Form Follows Function
Modern life, with its mechanization and requirement that we sit all day long, has put new demands on our bodies.
Biological anthropologists wonder how sitting, looking at a computer screen and pushing buttons will affect our evolutionary journey.
We already know that some muscles are changing.
For example, the psoas minor, which runs down the front of the lower spine to the pelvis, is either atrophied or close to non-existant in many people today.
This muscle is essential for standing, moving, bending, lifting your leg to walk, and getting around.
In the pre-modern era, people in the West stood, stooped, squatted, walked and carried objects all day long as a matter of living day in and day out.
They stand and walk with simple sandals or in bare feet. They don't slouch in chairs or cars all day long like we have to in order to live.
They use the natural alignment that humans have evolved into over thousands of years in order to stand, walk and sit at ease without constantly tensing major muscle groups to "hold" themselves in the "correct" posture, as we see in the image of Africans walking and carrying below.
That is natural posture!
for The International Fund for
Agricultural Development
The weight of the upper body is supported directly through the pelvis in a natural alignment with the ankles, knees, hip sockets, spinal vertebrae, and atlas upon which the head rests. The feet serve as the base of support.
This means that if the body is aligned well, it can stand with little effort because the major weight bearing joints are balanced on each side, as we see in the image of a teeter-totter to the right.
So they do not need much muscle power to hold the body erect.
Note, the top cervical and lower lumbar vertebrae are located in the center of the torso on the axis of gravity. So, the spine is deepset in the body and not, as many people think, on the surface of the back.
The spring in your step comes, in part from the structure of your feet and legs.
It also comes from the spring-like lever location of the pelvis. The compressive thrust of the spine in down and to the rear, as we see in the yellow line, while the femurs push up and forward into the hip sockets, with the blue line.
This vector of forces acting on the pelvis, coupled with ligaments and muscles, make the pelvis a giant lever, which enables you to move easily.
As we see in the image to the right, the pelvis and lower spine, along with the head and upper spine naturally rotate forward.
With these forces always at work, coupled with our modern tendency to sit, your body can lose its standing equilibrium, with your major weight bearing joints no longer functioning as balanced first class levers.
In fact, we can see these forces as work in the above right image with the blue, green and red axes. The red compression axis is behind the axis of gravity. It embodies the compression strength of the skeleton with its bones and ligaments.
In front of the axis of gravity, we see the blue tension axis that embodies the muscle tension necessary to hold up the body and prevent it from falling forward.
For example, we told to:
1) Tighten our glutes to hold the upper body upright.
2) Pull in our stomachs by tightening our abdominal muscles.
2) Pull our shoulders back and hold our chests up.
4) Hold our head up and back to complete our "proper alignment."
Instead, then, of having our major weight bearing joints functioning as first class levers, they become distorted, with muscles always tense on one side or the other.
This hypertonicity pulls your spine out of its naturally evovled alignment.
Unaligned, you move less efficiently than if you were aligned because you are: 1) Wasting muscle energy holding yourself in misalignment. 2) Having to fight shortened and disfunctionally tensed hypertonic muscles to get your body moving. 2) Having to move certain body joint a greater distance because they are not where they should be.
As Mabel Elsworth Todd explains of the spine, for example:
"The longer the axis of a flexible, curved structure controlling weight, the greater the speed and power of movement." (From her The Thinking Body, p. 175.)
In other words, an aligned spine moves better than a misaligned one.