A few months ago, I was helping a client untangle tightness and pain the neck and shoulder region that we traced back to long days spent nudging a computer mouse back and forth.

When said client asked me how to prevent the same problem from returning, I shrugged and suggested, “Get a job as a forest ranger?”

But in all seriousness, computers are a problem, and they’re not going away. And, sad as it may be, most people can’t walk out on their urban jobs to meander in the woods from dawn until dusk.

I am of the opinion that computers need to change — dramatically. It’s a hard fact that the human body is not meant to plunk down in front of a glowing rectangle and remain there for ten, twelve or fourteen hour stretches at a time (interspersed, of course, with long commutes in vehicles having poorly designed seats that force you into a slouch with your head jutting forward).

And no amount of ergonomics is going to change that. No standing desk, or treadmill desk, or bouncy ball seats or overpriced chairs with kagillians of adjustments to maintain that perfect posture are going to make the machine-human interface more functional.

If we really want to make it possible to spend the majority of our lives in front of computers, then what a computer is needs a revolution.

My vision? A three dimensional interface that would mimic natural human movement — bending, reaching, squatting, turning your head and spine. And please add some texture! All these smooth surfaces and shiny buttons are dumbing down our kinesthetic capacities.

But, until some smarty-pants engineers figure all that out, we’re kinda stuck with the glowing rectangles that are modern computers, for better or for worse.

So, if you, like so many people, find yourself forever staring at a screen, and if you bemoan the hunch forming in your shoulders, the stiffness in your neck and hips, and if you know you should work on your posture but you just don’t know how, or you’re too busy to focus on that….

Behold! The ten commandments of sitting in front of a computer. These are the tips I dispense on a near daily basis to my techie clients, so I thought it would be a great idea to corral them all into one easy to find list.

No. 1

Thou shalt sit with your hips higher than your knees.

If you do nothing else, this principle will change your freaking life. I can’t tell you how many people are sitting in chairs that are too low for them, mostly because that’s how they can cram their knees under desks that are also too low.

When the seat of your chair is low enough that, upon sitting in it, your knee joint is above your hip joint, it rocks your pelvis back so that your weight falls on your sacrum — the triangular base of your spine — and thus forces your entire spine into a forward C-curve.

In this posture, your bones are not stacked, gravity drags downward on your neck and shoulders and all your muscles have to work super hard to stabilize you. Which results in fatigue. And tension. And pain.

It turns out that sitting upright is less about core strength and more about stacking your bones properly. A well-stacked structure doesn’t require much effort to support, whereas a faulty foundation needs a whole lotta shoring up.

No. 2

Thou shalt not sit on a soft surface.

Soft surfaces also cause that pelvis to rock back and fold your spine into the dreaded C-curve. Now, everyone is going to need different levels of padding based on their structure and how much tissue they’ve got around their sit bones. Some people need a bit more and others are perfectly happy sitting on a wooden plank.

However, that padding needs to have support beneath it so you don’t just sink in forever. That’s why I don’t recommend sitting on those bouncy yoga balls. They’re too squishy and don’t give your spine any support — think about a building with its foundation in quicksand.

Not exactly the most stable thing.

The dynamic aspect is valid, though, so if you like to add a little instability into your chair, I highly recommend Kore Stools, which have a rocker bottom. It requires that you keep your feet on the floor (see #3, below) and also that your body constantly adapt to shifting balance.

I have them in my office and notice they greatly reduce muscle fatigue while simultaneously engaging the body from the feet all the way up to the upper neck.

No. 3

Thou shalt keep thine feet on the floor.

The purpose of positioning your hips higher than your knees is so that you can distribute your bodyweight into your feet, gaining support from the ground.

Try this: sit down on a firm-ish surface. Lift your knees so your feet are off the floor. Feel your back and shoulders engage? That’s because when you eliminate your legs and feet from the equation, all of your support has to come from the muscles around your spine and torso.

Remember how I said stacking your bones allows your muscles to relax? Well, those bones need something to stack on top of. Your feet on the floor give your spine support, especially as you lean forward toward your computer.

Again, try this: sit back down on that firm-ish surface. Cross your ankles and tuck your feet underneath your seat. Now, lean forward a few inches, as though you were peering closely at a computer screen. Feel your low back engage?

For comparison, now put your feet on the floor with your knees bent at a 90 degree angle. Lean forward again, in the same fashion. Notice that your back stays more relaxed?

For extra bonus points, now put one foot ahead of the other (it doesn’t matter which one). Lean forward again, and notice how your feet take your weight so your muscles can stay loose and soft?

Feet are more than just stubs at the end of your legs. They’re there to support you — literally. Use them.

No. 4

Thine monitor shalt be at eye level or above.

I see a lot of ergonomic recommendations for keeping the monitor slightly below eye level. I think this is because lots of people have those hyper curves in their necks and this sort of looks like it straightens the curve out a little when the viewer tucks their chin to look down.

