a traumatic event, there is no lasting effect on the animal.

However, if that activation isn’t fully released, the sympathetic nervous system remains charged and active on some level. Essentially the animal—or the person—remains locked in fight or flight mode.

This is what’s happening to stressed out, burned out people day in and day out.

You’re living on some level as though there were a literal tiger on your heels. And existing in this perpetual state of neural activation results in ceaseless muscle tension, disrupted sleep, an inability to focus, lack of creativity and inspiration, difficulty connecting and relating to others, digestive issues, and even your plain old garden variety generalized anxiety.

Body Over Brain

While mindfulness strategies such as gratitude journals, meditation practices, affirmations, and even psychotherapy are helpful, the reality is that their ability to effect change can only reach so deeply when it comes to your biology.

The aspects of your brain affected by stress and trauma are ancient, primordial. You can’t have a rational conversation with them. Not only do they not speak English (or any other human language for that matter), they also don’t even know that language exists.

But you CAN talk to them — if you learn their language. And when you do this, you have access to the greatest free bio-hack that no virtually one else knows about.

Because just as your mind can influence your body, so too can your body influence your mind. In fact, the body sends signals to the brain far more frequently than the brain does to the body. The heart, for example, contains sensory nerve bundles that send information to the brain about nine times more frequently than the brain sends signals to the heart².

The body and brain are constantly “checking in” with each other, asking how things are going, ascertaining whether a state change is necessary. Thus, you can think all the happy thoughts you want, but if your body is chronically sending fear and threat signals upward to the brain, it will be nigh impossible to achieve true relaxation.

Balancing Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Activation

While accidents, injuries, and traumatic events usually happened in the past, there is no need to mentally travel back to them. The stored charge in your nervous system is current and happening in present time, so that’s when and where we’ll deal with it.

We’ll use a body-up approach. Rather than trying to talk sense to your nervous system and explain that the tiger in the bushes is simply a figment of its imagination, we’re going to instead learn and make use of its own language: sensation.

Felt sense is a powerful communication tool, but many people have a diminished ability to actually feel their own bodies. Reestablishing this connection can take a little practice, but it’s not hard and anyone can do it with just a modicum of time and attention.

Working with Felt Sense

If I were to ask you what you feel right now, you’d likely tell me that you either feel nothing (or nothing of note) or you would indicate areas of your body that are tight, tense, aching, or painful.

This is true of most people. We either hurt, or we feel nothing at all. But there are tons of sensations happening in your body all the time that have nothing to do with pain. It’s just that you haven’t trained yourself to pay any attention to them.

Developing your sensory awareness is a skill, and the best way to enter into it is through objective description of your present moment sensory experience in your body. For our purposes, you’ll want to describe sensation as though you were a scientist in a lab examining a specimen.

Tight, dense, heavy, warm, dark, gummy, thick, or bubbly are examples of descriptive sensory language. These are helpful. They allow us to get a handle on your body’s experience. What’s not useful are stories about sensation.

Things like…

Sometimes I notice my left shoulder feels a little tight, like when I do an overhead press at the gym.

What usually happens when I’m sleeping is that my arm goes numb and it wakes me up.

My yoga instructor said my pelvis should be more tucked under, like this…

When I’m sitting at my desk, I tend to hunch over and lean on my elbow and I really just need to strengthen my back muscles more, I think.

These are an intellectualized version of your experience. They come from floating above your physical sensations and analyzing them in a detached, clinical way. What we want is for you to connect to the sensory experience directly. In this way, you’re able to converse with your biology.

The Felt Sense of Feeling Good — Resourcing

We’re conditioned to seek and destroy problems, but when it comes to stress, trauma, and burnout, this problem-fixated focus is actually causing you a lot more pain. If the underlying tension and tightness that are causing your discomfort are related to sympathetic lockdown—and they are, I guarantee it—then focusing on the pain perpetuates the threat response, and thus the tension.

