| Skeletal alignment is the most overlooked factor relating to pain-free living and healthy aging. Align your bones to find lasting relief from back pain, scoliosis, hip pain, knee pain and a long list of health complaints. |
| Standing "up straight" is not what we've all been taught! |
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| Bone deep strength is different from muscular strength. Aligned bones provide strength that is natural and enduring, while developed muscles provide strength that is unnatural and must be worked at continuously to be maintained. This woman is not strong because she carries rocks on her head. She is able to carry rocks on her head because of an interplay of naturally aligned bones and elastic muscles. |
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How can a small woman with so little muscle power carry such an astonishingly heavy load of rocks on her head without developing back pain and other problems?
This woman has never lost the skeletal alignment she first discovered as a very young child learning how to stand and walk. This means her bones do the job of carrying the rocks rather than her muscles having to struggle to do so.
This is the key to understanding why 80% of Americans experience varying degrees of back pain and a long list of complaints including scoliosis, hip pain and knee pain. At some point (and it is now occurring at younger and younger ages) people often develop unhelpful habits of use that can lead o back pain, neck pain, and other kinds of pain.
American culture has lost sight of what it means to be naturally aligned. Because we no longer know how to rely on aligned bones for support, we have become obsessed with muscle strength to hold us up. Unfortunately, overly developed muscles are storehouses for chronic tensions that interfere with relaxed breathing, restrict easy fleibility, limit range of motion of the joints, impede optimal flow of blood through veins and arteries and place stress on the spinal cord, the primary neural pathway through which impulse travels back and forth from the spine.
While there's no reason for anyone to begin carrying heavy loads on the head, valueable lessons can be learned from those people who do this successfully, sometimes day in and day out for decades. The skeletalalignment that makes it possible for some people do this, is what makes it possible for anyone to relearn how to live with genuine strength and easy flexibility. This is the open secret to finding lasting relief fromback pain, scoliosis,hip pain, knee pain and a whole host of health complaints.
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The little girl pictured here learned how to balance a heavy head (similar to a load of rocks) on top of her spine by stacking each weight-bearing joint—her ankles, knees, hips and shoulders—along the axis the runs through the center of her body. Through a process of trial and error (falling down again and again) all healthy babies discover the correct relationship among the bones that makes standing and walking possible. This relationship is governed by the same laws of nature that govern physics, engineering and architecture.
It makes good architectural sense that our legs, like all foundation posts, should be plumb (perfectly vertical) columns of support. This sets the pelvis at the proper angle to allow the spine to be a self-supporting structure, so that muscular tension is not forced to compensate for misalignment. Natural structural support lasts a lifetime, but, without it, gravity acts like a pile of rocks on our heads, and, as the years go by, we slowly crumple under its weight.
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| How our bones are aligned determines not only how we feel today but how we will age tomorrow. |
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| When weight-bearing joints do not align along the central axis, a gradual yet inevitable process of collapse has begun. Using muscle tension to try to counteract this collapse (as the man on the far right is doing) only gives the illusion of "up-rightness" and does not prevent collapse in the long run. |
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| People whose joints line up along the central axis are far less likely to suffer back pain and a whole host of other complaints. Aligned people come in all sizes and shapes but are more likely to be found in less technologically-advances places in the world. |
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