The exercises are working!

I can't remember if I've ranted about Pete Egoscue's exercise methods here before or not. (I hate that I never can remember this stuff!) Since I can't remember, I'm doing it now, so if this is a repeat, feel free to skip.


The Egoscue Method isn't an exercise plan for losing weight or getting cut. It's about feeling better--losing the aches and pains and mysterious "why does my knee hurt after I play tennis?" stuff.

In general, if you believe that chiropractic health care works, you can figure that the Egoscue exercises will help with the same stuff. The grinding in your neck when you turn your head, the ache in your low back, definitely. But these exercises claim (and the logic behind the claims look sensible to me) that they can also help with hip pain, knee pain, and even ankle and bunion trouble.

Yes, really, it looks plausible. It's an anklebone-is-connected-to the-kneebone, kneebone-is-connected-to-the-hipbone kind of thing.

They also say it can help with RPI injury, because the root of the injury is the way we're holding our shoulders which makes us use our wrists wrong. I'm a little more skeptical about that, but I figure it is probably harmless at least and possibly helpful in preventing such troubles.




I've been doing the Egoscue exercises off and on for about three years now, and I'm seeing some interesting results.

Bear in mind that these exercises are like any others--the more dedicated you are, the faster you see results. From the beginning, there have been small improvements--the itchy spot on my back that's actually a tense muscle relaxes and leaves me alone when I'm doing the exercises regularly. My shoulders seem to bother me a little less.

But this week I've started noticing when my posture isn't good.

I look like I've got pretty good posture because I don't have the same kind of posture problems most people have. Most people round their backs so the curve of the low back flattens out, and their chest and shoulders round forward. I do sorta the opposite. I roll my hips forward so that the curve of my lower back is more exaggerated than it should be, and my upper back is fairly straight. By comparison I look like I'm really sitting up. But my shoulders are rounded too, and I jut my head forward on my neck a lot.

At work this week, I've caught myself several times with my hips rolled forward. I was sitting like I always sit, and suddenly I realized that I had my hips in a funny place (like I always do) and was able to relax them into a more natural posture. I've been doing the same with my head--I suddenly realize just how far forward I've pushed my head, and pull my neck back to something a little more sane. It's strange, because the "wrong" positions are my habitual ones, so the "right" positions feel funny too, but I know it is an improvement.

I'm excited, because this is the first time I've been able to get the correct hip postures to feel any kind of natural, and also because noticing the wrongness seems like a huge step in the direction of solving the problem.



I really haven't been expending a lot of effort on doing the Egoscue exercises for a while, but I have been doing the low-intensity stuff regularly for a long time now (over six months) and it looks like even that has an effect eventually.

Somewhere around twice a week I do the static back press, which entails lying on the floor with your legs on a chair. You're supposed to relax and breathe. I often fall asleep doing this one, and if my back is bothering me so I can't sleep in bed I'll get up and go in the living room with a blanket and sleep in the static back press for a while. There's no effort at all, only time expended. You can't really read or watch tv while doing it, so it's good for napping, meditation, and audiobooks. I try to give it fifteen minutes when I do it.

Once a week, I do the supine groin stretch. This one has about as much effort as the static back, but the correct position is a little harder to get into initially. You lie on your back with one leg on the chair like static back, and stretch the other one out, braced so the foot can't roll to the side. Then you relax. When I'm really tired, I can sleep in this position too, but it's just a little harder to maintain so it is a little harder to drop off. I give this fifteen minutes on each leg. I'd improve faster if I'd give this one more time.

Other than that, I do office sets of exercises from the website when the mood strikes me at work. They are a mini-routine that is usually five exercises and take about five minutes. I do them when I'm bored, or when I'm having to do a lot of keyboard pounding, or just when my shoulders feel especially wrong. That works out to doing them two or three times a week.



The worst part about the whole thing is that I'm so very excited about it, I'm afraid I'm off-putting. People who are too fervent about their alternative medicine creep me out, and I'm too fervent about this. It has also made me more conscious of other people's posture. I often see people with noticeable posture problems as I go through my day, and I can imagine myself whipping a copy of the book out of my bag and approaching them. "You're in pain aren't you? Egoscue has the answer. Egoscue forgives you. Egoscue wants to help. Accept Egoscue into your life and your pain will be relieved..."

*shudders*

Besides making me want to approach perfect strangers and say "Your back doesn't have to hurt like that, you know," my new awareness of posture has made me frightened for the physical health of Americans in general. We're so very, very sedentary, and even when we exercise we don't always do things that maintain our true ranges of motion. I'm terrified that the standards of beauty and good health are going to unconsciously slip so that rounded shoulders and jutted-forward necks are accepted as normal.



Anyway. Time to go get ready for my day.