Pain Free Living

MANY EXPERTS SUGGEST THAT HUMANS rose above other beasts because of our brains. But I believe that we owe our special “alpha mammal” status to our musculoskeletal system.

Mere muscle and bone, connecting tissue, jointure, and a gossamer neural tapestry put you into an upright position, balanced on two feet. It allows you to walk, run, turn to the left and right, spin around, reach out and up, use your hands to throw baseballs and snowballs, make love, pray, write sonnets, wage war, and sign peace treaties. I could go on and on. In terms of sheer variety, the human repertoire of locomotion is indeed extraordinary.

Muscles have two major functions: They contract (the fibers shorten) and relax (the fibers lengthen). No other tissue in the body does this. The result is motion: an ability to accomplish an immense number and variety of tasks, activities, and acrobatics.

Skeletal muscles move bones because they are attached to bones at both ends of a muscle via tendons (the “attachment” or origin, closest to the spinal axis, and the “insertion,” which is farther from the axis). By shortening its fibers, a muscle draws the bone near the insertion and toward the anchor and the body’s spinal axis.

And yet unlike our other major physiological arrangements, the musculoskeletal system gives the impression (a misimpression, for sure) of being rather haphazard, even crude in function and form—too many moving parts, flat spots, and low-tech compromises. To most students of human anatomy, once you’ve seen one small intestine, you’ve pretty much seen them all. The same goes for healthy lungs and hearts: humans have more or less the same collection of conduits, bellows, filters, and pumps. However, the musculoskeletal system comes in a variety of homely shapes and sizes—and not because of sloppy quality control or crude design. I can offer at least two good reasons. One, it operates in a far more eclectic external environment than any other physiological system and, two, the musculoskeletal system provides the means of locomotion for individuals who differ widely in weight, height, muscular strength, stamina, habits, and activity levels.

To move bones back to their starting points, the muscle that made the initial movement possible relaxes and allows its opposing muscle to contract and therefore return the bones to their resting positions.

By working in pairs, muscles alternate between contracting-relaxing and relaxing-contracting to, for example, allow the body to bend over and then stand up straight. But if one muscle contracts only partially or doesn’t fully relax, the bones cannot return to their proper positions. The body does allow for temporary variations in contraction-relaxation to account for different situations, but over time it will “forget” its full alignment and balance.

Arguably, the musculoskeletal system has far more direct external interaction than other internal systems, which are tucked away deep inside the body’s protective envelope. Your left ventricle doesn’t stub its valves on rocks or bang up its knees playing basketball. Only skin has more exposure to earth, water, wind, and fire. It alone suffers from insect bites, poison ivy, and razor burn, not to mention more severe injuries. Our world is a rough place of many extremes; the sheer number of plausible ways to live, work, and play is huge. While the skin and other organs go along for the ride, the musculoskeletal system is the ride. We move it, and it moves us until we die.

Consequently, there is a wide range of performance—and that can be misleading. Mary is tall and thin, walks with a slight limp on the right side, and is an okay weekend ice skater but tires easily. Joe, short and fat, can’t swivel his head more than a few degrees in either direction, spends much of his day at a desk or sitting in front of the TV at night, and has insomnia. Meanwhile, Sharon, an Olympic athlete, breaks records using the exact same musculoskeletal equipment (the same, that is, in terms of design function). For both Mary and Joe, their musculoskeletal systems, measured by miles traveled, loads lifted, and the daily routine of stretching, bending, twisting, turning, and artfully using their hands and feet, is a remarkable display of endurance and physical prowess, although it falls far short of Sharon’s potential. Such wide disparity is typical—most people are more like Mary and Joe than Sharon—and it contributes to the false notion that the musculoskeletal system is, in general, an inferior piece of work, frail, accident-prone, and inconsistent.

Aspiring anatomical architects and engineers fancy that they can devise a better spine, a stronger knee, a longer-lasting hip. But the body is truly ingenious and already knows how to give reliable structure and coherent, multidirectional movement to 206 or so skeletal bones. Just being able to stand up, bear our own weight, and remain in place is a remarkable achievement. Walking is a miracle of coordination! No matter how it happened, we are lucky that our ancestors got an apparatus that allowed them and us to counteract gravity, to stand upright on two feet, and to smoothly walk and run from point A to point B—because we’d never be able to invent it from scratch on our own. Today’s prosthetic devices are impressive in that they restore functions to people who have lost them. But, as anyone who wears a prosthesis can tell you, they are only rough approximations of the original limbs they replace.

As I explained in my book Pain Free, the design of the musculoskeletal system allows for temporary misalignment in case of accidents or unusual, life-or-death conditions when the system is under stress, yet this is meant to last for only a short time. Many people subject themselves to a nearly permanent state of misalignment that often lasts years. Something has to give, and it usually does.

