It’s a battle parents have been fighting for generations.
“Sit up straight or you will ruin your back.”
Teenagers — many of them, anyway — view slouching as the cool thing to do. Parents recoil at it.
“We want what’s best for our kids,” said Juanita Gonzalez, who has two teenage boys. “Good posture is important for looking and feeling your best.”
Tommy Gonzalez, 17, says he grows tired of his mother’s harping to stand up straight.
“She says slumping adds stress to the spine and can make my body look heavier and shorter,” he said.
Mom is half right, according to Esther Gokhale, author of “8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back.”
“One of the things I teach parents is not to tell their children to stand up straight,” Gokhale said in a telephone interview from Palo Alto, Calif. “That does more harm then good. the way kids will do it is they will tighten up their lower back, and that causes a sway or an arch in the lower back, which can cause serious lower back problems.”
Gokhale teaches a course on teen posture on her website egwellness.com and YouTube. It shows techniques on maintaining good posture during everyday activities, including sitting, studying, walking, carrying a backpack and sleeping.
To be upright and relaxed, the essence of good posture, children need to learn to place their pelvis correctly.
“One way to guide that is to pretend you have a tail and remind your kids not to sit on their tail,” Gokhale said. “Another guideline that is very important is using your inner corset by using your muscles to protect and lengthen your spine. you don’t want the kids to try to have good posture by tensioning up their muscles. that is counterproductive.”
Getting your children to stand in a natural posture means relaxing the back, neck, shoulders, hips, knees and feet. as a simple rule, parents should remind children to put their “tails” behind them and not to sit on their tails.
Gokhale said your back is the central point of how your body functions.
“If your back is killing you, it’s going to kill everything,” she said. “It undermines everything in your life. I know from firsthand experience. I faced having a very crippled life until I figured out how to get to the root of the problem.”
She had severe back problems about 30 years ago and ended up with a herniated disk.
“Surgery did not work, so I was forced to think outside the box to find a solution for my own problem,” she said. “It turned out to be an extremely good one.”
Gokhale studied at the Aplomb Institute in Paris and traveled to parts of the world where back pain is virtually unknown to find out what those people were doing right.
“Life is your exercise and your therapy, if it’s done wisely,” she said. “That is a very important part of my philosophy. I don’t do half an hour of this or 10 reps of that.”
Gokhale said many people blame their chair for bad posture. but you can actually use any chair to eliminate or prevent back pain by sitting with a lengthened back.
“There are two techniques that I teach for sitting,” she said. “One is stretch sitting and the other is stack sitting.”
Stretch sitting decompresses your spinal discs and nerves, reduces muscle pain, and improves circulation around the spine and arms.
“The other technique is where you sit up on the front edge of the chair to allow your pelvis to tip forward so that your tail is behind you, and find a balance point so your vertebra ‘stacks’ easily without muscle tension,” she said.
Robert Leal, a certified yoga instructor at the Root Yoga Studio, 501 Texas, said proper posture is a vital part of his exercise routine.
“A nice healthy spine is everything in yoga,” he said. “Proper alignment brings proper space to your body tissue, ligaments and cartilage.”
He said that if you are creating a resistance in your lower lumbar or your shoulders by standing or sitting improperly, you are creating blockages of blood flow.
“Resistance is another word for pain, so the more resistance you have in your body, the more pain you will create,” he said.
The way a person stands, sits and breathes could determine how healthy he is, Leal said. if a person is hunched over, he is creating a blockage in the diaphragm and not allowing the lungs to reach full capacity.
“All the exercises in yoga stress good posture,” Leal said. “They stress the importance of hips, shoulders and the spine. Back bends are important to open the center of the chest so your bringing space to your ribcage.
“Good posture encompasses all of the body.”
Victor R. Martinez may be reached at vmartinez@elpasotimes.com; 546-6128.
<a href="http://www.elpasotimes.com/ci_15860898?source=most_emailedtag:news.google.com,2005:cluster=http://www.elpasotimes.com/ci_15860898?source=most_emailedMon, 23 Aug 2010 13:50:20 GMT 00:00″>Straight talk: Teaching teens good posture goes well beyond saying ‘don’t slouch’
esther gokhale, lower back problems, parents, spine, stress, sway
