Reasoning behind counter-nutation

Try the fitness industry (cynical me). If they can unwind tuned muscles and make them flabby by tucking butt and tummy, then they can charge an arm and a leg to watch you like a rat on a treadmill throwing money at them, trying to tighten them up again and pretending that we enjoy it.;-)

Try the fashion industry, which has from time immemorial had us using body language and clothing language to change our image, ie what people think they see in us. The tucked butt and tummy has a long history.

I was watching a 1935 Ginger Rogers movie the other night. The slim, slightly hunched, vulnerable silhouette, with no emphasis on the breasts and butt, straight out of the great depression.

This era followed that of the Flapper after emergence from the romantic period. In the 1920's girls cut their long hair into the 'shingle', the first shocking mini-skirts and the boyish outline supported by binders for breasts and narrow hipped corsets.

The fashion nazis keep changing the goalposts in response to what they see in politics and on the street, and we all gleefully part with our dollars to make sure we look like we are at the cutting edge, way ahead of the rest of the field, despite the fact that we are still our boring old selves with the lumps in the wrong places, but don't wan to be seen that way.

The WW2 era was one of military lines, very tailored and sparse, economical use of fabric and trimming, which was a necessity during the War.

After WW2 when women had to all leave the farm and the factory and turn back into women again, and get back into the house, pregnant, in that kitchen that started to bristle with whitegoods and new cleaning products. Out came the conical bras for the boobs, and all that bodice draping, and the voluminous, gathered skirts and stilettos to enhance their feminine outline, so they would be attractive as the sexual, and potentially maternal creatures, who kept the men fed, that were needed in this new, prosperous consumer age.

Then came Women's Lib in the 1960's. Boobs became unmanageable without a bra (cos many were sacrificed on the pyre of university demonstrations). The Pill allowed women to pretend that we didn't have to be women all the time. We could be part time men, or take the Twiggy option and look like vulnerable waifs out of Dickensian England, cos it was all too hard (sigh)!!. Of course we still wanted to show off our sexy legs in mini-skirts, but I tell you what! You wanna feel vulnerable? Try wearing a mini-skirt that only just covers your knickers when you are standing up, then try sitting down!

Then came Woodstock and we said, "Stuff the lot of them!" and wore what we wanted, and not very much if we could get away with it, and let it all hang out (and breathed a short sigh of relief to be free of tyranny of Paris catwalks, but enslaved to the shoddy workmanship of Indian entrepreneurial textile traders who gave us shisha mirror beads, cheesecloth and bad embroidery).

Then came the backlash against all that and Gordon Gecko was born, and we all wanted to look like him, masculine and powerful, with non-existent hips and butt, and shoulders that intentionallyl overshadowed everything in their path, including what was left of our boobs after all that Jane Fonda lycra-stuffed exercise.

Of course, to the addict, retail therapy feels so goooood!

Now if you will excuse me, I am off to buy some satin and some chiffon and some blingy trimmings for a silver dance bra! shop till ya drop!

The question I don't understand is, "How can it be neutral posture, if you have to zip and tuck to achieve it?" Go figure.

Louise

Aza - how cool that our resident midwife has gotten into WW posture! It is beautiful, strength-building, and your lumbar spine will (eventually) love you for it.

I think the degeneration went just as Louise colorfully described - but that its roots are probably much older and definitely male. Men seem to have an innate sense of their core, which must translate as ‘center of gravity’, being deep within their abdomen.

Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man (man in circle) is an interesting study on the subject. He depicts the navel as man’s center of gravity when the body is surrounded by a circle, but that center drops several centimeters when enclosed in a square. In reality, the center of gravity of all humans is the sacrum. Maybe because men have a pronounced thoracic curve - giving bulk and brawn to their upper body - they sense their navel as central. Perhaps their defensive warrior posture (think Tai Chi) shifts their center of gravity to their abdomen. Maybe they are just conflicted - lol.

For whatever reasons, the idea of “core strength” is very old and very entrenched in all systems of exercise - East and West. Only very recently though - the last 15 years or so - have women become seriously contaminated with the concept. There has never been a question where our center of gravity is, as any woman who has ever been pregnant will tell you. How so many of us were led to believe in the male concept of “core” is difficult to understand. I guess they owned the infrastructure and if we wanted to play we had to play by their rules. Their worldview was self-referenced and it never occurred to them that women might have a different core. If you think about it, it is simply astonishing that no yogi, doctor, artist, or scientist ever informed women of this reality. Perhaps it could only have come from another woman.