However, I completely disagree with the whole thing. If your monitor is below eye level, you’re going to — as I mentioned — tuck your chin. The average human head weighs around ten pounds. Tip that bowling ball forward a bit, and it’ll tug on your neck, pulling your shoulders into the dreaded computer hunch.

Take it from a tall person who feels great neck and shoulder relief whenever I find myself in a crowd of people taller than myself, looking down constantly strains your neck.

I recommend positioning your monitor at or above eye level. If you have a laptop, this is tricky for obvious reasons. Short stints on a laptop are probably not a big deal, but if you’re hunkered in front of a screen day in and day out for long stretches, you might seriously consider getting an external monitor to plug in so you don’t wind up hunched over by the age of forty.

No. 5

Thou shalt move thine muscles in equal proportion to the hours spent sitting.

Okay, so people always want The Stretches. You know: what’s the best stretch for…? Neck pain, shoulder tension, tight hips.

Stretching is good. You should do it. Regularly. I should probably stretch more than I do, too.

However.

A twenty second neck stretch WILL NOT combat fourteen hours of computer work. It just won’t.

You’ve got to move your body. There is so, so much time and energy put into developing the ideal computer desks and chairs, standing desks and convertible desks and treadmill desks and I don’t even know what all.

But they all have one thing in common: stagnation.

Sure, if you’re standing, you might rock side to side a bit more, shuffle your feet back and forth a bit. Standing desks aren’t awful, but I don’t think they’re a panacea either. They don’t correct the inherently flawed design of a flat computer screen.

The human body is meant to move and bend and squat and lift and twist and shift and carry things. It’s meant to feel texture, to stretch upward and downward. It’s meant, at the very least, to walk.

Not to stand. Not to sit.

So, make movement a priority. And I don’t just mean an hour in the gym a few times a week. I mean puttering about. I mean being up and engaged and doing something.

As an added bonus, nearly ever single person I know reports that this kind of “exercise,” if you can call it that, makes them feel better, sleep better and just generally lifts their moods.

P.S. There was a study done, and I should have saved the data because now I can’t figure out where I saw this graphic, but anyway, some scientist did fancy research and found that actually exercise as we normally class it (a high intensity workout in a gym) has very little impact on your body composition (how much lean mass vs. body fat you carry). The two biggest factors were 1) how much muscle mass you carry, and 2) how much low intensity steady state cardio you do.

That last one? Is what I’m talking about. Puttering.

No. 6

Thou shalt sit on the floor.

Squatting is all the rage right now. I hereby predict that in another five to ten years, we’re all going to be sitting on the floor and proclaiming that it’s mad science and the hottest new thing and why didn’t we all do this earlier and everyone should sit on the floor while drinking their green smoothies and hot buttered coffee.

But seriously. Floor sitting is soooo good for you. Sitting in a chair only moves the hip joint in one linear plane, but when you sit on the floor, particularly cross legged, you rotate the femur in the socket and use up more of its range of motion.

That little shift engages more muscles, which results in more flexibility. It’s really hard for a muscle to make a fist in your hip if you constantly request that it move because in order to move? It has to first relax.

Sitting on the floor stretches your hips, moves your spine, AND it has the added benefit of preserving your mobility as you age, so you’re never going to be that stiff-muscled grandma who can’t play on the floor with children. Or cats.

Pro Tip: The same rule as in #1 applies here as well.

If your hips are quite tight and/or it’s been a while since you plopped down on the carpet, find something firm to place under your hips and elevate your pelvis off the ground a little. It will help free your hip joints and take strain off of your knees, which is often a problem area when people first start floor sitting.

Firm foam rollers, yoga blocks and bolsters or meditation cushions all work well for this.

No. 7

Thou shalt change your chairs.

Much like sitting on the floor stimulates your hip joint differently from sitting in a chair, different chairs will also change how you sit.

Remember how you’re supposed to be moving, and not just a stationary object? Well, the more variety of chairs that you can sit in, the better for your muscles and nervous system. It prevents you from fossilizing into one static posture.

Changing up how you sit is the next best thing to not sitting at all.

Remember, there’s no one right perfect chair, or one absolutely correct sitting posture. Movement is the name of the game, so shake it up on the regular and notice that your fatigue diminishes, along with the stiffness in your spine.

No. 8

Thou shalt sit on thy sit bones.

We’ve sort of already covered this in our sections on soft surfaces and elevating your hips above your knees, but it bears repeating.

Your “sit” bones are actually technically called ischial tuberosities, and they form the base of your pelvis. You know those bones you feel when you sit on a bicycle seat? Those are the rami, and they’re the bony bars that jut forward from your sit bones.

