Forward Head Posture

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Luke Ford

I didn’t know what “Forward Head Posture” was until a few weeks ago when I gave an introductory Alexander Technique lesson to a chiropractor.

I wanted him to stop compressing his neck but he complained that the orientation I wanted instead was “Forward Head Posture.”

When the head is balanced on top of the spine, movement and breathing are going to be much freer than when the head is not balanced on top of the spine. When the head tips forward or back, the pull on the spine is going to be up to four times the normal.

You can see this by holding up a book directly above you and then compare the effort it takes to do that versus holding the book out from you. Holding ten pounds straight up will take little effort for most of us, but holding ten pounds straight out from our body is going to cause strain for most people after a minute or so.

According to Wikipedia: “Forward head posture is the anterior positioning of the cervical spine. It is a posture problem that is caused by several factors including sleeping with the head elevated too high, extended use of computers, lack of developed back muscle strength and lack of nutrients such as calcium. [1] This posture is sometimes called “Scholar’s Neck” or “Reading Neck.”
Individuals who display this posture are often associated with geek culture due to the awkward appearance that is caused when moving.”

According to Chiro.org:

In the poster on the left, the first sketch (top-left) represents “perfect” head posture. A line dropped from the center of the external auditory meatus (EAM) would land directly in the center of the shoulder (the tip of the acromion process). The graphic on the right demonstrates the progression of forward head posture (occasionally referred to as “anterior head translation”).

According to Kapandji (Physiology of the Joints, Volume III), for every inch your head moves forwards, it gains 10 pounds in weight, as far as the muscles in your upper back and neck are concerned, because they have to work that much harder to keep the head (chin) from dropping onto your chest. This also forces the suboccipital muscles (they raise the chin) to remain in constant contraction, putting pressure on the 3 Suboccipital nerves. This nerve compression may cause headaches at the base of the skull. Pressure on the suboccipital nerves can also mimic sinus (frontal) headaches.

Rene Cailliet M.D., famous medical author and former director of the department of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Southern California states:
“Head in forward posture can add up to thirty pounds of abnormal leverage on the cervical spine. This can pull the entire spine out of alignment. Forward head posture (FHP) may result in the loss of 30% of vital lung capacity. These breath-related effects are primarily due to the loss of the cervical lordosis, which blocks the action of the hyoid muscles, especially the inferior hyoid responsible for helping lift the first rib during inhalation.”

Persistent forward head posture (a.k.a “hyperkyphotic posture”) puts compressive loads upon the upper thoracic vertebra, and is also associated with the development of Upper Thoracic Hump, which can devolve into Dowager Hump when the vertebra develop compression fractures (anterior wedging). A recent study found this hyperkyphotic posture was associated with a 1.44 greater rate of mortality.

Alexander teachers don’t use the phrase “Forward Head Posture” and they don’t seek perfect postural positions.

Children tend to have good posture but it’s rarely static. Instead, it is dynamic. As they jump up and run around, you’ll likely see the head leading the movement, balanced on top of a lengthened spine.

Instead of diagnosing “Forward Head Posture”, Alexander teachers would likely say that a person stuck in such a position is stuck in the fight-or-flight reflex.

My definition of the Alexander Technique is that it is a way of noticing how you respond to stimuli and learning to let go of those responses that don’t serve you. The fight-or-flight reflex may serve you in a fight or when stuff is falling on you, but most of the time in life it simply constricts your freedom of movement, breathing, and thinking.

When my students is stuck in some version of fight-or-flight, I first want him to notice how he’s tightening around his sub-occipital joint and then I want him to start letting go of this unnecessary tension. As he does so, his head will release forward in rotation and up in space, leading his whole body into length and width, freeing up his breath and his movement, his thinking and his emotions.

Here’s a chiropractor’s video (from PostureVideos.com) on Forward Head Posture:

Notice how with every exercise, the chiropractor tightens and compresses. This increases the primary cause of bad posture — unnecessary body tension — and does nothing to educate a person about their responses to stimuli.

On the other hand, this chiropractor plainly has good posture and good use of herself, so there must be something to what she’s advocating. For people who must do exercises and don’t want the bother of looking at their own habits and reprogramming their own reactions to stimuli, this will likely work better for them than Alexander Technique.

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How to Achieve & Maintain Good Posture : Shoulder Squeeze Exercise to Promote Good Posture

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Luke Ford

According to ExpertVillage: How to do a shoulder squeeze exercise, which will help you maintain proper posture; learn more about the importance of proper posture in this free personal health video.