One way we can back ourselves into pain relief is by using a little reverse somatic psychology and putting your attention on the areas of your body that feel really good. In this way, we’re creating a sense of safety for your biology which effectively allows it to discharge the stored sympathetic nervous system activation.

This is a form of resourcing — using people, places, things, experiences, and even sensations that have a positive impact on your well-being to create a sense of safety and connection that soothes your nervous system.

This is a relatively easy practice that can be done anywhere, but until you develop your skills a little bit, it’s best to be in a private, quiet location where you won’t be disrupted.

• Sitting, standing, or lying down, scan your body with your attention. What sensations feel pleasant?

• Because it can be difficult to notice your sensory experience in a vacuum at first, I like to employ one of Dr. Peter Levine’s practices to jumpstart your awareness:

• Place your right hand under your left armpit, flat against the rib cage. Place your left hand on your right shoulder. You should now feel as though you’re giving yourself a hug. Notice what feels pleasant about this position.

• Use sensory language to explore the feeling. Describe the pressure, temperature, and weight of the sensation if you can. Remember to use words like warm, tingling, sticky, dense, thick, light, empty, firm, etc. and not to delve into mind chatter or stories about why you feel the sensations that you do. Stay in your body.

• Focus your attention on positive sensations—things that feel pleasant, safe, and secure. When you have a firm grasp of a positive sensation, see if you can expand the feeling just a little bit further into your body. For example, if you have a warmth surrounding your heart that’s comfortable and cozy, see if you can spread that glow a bit, maybe extending it out to your shoulders, up to the base of your throat, or downward into your abdomen.

Spend at least a minute, but longer if you like, exploring this pleasant sensation expanding in your body. Once you feel complete, release your arms and notice how your body feels overall.

What has shifted? Is there less tension in your shoulders and neck? Have painful symptoms dissipated? Do you feel calmer and more centered?

Focusing your attention on pleasant sensations in your body is something you can do at any time of the day, no matter where you are, to down-regulate stress responses and restore neural balance.

You’ll notice the tension in your muscles dissipate, your breathing will slow. Often, colors become brighter as your vision clears and mental focus improves. These are all effects of discharging sympathetic lockdown.

Resourcing as a Skill

Resourcing and working with felt sense are tools that take some time and practice to develop, but they have a profound impact not only on your physical and mental well-being, but also on focus, productivity, and performance.

Of course, as with anything, developing skill in this practice takes time and effort. Somatic Experiencing practitioners can help you to finesse your technique, but you can also work on your own.

There’s an entire chapter in my ebook dealing with neural regulation, including detailed information on working with felt sense and specific practices to help you calm your stress response. You can order it here.

1. https://www. psychologicalscience.org/observer/burnout-and-the-brain
2. Blake, Mandy. “1.2 Heart Brain” Body=Brain.

One symptom of poor posture is lower back pain. Of course, there can be multiple reasons that your back aches and a lot of those depend on your individual structure, genetics, and life history.

I generally recommend that clients consult a physician and receive any necessary imaging to rule out lower back pain causes that require medical intervention prior to engaging in bodywork or exercises targeting their symptoms.

But if you’ve been to the doctor for a thorough evaluation only to be sent away with a shrug and a prescription for pain pills you don’t want to take, you’re certainly not alone.

Physicians are wonderful at what they do and have my utmost respect for their ability to address life-threatening conditions, but unfortunately the conventional medical approach to treating back pain often leaves something to be desired.

While doctors typically rely heavily on their two heavy hitters—drugs and surgery—to treat a variety of conditions, not every case of back pain needs to be addressed in this way.

Non-specific lower back pain—that is, lower back pain of indeterminate cause—typically results from one of two issues in the spine: a lack of stability or a lack of mobility. These are actually two sides of the same coin. Where your body is not properly supported—a lack of stability—there will be additional tension to compensate, resulting in reduced mobility.