Most people have a tendency to rock back onto their sacrum, which isn’t a stable sitting surface. Sitting on the sacrum causes your whole spine to lock up, which is not what it’s meant to do. Despite being commonly referred to as the spinal “column,” your spine is really more like a slinky or a spring.

When you ask it to become a support structure and bear weight it’s not meant to, it has to become more rigid. That’s just a principle of physics.

So, rocking forward onto your sit bones will give your spine some instant relief. An added bonus? Most people find that they don’t have to work nearly as hard to keep their shoulders back once they’re sitting on the proper pelvic bones since the spine is free to be upright instead of forced into that C-curve.

No. 9

Thou shalt stimulate your peripheral vision.

The body shapes itself to the space around it. Watch a tall person walk into a room with a low ceiling and notice how they instinctively duck their head.

But your body also shapes to your perception of space (because reality is, after all, only what you perceive). Staring at a computer screen all day can give you tunnel vision, which means you’re only perceiving a very small array of space in front of you.

That tends to cause your head and neck to jut forward, resulting in — you guessed it — the dreaded shoulder hunch.

Simply moving your eyes away from the screen and stimulating the periphery of your visual field can help to remind your body that it exists in a three-dimensional world with equal space to each side and behind it as in front.

One way to do this is to hold your hands out in front of you, index fingers extended up. Move your hands apart at the same speed, following with your eyes (your eyeballs will remain looking forward as the fingers travel into your peripheral visual field). See how far out to the sides your fingers can go before you lose sight of them completely.

No. 10

Thou shalt reset your eyes.

Eye strain from looking at computer monitors is a real thing, but did you know that your eyeballs are connected to tiny little muscles at the base of your skull that adjust constantly in response to your vision? This is connected to physical balance and coordination.

However, when your eyes are fatigued, or the muscles around your eyes are tight from strain, those little muscles in your neck are often a corresponding mirror of tension and pain.

Simply reducing your eye strain can help to ease tension in your neck and shoulders, too. The best part is, it’s not hard to do, and often has the added benefit of soothing your nervous system.

So, whenever you’ve been in front of the screen for long hours or you’re just feeling stressed and wound up tight, try the following.

Wherever you are (unless you’re driving, in which case WHY ARE YOU READING THIS?!!), look up. Allow your eyes to drift slowly around the room, letting them land on any colors, shapes, textures or movements that attract them.

Remember that vision is simply light reaching your eyeball, and think about the images you’re seeing traveling into your eye rather than pushing your eye toward them.

It doesn’t matter if your vision is blurry or keen. Simply spend a few moments allowing your eyes to wander thusly until you feel calm and relaxed.

Then, notice if there is a reduction in tension around your eye socket, if colors seem a bit brighter or if you feel that you’ve got a more complete visual image of your surroundings.

This is an easy practice to use on a daily basis to erase any accumulated stress and eye strain.

So, here we are, at the end. I never know how to wrap up these lists. I can tell you that I’ve just given you my ten commandments for sitting in front of a computer, but you already know that because you just read them. So let’s agree to not restate the obvious, okay?

Anyway, these suggestions won’t make life in front of a computer perfect, but they’ll certainly make it less unpleasant and give you back some freedom of movement in the process.

Until you get that job as a forest ranger, that is. Send me a postcard when you do.

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Get out your measuring cups and we’ll play a new game
Come to the front of the class and we’ll measure your brain
We’ll give you a complex and we’ll give it a name

Andrew Bird

I’m so tired of people being measured, in every way.

Beauty, brains, height, and — yes — posture.

We’ve been conditioned to believe only in external metrics rather than relying on our internal sensory intelligence.

When a baby learns to walk, no one is instructing that baby. No one tells her to engage her glutes, stretch those hip flexors, contract the transversus abdominus.

No, the child is relying on inherent biological intelligence to learn a new movement skill — a new way of navigating her environment.

We all start out this way, but somewhere along the path, we come to believe that external sources know better. That data and science and objective measurements can somehow encompass our embodied experience.

We believe — because we are taught to believe — that we are messing our bodies up. That we’re doing it all wrong. That we must work hard to correct our wayward habits.

And that there is a right answer.

Our entire medical system is oriented around the right answer. In some cases, this is a good thing. If I’m in a terrible auto accident, I want the emergency room doctors to know how to put my bones back together again.

Medicine is a wonderful tool when you’re sick or injured. Drugs and surgery can bring you back from the brink of death, stave off disease and even improve your overall quality of life.

But they’re not everything. Doctors are not wizards, and they don’t know everything about what it means to be you.

Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, you hand over ownership of your internal experience. You cease inquiry into your sensory wisdom and seek answers from external sources.

In the western culture in particular, we live in an impoverished sensory state — a grayscale that allows only the feelings of pain (which is, in and of itself, a multidimensional and nuanced sensation) and bland nothingness.