Pain, limitation, and other problems aren’t caused by the design and quality of the musculoskeletal system so much as the way we are using and misusing it and its component parts. Our upright, balanced, bipedal posture is a product of the messy, improvisatory business of climbing down from trees, getting our heads up over tall grasses, and getting our forepaws off the ground to hold weapons, tools, and food supplies. Until these changes occurred, our distant ancestors were little more than a bunch of hapless primates, the favorite lunchmeat of carnivores no bigger than French poodles. Thankfully for us, humankind stood up on two legs, started moving, and hasn’t stopped since.

Going vertical required skeletal alignment, flexible and resilient jointure, close muscular coordination and orchestration, and a means of staying upright. Voilà! A two-legged, antigravity machine—an all-weather, all-terrain sport utility vehicle emerged from the mists of time. It is obvious that simple skeletal misalignment drastically impedes the function of the musculoskeletal system. Today, millions of people are slowly collapsing out of vertical alignment and losing their battle with gravity thanks to a sedentary lifestyle. They don’t even get the minimal levels of motion required to maintain adequate muscle strength and engagement to support spinal function, skeletal alignment, balance, and proper joint interaction and articulation.

The Egoscue Method was devised to restore alignment by reintroducing motion that strengthens and re-engages temporarily dysfunctional supporting muscles and other musculoskeletal components. I call it postural therapy, a way to address injury and chronic pain without resorting to toxic drugs or invasive surgical procedures. Also, it is an effective technique for achieving peak athletic conditioning.

Or so I thought. Actually, I was correct, but my reasoning was wrong. I concluded that postural therapy is effective because misalignment is bad, and that proper skeletal alignment is good. From a literal and superficial standpoint, that’s true.

Let’s circle back to the exercise I asked you to do in Chapter 2. The primary purpose of the musculoskeletal system—numero uno— is to download and circulate high-wavelength energy to fuel the sixty trillion cells in the typical adult body. All the body’s internal systems function more powerfully because adequate energy resources are available and, in turn, that enhanced function leads to the uptake of more energy, more capacity, and an increasingly healthy life. While the musculoskeletal system moves us, it also fuels us.

What’s more, a strong, properly aligned and engaged musculoskeletal system makes it possible for your body’s internal sensory apparatus to precisely monitor and choreograph the complex interplay of the chemical, electrical, biomechanical, and cellular processes. Simply by standing up on two feet—an overt act not unlike tuning an antenna—the body is informed within fractions of seconds to how well the liver is functioning and whether the heart is straining. Messages by the billions streak up the spine to the brain and orders race back down: sample, adjust, tweak, recalibrate, sample again. . . .

Musculoskeletal system misalignment, visible and measurable, is a reliable indicator of the body’s inability to take on energy supplies. A misaligned musculoskeletal system triggers a host of warnings that activate hormonal responses that affect your mood, respiration, blood pressure, energy levels, and resistance to illness.

Not only does misalignment interfere with the flow of message traffic, it sends messages of its own announcing that the body is literally losing its life. Stiffness and immobility are two characteristics of a corpse. By cutting off oxygen, freezing joints, and contracting muscles, the musculoskeletal system concedes that gravity is winning, and will win.

Now I’m going to get a little technical—just a little. It is as if we have two metabolic loops, one for processing and utilizing energy derived from edible matter, and another for ingesting and digesting high-wavelength energy that radiates through the space we inhabit. Without the second high-wavelength energy loop, the first metabolic loop is under siege, struggling to keep the various internal systems efficient and healthy but losing ground over time. By firing up both loops simultaneously there is plenty of energy. The musculoskeletal system not only provides routine locomotion, it tells us directly, unmistakably, whether our energy intake is high or low.

Your car has a fuel gauge even though it will be obvious—and inconvenient—when the tank runs dry. The human body has one as well. Instead of a little arrow pointing at the half mark, your shoulders and spine do the pointing by rounding and slumping; you lose skeletal alignment, and with it, balance is also lost. As the head begins to hang forward and down (and other musculoskeletal components lose their verticality), the arrow goes to the quarter mark or less. As a result, major posture muscles are losing even more of their energy charge as tone, length, and strength dwindle.

The musculoskeletal system plainly displays, in real time, how much or how little energy is on board. I suspect that our earliest ancestors chose mates, hunting partners, and leaders by intuitively making alliances with those who looked right. They read the body language, the posture, and correlated it to the likelihood of success based on the appearance of those who had succeeded in the past. An upright, balanced posture was empirical evidence of strength, stamina, and prehistoric street smarts.

Today, your posture is capable of sending the same positive message or delivering a dire warning. I believe you are capable of reading those warnings; you’ve got all the right equipment, and that is why I’m going to keep yammering at you about the importance of musculoskeletal balance.

Balance, balance, and more balance . . . you either have it or you are losing your perfect health.