In order for your body to function optimally, you must have adequate support. Your body is an incredible feat of engineering, a system of levers and pulleys more complex than any machine we could ever hope to create. Each tiny joint in your body supports a system of joints above and below it. Irregularities in movement in one tiny area of the body can affect the functioning of everything else.

Your sacrum—a large, triangular bone at the base of your spine consisting of fused vertebrae—fits into the pelvis much like the keystone of an arch. If the two pelvic bones are imbalanced, they will torque the sacrum, putting strain on your sacroiliac joints (the points at which your sacrum connects to your pelvis) and causing lower back pain.

The five vertebra that make up the portion of your spine in your lower back—your lumbar vertebrae—are particularly prone to shifting and torquing as a result of poor postural habits. In fact, if there are twists in your body, they almost always show up in this area due to the lack of bony support between the bottom of your rib cage and the top of your pelvis.

Your lumbar spine is designed to allow ample movement in forward, back, and side bending¹. Because one of the primary functions of the lumbar spine is stability during load bearing, the surrounding muscles are vulnerable to compression from sitting and gravity, as well as compensation for postural restrictions elsewhere in your body.

Additionally, if you suffer from the rampant occurrence of tight hips that’s so common in urban professionals who spend a lot of time in front of computers or commuting in cars, your spine is doing some heavy lifting that it was never intended to assume.

If your hip joint is so restricted that your femur moves only a limited amount in the joint, then your thigh bone and your pelvic bone effectively function as one single unit—as though there were no joint in your hip at all.

Thus, to move your leg, the muscles of your lower back have to pick up and swing your entire pelvis and thigh forward, doing the job that’s supposed to fall to bigger, more powerful muscles like your quadriceps, glutes, and hamstrings.

Over time and thousands of steps per day, this causes tightness and rigidity in the muscles supporting your spine, and finally pain. It can even cause structural issues and inflammation in surrounding joints, like your sacroiliac joint.

Use the following exercise to reduce muscle guarding and tension around the hip joint, which helps to restore normal function to the lumbar vertebrae of your spine.

Exercise for Lower Back Pain Relief

1. Lie on the floor or on a yoga mat, face down. Bend your knees so that your feet are pointing toward the sky. Let your feet be relaxed.

2. Cross your feet right over left, and then cross them in the reverse, left over right.

Repeat this movement, increasing the speed. The movement should be relaxed and free, not controlled. What you’re doing is using the momentum of your feet to roll your thigh bone in the socket and warm up the joint.

The more speed you add, the less you’ll tend to control the movement and the more mobility you will encourage.

3. Once you’ve completed around fifty repetitions, lower your legs so that they’re flat on the floor again. Now we’re going to initiate a twisting movement for the lower back, opening up the front of the hip as well.

Please note, if at any time you experience pain with twisting, make the movement smaller until you no longer feel the pain, or stop completely. You should have no sharp pain or muscle spasms with this practice.

4. Bend your right knee so that your right foot is toward the sky. Imagine your right knee floating up off the floor, and twist your leg and hip so that your right foot reaches across your back, opening up your hip and touch your right foot to the ground on your left side.

Allow your body to roll and open up as you do this. Only go as far as is comfortable.

5. Switch and bend your left knee, floating the knee and thigh off the floor, reaching across your body to touch your left foot down on your right side.

Use as little effort as possible to lift the leg and reach across to the other side.

Sometimes it’s helpful to imagine a string pulling your foot toward the sky, across your body, and to your other side. See how much tension you can let go of and still complete the movement. The goal is to make this as effortless as possible.

Complete about ten to twenty repetitions of this practice toward either side.

For more movement practices that help reduce muscle guarding and tension and alleviate common, painful conditions like lower back pain, get Perfect Posture for Life, my ebook that goes covers posture correction in-depth. Click here to order the ebook.

1. Calais-Germain, Blandine. Anatomy of Movement. Eastland Press, 1993. Print.

Is upper back, neck and shoulder pain the bane of your existence? You’re definitely not alone.