There is no culture of sensory language. We don’t talk of buzzing or stickiness or wooden tissue. And we certainly don’t acknowledge pleasurable sensations like the wind caressing your cheeks, the soothing flow of breath exiting your lungs or the deep relief of moving a joint in a way that finally alleviates pressure.

And as your rich sensory world fades to a fuzzy black and white, nuances disappearing in a wash of low resolution awareness, you also take on beliefs — beliefs about how your body “should” be.

What constitutes a good body differs from culture to culture. In western society, we believe in shoulders back, stomach tucked, a straight spine.

We believe in a snapshot of good posture, a pose on the cover of a magazine, confident and self assured.

Speak the word “posture” to any group of people — tell them you work with it, that you’re a posture therapist — and watch closely. I would bet cold, hard cash that you see at least half the group pull their shoulders back and clench their bellies.

They’ll do all this, and then ask you if they’re doing it right.

But let me ask you this instead:

What if there is no right way to be in your body? What if the western notion of “good” posture is simply one option on an endless spectrum?

What if the answer to the question of whether you’re doing it right is, “Yes, and what would change or shift if you did it differently? What else might you discover if you tried another way?”

What if instead of asking a practitioner to tell you what’s wrong with the way your body moves, you instead work collaboratively, using movement as inquiry into your embodied experience?

What if you denounced the notion of good and bad posture all together?

What freedom would that grant you, what doors would open, what blockages would unstick and what limiting ideas might disappear in a stunning beam of sunlight?

What if you’re already doing it right, and also, there’s more?

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Client: Is working on the front of my shoulders going to improve my posture? (voice: uncertain, questioning, confused)

Me: Is posture only in your shoulders?

It was eight in the morning when my answers are at their most terse and cryptic (pretty sure softness and compassion don’t boot for me until at least 10:30). But what I really wanted to say is, there are at least a hundred things wrong with that question.

Not that it’s the client’s fault, mind you. I suffer this inquisition nigh daily, fragmented across faces and ages and years. Because this isn’t a personal question walking into my office; it’s a cultural one.

The reason we, as people, refer to our bodies in such fragmented, discombobulated ways is that we’ve been conditioned to think about ourselves as a collection of parts, like Lego bricks. If one Lego is broken, just replace it with a new one and the whole construct will work again.

If one wall of your Lego house falls down, you don’t rebuild the opposite one. You fix the part that’s broken. Duh.

Bodies aren’t buildings. Thinking about them like staid structures — or even machines — leads people to mistakenly focus on their symptoms, often for years at a stretch, without ever uncovering the root of their problems.

It also affects how we talk about our bodies. My clients refer to issues they’re experiencing as “it.” Their intellect, of course, is floating above all that base nonsense of muscles and tissues and bones. “It” is misbehaving, completely apart from their highly intelligent brain.

My back is tight, why is it doing that?

My left foot turns out, why does it do that?

Let me just point out the obvious here: It is also you.

Of course, you are not your back or your foot, but your foot and back are parts of you. Part of a bigger whole, a synergistic organism.

In my client’s case, his complaints were largely in his back: bulging discs, pain from a motor vehicle accident many years before, aching shoulders, stiff spine, slouched posture.

These are such common complaints that I’m beginning to think we have a societal epidemic. And of course this person spent years addressing his “back” problems before coming to me where I promptly plunged my knuckles into the taught, wooden tissue of his chest and ribs.

Prompting his confusion.

Because if his back is where the pain is, we must fix his back. No?

No.

His back — and yours — has a front. That front, unlike the segmented wall of a Lego house, is not only connected to your back, but functions reciprocally with it.

There are actually two types of tight muscles: locked long and locked short (credit for this concept: Thomas Meyers, Anatomy Trains).

Locked long muscles are those that are stretched. When you bend forward to touch your toes, you feel a pull in your hamstrings. That’s your stretch reflex jumping in to protect your body from over-reaching and tearing a muscle. The tension you experience is your own nervous system contracting the muscle, holding on, keeping you safe.

This is most frequently what you’re feeling when your back and shoulders ache. The muscles are being stretched; they’re fatigued and sore and hurting and it feels so effing good when someone rubs the tension out.

But the sneaky culprit is really muscles that are locked short. Those little buggers never complain because they’re not being pulled on. Instead, they have a set point that’s quite short. Every muscle in your body has this set point. It’s a level of ongoing tension at which the muscle exists, constantly. If you didn’t have this, you’d be a puddle of bone soup on the ground. People under anesthesia are more or less in this soup state.

The problem is that after years of hunching forward over computers, away from stress, to hide from the world, to save yourself from overwhelm, that set point in your chest and ribs and diaphragm becomes constricted. It’s no longer helpful. In fact, it’s crunching you into the fetal position.

And your poor back bears the burden, hanging on for dear life, trying to keep you upright. Or close to upright.

