CHAPTER 7
Hanging: The Power of Decompression
“The question of whether we descended from apes, or split from apes, no longer arises, because it hasn’t yet happened… We are apes.”
—Richard Leakey in The Hominid Gang by Delta Willis
A key distinction between human beings and other mammals is our capacity to walk upright on two feet. The story becomes extra interesting when you ask, “What the heck were we doing before that?” Our earliest ancestors are believed to have diverged from the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees between 6 and 13 million years ago. A frequently held belief is that climate change shifted our apelike grandparents away from the safety of dwelling within the trees covering much of Africa at the time, out into the savannah.1
Other researchers believe becoming bipedal helped our ancestors keep cool in the hot African sun. This would also explain why our ancestors lost the hair from most of their bodies other than the parts that either help send olfactory (smell) signals to potential mates, like the genitals and armpits, or those that protect us from sun, like the top of the head and eyebrows. That’s right, your super-cool haircut is likely more of an exaptation (a trait that has been co-opted for a use other than the one for which natural selection built it) evolved for either sun protection or warmth for your noggin.2
Regardless of your belief systems around evolution, the human shoulder girdle is built to brachiate (fancy word for “hang”). At a primordial level, human beings are natural hangers, pullers, and curious explorers. Our bodies are designed to navigate through trees (and mountains): A few of these traits include a short spine (particularly the lumbar spine), short fingernails (instead of claws), long curved fingers well suited for grasping, reduced thumbs, long forelimbs, and flexible and freely rotating wrists.3 Perhaps these traits are remnants from our brachiating ancestors, but more importantly for the purposes of this book, they indicate a biological demand to continue reaching up, hanging, and pulling for optimal health.
When was the last time you hung from something or even stretched your arms over your head? If you’re like most people, it’s probably been longer than you’d like to admit. If that is the case, you’ve likely complained of neck, shoulder, or back tension at some point in the last year. Tapping back into your primordial brachiating roots could be the solution!
THERE’S HOPE!
Pioneering orthopedic surgeon Dr. John Kirsch refers to humans as the fifth great ape. The Kirsch Institute conducted a study in 2012 with ninety-two subjects suffering from chronic shoulder pain and found ninety out of ninety-two participants were able to return to comfortable living after implementing a simple daily hanging protocol. Many of these participants avoided surgery and the likelihood of long-term pain with this free and simple intervention.4 Kirsch is convinced the divergence away from regular hanging is a crucial factor in today’s chronic shoulder issues and impingements and claims in his book Shoulder Pain? that his simple protocol of regular hanging along with some basic dumbbell exercises will heal 99 percent of shoulder pain.
We’re rarely taught this, but even our bones are malleable. There are numerous visible examples of this, from modern baseball pitchers’ upper arm bones (humerus) becoming physically altered by the repeated torque of throwing the baseball, to ninth-century European archer skeletons clearly showing greater bony development around the attachments of the dominant archery muscles.5 The idea that our bones do in fact change with time and movement is known as Wolff’s law, which states that bone grows and remodels in response to the forces that are placed upon it in a healthy person. We find it easy to believe we can move ourselves into a dysfunctional position, but somehow conceive it to be unfathomable to move ourselves back into a balanced posture.
ANATOMICAL BIT…
OK, let me play anatomy professor for just a minute so that I can fully explain why hanging is actually an incredibly important part of realigning your body and returning your strength to its intended level. Hanging creates space within the coracoacromial arch (CA arch), a curved structure in the shoulder that overlies the rotator cuff tendons and includes the coracoacromial ligament. Impingement here is very likely why you may find it painful or challenging to raise your arms straight above your head without swaying your low back forward (resulting in low-back issues—that’s right, your low-back thing may actually be a shoulder thing, or vice versa). Hanging stretches the CA arch, expanding the subacromial space, resulting in decompression of these tissues. Our shoulders get stiff and stuck in forward flexion, and regular hanging can not only relieve pain but literally reshape your postural patterns, changing not only the way you look but also the way you think and feel, as explained in the first chapter.