Corsets fit into the picture as well, undoubtedly influenced by this same male notion that navel-to-spine was a desirable thing. Women could accentuate the look to the point of deformity, which became a fashion statement in its own right. Self-imposed corseting continues to this day, even though the hooks and eyes and stays have been discarded for over a century.

Doctors were traditionally male and it follows suit that they built their conceptual framework upon a more vertically arranged spine. There is much to suggest in the history of medicine that some part of the Judeo-Christian-scientific worldview wanted to distance itself from being too close to the animal kingdom. The elephant in the closet is none other than the pelvis. We know that humans have always had a keen perception of their mammalian pelvis, and have depicted it in story and art for thousands of years as centaur and minotaur. How was it that deep, intuitive knowing became replaced by a completely false story that continues to be told to this day?

I think the answer is very simple. One or more persons simply decided to change the story. I think a conscious decision was made by the men of science to represent the pelvis in a more “human” way. The Lie was easily reinforceable by the fact that the pelvis rotates backward in the supine position - the way it is normally viewed by Them.

The longer the Lie was told, the more uptight They became. Unfathomable investment was made by many branches of science into a conceptualization of the human body that was wrong at its core. Nowhere was the mistake more egregious than in the medical specializations of orthopedics and gynecology. A century of laminectomies and hysterectomies with a shared etiology in bad posture ruined the health of many, many people. Fortunes were made, universities built and libraries filled with endless iterations of the Lie. Women were the cheapest and most abundant fodder for what was to become a Lie-Machine, and publicly traded “cures” for common women’s disorders created some of the most powerful corporations on the planet.

Yet, the Lie could not have withstood the truth of the female body indefinitely. As pitiful sideshows of contrived anatomy play at medical conferences across the country, women are beginning to rattle their ancient bones.

We live in very interesting times.

Christine

Aza,

I do not think are natural posture is completely loss personally or has it changed in every facet of society. As a girl growing up I was always was reminded by my mother to hold my head high and stand up straight. There was never any mention of tucking your butt in. However when I started ballet classes then I was told turn out and tuck your butt in, however I was never under the impression I was suppose to do that any other time then when dancing. However even with all the training of my mother I still allowed my shoulders to fall into the classic c shape. I feel there is far more of a problem in our society for men and women because of the c shape. If we naturally pull our selves up as Christine suggest then your lumbar curve seems to fall into a nice neutral place where it is meant to reside. No focus needs to be particularly made to the lumbar curve if you are sitting up straight and allowing your shoulders to relax naturally, it just follows in the correct place. This is my observation, in fact when I focus to much on the lumber curve I tend to hyper extend it and have severe pain in my coccyx and the lower back muscles.

I do think there are a lot of women now who are fitness guros trying to have a size 4 body who do suck things in and tuck their butts under consistently because of the multiple dance classes and fitness programs they have been involved in. I have observed many from this site that struggle with prolapse and they seem to be women who are young who were fitness enthusiast before giving birth...The fitness and dance world seems to have changed a lot of women in the last ten to fifteen years. But the average women on the street I do not see her sitting straight tucking her butt in and sucking her stomach in, I see the opposite. Slouching down in the shoulders significantly letting there butt be where ever it is no matter how big it is and their bellies seem just to wiggle around just fine out and front of them and I see no effort to pull it in. That previous sent. states the avg women in western culture, not the fitness or health conscious women.

It would do us all a world of good to listen to our mothers and sit up straight (providing we our not pulling our shoulders back to accomplish a weird military version of straight).

kathy2124

sorry y'all- I'm gonna have to blame it on religion. Understand that at one point the fertility goddesses were the large breasted, rounded bum, rounded tummied figures. Women were worshiped for their appearance and if you look even as recent as Renoir and his nudes you can see that we have not always been obsessed with thin and invisible-
but those goofy Puritans and their ideas about sex and women in general are what caused our current problem- it is so embedded in our society- many of our laws are designed to make women invisible- goodness knows we only recently stopped being considered property and gained the right to vote.