The segmentation doesn’t stop within our bodies. It’s not just that we see our backs as separate from our fronts, that we talk about tight hamstrings but never correlate them to constricted cores, to locked up shoulders, to a clenched jaw.

No muscle exists in isolation in your body; a tight hamstring is not just a tight hamstring. It’s part of a larger stress pattern. That pattern might be related to physical habits, like poor ergonomics at work or slouching on the couch playing video games for too many hours.

But I’m honestly tired of the “fix your posture” mandate. People are being brainwashed to believe that if you just hold your body correctly, the pain will disappear (and also any impression of physical sensation along with it because, let’s face it, as a culture we’re panic-stricken by feelings).

There are two problems with this edict. The first is that holding your body in a pose requires tension. And tension zaps your energy. It drains your physical stamina. It perpetuates friction within your body. Working hard to get your body functioning properly is kind of an oxymoron. Because seriously, you think you’re smarter than thousands of years of evolution? Your body knows how to work right, if you would only strip away the barriers to it doing so. Like, tension.

Second, posture isn’t something you do. It’s an expression of who you are and what you’re experiencing.

To understand this, let’s look at horses for a second. (C’mon, are you surprised? I’ll take any chance I get to look at horses for a second. Or an hour. Or ten.)

People always say the same thing when they find out that I do bodywork on horses: That must be hard, horses can’t talk and tell you what hurts!

Can’t talk, eh? I’d beg to differ. Spend two minutes around a horse and I guarantee you’ll see that horse talk. They don’t use words, though; they use body language. The twitch of an ear, wrinkling a nostril. Lifting a head, bracing their hindquarters to run….you know when a horse is calm and happy or upset and scared.

The feeling shows up in the muscles.

I’m gonna say that one again: THE FEELING SHOWS UP IN THE MUSCLES.

You’re not so very different from that horse. Your feelings show up in your muscles, too.

So maybe it’s not so much that you’re sitting poorly at work that’s wreaking havoc on your back. Yes, those hunched and bunched shoulders are compounding tension into your neck and back. Yes, they’re shortening your pecs and locking out your traps. Yes, your scalenes are taught as a hanged man’s noose.

But. Is it the desk or the job?

You keep trying to fix your posture so your back feels better so you can go back to doing the same stressful, overly demanding work in a toxic environment that perpetuates your stress, tension and, ultimately, pain.

Or maybe it’s not the job. Maybe it’s a septic relationship, unwieldy financial burden, caring for an aging parent with dementia, the list does go on.

This, folks is the mechanization of humanity. This is the paradigm in which you are told, repeatedly, that you have to fix yourself. That if you’re breaking under the load, it’s you that’s to blame, not the load.

Fix, fix, fix. Better posture, better ergonomics. Studies say and standing desks. Examining bodies in segments. Did you know that spinal studies are done on human spines removed from cadavers and separated from their supportive structures?

They look at spines without their ribs and pelvis. They fail to examine the correlation between the femur and the neck. It’s akin to looking at a bicycle wheel without the tire or tube or spokes. Irrelevant.

Looking at your posture without looking at your life is the same thing: irrelevant.

Because your posture is an expression of your internal experience, and without taking that into account, you’re merely fixing surface symptoms, not identifying causes.

Your back has a front. And your body has a life.

No one part of the whole is whole unto itself, but they all contribute to the collective functioning of the entity.

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Poor computers. They get blamed for so many evils, not the least of which are all our posture ills.

Hunched shoulders? Too much time in front of the screen.

Neck pain? Stop poking that smartphone.

Stabbing pain in the middle of your back? Must be your desk set up. (Also, this.)

Not that our electromagnetic glowing rectangles are totally blameless. Sure, hunching over spreadsheets and databases while crouching on hideous, lumpy “ergonomic” seats can do a number on your body (the first time I really noticed pain in my shoulders was when I got hired as a teenager to clean a health insurance company’s database and spent whole days in front of one of those ancient black screens with courier font blinking at me in lime green).

But there are a lot of reasons that shoulder tension happens. And this is one of those chicken-egg type scenarios that we find so frequently when it comes to the human body.

Back in the fifties, doctors used to have to see patients suffering from gastric ulcers. This was a seriously uncomfortable topic for these uptight, mind-body separation folks who believed that physical ailments had nothing to do with psychology (because the mind is totally different from the body and they’re, like, not even connected, obviously).

It was thought at the time that ulcers were caused by stress. Eek. Now doctors had to have a chat about lifestyle (ewwww!).

Imagine their relief when years later researchers discovered that ulcers are caused by a certain bacteria in the gut, H. Pylori.

Phfeww! Now doctors could just prescribe some antibiotics and go on their merry little medical way, no squirmy convos about stress needed.

Imagine their frustration, then, when we later found that H. Pylori lives in the viscera of around 80% of all humans and is typically asymptomatic except when exacerbated by stress.

