posture

by

Sit Up Straight, Part Four: Keys to Creativity

I never learned how to type properly. I went from hunt-and-peck to 50 words per minute on my own. I started by staring at the keys. I still stare at the keys.

Let’s be clear about one thing: I have the keyboard memorized. I don’t have to look at it to find the letters. What I have to do is face it. My muscle memory for typing is so strongly tied to looking at the keys, it shuts down if I try to face the screen. I’ve tested a few different positions, with the following results:

Can Type Just Fine:

  1. hunched over the keyboard and staring at it (natural resting state)
  2. hunched but with my eyes purposely unfocused
  3. hunched with my eyes closed
  4. sitting up but with my head still tilted down

Still Works But Slower and with More Mistakes:

  1. sitting up with my head down but eyes closed
  2. facing the screen with eyes unfocused
  3. facing the screen with eyes closed

Get Stuck After Two Sentences:

  1. facing the screen and watching as I type

The profound connection my brain has made to my neck is amazing. Somehow I’ve managed to tie a physical posture, a dexterity-based task, and creative imagination together like a Gordian Knot . When I try to change one, the others shut down.

KeyboardI tried taking online typing courses, hoping I could re-learn by being taught properly. I got better at typing while looking at the screen, and thought fixing my typing posture might be simple. But when I tried keeping that posture during my daily writing session everything fell apart. I couldn’t do it. I would write a sentence or two and my brain would just stop. Normally I can write an entire post in one sitting without stopping. The words flow naturally and uncritically and I can come back to edit later. But when I was typing properly I found my internal editor could not shut up.

After much trial and error I determined the problem. When I type hunched over and facing the keys, I know the words because I am listening to them. Some voice in the back of my head starts talking, and the fingers follow. This is probably why I have such a problem with typing the same words twice or replacing words I mean to say with ones that look or sound similar. My fingers are just playing catch-up, like a personal assistant following my brain around and scribbling furious dictation.

But when I watch the words on the screen, I hear them twice. I hear them first in my head when they come to me, and again as my eyes read them on the screen. There’s an echo. Watching what I’m typing is like having that assistant quietly repeat everything I say right after I say it. It’s maddening.

So far I’ve been focusing on just losing the hunch. I still look at the keys, but I focus on keeping a soft tilt in my neck instead of rolling my whole back over. When I’m doing really well I’ll try to soften my focus and reenforce the fact that I don’t need to see the keys. This doesn’t seem to slow me down, but I keep unconsciously re-focusing my eyes and having to purposely bring the softness back.

In addition to the typing techniques, I looked up a few stretches designed for office workers who hunch over their keyboards. When I remember to do my stretches they seem to work well, but the effects are temporary and I always forget about them. I even tried putting the stretches on my task list at work, but I keep glossing over the task. At least I can soft-focus with some things.

The more research I do in my goal to correct my posture, the more I hear that general stretching and exercising are where I need to start. I’m still working on moving more, though it’s hard. I’ve had to resort to finding more challenges and schedules in order to keep myself motivated to exercise. Sometimes I look back with longing at my college days majoring in drama and dance, when exercise was a part of my grade and half my classes required me to wear yoga pants. I used to eat giant cinnamon rolls for breakfast without gaining any weight. I probably had terrible posture but I never noticed. My calves looked amazing. Sometimes I find my mind drifting off and I hear a familiar tune I’m finally starting to understand…

by

Sit Up Straight, Part Three: Ariel Yoga

Not long after I published my first post on learning to correct my posture, a friend told me I should try Ariel Yoga. She said the inverted postures allowed your spine to hang freely and your head to be “loose and bowling-ball-y.” She said she left the classes feeling taller and straighter, and suggested it might improve my walking posture. There was a studio she’d been going to that was only a few minutes’ walk from my apartment. I was sold.

The first class was expectedly awkward. Like any form of yoga, I spent my first day turning my neck around trying to look at the other people and confirm I was doing everything right. Ariel yoga is done using a large silk hammock to support and alter typical yoga stretches and postures. The hammocks are mostly opaque, but just see-through enough that if you press your face against them you can still see what the teacher is doing. We started class by sitting in our hammocks and doing basic stretches normally meant for the floor. Sometimes the hammock versions seemed less helpful than the standard poses, while others were leagues better in the hammock. I’ve never known a pigeon pose to stretch my hips quite as well as a pigeon pose suspended two feet off the ground.

Ariel YogaAfter a few starter stretches to get us comfortable with the hammocks, the inversions began. The most basic is called the Spiderman, in which you hang upside-down with the soles of the feet together and the knees bowed out. You know, like Spiderman. The first moment I did it I felt the effects. Because the hammock holds you up by the pelvis and not the waist or the legs, nothing is straining or yanking. Your entire spine is allowed to relax against the pull of gravity, all the way up to your tailbone. It was amazing. I felt like my lumbar spine was massaging itself.