A beautiful description of ape (and human) compared to monkey shoulder anatomy comes from John Gribbin and Jeremy Cherfas in the book The First Chimpanzee: In Search of Human Origins:
By contrast to monkeys, the collar bone of apes (and, of course, man) is longer and helps to keep the shoulder away from the chest. The shoulder is much freer and can move in all sorts of ways; it isn’t much of an effort for you to scratch your right ear with your left hand from behind your head, but no monkey could do this… This cluster of adaptations that allows movement by arm-swinging, or brachiation as it is called, is a property only of the apes—gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and men.6
BABY STEPS
For many of you, this might be the first time you’ve intentionally hung from anything since grade school. If that’s the case, it’s great news! You’ll experience more tangible results from this practice than most other seasoned brachiating people. The key is taking it slowly. You can start simply by simulating hanging from things in front or slightly above you with only as much weight as feels comfortable. Gradually work your way up to hanging from something above your head while keeping your feet on the ground or a bench to support your weight. Eventually you will have worked your way up to a proper hanging position with no additional support beyond your own strength. This is the promised land of maintaining healthy shoulders, neck, spine, grip strength, and tough yet supple hand skin for as long as you occupy your body!
HANGING POINTERS
Get a rock-solid grip: Wrap your fingers as far around the bar as possible and create a strong lock with your thumbs wrapping your index and middle finger. Pretend you are squeezing the pulp out of the bar. Switch between an overhand and underhand grip to explore a full range of motion of the shoulder joint and connective tissue around the forearms. You can vary the width between your hands regularly as well.
Break the bar: As you’re hanging with the overhand grip position, alternate between rotating your fists inward and outward as though you’re attempting to break the pull-up bar. Put extra emphasis on rotating your fists outward as though you’re attempting to point the thumbs behind you. This activates the posterior muscles of the shoulder girdle that need to be strengthened in order to reverse the forward-rolled shoulder pattern.
Strong fingers make strong shoulders: Rotate between emphasizing the pressure on each finger, as all the digits will activate different muscles through your arms and shoulders. Also, alternate between squeezing the bar as tightly as possible with all your fingers and coming back into a more relaxed grip; hanging can be very dynamic, as you may be finding out!
Engage the belly (hollow position): The tendency for many people is to allow the abdomen to sway forward, borrowing motion from the lower back that you couldn’t find in the shoulders. Avoid this by pointing the toes, slightly raising your feet in front of you and drawing your low ribs to your hips as though knitting up your abdomen with a corset. You could also picture your pelvis as a wineglass and you pouring the wine back behind you (don’t spill it out the front of the cup and ruin your nice carpet!).
YOU’RE SO CALLUS
Your skin is an essential part of your kinetic chain of movement, and you’re only as strong as your weakest link. For many people, the weak links are skin and grip strength (or lack thereof). I can’t help but feel a little bit more badass every time I put on a pair of motorcycle gloves, as though some biker gang alter ego emerges momentarily. This sensation is likely similar to how folks in the gym feel wearing gloves to protect their hands from the abrasion of bars, kettlebells, and dumbbells. What they may not realize is they’re in fact wearing a crutch that in the long run is impeding their full-body (including skin) strength and adaptation to the movements in a natural setting. If you’ve adapted your muscles to movements your skin strength is not adequately robust enough to support, you are not truly adapted for the movement you’re practicing in the gym.
This could be equated to taking a basic town car with cheap, skinny tires and replacing the engine with that of a Formula One race car. When you take it to the track, it’ll be all kinds of loud but won’t effectively distribute the engine’s power to the road, leaving the car spinning its cheap tires, losing traction until eventually they blow out. The analog to this tire blowout in the human body is the formation of a blister, which comes as a product of new friction where the body did not have adequate time to toughen the skin through the process of callusing.
The skin of your palms and feet, known as glabrous (smooth and hairless), ridged skin, and/or thick skin, is built for friction. The rough, callused skin that shows up after activities like hanging is thought by many to be dead skin, but it’s quite the opposite. It has increased circulation, and the tissue has formed a cross-link pattern, making it more durable to protect against future damage. Spending time working with your hands essentially makes your hands smarter, stronger, and more dependable.7
GET A GRIP
Grip strength doesn’t really matter for anything other than occasionally crushing a can as a bar trick, right? It turns out a lack of grip strength is associated with heart attacks, stroke, and cardiovascular disease—three of the top five biggest killers in the United States. As a part of the international Prospective Urban and Rural Epidemiological (PURE) study, researchers calculated grip strength using a dynamometer for almost 140,000 people from 17 different countries and observed their health for an average of four years after.8
Here’s where it gets creepy: They found each eleven-pound decrease in grip strength to be associated with 17 percent higher risk of dying from heart disease, 9 percent higher risk of stroke, 7 percent higher risk of heart attack, and a 16 percent higher risk of dying from any cause. Grip strength was an even better predictor of death or cardiovascular disease than blood pressure! It turns out, one of the key factors to being harder to kill is maintaining a grip on life.9
Statistics like this can become perverted quickly, with people attempting to isolate their grip strength in prevention of cardiovascular disease. Grip strength is actually better developed holistically by doing manual work that involves grabbing, pulling, climbing, or hanging. That’s right, it’s better to actually do activities involving grip strength than to try to hack your heart health by isolating your can-crushing muscles. You could join a climbing gym, start a garden, do yard work more regularly, or just start hanging on random branches as you’re out for a walk!