Crap. Now we’re back to those uncomfortable little talks again.

I tell you this because, “Why is my shoulder tight?” is probably the most common question I hear. You want to know what’s causing all that shoulder tension, I get it.

Well, like the doctors above, I can point to some very physical triggers – computers, mousing, laptops in particular aren’t great, carrying heavy toddlers on one hip, of course athletic pursuits play a role, injuries, etc.

But wait, there’s more!

A few years ago, I was working on some horses at a stable in the Portola Valley of California. A lovely woman who had similar training to me struck up a conversation. She specialized in something called TMJ disorder, basically jaw tension and pain.

I loved what she told her clients. “Listen, you can keep coming in here and paying me to help you deal with this, but you’d be best served to go home and figure out why this is happening in the first place.”

i.e. what are you so stressed about, bro?

Because jaw tension, teeth grinding and jaw clenching, those are symptoms of inner friction. Sure, you could have an injury that’s causing this, but nine times out of twelve, it’s stress related. And, like the bacteria scenario, stress exacerbates tension from injuries.

Well, shoulders are like this also. There is, perhaps, no part of the human anatomy that’s so physically expressive (barring facial expressions and straight up words, of course).

Look at magazine ads sometime. Even the covers of magazines are great. Those models really use their shoulders.

They can make themselves look friendly and warm, seductive, innocent, sassy, strong, confident, introspective….

All just by tilting their shoulders a little differently.

Most of us don’t consciously pose our shoulders (thank god). But, our shoulders do express our thoughts, feelings and beliefs, both lifelong perceptions of ourselves and our current, fleeting mood.

It’s worth noting that your shoulder isn’t something separate from you that’s attacking you with all this uncomfortable tightness. You might ask me why it’s tight, I’m going to throw back at you that it’s not tight, you are tight. That shoulder has a brain, and you happen to share the same one with it.

You know how I’m a sucker for language reflecting physical stuff, right? (Admit it, you totally knew this was coming.)

We have numerous linguistic metaphors for stress in our shoulders.

She has the weight of the world on her shoulders.

Shoulder the burden.

A chip on his shoulder.

A shoulder to cry on.

It’s no wonder shoulder tension is a huge complaint. They should be called should-ers, actually, because on your shoulders is where all your “shoulds” rest.

All the things you think you should be doing, the roles you’re supposed to fill, the things you’re supposed to do, clothes you should wear, the way your body should (or shouldn’t) look, the needs of everyone around you, the responsibilities you may or may not actually have to take on.

So, are your shoulders tight because your pec minor is short, your serratus anterior is causing your scapula to wrap around your rib cage and restrict your overhead mobility?

Sure.

But why are those muscles tight in the first place?

What burden are you shouldering that you can just put down right now?

When you pause to notice that you’re moving so fast you forgot to breathe (more common than you’d imagine), that social situations are making you nervous and anxious and you’re tightening up those armpits (yes, these are part of your shoulder), that you don’t want to be seen in the workplace – either because people might start gunning for you or because you’re just more of a background, introverted type – so you clamp down on your lungs and stop filling your chest with oxygen (by the way, have we talked about the fact that your ribs and shoulders are intricately related?)….

With this kind of awareness is where real change happens.

Because you can stretch your shoulders until you’re blue and the face (and your butt’s covered in purple polka dots), but if you don’t look at why that tension is happening in the first place, you’re going to keep coming back to square one over and over again.

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One of the questions I get asked roughly forty thousand times a week (besides if I know all my blue hair dye has rubbed off on my neck making me look like a zombie) is:

The more painful my massage, the better, right?

After which I take a deep breath. And count to ten. And try not to punch the full length mirror in my studio. (Breaking mirrors is bad for the karma, or so they say.)

In the more than a decade that I’ve been a professional posture magician, the thing that consistently drives me onto my proverbial soap box is our culture’s addiction to extremity in every circumstance. It’s downright pathological.

We’re programmed to assume that anything not at the very edge of uncomfortable, practically unbearable, can’t possibly be effective.

This is reflected in everything we do.

Lose 10 pounds in ten days.

Five minutes to flatter abs.

Crossfit.

Juice fasts.

80 hour workweeks.

Sleeping in conference rooms to roll out projects that meet arbitrary deadlines (that a decade from now, nobody will remember).

Bragging about not having had a vacation in ten years and getting by on twenty minutes of sleep a night.

Zero carbs. Not even wine. (Sob.)

Waist training (With corsets…did you know there are actually modern women who wear steel-boned straitjackets in an effort to choke their waists into a size four jean?! I’m not over it yet either. We can start a support group.)

Whatever happened to dialing back the junk food a little bit and going for a walk at lunch?

This never-ceasing drive for more, deeper, faster, harder, stronger, bigger, better and badder turns your body into your enemy, out to get you with its tight muscles and inflamed joints. And if you just beat it up enough, then finally, it’ll submit to you, its eternal master, and be forever skinny (or Forever 21?).

