This is pretty cool:

by Sano Creative Design Lab

See Full post at: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1942313546/the-worlds-best-laptop-stand-the-apex-revolution?ref=fundedtoday

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Alexander Technique Classes, Lessons, Workshops by Brett Hershey in Los Angeles Burbank at www.alexandertechla.com

The Alexander Technique is an excellent solution to and the best prevention of Text Neck!:

Original Article: http://www.sun-gazing.com/teen-girl-feeling-intense-neck-pain-parents-horrified-doctors-diagnosed/

Kids theses days! Some of them are spending up to 5,000 hours a year reading texts and browsing online, all while hunched over looking down at their cell phones and laptops. On average, a person spends around 2-4 hours a day crooked over looking down at their personal devices, and young adults spend even more time than that, logging hours at a time in one sitting. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a computer, tablet, or cell phone screen, because they all require the user to angle their head down, bending their necks in the process. This relatively new behavior is leading them to develop what is now called “text neck,” an uncomfortable and chronic pain in the neck area. Text neck occurs when the proper and normal curve in the cervical spine becomes reduced and in some cases it may even move forward. Ideally a person wants to have a 40 degree curve in their spine, but x-rays of text neck sufferers show curves so drastic that they actually have reversed and bend forward in the opposite direction. This type of reversed spinal curvature used to take years to develop and was only seen in older and elderly adults.

More and more sufferers of text neck are showing up at doctors offices nationwide seeking relief for their aches and pains. They are also increasingly younger and setting themselves up for a variety of possible problems that go beyond general neck pain, including shoulder tension, migraines, and even numbness and tingling sensations down their arms.

In order to correct the problem sufferers require physical therapy, trips to the chiropractor, and lifestyle changes. To reverse damage, professionals use head weights, shoulder exercises, resistance bands, and adjustments to recondition and strengthen the patient’s shoulder, neck, and back muscles. For people reading this and others who may be concerned about text neck, there are less drastic things that can be incorporated into your everyday routine to avoid it. Firstly, it’s important to sit up straight and stop looking down at phones and devices. Instead, hold your phone up higher so that it’s right in front of your face and eyes. There is even an app available that blinks a red light warning you to raise it higher, in order to help people remember to elevate their phones. Also stand up more often throughout the day and stretch, roll your shoulders, and move around. Just by being aware and conscious of what you are doing, and for how long, can help you avoid tech neck and all the uncomfortable aches and pains that come with it.

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Alexander Technique Classes, Lessons, Workshops by Brett Hershey in Los Angeles Burbank at www.alexandertechla.com

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/adrian-farrell/ergonomic-chairs-myths_b_7877528.html

by

 Adrian Farrell 

Alexander Technique Teacher with a corporate background

Cynical click-bait headline aside, I’ll cut to the chase, they don’t work. There, I said it.

But let’s look at why that is, there are three main reasons:

1) You’ll think that it’s supposed to take responsibility for you. This is a commonly held view, and it seems the more expensive the chair is, the more likely you will fall into this trap. Harking back to my previous blog, you have to remember that a chair is an inanimate object, it is incapable of “doing” anything, let alone taking responsibility for you. For sure, a good ergonomic chair will provide what we call in the Alexander Technique a “mechanical advantage“, but it wont be providing any guarantees. You need to provide your own guarantees.

2) There’s a strong chance that you will adjust it to your current conception of comfort or habitual use, i.e. to support your current levels of collapse and effectively ingraining them further.

3) This is probably the most pernicious of the three, you’ll bring your old habits to it. Even if the chair is set up perfectly to offer you the greatest mechanical advantage, the habitual way you use yourself will fight against this advantage. Have you ever felt that a well set up ergonomic chair leaves you feeling more tired than a regular chair?

                            Image used with permission Baloo, Rex May

Frankly, a piano stool is as ergonomic as a chair needs to be. You don’t see piano players on stage, or at home, with fancy ergonomic chairs. In fact, I’m sat on a piano stool as I’m writing this! Yes a piano player tends to be more dynamic in their movement, but it’s their mental engagement rather than the physicality you could learn a little something from.

If you redefine sitting as standing on your bottom then you can see why a firm flat surface is all that is required, and I promise to write more on the specifics of sitting in a later blog post.

When you consider the cost of ergonomic chairs, and they don’t come cheap, it seems strange to me to want to spend all that money when an Alexander Technique teacher can teach you to sit well in any chair, freeing you to sit anywhere with ease and poise, for less! But that’s just me. I guess it’s usually employers who are forking out for expensive furniture, but given my points above, if you are an employer, it might be more cost effective to educate your staff rather than the furniture.

I was talking to a client the other day who has back pain issues, and she was telling me a story of how when a friend had offered her a chair and asked which one she’d like. She replied “It’s not the chair, but how you sit in it”. Couldn’t have put it better myself!