Over half of all Americans experience back pain symptoms every year¹, yet the medical establishment’s ability to address spinal pain is fairly limited. Doctors rely on anti-inflammatory drugs and muscle relaxers to alleviate the symptoms, turning to spinal surgery for more acute cases.

While I’ve seen surgery help some of my clients in more dire circumstances, it’s a bit terrifying that spinal surgery fails to resolve a patient’s condition so frequently that there is actually an official diagnosis for this lack of result: failed back surgery syndrome.

Perhaps even more frighteningly, doctors have been recently found to be splitting their attention across multiple operating rooms at the same time² and taking kickbacks from medical device companies³. It doesn’t take a leap to realize that a person struggling with chronic back pain is facing a dire situation fraught with risky and possibly perilous choices.

Yikes. With all of our advanced imaging and research, why are doctors still unable to address such a common health complaint?

Understanding the Spine

From my perspective, the reason that people aren’t getting the help they need for stiff, aching backs is that the way Western medicine views the spine is somewhat limited.

That view is reflected linguistically in our reference to the backbone as a spinal “column.” When we talk of firmness in the context of having good boundaries, we refer to “having a spine.” In short, the cultural view of the spine is as something rigid and unyielding.

And surgeries mirror this concept. When a doctor recommends spinal surgery, what they’re likely going to do is increase stability and decrease movement by fusing vertebrae. However, according to Dr. Charles Rosen, clinical professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine, “Maybe 5 percent of patients with back pain need surgery.” Yet in the United States alone, over a million people undergo spinal surgery each year³.

That means that a vast number of people who experience debilitating spinal problems undergo unnecessary surgery every year that reduces range of motion and flexibility of the spine while not resolving their symptoms.

Your Spine is A Slinky, Not a Strut

There are many reasons why surgeries fail. The doctor did a poor job, or the problem wasn’t accurately diagnosed in the first place. But in my view, a major component of the failure of spinal surgery is that your spine isn’t meant to be a rigid structure.

While absorbing compressive force is one function of the spine, in a living body that bony column also has to facilitate movement. I envision the spine functioning more like a spring, or a slinky. If you look at the anatomy of your spine, you’ll see that viewed from the side, it has three curves, one each at your neck, mid back, and lower back. You could also count the fused sacrum—the bottommost bone of your spine—as a fourth curve.

These curves function to absorb load and shock as you sit, stand, walk, and run through life. Each time your foot strikes the ground, a shockwave goes through your body. There are many structures designed to help your body cope with and dissipate this shock, but your spine is definitely a major one.

If your spine were meant to be a column—a rigid, supportive structure that connected your head to your pelvis and had no other function than to hold your head upright—it would be straight.

But it’s not like that at all. In addition to the curves that help your spine to spring, it’s comprised of twenty-four individual vertebrae (not counting the fused ones in your sacrum), separated by cartilaginous discs that also aid in absorbing compressive shock while allowing for independent movement.

The Spine Generates Movement

Your spine essentially serves three purposes. The first is to protect your spinal cord, the thick rope of neural material that runs through its center. Second, your spine provides flexible support for load bearing and movement. And third, your spine has to allow mobility in your torso—to bend, flex, and rotate.

Professor Serge Gracovetsky, author of The Spinal Engine, studied the spine extensively and found that in addition to the above functions, the spine is a primary generator of locomotion. What that means is that the human gait, previously believed to be primarily a function of the legs, actually stems from the spine⁴.

So, you’re not a stiff torso carried around by a pair of sticks (legs). Movement stems from your core, initiated by a lateral bend to your lumbar spine.

This makes quite a lot of logical sense when you examine the connection of the psoas, a deep abdominal muscle that originates at the front of the spine, to the upper thigh.

Hope for Back Pain – Prioritizing Resilience

In virtually every case of back pain—upper back pain, lower back pain, middle back pain, back pain on one side, back pain that spans both sides—my clients’ symptoms have shown improvement when the spine became more mobile, not less.