Hi Aza

Think about the quest for the six pack and buns of steel, which has spread from the body building industry to mainstream, and from men to women. Generally women don't want 'bulk'. They just want to look 'toned' and 'buff', I guess so they can be admired for having 'beautiful' bodies.

Now think how muscles work. They can either be short and fat (contracted), or long and thin (stretched). How do you make a muscle look more defined? You make it stick out. How do you make it stick out? You make it short and fat so it takes up less space from end to end more space from side to side. How do you make it short and fat? You decrease the distance between its anchorage point. How do you increase the distance between its anchorage points? You flex your body, curl it up. You do it like this. It makes me feel the bulging, just watching her! You will notice that she can only make a 6 pack by straightening her lumbar curve which will counternutate her pelvis, ie lessen the distance between base of ribcage and pubis. The only other way she can shorten the distance between ribcage and pubis is by slouching her shoulders down, which would not show off her pecs. It is all about appearance, not function. Hey, when I think about it, she looks like a dog pooing, butt tucked under but shoulders erect.

There is only about 1cm of movement in the SI joint according to Greys Anatomy, so the tilt probably changes more as a result of straightening the spine than actually rotating the SI joint. Christine tells us that the SI joint (along with the symphysis pubis) is continually changing as we walk, because the right and left sides of the pelvis alternate between nutating and counternutating as we change to the other leg. The other time the SI joint moves is, of course, during labour.

Boy, did I find some gross videos before stumbling on that one! Yes, you can build a bigger 6 pack that will show all the time with working out and diet (and illegal stuff that will do long term damage to your body's metabolism), but that is different from *how you use your body* to display what you have. I guess if you are into bodybuilding it helps if you start with the right genes too.

My bellydance teacher tells me that she has been zipping and tucking for so long now that her abs are permanently tucked in. I can remember having permanently tucked, effortlessly tight abs after all those years of tucking too! I have to try very hard not to shake my head and roll my eyes when she tells us that. Mind you, she is a personal trainee and dance teacher by occupation and she does have very strong and obedient abdominal muscles. However, I do catch her slouching without tucked tummy muscles at times and she just looks normal. I guess I will get through to her eventually (sigh). Timing is everything. She understands why I don't tuck and zip, but she does not see that it is potentially damaging for every woman.

... but it still doesn't explain why normal women, who have no need to have a hypermobile torso, zip and tuck!

L

its so much easier for your run of the mill couch potato to lean on her ligaments rather than actively hold up her spine. if you rely on the ligaments rather than muscle to hold your spine together, gravity will probably pull you into a lousy slouchy posture, with counternutated pelvis. and then if you try, once in a while when you can't get your mothers voice out of your head, to stand up straight, you will find yourself too tight to maintain much else than a sway backed posture with your shoulders up by your ears.

I posted this elsewhere, but it's on this very subject, so I copy/pasted it here too:

I think everybody's bad advice about posture may be our American idea that women need to look like men. Flat, hard and denim-clad. My husband is so wonderful in this area. He tells me, "I don't want to hug someone who's flat. Who wants to hug someone who feels like them? Mommies are supposed to be soft. Daddies are supposed to be muscular. It's natural." :D Christine's book and DVD has so encouraged me to try to be more feminine. Peer pressure is an awful thing. "I'm so fat" say my skinny friends. "I do pilates every other day and power walk at least an hour on the between days. What are you doing for yourself?" say my well-meaning friends who don't have 4 small children. Christine, your book has given me the courage to be a woman and not feel like I have to look like a man.

BTW, it's easy to blame things on religion, but I think the culture of the day is to be blamed. Our Victorian heritage (not our religious heritage) gave us ultra-slim waists, way-too-high and pushed-together boobs and all the rest. Religion never told women to have their ribs surgically removed so they could reduce their waist size. We have Queen Victoria to thank for prudishness.

Hi Aza

Yes,yes,yes,yes...

I used to have SI and lower back pain a lot, and I think it was mainly caused by lifting with a straight up and down spine, like I described before, which would have led to excessive counternutation. Straightening the lumbar spine with its wedge shaped vertebra pinched a few discs fairly badly and they are all a bit damaged or ragged as a result. No doctor ever 'got' it, and it just got worse and worse, adn the discs didn't get better with a physio exercise program (I now know why - the lumbar discs were still being squashed by a straightened spine!).