Really? Come the fuck on.

Your body isn’t against you. In fact, it IS you, so maybe you should just fucking cooperate with it for once in your life.

(I did mention a soap box, didn’t I?)

You wouldn’t beat a puppy senseless if he didn’t sit when you told him to. You’d be patient. You wouldn’t yell at him. You’d ask nicely and if he gave you the first inclination toward sitting, you’d lavish praise on him in the form of cookies and pets and loves.

So why are you beating your body, screaming at it and locking it in a cage when it doesn’t behave the way you want it to?

Listen, if you want your body to change, you have to give it space (and patience) to learn something new.

It’s not a machine; it’s a living, breathing, feeling, sensing organism. In fact, it’s not so very different than that puppy. Yes, there’s the modern, thinking you, but the vast majority of your functioning exists well below conscious awareness.

Basically, your body is still living in the jungle. If you’re not nice to it, it’s not gonna come out from behind the tree.

With that in mind, here are five specific reasons painful massage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

 1. Deeper work doesn’t always mean pressing harder.

For years in my private practice, several times a week I would hear the refrain, “I know this is gonna hurt, and that’s okay, whatever you gotta do to make this better is fine. I’ll put up with it.”

Because, let’s face it, most people think that deep tissue massage is best, and really, really, REALLY deep tissue massage is the pinnacle of effectiveness.

To be honest, I really can’t stand bodywork of any kind that feels like inattentive petting. When someone just sort of rubs oil on my skin, I feel like I leave the session more tense from trying to swell my muscles and push into their elbow a little harder.

So, yeah, pressure is really important. Too light and it’s irritating. But too deep? And you’re not necessarily getting more bang for your buck.

The body is organized in layers, and all of those layers are interconnected. Sometimes, work on a muscle that is readily available can affect deep change in the body.

What that means is, you don’t necessarily have to lean your whole body weight into someone’s shoulder to make changes to posture and movement at deep levels in the body. Sometimes, lighter pressure gets you more gain.

A good practitioner will contact tissue where it’s tight. Sometimes this takes a good amount of pressure. Sometimes, hardly any at all, but it always feels productive and like something you can hang with, i.e. stay relaxed throughout, even if maybe it’s a little uncomfortable.

The bottom line is that if more pressure were all it took to get people to feel better, we’d all have bought steamrollers years ago.

2. Your nervous system hates anything that feels threatening.

It’s easy to forget that your body isn’t a machine; it’s an information system. The tension in all your muscles is controlled by a big ol’ super computer – your brain.

And that sophisticated system is constantly taking in data about your position in the world, adjusting and tuning your posture and movement.

What this means is that the archaic notion that bodyworkers are “stretching” your tissue is pretty inaccurate. Yes, there’s some stretch going on, but the bigger impact comes from stimulating your nervous system to make a change.

When you alert the brain to a movement inefficiency, i.e. stored tension, it adapts, relaxes the tissue and allows for a new muscle firing pattern to take shape, one that utilizes less effort and causes less pain.

BUT. If you’re grinding away at tight muscles for all you’re worth, the brain senses a threat. It’s being attacked. This is like hovering over a puppy and shouting at the top of your voice for it to come to you. The puppy doesn’t know what’s going on, but you sure don’t seem like a safe base.

And so your muscle tightens. This shows up as you gritting your teeth, clenching your thighs and curling your toes. At this point, you and your therapist are basically two brick walls pressing against each other, and not much is actually getting done.

That’s why you feel good after a painful massage (endorphin rush) and then tight the next morning (your brain never had a chance to relax and find a new way to move).

3. You have to open up the superficial tissue before diving deep.

You know that big, green and yellow-turning-purple bruise you sport on your hip after a really deep massage, the one you brag about to your friends? As in, “My therapist really dug her elbow in there, hurt so good, I know it was tight but she really went after it.”

That bruise isn’t such a good thing.* I will say that sometimes bruising occurs with bodywork. I’ve certainly had a few cases of it. And yes, it’s usually in areas that are very tight, but also usually not in a muscle belly but rather in an area close to the bone where the soft tissue is not very thick. And notice I said “sometimes.” As in, rarely.

This is because when the therapist digs that elbow in so hard and you’re gripping your molars together practicing your Lamaze breathing, curling your toes until she lets go, the tissue is actually getting injured. Bruises are the result of tiny blood vessels being damaged and broken.

Damaged!

Listen, you went in for a massage to get better, not to tear your body apart even more.

Here’s a little secret: if the therapist moves slowly, releasing first the outer “sleeve” layers of your tissue before proceeding more deeply into your “core,” or what you might refer to as deep tissue, the muscles slowly melt.