In fact, when assessing a person’s movement, I watch them walk and look for places that don’t allow movement to translate through the spine. It’s a bit like looking for rocks blocking the flow of a stream.

A mobile spine is a resilient spine, while a stiff, inflexible one is prone to injury. My experience with my clients has shown me time and again that restoring mobility to areas of the spine that have become stiff, fixed, or rigid releases tension from surrounding musculature and alleviates pain.

And this is yet another reason that the traditionally accepted definition of posture as a rigid pose, placing your body into straight alignment and holding it there, is less than ideal. The kind of inflexibility generated by such a practice makes you brittle over time and reduces the number of options your body has for movement.

Fixing a Hunched Back

The mid back is an area prone to tension, especially in those who spend hours sitting or standing at computers day in and day out, resulting in a depressed sternum.

When the rib cage collapses downward, it causes your belly to pooch forward and your upper chest to flatten. The result is a kyphosis in your thoracic spine—increased curvature of the mid back, like the beginning of a hunchback.

This posture provides no support for your head. Your neck is forced into a forward angle and the result is head-forward posture.

Neck and Upper Back Pain Stretch

This practice will elongate the thoracic spine, restoring mobility and decreasing tension.

1. Stand arm’s length away from the wall. Put your palms flat against the wall and spread your fingers wide.

2. Keeping your palms against the wall, step back and stretch out so your hands are directly overhead and you’re looking down at your toes with your ears squarely between your arms (Fig.26). Pull your belly button gently toward your spine to protect your low back.

3. Press your palms into the wall with a slight downward pressure, like you’re trying to slide the heels of your hands down the wall. Engage all the muscles of your arms and shoulders, using 100% of your strength to press into the wall. Remember to keep your belly button engaged.

4. Hold this isometric contraction for 15-20 seconds and then relax, deepening the stretch. Be careful not to let go of your belly button and let your low back hyperextend when you relax. You should be able to press your chest forward and down further.

5. Repeat this 2-3 times, deepening the stretch a little more with each repetition.

Mid Back Exercise for Upper Back Pain

In this practice, you’ll be waking up the muscles of your back and shoulders to “turn them on” so that your body can use them as you move about your life.

You’ll need a wooden dowel or short stick of about eighteen inches in length.

1. Lie on the floor or on a yoga mat, face down.

2. Place your arms out in front of you, palms up. Grasp the stick or dowel in your palms with your hands shoulder-width apart and your elbows bent.

3. Keeping your elbows in line with your wrist and your head in line with the rest of your spine (don’t lift your chin and look up), lift your elbows a few inches off the floor and hold for a count of ten.

4. Repeat for six sets, holding for ten seconds each time. If this is too long, drop down to only five seconds for each set. Don’t over-exert! There is no benefit to doing more than your body can handle.

You can find more posture-correcting practices just like these in my ebook, Perfect Posture for Life. Learn more and order the book by clicking here.

1. https://www.acatoday.org/Patients/Health- Wellness-Information/Back-Pain-Facts-and-Statistics
2. Baker, Mike, and Justin Mayo. “Swedish double-booked its surgeries, and the patients didn’t know. The Seattle Times, 28 May 2017. Web.
3. http://www.orthopaedicsurgery.uci.edu/pdf/rosengoodhousekeeping.pdf
4. http://www.alexandertechnique-running.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/The-Spinal-Engine.pdf

(This post is part of a series on fixing bad posture. To read all the previous posts in the series, click here.)

Way back in the dark ages when I started my practice, no one knew what a foam roller was. We didn’t cover it in my training. No one talked about it at all.

Now, it’s all the rage. All across the gym universe, everyone’s doing self myofascial release with these big logs of foam, and when those fall short of making lasting changes to tissue tone and mobility, they move on to PVC pipes, rollers studded with nubs, rolling pins, and all manner of torture devices…er, myofascial release tools.