WW posture has allowed me to take the pressure off these discs, and utilise the little spinal processes I was talking about in my previous post, to stabilise, or lock the vertebrae together, when lifting.

I posted a long time ago about a current affairs program I was watching just after discovering WW. There was footage of bags of grain being unloaded off a Relief truck in Africa somewhere. A very slim woman took one of these bags, probably 120lb, by the look of it, on her head and turned and walked away from the camera. I could see that her spine undulated and rebounded like a trampoline, the bag of grain moving up and down slightly as she walked. It occurred to me at the time that the spine is indeed a spring, and not a colulmn, when allowed to be the shape that it was built in. It does indeed absorb shock from top-imposed forces. I think when you step and put the other foot down, the ground exerts a force upwards. This force is absorbed by the bones and muscles of the legs, around and through to the upright, circular pelvis, which rocks (nutates and counternutates alternate sides as you walk) and passes these forces into the sacrum, and up the spine, where the spinal undulations resolve those forces like a snake moving on sand. I think the side to side sway of a woman's hips during walking is an additional sideways dissipation of these forces, maybe to provide extra force resolution during the load carrying of pregnancy?

Another explanation of spinal, sacral and pelvic function is the tensegrity model, which was invented by Buckminster Fuller, of geodesic dome fame.

It is based on the equilateral triangle being the primary stable shape in nature. When you join six equilateral triangles you get a stable hexagon. when you join six equilateral hexagons together in a ring you end up with the space in the middle for an additional identical hexagon. This is the honeycomb pattern, also a stable configuration of close packing in nature.

When you make a triangle 3D you end up with a tetrahedron being the primary, stable 3D figure in nature. Yada yada, check this out for more. Body Tensegrity Explanation .

This is the mechanism of spinal flexibility, strength and stability, even though the spine is clearly a bendy, wobbly thing, and not a straight column. The whole body, including the spinal structure is made up of structual triangles. Check this out, Anatomy Trains . Mind blowing, eh?

That's the end of my tetrahedron rant for today.

Aza, I think your recovery will happen slowly. Once you understand WW you will have faith in your body to overcome this. Your whole body is probably out of whack and it will take time to juggle it all back to how it is meant to be, and to remember this new way automatically, every day when you get out of bed. It is brain training as much as body training. I can see that WW cannot do anything but help it along. It will be very interesting to see how you, as a woman without POP progresses.

Cheers

Louise

that's my brain short-circuiting

one day I will understand that tetrahedron stuff. Lord knows I've tried.

I am going to humbly back away from this thread now, in hopes of preserving the few remaining synapses in my brain

Hi Aza

You probably just need a Bex, a cup of tea and a good lie down. Don't worry dear. I have been observing all this tetrahedron stuff since I was 18 (49 years ago), and studying architecture. It blew me away then, and my observations of nature since then have only increased my sense of awe about the living world.

I suggest that you get six toothpicks and a tube of hobby glue. Glue them into an equilateral tetrahedron, attach it by a thread to a window frame or a pin stuck in your ceiling, and just ponder if for a bit. Why is it the basic stable 3D figure?

When you get the urge to waste some more time, repeat the model until you have 20 tetrahedrons. Then glue them together to make an icosohedron as illustrated in the tensegrity article. Then attach a thread to one of the apices and hang it up, and ponder it for a bit.

Then don't try and noodle on it, just consider what it is, and how it works, and what happens if you change the lengths of some of the sides. You can add other tetrahedrons or icosohedrons onto its surface to create molecule-like structures. Yes, the principle goes right down to molecular level (sorry, TMI!).

Eventually you will see how the levers of the human body operate. The body is only stable because it is made of stable triangles. what happens if you break your femur? A whole heap of triangles collapse and you cannot use your leg until that structural member is mended.

Skip the Bex, enjoy your cuppa and your lie down, and Happy Australia Day.

Ozzie, Ozzie, Ozzie, Oi, Oi, Oi!

Louise

Sorry Gmom and Aza, maybe I am a bit :::bzip:::'ed myself! Don't worry Gmom, your head will be better in a year or so. I remember it well. :-)

Aza, Carlos is spot on.

If you read that book extract about Anatomy Trains you will see that you can get homeostasis in lots of postures. There is not only one standing and one sitting posture. There are many stable postures, and we interact with our environment too. It is all about balance, tension and compression.