Seriously. It feels like they open and spread and ooze out of the way. Clients often start to feel sleepy or even a bit woozy because the body is opening up, relaxing and feeling zero threat. And, no damage is happening. Working this way, slowly and methodically, a good therapist can often palpate all the way to the bone (feeling it through the tissue) with a client totally relaxed and experiencing minimal discomfort.

Now, that’s deep work. Tissue prep is uber-important. I once had a guy try to attack my quads with a rolling pin super aggressively. If that ever happens to you, throw him a raw steak and back away slowly until it’s safe to turn and run the hell out of there!

*Bruises from cupping are a different story and shouldn’t be lumped into the same category.

4. Excuse me, sir, I think you’ve found a bone.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard massage therapists tell me that there are lots of knots in my back. Usually in my right shoulder. I know, I’m right hand dominant.

They then proceed to dig away at those knots as though they were excavating a hidden source of uranium. And me? I’m left with inflamed nerves and swollen tissue. This is why massage therapists will sometimes tell you cheerfully to “ice that area” when you get home.

Because you know what? Most of those “knots” in your back are ribs that are twisted, maybe slightly out of place or popped out of the joint completely, or warped by spinal dysfunction.

I don’t mean your spine is messed up and needs surgery or anything, but ribs connect directly into your vertebra. It’s like one big suspension system. The spine is like a slinky – it can lengthen and spread, open on one side while closing on the other, twist, bend. And your ribs kind of move like Venetian blinds connected to that spinal slinky.

If your spine is stuck in some areas (and most people have a few sticky vertebra if not many), the ribs will have to contort themselves to move around the column in your back. That means they’ll pop out of place a bit.

And when you dig away at them? Well, one, they’re not very far beneath the surface of your skin. The layers of muscle on your back are strong, but usually long and flat. And two, all that pressure directly on a sensitive bone like a rib really inflames it, so you wind up all swollen.

Which makes you think something got done because you can really feel where that therapist worked, right? I hear you.

But the reality is, that pressure on the bone won’t help reorganize the spine and rib complex, helping the bone move back into place. Gently releasing the tissue around the rib is an excellent start and doesn’t involve the kind of nervy, nauseating pain that comes from leaning your elbow into it full force.

5. Pain isn’t necessarily productive (but sometimes it is).

Okay, so you know I’m against mindless digging into tight muscles and leaning on poor, defenseless bones. But is pain ever useful?

Sometimes.

Have you ever heard that Eskimos have something like fifty words for snow? They have snow that falls in big flakes and wet snow, powdery snow, thick snow, I don’t even know really what kinds of words they have. But to anyone who lives in Florida, snow is snow, right?

Well, with regard to pain, we’re all living in Florida. In the western culture, we’ve got one word for pain, but that word actually encompasses a vast array of sensations.

There’s the pain that comes from being smacked by a 2×4 or punched with brass knuckles. There’s pain in your gut when you eat something that disagrees with you. There’s hot, inflamed pain when you sprain your ankle, and stiff, achy pain from arthritis.

The two kinds of pain I want to differentiate are inflicted pain and stored pain. The first is felt when stimulus is applied to you, as in I punch you in the shoulder. Ow! Why did I do that? To prove a point.

But stored pain, that’s stuff we usually carry around but have no idea we’re living with on a daily basis. If I poke you in a tight muscle, it will hurt. But, I’m not the one causing the pain. If the muscle were loose and I applied the same amount of pressure, it wouldn’t hurt at all.

The pain is in your tissue, I’m just making you aware of it. And in this sense, pain can be productive, informative and generally useful. They key is to never let the pain during a bodywork session exceed what could be described as “intense.”

Intensity is what you have with a good stretch in yoga. You can still stay there, hanging with it, relaxing into it and breathing, but yeah, it’s not exactly the most comfortable thing in the world.

So, if you find yourself clenching your butt and grinding your molars during a massage, maybe just ask your therapist to back off a teensy bit so your poor nervous system can have a chance to work with you instead of against you.

It bears mentioning that there are terrific massage therapists out there – I mean, really dedicated, well-educated, accomplished practitioners who have made it their life’s study to practice a very therapeutic healing art. They are sheer gold, those people, and this guide is in no way meant to denigrate their powerful work (who knows where I’d be in life without my army of healing practitioners?).  Most of them are deeply aware of all the above and will take it upon themselves to educate you, the client.

But many, many, many therapists find themselves enslaved to the more aggressive, harder, deeper model instead of the more intelligent, more specific, slower approach simply because that’s what’s demanded by clients (who haven’t gone to massage school…). These five principles of intelligent bodywork are meant to help you as the owner of your body communicate better with your therapist to get the best results from your sessions in whatever form you might choose and to shift your perspective on your body from a mechanized model to viewing your anatomy as more of a high-functioning information system engaged in a constant process of change and adaptation.

Phew. Those were some big words. I might need wine now.

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