The general consensus seems to be that if a little pressure is good, then really aggressive pressure is great. You have to break up all that scar tissue and those fascial adhesions, am I right?

Now, I’m not 100% against foam rolling myself. I use it, albeit in very specific ways and with precise intention. But, if I can be frank with you, I was always a bit dubious as to its benefits. If foam rolling is so great, why do I have numerous clients who diligently (and painfully) roll their IT bands like they’re trying to make lefsa out of them, yet they still wind up on my table with flexibility issues and pain?

It seems the foam rolling tides have turned. I’m seeing former devotees toss their rollers in the trash and swearing them off forever. While I don’t necessarily think you need to go that far, I will say that foam rolling isn’t exactly all it’s cracked up to be.

Understanding the physiological processes happening inside your body when you foam roll will help you to use it in a more targeted fashion, and with greater intention.

First of all, the premise behind foam rolling is off. When you’re rolling out your IT bands, your adductors, or cringing in agony over the pressure of that log on your super tight lats, you are not actually “breaking up” adhesions. You’re also not “breaking up” scar tissue.

To do so would not only be agonizing, it would also be impossible. Recent studies show that it takes a minimum of 1,000 pounds of force in order to deform fascia a paltry 1%¹. This makes logical sense because if the thick connective tissue of your thighs or feet were so delicate as to “break apart” with pressure, you’d be tearing up your soft tissue every time you bumped into a table, sat in a chair, or stepped on a pebble.

So, if foam rolling doesn’t “break up” tissue, what’s really going on when you roll out those tight quads and feel the pain decrease? I mean, the pain is going away, so the muscle must be getting looser, right?

In order to understand how foam rolling affects your muscles and connective tissue, you have to remember that your muscles don’t just “get tight” on their own.

Have you ever seen a raw steak on a plate suddenly clench and tense up? No, you haven’t because that steak is dead, and therefore missing one critical component of muscle function: the nervous system.

Muscles don’t go all rogue on their own; they respond to cues from your nervous system telling them to tighten or loosen for the purpose of locomotion or support. Your soft tissue is scattered with tiny cells called proprioceptors that communicate information about position and movement. Your brain then signals muscles to contract or relax to either maintain upright posture or move your body.

One study² showed that foam rolling does seem to temporarily increase the range of motion of a muscle and, unlike with stretching, the flexibility boost doesn’t come along with the risky side effect of decreased muscular strength. But, results are pretty much temporary — your muscles return to their normal, habitual tension shortly after a foam rolling session.

So, what exactly is going on here? There are two plausible explanations. On the one hand, you’re stimulating your nervous system with something called novel proprioception³, giving your body new sensory stimulation that “wakes up” your brain. The theory goes that this novel stimulus encourages the nervous system to relax the muscle by causing the brain to reorganize its sensory map of the area contacted by the foam roller.

This phenomenon is what makes foam rolling a good pre-workout warm up. You get a slight boost in flexibility with no danger of weakening the muscle.

The second reason you feel like you’re making progress with foam rolling is due to something called diffuse noxious inhibitory control, or DNIC for short. Don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as its name makes it sound.

Essentially, DNIC “turns down the volume” on pain sensations coming from pressure against your muscles (like from a foam roller or lacrosse ball) when the brain decides that actually there’s no threat to your body³. In short, your brain decides that the foam roller isn’t such a big deal and quiets the uncomfortable signals coming from its pressure against your leg, which you in turn interpret as progress or muscle relaxation.

Your brain’s ability to produce its own painkillers is also a factor in foam rolling. The human brain has its own internal pharmacy, no prescription necessary, which can concoct endorphins, serotonin, dopamine, and even its own super strong version of morphine⁴.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with tripping your brain’s pharmacy wire, I do believe it’s important to know that this is what’s causing your pain to decrease as opposed to any localized change in tissue tone. In short, you’re not releasing tight muscles, you’re just taking an internally produced aspirin to calm pain, and the effects are temporary.

