Episode 54: Alignment Dogma - Spine

Movement Logic: Strong Opinions, Loosely Held

Welcome to Season 3 and Episode 54 of the Movement Logic podcast! In this episode, Laurel and Sarah discuss dogmatic beliefs and myths around the lower back, upper back, and neck from the yoga, Pilates, and strength training worlds.

You will learn:

• That the spine is made up of over 360 joints so maybe we should move it in all the ways (instead of keep it neutral all the time).
• That people are really bad at determining what position the spine is in just by observing (says research).
• That movement variety and movement preparation > “fixing” someone's alignment in a movement.
• Most yoga teachers never learn how to help their students progressively overload the strength they'd need to actually do the poses they teach.
• Pain causes people to adopt certain postures, but then what happens is people often flip this in their mind and say that it's the person's suboptimal posture that caused them the pain.
• Posture neither causes nor predicts pain (says science.)
• Lumbar flexion is demonized while sitting (don’t schlump) or bending forward (don’t round your back!) but research has been unable to connect flexing the lumbar spine in these scenarios with low back pain or injury.
• Deadlifting and squatting have been fearmongered to people who flex their lumbar spines in these exercises, but laboratory equipment has shown that even when it looks like someone has a neutral spine in these exercises, their lumbar spine is actually quite flexed.
• Any exercise is better than no exercise for low back pain, but no particular exercise is better than any other for low back pain.
• Why thoracic/upper back “hyper” kyphosis (a rounded upper back) is not a pathology.
• That back-bending is probably just flat bending in the thoracic spine.
• That “tech neck” does not predict neck pain.
• The neck is not a crane, and so we cannot apply the same physics to predict how a forward neck will respond to holding the load of the head forward of the body that we’d use to predict how a crane will respond to holding a load forward of its foundation.
• People who force their necks to be neutral have more pain than people with tech neck posture.

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Research mentioned in this episode:

Spinal Degeneration in Asymptomatic Populations

Intervertebral disc herniation: studies on a porcine model

To flex or not to flex? Is there a relationship between lumbar spine flexion during lifting and low back pain?

Arthrogenic neuromusculature inhibition: A foundational investigation of existence in the hip joint

Effects of load on good morning kinematics and EMG activity

Posture and time spent using a smartphone are not correlated with neck pain

Is neck posture subgroup in late adolescence a risk factor for persistent neck pain in young adults?