Expert: Dr. Erik Sorbo
Bio: Dr. Erik Sorbo attended Palmer College of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa where he received his Doctor of Chiropractic degree, with honors.

In my view, the more you do the exercise Dr. Sorbo prescribes, the worse you’ll feel and the more degraded your posture will become.

Squeezing your shoulders back will narrow your torso, restrict your breathing, and deepen habits of unnecessary tension (the primary cause of bad posture). Aside from that, it’s wonderful.

This exercise is called “Upper Cross Mirror Exercise to Promote Proper Posture”.

It’s likely to feel lousy and to increase pressure on your spine by deforming your head, neck, back relationship. When your head is balanced on top of your spine, it exerts much less pull on the spine than when it is pushed forward or back.

None of these exercises are going to do anything to help you to become aware of your habits of needless compression that are causing you pain and poor posture.

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Office Chair Yoga Stretches: Office Chair Yoga: Posture

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Luke Ford

According to ExpertVillage: “Cassie Naumann developed the styles of Lyenger, Ashtanga, Viny, and Hatha Yoga.”

Wow! One girl did all that? Sweet!

Cassie is adorable! She’s so fun to write about. Man, at times like this I wish I was not a member of the Alexander Technique teaching priesthood. Then I could really write what I wanted and not care about how my words reflected on my profession. I could just pour out my heart. I could be free. I could soar like a bird on the wings of desire. I could shoot like a rocket into the ozone of purple prose. I could explode my feelings all over my blog like a Fourth of July firecracker.

Anyway, I could watch Cassie Naumann all day and nod my head at her every point because of the pretty way she says things. Yet, because I am a devoted servant of the truth, I must reluctantly disagree with some of her postural prescriptions.

How I long to have coffee with her and discuss some of these weighty issues at greater depth. And to teach her Alexander Technique? That would be very heaven!

Cassie talks about stretching at the office and how this will improve posture. But nobody can stretch for long. To stretch, you normally have to use intention and when that intention goes away, so does the stretch and any postural benefit.

It’s hard to stretch and to work at the same time.

I admit that I stretch myself morally all the time to reach for the supernal gates of righteousness, but that’s a matter for another blog post.

Cassie talks about keeping your hips directly over your shoulders. Normally confined to the rigors of Talmudic thinking, my mind boggles at this image. I’ve not seen many office workers performing such gymnastics on the job.

If she means you should keep your shoulders over your hips, then that is going to lead to increased body tension as you try to align yourself. And the harder you try to align yourself, the more body tension you’ll develop, which will lead to deformed posture in the long run (even if in the short run, it makes you straighter and taller).

Cassie says “you should make sure your legs are at 90 degrees” when you’re sitting down. Again, trying to get yourself in some particular alignment will lead to fixing and tensing and tightening, which will further degrade your posture (as the primary cause of bad posture in my view is unnecessary body tension).

Ms. Naumann advises that your chair be at the right height so that you are not too low or too high. Hmm. As long as your feet can reach the ground comfortably and your hips are not below your knees, I’m not sure there is any right height for your chair.

Cassie says: “You want to keep your pelvis tucked in and your abs pulled in.”

Well, try that. It feels yucky. It constricts your breathing and your freedom of movement by increasing your body tension and compression. In the short term, it appears to improve your posture. In the long term, it makes it worse.

While viewing my first Cassie Naumann video brought on feelings of infatuation, even though I had no idea of her religious beliefs, watching this next neck stretch video propelled me into the murky deep waters of true love.

Cassie is hypnotic. I don’t believe her neck stretch video will do anything for your posture, but its very existence strengthens my belief in an all-powerful, all-beneficent deity running the universe.

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Obama, Netanyahu & Iran; Jews of Cameroon; Gay Jewish Pop Star & Ramaz Grad Tells His Story in Song

Posted on March 9, 2012 by TheJewishChannel

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Spanx – Slimming Smoothing Underwear

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Luke Ford

The Los Angeles Times says: “Spanx inventor Sara Blakely is now a billionaire at 41 years old, making her the youngest woman on the latest Forbes magazine billionaires list to amass that much wealth on her own. Blakely, the creator and owner of the line of women’s slimming, smoothing undergarments called Spanx, is the youngest self-made woman to make Forbes list – meaning she didn’t inherit or marry into the money.”