This “drug cabinet in your brain” could potentially explain why people who foam roll often escalate to ever increasingly intense levels of pressure. While we don’t yet have any solid evidence of this, it seems likely that over time, the body requires more intense stimulus to produce the same quantity of painkilling chemicals.

You might conclude from all of this that I think you should toss your foam roller in the trash. Actually, I don’t really think you need to go that far. Foam rolling has its place and benefits. For example, rolling the muscles of your back can “wake them up” by providing novel stimulus for people who largely engage in forward-flexion based activities throughout their days.

And I love using a foam roller as a fulcrum to bend around. Placing it across my back, I can extend each vertebra, working up the chain of my spine and dissolving tension in the muscles surrounding each segment of my back.

But this is slow, intentional work that requires mental focus and awareness. It’s not mindlessly flailing about on a foam roller for a few seconds while chatting about your stressful day at work with a buddy.

In order to reap the benefits of novel stimulus, your nervous system has to be “online,” which means your brain has to actually feel things. Most people go through their days paying little to no attention to sensations in their bodies, unless they’re experiencing pain that they can no longer ignore.

But you can start to focus more on the softer sensations in your body, whether foam rolling or not. This is free and something that everyone can learn with a little time and practice. Your brain — and body — will thank you for it.

In conclusion, foam rolling can slightly increase range of motion temporarily, but it also causes your brain to numb out stimulus from an area. This explains why people who roll frequently turn to increasingly aggressive devices in order to reawaken that sensory input and “feel the pain” again.

Want to learn all my juicy secrets and shortcuts for getting good posture? My ebook Perfect Posture for Life covers virtually everything I’ve learned in more than thirteen years of clinical practice, conducting thousands of posture and movement treatments with clients just like you. It’s like a direct firewire download from my brain to yours. Click here to get your eyes on it now!

1. Chaudhry, Hans, et al. “Three-Dimensional Mathematical Model for Deformation of Human Fasciae in Manual Therapy.” The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association. (2008). Web.
2. Madoni, SN, et al. “Effects of Foam Rolling on Range of Motion, Peak Torque, Muscle Activation, and the Hamstrings- to-Quadriceps Strength Ratios.” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. (2018). NCBI. Web.
3. https://www.bettermovement.org/blog/2013/ how-does-foam-rolling-work?rq=foam%20rolling
4. https://youtu.be/Gd2NaGZa7M4

So far in this series on fixing bad posture, we’ve covered the importance of good posture, four posture myths that are actually hurting your body, and defined a new model for good posture that’s far more functional than what you’ve likely been taught.

(To see all the posts in this series, click here.)

I’m sure by now you’ve realized I’m not the typical stretch-this-strengthen-that posture and movement therapist. One of the core principles in this new model for good posture is that it doesn’t require you to hold your body in a stiff, contrived, static “pose.”

But that doesn’t mean that alignment doesn’t matter. Obviously, if your shoulders are hunched and your chin juts forward, there’s going to be a lot of extra strain on the muscles in your back as they work hard to hold up the weight of your head.

In fact, for every inch forward of your center line that your head moves, there is a corresponding ten pound increase in the amount of strain placed on your spine. That means that if your head shifts a mere three inches forward of your midline, it can effectively weigh a total of 42 pounds¹!

So, we need to fix that, but not by tucking your chin back and holding your poor shoulders in place. Remember that every muscle in your body has a “set point” determined by the brain. This is like a default setting for tightness, informed by your daily habits and activities.

Repeatedly using a muscle in its shortened capacity causes this to become its habitual place — its neurological set point.

So, you don’t want to just force your body into “good alignment” and tell it to behave. Your body is actually really smart, and if it senses that muscles need to have their default settings rebooted, it will do that.

But you have to go underneath the original pattern rather than trying to wrestle with the one you already have established.

