For office workers around the world, sitting statically at a desk or bench all day goes hand in hand with increasingly persistent pain and discomfort in the back, neck and shoulders.
While using a standing desk at work, exercise, yoga, acupuncture and chiropractic have been shown to reduce pain, failing a radical change in lifestyle and/or livelihood, many resort to steroids or even surgery in search of a solution. However, according to Dr Haleh Agdassi, a rehab doctor at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation in California, “there’s no magic bullet for back pain.”
Nevertheless, Esther Gokhale, who trained as a biochemist and studied at Standford’s medical school, teaches techniques for maintaining better posture in Silicon Valley and her techniques have become surprisingly popular with executives and staff of Google and Oracle. She believes people suffer from pain and dysfunction because they’ve forgotten how to use their bodies. She says, it’s not the act of sitting for long periods that causes the pain, but the way we position ourselves. She is reintroducing her clients to what she calls “primal posture” – a means of holding themselves similar to that of older babies and toddlers that she says was common among our ancestors before slouching became endemic. Her low-tech method is based mainly on observations of people in various countries including India where she was raised and she’s published a book on the subject titled ‘8 Steps to a Pain Free Back.’
However, she’s not the first to focus on posture as the key to a healthy spine. Both the Alexander Technique and Pilates base their method on posture and increasing awareness of its importance to health and wellbeing. According to Ms. Gokhale, most Americans tend to be relaxed and slumped with ‘C’ shaped spines, or arched upwards and tensed in an ‘S’ shape. She aims to return her student’s bodies to the stance she says nature intended: upright and relaxed in a tall ‘J’ spine where the front of the pelvis relaxes downwards so the belt line slants forwards and the butt angles back so, as she says, “your behind is behind you, not under you,” an approach which contrasts with the neutral pelvis posture in Pilates and other physical therapies. She also takes hunched shoulders and rolls the up, back and down and helps students release tension in their necks by re-centering their heads over their spines and pulling up the hairline on the neck. This results in an elongated spine that can be maintained comfortably without straining the muscles.
Most of it comes with practice of course, but one of her clients has a more philosophical approach: “I don’t beat myself up about it. When I’m aware of my posture, I fix it and eventually it becomes who you are.” He also tries to limit the time he spends sitting to 4 or 5 hours a day.
