A Body in Motion

Ever since I read Stuart McGill’s Back Mechanic book, I’ve been paying close attention to my posture. To no one’s surprise, least of all my own, it is not stellar. I slouch when I stand, prop my neck up too far when I’m laying down, and bend through the spine when I bend down at all.

In short, I’ve been treating my spine like a bendy straw, which is perhaps a sub-optimal technique. Sure, my spine can move like a bendy straw when it needs to. But are bendy straws really designed to withstand a century of daily use? If not, perhaps I should give my poor spine some help.

One of the reasons I became enamored with the book is that I have long suspected that my posture has contributed to my spine problems. But I couldn’t figure out what exactly I was doing wrong or how exactly to fix it.

While I’ve known my posture was poor for as long as I could remember, I didn’t start to appreciate the role it could play in injury until 2019. Somewhere in 2018, I started to notice pain shooting down my triceps and into my forearms whenever I worked out. And no matter what I did, the pain would stubbornly return.

I tried modifying my exercises, altering some and swapping out others. I tried lowering the amount of weight. I added a better warm-up. I checked my form. I tried NSAIDs and tendonitis braces. Nothing seemed to help.

Then, during a visit to the Mayo Clinic in February 2019, I visited their patient education center and saw a cutaway medical model of the human arm. Having nothing better to do, I studied its anatomy, and took particular note of a white line running from shoulder to wrist. Hmm, that’s interesting, I thought, and checked the legend. I was looking at the ulnar nerve. Its path mapped pretty well with where I felt pain. Maybe there was something to that?

Health-wise, my focus was still on my troublesome sciatic nerve, so I shelved the arm pain until a few months later when I decided to stop guessing and go to a doctor.

Since I mainly noticed this pain when I worked out, I visited a very kind sports medicine doctor. She asked me a few questions, listened to mine, and sent me away with a prescription for prednisone.

I took the medication as directed, and it did actually seem to help. My arm pain was perhaps 60% better. Which was good enough for me to go back to ignoring it.

For a month or two, that is, and then it became increasingly clear that the steroids had temporarily masked the problem, but had not really fixed it. Slowly but surely, the arm pain crept back.

I gave more thought to that ulnar nerve, looking up illustrations online and tracing its course up through the shoulder and into the cervical spine. At the same time, I kept replaying something an old acquaintance (who was perhaps the fittest person I’ve known in real life) had said, “It’s not the way you pick up the weight in the gym that hurt you. It’s the way you picked up pencils off the floor for forty years.”

So I wondered, what if my form in the gym was fine? What if my form in the rest of the world was crap?

Because I couldn’t sit down, I spent much of my at-home working time laying on the couch. I hadn’t – and still haven’t, for that matter – figured out a way to work on my computer without bending my neck at an unhealthy angle. But I did make an effort to stand up straight when I stood. While walking, I imagined a string attached to the top of my head, pulling my neck up. It felt odd, walking that way. I felt stiff and unnatural, like a coat on a wire hanger. My eyes were drawn to the ground. It was a posture that might work on the open prairie, but not in this urban jungle where so many points of interest were above my head.

But the thing was, it worked. It didn’t take long – a week? Two? I don’t remember exactly, but the pain slipped away. It would lace back through me sometimes, like a snake licking my elbow with a venom tongue. But it was now an occasional annoyance and easy to regain control of.

It was odd, and a bit annoying, I thought, that the sports medicine doctor who examined me had never checked my posture. Looking back, the problem was so obvious. But she never asked what I did or how I moved. Instead, she had given me a prescription for steroids and sent me on my way.

I began thinking in a serious way about how a similar misalignment of bones and muscles might be causing my sciatic nerve issues. I tried to stand straighter. I tried to pull my shoulders back. I tried to support the curve in my lumbar spine when I lay down.

The effects were less dramatic. In fact, I would call them non-existent. I wondered if maybe I just didn’t have the tools to understand what I was doing wrong. Perhaps I was fine while standing and walking (which would explain the comparative lack of pain then), but there was something about my dynamic movements that was slowly chipping away at an internal weakness.

And so, when I read Back Mechanic, I had an aha! moment. It was like someone told me a word that was on the tip of my tongue, but which I had never learned. Perhaps my understanding had not been wrong, just incomplete. Maybe it wasn’t my walking, or even my working, that was the problem. Maybe it was the way I put on my socks and stuck the sheet pan in the oven.

Finally, I had a book that did not pretend I was a medical mannequin. My life is not a series of static poses. Rather, I’m a body in motion, and I am constantly transitioning between one pose and another.

I have long been aware that some of my motions are awkward. I have moments – such as when I’m putting on my socks – that aren’t painful, but that do give me the sense that my structural integrity is being compromised. The motions felt awkward and unnatural, but I couldn’t figure out how to make them better. Reading Back Mechanic gave me a few ideas.

I’ve been practicing what McGill calls spine hygiene, and what I might call “good posture in action.” Instilling new habits is never an automatic process, and I still have to make a conscious effort to move properly. Sometimes, I’m not sure that I’m doing it right. Even when I’m reasonably confident in my motions, they require practice before they’re committed to muscle memory. I am not great at remembering spine hygiene when I wake up in the middle of the night, or when I sneeze.

Still, as long as I have a script to follow, I can practice my lines. Some frequent motions are becoming more natural. I lunge to put on my shoes. Putting the dishes away feels less risky.

Time will tell if good spine hygiene is enough to move the dial on my sciatica. But if I can stave off any further back problems it will be effort well spent. And maybe, finally, I’ll be able to put on my socks without wondering how many bends my straw has got left.