When you force your body into a position, you’re really just overlaying one pattern on another, like the proverbial onion. You can imagine this like donning an Armani suit over the top of a pair of sweats. Sure, you’re wearing the fancy clothes, but the sweats are still there, looking all bulky beneath your suave exterior, causing your suit to bulge and ripple in odd ways.

Your body is a lot like this. Take on a new neuromuscular pattern over the top of the old one and the result is tense, jerky movement rather than ease, fluidity and grace.

Somewhat paradoxically to conventional wisdom, your body wants to be in optimal alignment. Like water, it seeks the path of least resistance, and if you can give your body an experience of balance and ease, you’ll find it naturally gravitates toward beautiful posture.

So, the secret to optimal alignment isn’t to assume an arbitrary upright posture — a “pose,” if you will — but rather to peel off the layers of tension that are shifting your body out of balance. This helps bring your physical body into what I call “neutral alignment.”

Functioning from neutral alignment also grants much more potential for movement and expression as you let go of all the artificial tension that’s holding you up. You see, in order to contract, a muscle must first relax. You can’t pick up a coffee mug with a closed fist; you have to open your fingers first before they can grasp the handle. Relaxed muscles are a lot stronger than tense, rigid ones because they have a greater ability to generate force.

So, how do you peel off these layers of tension and fix head forward posture?

While you might think that in order to correct head forward posture that we’d need to address your neck, this is actually not the root cause of your forward jutting chin. In fact, head forward posture starts from much further down in your body, sometimes even initiating in tight hips.

But for our purposes, we’ll start with your breath. Virtually every muscle in the core of your body is related to breathing, and if they’re tense, your breathing will be restricted. Tense, constricted core muscles also pull your chest and shoulders downward, rounding your back and spine.

This collapse through your core is like having the rug pulled out from under your neck and head. Your neck and shoulders “stack” on your rib cage, so when it curls forward, there’s no supporting foundation for keeping your neck and head upright.

The result is the dreaded head forward posture. In order to start the process of peeling away layers of tension so that your chest can lift and support your head and neck properly, let’s start with dissolving tension in your core using this breathing practice:

• Lie on the floor or another firm, supportive surface (most beds are too soft, futons are great). Notice which parts of your body touch the floor and where you’re holding yourself up. You’ll probably find there are a few points of pressure where you’re connecting to the floor and a lot of body surface that’s held away from it.
• Take a deep breath into your body. Focus your breath into the sides and backs of your ribs, envisioning the flow of breath falling down your spine like a waterfall on the inhale.
• With each exhale, allow your body settle down and be more supported by the floor.
• As you inhale, notice areas of your chest, ribs, and back that don’t move with your breath. Pay specific attention to your armpits, directing your breath all the way out into them (yes, you have ribs and lung space here, and it’s a common place to hold tension).
• Allow your breath to fill your chest all the way up to your collar bones and down deep into the bowl of your pelvis. Mind that you don’t arch your back up off the floor to extend breath further down.
• Feel how allowing your breath to flow down your spine like a waterfall lengthens each vertebra, unfurling your spine and creating space in your core.
• If you are having difficulty feeling all of these sensations, be patient. Developing internal sensory awareness is a skill, and one that many of us haven’t spent much time cultivating. Pay more attention to what you can feel, even if it’s only small movements of your breath.
• Repeat the breathing process for 5-15 minutes, letting your body settle more and more heavily into the floor with each exhale, feeling the weight of your shoulders, ribs, spine, pelvis, legs and feet.
• When you are ready, slowly come to a seated position, and then standing. Notice the difference in your chest and ribs. Clients often report feeling lighter and breathing more easily when this rib space has been opened up.

This practice is an excellent way to decrease overall body tension any time you have a few private moments. It can also calm your nervous system and reduce stress levels while bringing your tension levels back to baseline.

If you’d like a few more posture restoration practices like these, my ebook Perfect Posture for Life is chock full of them. You can order it here, download it immediately and get started right away!

1. https://erikdalton.com/media/42lb-head/