Getting slightly away from my above points, have you noticed that schools don’t have ergonomic chairs? Well, this is actually a very sorry state of affairs, because children are not at “work” they’re not covered by Occupational Health and Safety rules. School chairs are frequently designed to slope backwards so that they stack more easily. What’s so bad about this? If the surface you’re sat on slopes backwards, your pelvis will naturally want to tilt back, causing your lower back to round resulting in slouching. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination. It’s actually an anti-ergonomic chair! So much so that teachers, who are at work, are advised not to sit on them by Occupational Health and Safety.

Alexander Technique teacher Richard Brennan has started a petition to ban backwards sloping chairs, please sign it if you are concerned about your child’s welfare. With more and more careers being sedentary our kids need all the help they can get before they reach the workplace with all the demands on the body that creates.

“No, what we need to do is not to educate our school furniture, but to educate our children. Give a child the ability to adapt himself within reasonable limits to his environment, and he will not suffer discomfort, nor develop bad physical habits, whatever chair or form you give him to sit upon” – F.M. Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance.

This blog was originally posted here, where I also talk about my personal experience of some well known ergonomic chairs, and surprisingly, find one I actually like!

The Alexander Technique has been clinically proven for back pain via an NHS funded, gold standard randomised trial. It was performed by Southampton University and their results were published in the British Medical Journal.

World wide resource for the Society of Teachers of The Alexander Technique: www.stat.org.uk

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Alexander Technique Classes, Lessons, Workshops by Brett Hershey in Los Angeles Burbank at www.alexandertechla.com

Interesting article about posture.

It’s accurate in some ways, but misses the causality of the difference in the spines. It says the reason is that they have strong and we have weak abdominals (core strength). 

However, toddlers and young children can hardly do a sit-up, yet they have fantastic use and beautifully elongated spines. 

And millions of Americans are doing crunches and other core strengthening work everyday and  yet their backs are still truncated and hurting. It’s because of HOW we are using ourselves, both during those exercises and (more importantly) the rest of the day.

 Article below. Listen to the NPR story here:

Back pain is a tricky beast. Most Americans will at some point have a problem with their backs. And for an unlucky third, treatments won’t work, and the problem will become chronic.

Believe it or not, there are a few cultures in the world where back pain hardly exists. One indigenous tribe in central India reported essentially none. And the discs in their backs showedlittle signs of degeneration as people aged.

i

Many ancient statues, such as this one from Greece, display a J-shaped spine. The statue’s back is nearly flat until the bottom, where it curves so the buttocks are behind the spine.

Courtesy of Esther Gokhale/Gerard Mackworth-Young

An acupuncturist in Palo Alto, Calif., thinks she has figured out why. She has traveled around the world studying cultures with low rates of back pain — how they stand, sit and walk. Now she’s sharing their secrets with back pain sufferers across the U.S.

About two decades ago, Esther Gokhalestarted to struggle with her own back after she had her first child. “I had excruciating pain. I couldn’t sleep at night,” she says. “I was walking around the block every two hours. I was just crippled.”

Gokhale had a herniated disc. Eventually she had surgery to fix it. But a year later, it happened again. “They wanted to do another back surgery. You don’t want to make a habit out of back surgery,” she says.

This time around, Gokhale wanted to find a permanent fix for her back. And she wasn’t convinced Western medicine could do that. So Gokhale started to think outside the box. She had an idea: “Go to populations where they don’t have these huge problems and see what they’re doing.”

EDITOR’S ADD NOTE, Wednesday, June 10:

So Gokhale studied findings from anthropologists, such as Noelle Perez-Christiaens, who analyzed postures of indigenous populations. And she studied physiotherapy methods, such as the Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais Method.

And the original post continues…

Then over the next decade, Gokhale went to cultures around the world that live far away from modern life. She went to the mountains in Ecuador, tiny fishing towns in Portugal and remote villages of West Africa.

“I went to villages where every kid under age 4 was crying because they were frightened to see somebody with white skin — they’d never seen a white person before,” she says.

Gokhale took photos and videos of people who walked with water buckets on their heads, collected firewood or sat on the ground weaving, for hours.

“I have a picture in my book of these two women who spend seven to nine hours everyday, bent over, gathering water chestnuts,” Gokhale says. “They’re quite old. But the truth is they don’t have a back pain.”

She tried to figure out what all these different people had in common. The first thing that popped out was the shape of their spines. “They have this regal posture, and it’s very compelling.”

And it’s quite different than American spines.

If you look at an American’s spine from the side, or profile, it’s shaped like the letter S. It curves at the top and then back again at the bottom.

But Gokhale didn’t see those two big curves in people who don’t have back pain. “That S shape is actually not natural,” she says. “It’s a J-shaped spine that you want.”