ALIGN YOURSELF
The farmer’s carry exercise is one of the more valuable “functional” movements to strengthen your grip strength in a natural way. It’s very simple: Grab a couple heavy weights (this could include paint cans, kettlebells, dumbbells, or anything you can hold on to) and take a walk for thirty seconds or so. Pay attention to gripping evenly through all your fingers and imagine you’re squeezing the pulp out of the handles as you walk. Follow the same principles described in the Aligned Standing (mountain pose) exercise from Chapter 6. Stay calm and breathe through the nose. Your heart will thank you in a few years!
SPINAL DECOMPRESSION
Low-back pain caused by musculoskeletal conditions costs Americans more than $100 billion each year, and more than 80 percent will experience it at some point in their lives.10 Our modern lives are inherently compressive to the discs of our spines due to an overabundance of sitting in dysfunctional positions, sedentary lifestyles that inhibit fluid from freely circulating throughout our tissues, and, I would suggest, a lack of decompression time spent hanging. Continually sitting with pelvis tucked under like a sad puppy puts continual tension on the hockey puck–shaped discs between your vertebrae. Not to mention this position chronically shortens the muscle in the front of the hip, forming you into a ticking time bomb for low-back problems, and plopping you into the 80 percent or $100 billion category mentioned above. This painful fate is absolutely avoidable, and a daily hanging practice is a key part of the remedy.
In Pavel Tsatsouline’s powerful book Relax into Stretch, he recommends hanging from a pull-up bar with weight around your waist to assist with decompressing the spine.11 This is a nice technique because it adds an extra subtle pull through the spine, thus bringing new healthy fluid to tissues in and around the vertebral discs while flushing out the old stuff. Our spines are bearing some serious weight throughout the day, especially when you start asymmetrically loading them up with things like purses, briefcases, backpacks, and things of the sort. Multiply the awkward loads we carry by the chronic hunching over from chair sitting, cell phone staring, and couch reclining, and you have a spine crying out to be decompressed with a good hang.
DECOMPRESSION TIPS
Contract-relax: As you are hanging, alternate between squeezing your grip super tight for five seconds and then relaxing as much you can while holding on to the bar. Do the same with your shoulder girdle by pulling your shoulders down and lifting your body up, while keeping your arms straight. This motion is technically called depression and retraction of the scapula. Think of pulling your scapulae (shoulder blades) down and toward the spine, contracting to about 80 percent for five seconds, and then relaxing back into a passive hang for ten seconds. Repeat this for as many reps as you can maintain good form.
Breathe: A key to getting the most out of your hang time, like everything else, goes back to your quality of breath. Gray Cook, founder of the Functional Movement Screen (FMS), pretty much sums it up by saying, “If you can’t control your breath, you can’t control your movement.”12 Hanging is no different, so pay attention to moving your breath into the various parts of your torso, neck, shoulders, and hips. Each breath in assists in expanding your various parts, and the breath out is a release of tension in those areas.
KEY POINTS
The anatomy of the human shoulder girdle is built to brachiate (hang)—it has very likely been a primary component of human evolution.
You can literally change the structure of the shoulder girdle to restore function and reduce or eliminate pain with a simple daily hanging protocol.
If free-hanging is too much, you can replicate the effects of hanging by reaching your arms over your head and stretching them on the end of a chair.
One of the most effective ways to decompress your spine is to regularly get some hang time in each day.
Alignment Assignment
You didn’t think I’d just leave you hanging (dad joke) without providing some actionable homework to cultivate those brachiating shoulders of yours, did you?
For the next ten days (at least), find a way to hang for a total of ninety seconds to three minutes (depending on your fitness level) each day. This means you could hang for thirty seconds three to six times or fifteen seconds six to twelve times, or whatever works best for you. Find equipment at your gym, monkey bars at a playground, a strong tree branch, or another sturdy place to get your hang time in. I recommend buying a pull-up bar to place in a doorway you walk through regularly in your home and gifting yourself a brief shoulder-opening, spine-decompressing hang each time you walk through. This will become something you look forward to. These simple and consistent habits over extended periods of time are truly age-defying. Enjoy!