The next thing I will get you to build is the model with 6 struts, 2 in each dimension, held in position by continuous, free flowing string, each strut held in space by the four strings emmanating from each of its ends. This one is *really* hard to make until you tighten the last string (which is actually one continuous string, or perhaps 2 - there are four knots on mine), then it firms up miraculously into a tight 3d figure, which is actually an icosohedron with some of the tension members replaced by the struts (don't even *try* to understand this!) . You can rearrange the struts quite a bit, and it is still stable, because shifting the struts alters the length of the associated strings as well. This is the magic of the tetrahedron and its multiple, the icosohedron.

ps Hint: use 13mm reticulation pipe that you have straightened out. Bore 4 holes with a heated skewer in each end of each piece, so the string can flow through freely. That way, the strings cannot escape from the ends of the struts, making you start all over again. The model I made has the strings passing straight across each end, so there is a cross of string in each end. Which order do you thread it? That's for you to find out, cos I cannot remember. ;-) But I think I wrote it all down on a piece of paper - now, where is the paper filed?????

Where do I find all this stuff? Structural design notes and modelmaking exercises from Uni, Christine's early writings, model making and craft work and messing around with sticks and string in an altered state of mind in my youth, pondering the miracle of patterns in nature. Plus, my brain is a bit feral at the best of times, which is probably how I found this darned website in the first place!

Cheers

L

Gotta add that it's probably stemmed from, or supported by, we of the therapy profession. The typical posture we are all encouraged to have is considered "neutral position" between flexion and extension of muscles. Sitting on the coccyx is natural weight bearing that stimulates the muscles of the back to help maintain posture. Thus, it seems like a good idea to sit on the coccyx, for someone who is needing the stimulation to send a chain reactions to the back muscles for posture. For a patient who is already 'unstable' and having to relearn posture control, it may still be the best postion to teach.
Or...it may be that we've gotten it all wrong, and even our gait/sitting balance training needs rethinking. I'm thinking...
Honestly, from my own brief experience with this new position of the pelvis and back to improve my POP, I receive lots more nerve stim through my coccyx. I can't help but activate the back muscles when my pelvis is anteriorly tilted. Hmmm...pretty exciting stuff.
Bless this group,
*:.Oumrayan.:*

Hi Oumrayan

An interesting perspective. You are a physical therapist, I assume? I can see that you are open to different ways of seeing the female body. We are just figuring out what we can from scratch here, using our own experiences, our formally learned knowledge, Christine's research, our own googlings, our logical thought processes and a bit of imagination to help us along. All input it is welcome. Hopefully we will eventually discover some new truths, unencumbered by the blinkers of any one particular discipline.

Just wondering. Re "neutral position between flexion and extension of muscles", which muscles do you choose and which do you leave out of this neutrality. Standing and sitting involve so many muscles, and there are so many stable ways to stand and sit, with some muscles in tension and others relaxed.

Re "Sitting on the coccyx is natural weight bearing...", I cannot sit on my coccyx unless I am seriously slouching. The end of my coxxyx is cushioned away from the seat by my buttocks. Admittedly my coccyx is seriously hooked inwards so may not be typical. Can anyone else actually put weight on the coccyx when sitting? This reasoning of yours is an enticing possibility, but I cannot make it work.

Ouomrayan, I am not trying to pick holes in your post, just trying to assimilate it and apply it to myself.

I don't think anyone really has it completely wrong, but I don't think we have anywhere near the whole story yet, mainly because all the anatomy diagrams and models appear to be taken from cadavers, not living, breathing, vertical standing humans.

Glad you are finding some positive effects from WW posture. Keep thinking and keep posting.

Cheers

Louise

Sorry, didn't mean to take your question so far out on a therapy-bend, it's just something that interests me. I don't know much. Only that wherever nerves innervate a joint, it's prime pickings for weight bearing, which activates muscle groups. Sitting does provide weight bearing to the tailbone, as well as the rest of the spine, which supports sitting posture. This doesn't mean much to you and I, but for a person who is severely deconditioned, activating the muscles through weight bearing gives them the ability to sit upright, whereas, they may have no muscle tone without it. Aaaand I keep going on and on. Sorry again :)
Bless this group,
*:.Oumrayan.:*