Spanx is shapewear. You just put it on and it smooths out your appearance.

Alexander Technique lessons tend to do the same thing. They can take unsightly rolls of fat and more evenly distribute the blubber so you don’t walk around scaring small children.

Unnecessary body tension and compression is rarely attractive. By contrast, when you take up your full space in the world, when you assume your full height and width, you’re much more likely to move elegantly.

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Leaving The Present Moment To Focus On Achieving An End Result

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Luke Ford

Alexander teacher Hope Martin says: “The crux of what [F.M. Alexander] discovered was that trying to do a good job, working hard, end-gaining, always showed up in his system as tightening. And he had to stop that. He talked about inhibiting a habitual response, particularly ones that had to do with trying to do a good job and anticipating.”

Hope discovered Alexander Technique in her early twenties. “I’d been through the educational system. I’d been to a good college [University of Wisconsin]. And I didn’t feel like I knew myself. My education was so much about things outside myself. When I took an Alexander lesson, it was startling. All of a sudden I had an hour to focus on who I was… and how to let go of patterns that were not useful to me.”

“I had a good instinct that I needed some form of touch, some form of nurturing.”

“Alexander is helped through guidance and touch from another person but ultimately it is about relying on your own innate bodily wisdom.”

Host Paula Gloria: “I’m reminded of why my first [Alexander] teacher was not so enthusiastic about meditation. Perhaps by observing me, and at that point I had been meditating for ten years, she saw that I was using meditation to get out of my body.”

Hope: “Alexander is a western contemplative practice.”

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You Don’t Have To Think About Posture

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Luke Ford

I’m watching these posture videos on Youtube and almost all of them tell people to think about their posture.

While the Alexander Technique produces improved posture, it doesn’t talk about posture directly. It doesn’t want people thinking about their posture. It wants people to think about their use aka how they do things.

So while the posture videos by chiropractors talk about keeping the ears above the shoulders and the shoulders above the hips and the hips above the ankles, the Alexander Technique issues no such instructions.

Instead it tells you to think about releasing unnecessary tension and compression in your neck and back particularly and the result of this letting go of unnecessary tightness results automatically in improved posture.

In this Google video, San Francisco Alexander teacher John Baron says: “In this way, you don’t have to think about posture. Posture happens. Posture is an effect of the connection, this connection between the head, neck and back, which [F.M.] Alexander called ‘primary control’.

“When we’re aware of that connection, then nature does its job. We don’t have to think about doing posture right. Posture means to fix. We want fluidity.”

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Critiquing Youtube’s Top Yoga Videos

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Luke Ford

I went to youtube.com and put in “yoga” in the search box and looked at what came up.

Here’s the first video:

The video introduces itself thus: “Eager to master the arm balance? Equinox’s Briohny Smyth shows there’s no limit to what the artfully honed yoga body can do.”

This workout would be murder on the bodies of most Westerners. It’s entertaining to watch but it is a horrible model for an ordinary person. You try to become like this if you did not grow up doing yoga and you’ll only do yourself damage.

On Jan. 5, 2012, the New York Times Sunday magazine posted a long essay on the dangers of yoga for those who did not grow up practicing such flexibility:

According to Black, a number of factors have converged to heighten the risk of practicing yoga. The biggest is the demographic shift in those who study it. Indian practitioners of yoga typically squatted and sat cross-legged in daily life, and yoga poses, or asanas, were an outgrowth of these postures. Now urbanites who sit in chairs all day walk into a studio a couple of times a week and strain to twist themselves into ever-more-difficult postures despite their lack of flexibility and other physical problems. Many come to yoga as a gentle alternative to vigorous sports or for rehabilitation for injuries. But yoga’s exploding popularity — the number of Americans doing yoga has risen from about 4 million in 2001 to what some estimate to be as many as 20 million in 2011 — means that there is now an abundance of studios where many teachers lack the deeper training necessary to recognize when students are headed toward injury. “Today many schools of yoga are just about pushing people,” Black said. “You can’t believe what’s going on — teachers jumping on people, pushing and pulling and saying, ‘You should be able to do this by now.’ It has to do with their egos.”

When yoga teachers come to him for bodywork after suffering major traumas, Black tells them, “Don’t do yoga.”

Here’s the second video to come up on youtube for “yoga”:

Again, if an ordinary person tried to follow this, they’d likely do themselves damage.