We did a few more inversions that first day, and a few more stretches. Like any yoga class, we ended with the savasana relaxation pose. It was so amazing to be floating in the air with every part of the body evenly supported by a silk hammock. While I still I wasn’t sold on the concept, it was worth trying again. Besides, I’d bought the beginner’s two-class pass.

My second class made more sense and involved less peeking through the hammock to see what I was doing wrong. I was still in the beginner level, full of students just as clueless as myself. I already felt more confident in the hammock, and was able to try a few things I hadn’t done the first time. I bought another set of three classes, and started to move on to the All Levels classes. I did a Flying Dog series that was pleasant murder on my hip flexors. I did a one-legged balancing Sun Salute that made all other Sun Salutes seem like child’s play. And in each class I got to flip upside-down and feel the weight of my entire existence empty out of my coccyx like an hour glass. It was great.

Unfortunately, Ariel Yoga didn’t seem to have any direct effect on my posture. I still slouched, even on the short walk home from class. I did notice some positive, indirect effects. I was stronger, and there was more movement in my life. Holding myself up at the computer was getting just a bit easier, because my body didn’t feel so stuck in itself. The individual postures and inversions in Ariel Yoga didn’t matter as much as the fact that I was exercising again. I was building muscle again. I had been trying to strengthen my glutes and abs after reading about Anterior Pelvic Tilt, but my yoga practice was working out my whole body. Being inverted felt good on my back while it was happening, but the real benefit was the ab strength I used to get back up.

After a couple weeks of classes I decided that Ariel Yoga wasn’t a complete cure for my posture, but it was a fun, easy, and most importantly convenient way to increase my strength and flexibility. I loved that it took less than 10 minutes for me to get dressed and walk to the studio, and that it was challenging but never made me sweat enough to require a shower. Then I heard the news. My precious studio was moving to “a great new space” in Belltown. I’d either have to pay for the bus or pay for parking, and both would require at least a 20 minute travel commitment to ensure I got to class on time. My perfect little yoga situation was gone.

And so the search continues.

by

Sit Up Straight Part Two: Anterior Pelvic Tilt

Here’s a fun fact: it turns out fixing years of terrible posture is complicated.

I told you a month ago about my big posture realization and my resolution to fix it. After a lot of research and trial and error, I’m realizing that it’s not enough to say I have bad posture, because there are a lot of ways one can have bad posture. So rather than throw everything at you all at once, I’m splitting this subject up into several posts, each on a different problem that I’m researching. Today’s topic is:

Anterior Pelvic Tilt

The Problem:

At the top and front of your hips are two bony protrusions that signal the edge or your hip bones (the iliac crest). Below them and in the center is your pubic bone. If the way you’re sitting right now these three bones form a triangle that’s perpendicular to the floor, congratulations. Your pelvis is just fine. If your triangle is tilted with the iliac crests further forward than the pubic bone, then you’re in Anterior Pelvic Tilt.

The Cause:

Muscles can become tight and short by being kept in a shortened position too often. So if the muscles on the front of the hips are shortened, they are inclined to constantly pull your thighs and belly closer together to keep themselves shortened. This is most commonly caused by sitting too much.

In addition to shortening muscles, sitting all day can force some muscles to start slacking while other muscles are overworked. If your abs and glutes aren’t doing their fair share, the back muscles might try to compensate by working too hard in ways they weren’t designed for. You end up tight and stretched and weak and tense in all the wrong places, and the more you reenforce the position with sitting the more your body fights to stay in it. After a while your pelvis tilts every time you sit, then when you stand, then when you walk, and eventually the tilt is there all the time.

The Treatment:

To fix Anterior Pelvic Tilt you have to retrain the muscles through both strengthening and stretching exercises. The primary muscles to stretch are the psoas (which runs along the front of the hip) and the quads (the front of the thighs). Just reading about Anterior Pelvic Tilt makes my hips feel like they’re encased in cement, so I’ve decided to stretch all the muscles in the hip area. My favorite video for this is from The Yoga Solution with Tara Styles. It’s only five postures so you can do it really fast, but you can linger in them for a long time if you want to get a deeper stretch.

The next step will be to strengthen my glutes and abs, two muscles that should be doing more work than they are currently. I haven’t set up a routine yet, but unsurprisingly there are a million suggestions online for how to tone your butt and give you great abs. I’ll probably start with the basics like lunges, leg lifts, and crunches, and maybe move on to others as the routine gets boring.

After the first post a lot of people told me they also struggle with good posture. So, do any of you think you might have Anterior Pelvic Tilt? Is your tilt bad enough to join me for several weeks of bicycle crunches?