Gravity Gravitas

or the gravity of gravity

Now you may be worrying about the amount and kind of food you are eating. Will it be healthy enough to get you through life without illnesses? Or about the amount of exercise you are doing. Will it be enough to be able to function until the ripe old age of 90? High aims and probably worth worrying about a little as the quality of life is dependent on our functionality throughout. 

You may think this is enough to worry about but may I be so mean and throw in another stinker. If you are a new mum or about to be a mum you may want to keep this jewel of information for a time when your children are old enough to dress themselves, get their own food and wipe their own bottoms and you have the capacity again to worry about something else. 

The one and very important other thing you need to worry about is gravity. "Why is that?" you may ask as you can't really do anything about gravity. Well that is were you are wrong. Food is ingested only several times a day and the body has many mechanisms to prevent yourself from poisoning and harming yourself by accident. Exercise may be good for you or may not but either way there is a limited amount of time you spend running, walking, exercising (maybe 7 hours a week i.e. 7 out of 172 hours?), but gravity is acting on your body ALL THE TIME. While your exercising and eating and sleeping and sitting and pooing … It will pull you towards the centre of the earth if you like it or not. It will pull on you, your body parts and each individual cell, the food you are eating, the clothes you are wearing, the bag you are carrying. OK, so far but were is the problem?

Human have evolved to present themselves to gravity in a variety of manners, sitting, standing, walking, but mostly upright, eyes level with the horizon. To be able to live life upright we slowly evolved a complicated set of muscles, tendons, bones that is able to balance on two feet and is trained to stay/live in this position by constant practice, e.g. standing/walking developed over thousands and hundred of thousands of years. Now in the last 100 years, for many of us our life style has change dramatically decreasing the amount of standing and walking. Where are we headed for next in evolution? 

Hmm interesting but where do I come in? In the short term, the way we present ourselves to gravity influences the functionality of our body. If you carry your head forward from your shoulders, gravity will pull on it and as there is nothing underneath it to hold it up, muscles in the neck and upper back have to constantly pull it up and back (neck pain anyone?) If the head is balanced plumb over the shoulders the bones (vertebrae in the neck and back) carrying the weight and muscles are only used to support the spine not carry all the weight itself. This applies to every part and muscle of the body. Out of alignment, muscles and bones not designed to carry weight and work against gravity to keep us upright are called to work and fail over time as they weren't designed to do the job. 

But gravity doesn't stop there. Our body is programmed to make use of gravity, e.g. when we go to the bathroom, give birth or when we eat food. These processes carried out without the use of gravity put a huge amount of strain on the body. Giving birth on your back is a lot harder than all fours and so is menstruating when sitting with our pelvis tucked under or lying down for large amounts of time. The body has to push against gravity instead of with it. Food is designed to slide down the oesophagus, but with a head that is forward from the shoulders, the very few muscles in the neck/oesophagus will need to push the food back first before it can slide (cause for suffocation when eating).

Gravity acts all the time on all of your body. Knowing where you should be in space and how to best present yourself to gravity to avoid and reduce many illnesses caused due to wear and tear and mis-alignment (including CV disease, diabetes II and osteoporosis) is well worth some investigation. If you are already at a stage of pain, find out if a simple (but maybe note easy) readjustment to how you present yourself to gravity can help (sometimes almost instantly) before going for surgery or medication. 

Alignment is the new worry, but luckily gravity applies to everyone the same and the solution is the same for everyone - it is based on basic mechanical principles. It is a simple solution if not easy. Regular walking and living in alignment will provide you with a metabolic change, which will help with weight control and provide all the exercise you need to stay healthy. So no more worrying about exercise. See I am not really mean, all I have done is replaced your worry about exercise with worrying about alignment. 

If you are interested in learning more about alignment work contact me here or on Facebook about one to one classes. I teach 25 alignment marker that are the easiest to control and have the largest impact on overall health. They classes are based on alignment work by Biomechanist Katy Bowman. For a manual on how the body and body alignment works have a look at Katy's Wholebody Restorative Exercise course, her blog Katy says and her book "Every Woman's Guide to foot pain relief". Otherwise, see if you can find a very good physiotherapist or chiropractor who can tell you when you are neutrally aligned - and not just tell you how you should look when aligned but actually gives you concrete points of alignment (bony markers) to look out for based on biomechanics. 

ALIGNED WE WILL CONQUER GRAVITY - or at least live with it in peace until gravity takes us to our grave.