The instructions list a whole bunch of things to do but there’s no awareness of how somebody might try to follow these instructions. The model certainly carries an excess of body tension.

If the average bloke tried to follow the directions, he’d likely tense and compress his neck and his torso and interfere with himself in numerous ways, raising his likelihood of injury.

Watching these videos and trying to imitate them without a long background in yoga would be like watching NFL highlights and then — without a background in football and the wearing of padding — going out and tackling people.

Here’s a video advertised as yoga for beginners:

Esther Ekhart starts off with some cat cow. She’s filled with unnecessary body tension and pulls her head into her torso, compressing her neck and back. This is a lousy model for anybody to follow. This will make movement and breath more difficult.

It would be much better to have a teacher who can free her neck and think about her head releasing away from her torso as her back lengthens to widen, letting go of unnecessary tension.

You’d also be better off allowing the head to lead the movement instead of the torso as Esther does.

Two minutes in, she advocates pushing the shoulders back and down on to the spine. This will feel lousy and it will constrict the breath and movement. I feel sorry for anybody who follows this teacher.

She advocates pulling the bellybutton in and up. Well, try that and see how you feel. You’ll experience constriction of your breath and of movement and of your emotions and of your availability to life and to yourself and to other people.

It’s tempting to believe that by doing various exercises you are taking care of your body but if you follow this teacher, and many of the other teachers on Youtube, you’ll only tighten up, deepen bad habits, constrict your breath and your movement, and lose your freedom of thought and feeling.

Here’s a teacher (Sadie Nardini) with elegant use and a safe workout:

I just put “Alexander Technique” into the Youtube.com search engine and the first suggested term was “exercises.” People want something to do. It’s so much easier than looking at your habits and learning to undo the habits that aren’t serving you.

The following video is titled “Yoga Exercises and Training : Alexander Technique Yoga”.

This is bizarre. No Alexander Technique teacher would teach in this way. She uses all this talk about holding the shoulders down and other exercises that aren’t part of any Alexander Technique lexicon. We don’t advocate holding positions, we try to teach developing orientations (such as the neck is free, the head is releasing away from the torso and the back is lengthening to widen).

Jennifer Parker owns Fluidity Yoga in Omaha, but I wager she is no Alexander teacher. She mentions none of the fundamental principles of the Technique. It’s weird to watch someone teaching “Alexander Technique” who shows no understanding of Alexander Technique.

At the end of the video, Jennifer urges people interested in the Alexander Technique to go find a professional teacher.

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Where Was The Bombshell In The Latest Andrew Breitbart Video?

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Luke Ford

Dennis Prager today: “Breitbart.com releases new footage of Barack Obama lovingly introducing the late Harvard Law Professor, Derrick Bell, one of the founders of Critical Race Theory, a legal theory that presupposes that American society is inherently racist. Why didn’t the mainstream media release this information four years ago?”

Soledad O’Brien on CNN says to Joel Pollack, editor of the Breitbart sites: “Let’s go back to the clips. What part of that was the bombshell?”

Joel: “The bombshell is the relationship between Barack Obama and Derrick Bell.”

Soledad: “So he’s a Harvard Law student and he’s a Harvard Law professor. Yeah?”

Dennis: “The bombshell is how close Barack Obama was and what a disciple he was to one of the most radical law professors in American history.”

Joel: “Derrick Bell is the Jeremiah Wright of academia. He developed critical race theory which holds that the civil rights movement was a sham and that white supremacy is the order and it must be overthrown.”

Dennis: “We have a Harvard law student whose greatest intellectual influence was a man who thought that white supremacy was dominant in the United States.”

According to Wikipedia: “Although no set of canonical doctrines or methodologies defines CRT, the movement is loosely unified by two common areas of inquiry. First, CRT has analyzed the way in which white supremacy and racial power are reproduced over time, and in particular, the role that law plays in this process. Second, CRT work has investigated the possibility of transforming the relationship between law and racial power, and more broadly, the possibility of achieving racial emancipation and anti-subordination.”

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Standing Room Only at Beth Jacob Purim night

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Luke Ford

Anon emails: What an amazing comeback [for a shul that used to be known as Death Jacob]. So many 20somethings and 30somethings with their children. Beth Jacob attracts young people who are comfortable with their modernity and don’t need to prove that they’re more “orthodox” than someone else. Really nice crowd.

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