In fact, if you look at drawings from Leonardo da Vinci — or a Gray’s Anatomy book from 1901 — the spine isn’t shaped like a sharp, curvy S. It’s much flatter, all the way down the back. Then at the bottom, it curves to stick the buttocks out. So the spine looks more like the letter J.

i

Healthy spines in the Western world: The J-shaped spine is often seen in photographs from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Library of Congress

“The J-shaped spine is what you see in Greek statues. It’s what you see in young children. It’s good design,” Gokhale says.

So Gokhale worked to get her spine into the J shape. And gradually her back pain went away.

Then Gokhale realized she could help others. She developed a set of exercises, wrote a book and set up a studio in downtown Palo Alto.

Now her list of clients is impressive. She’s helped YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and Matt Drudge of theDrudge Report. She has given classes at Google, Facebook and companies across the country. In Silicon Valley, she’s known as the “posture guru.”

Each year, doctors in the Bay Area refer hundreds of patients to Gokhale. One of them is Dr. Neeta Jain, an internist at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. She puts Gokhale’s method in the same category as Pilates and yoga for back pain. And it doesn’t bother her that the method hasn’t been tested in a clinical trial.

“If people are finding things that are helpful, and it’s not causing any harm, then why do we have to wait for a trial?” Jain asked.

But there’s still a big question looming here: Is Gokhale right? Have people in Western cultures somehow forgotten the right way to stand?

Scientists don’t know yet, says Dr. Praveen Mummaneni, a neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco’s Spine Center. Nobody has done a study on traditional cultures to see why some have lower rates of back pain, he says. Nobody has even documented the shape of their spines.

“I’d like to go and take X-rays of indigenous populations and compare it to people in the Western world,” Mummaneni says. “I think that would be helpful.”

But there’s a whole bunch of reasons why Americans’ postures — and the shape of their spines — may be different than those of indigenous populations, he says. For starters, Americans tend to be much heavier.

“If you have a lot of fat built up in the belly, that could pull your weight forward,” Mummaneni says. “That could curve the spine. And people who are thinner probably have less curvature” — and thus a spine shaped more like J than than an S.

Americans are also much less active than people in traditional cultures, Mummaneni says. “I think the sedentary lifestyle promotes a lack of muscle tone and a lack of postural stability because the muscles get weak.”

Everyone knows that weak abdominal muscles can cause back pain. In fact, Mummaneni says, stronger muscles might be the secret to Gokhale’s success.

In other words, it’s not that the J-shaped spine is the ideal one — or the healthiest. It’s what goes into making the J-shaped spine that matters: “You have to use muscle strength to get your spine to look like a J shape,” he says.

So Gokhale has somehow figured out a way to teach people to build up their core muscles without them even knowing it. “Yes, I think that’s correct,” Mummaneni says. “You’re not going to be able to go from the S- to the J-shaped spine without having good core muscle strength. And I think that’s key here.”

So indigenous people around the world don’t have a magic bullet for stopping back pain. They’ve just got beefy abdominal muscles, and their lifestyle helps to keep them that way, even as they age.

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Alexander Technique Classes, Lessons, Workshops by Brett Hershey in Los Angeles Burbank at www.alexandertechla.com

You’ve probably seen articles like this one recently in the news:

There’s no doubt that, due to technology and the proliferation of the automobile, we are sitting more than ever before. Increasing number of jobs require us to be in front of a computer and commuting traffic seems to just be getting worse.

And I agree that the human body is made for movement, and therefore prolonged sitting, or immobility is deleterious to our health, as is smoking.

However, what I see missing in this analysis is HOW WE ARE SITTING. Sitting is far from a uniform activity. There is a wide range of positions, postures and ways people use chairs. Or in Alexander Technique terms, there’s a wide range of ways people use themselves while sitting. Just take a look around the office, cafeteria or restaurant.

Note the photos below. There’s a big difference between how she’s sitting in the first photo and how she’s sitting in the second, or even the third.

To extend the metaphor: there’s a lot more smoking in the second and third than in the first, where she’s balancing her head on top of her spine, and her spine on top of her sits bones.

I am a strong advocated for  taking breaks, standing (and lowering) desks, treadmill desks, nap rooms, working on a laptop in bed, walking meetings, improving diet, fitbreaks, etc. They are generally good for us.

Yet, we also need to pay attention to how we are sitting and doing all these activities.

For example, yoga sounds soothing and perfectly safe, yet I’ve worked with a yoga student who ripped her sternum because a teacher pushed her too much in class. On the other hand, Crossfit seems dangerous, yet I’ve seen some Crossfitters who have never been injured (and their use was impeccable).

So how are we supposed to sit? Before taking Alexander lessons, many of my students would catch themselves slouching or hunching as they sit. They then would lurch up into a braced military pose, which lasted about five minutes. Defeated, they then collapse back down.

So again, how are we supposed to sit? How are we supposed to do anything?

That’s what Alexander Technique lessons are for: to remind us how we are designed to sit, stand and move – in any human activity –  in accordance with our architecture, so that we’re taxing our body and mind as little as possible.

Try one ; )