Pain Free Performance — Posture Alignment Therapy

Live Pain Free!

Posture Alignment

Dr. Greg Gelburd Discovers Egoscue at Pain Free Performance!

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DR. GELBURD DISCOVERS PAIN FREE PERFORMANCE!

It’s an early morning in Haiti and I’m doing an airbench before clinic. My eyes are closed and I’m concentrating on Cindy Meyers’ words: “push down on your heels and push your lower back into the wall and hold for two minutes”.  I look like a man sitting in a chair without the chair under me. This is a small pause before my very busy medical clinic begins.

How did I come to airbenches in Haiti, doing these and other  postures described in “Pain Free” by Pete Egoscue to help resolve issues in my foot, my lower back and my shoulder? I’ve written this little story to describe to you how postural therapy has rescued me and why I believe many others in Charlottesville would benefit from some time spent with the people at Pain Free Performance where they treat pain with postural alignment.

Seven months ago, I was faced with several muscular skeletal problems that were not going away, the result of one bike collision with a car, 45 years of running with the wrong stride and a slowly aging 60 year old body. My pain was so severe a year ago I hiked down a Glacier National Park mountain backwards for two miles because I couldn’t come down on my right heel, it felt like a knife jabbing my foot! The bears thought I was just wacky but at least they stayed away.  I sought out help from Cindy Meyers, Mackie Boblette, and Kat Draego at Pain Free Performance. In February I saw Cindy for an evaluation and she photographed my body from several angles against a grid background. She showed me where my shoulders and hip bones were off balance, and then how my head was too far forward on my neck and how my gut was not so much full of extra hamburgers as I thought, but it protruded a little because of the lack of curvature in my middle back. She watched me walk and perform some stretches and positions so she could evaluate the way my body moves and from that she gave me a specific regimen to begin to re-balance my body.

Cindy, Mackie and Kat are Postural Alignment Specialists certified by Egoscue University.  Developed over forty years ago by anatomical functionalist Pete Egoscue,  this postural alignment therapy focuses on realigning the entire body. So even though my heels were giving me fits, the fact that my head, shoulders and hips were off kilter is what was causing the overall dysfunction and pain in my feet.

Every two weeks I have spent an hour with Cindy and Mackie for re-evaluation and a new program prescription as my body changes. I spend about 15-20 minutes each day performing these simple but deeply effective isometric postures, strengthening and balancing my skeleton and muscles. The results are amazing! Who knew? Even a vegan diet couldn’t get rid of my gut, but not only is that disappearing but my heel pain is pretty much gone! I’m back to running after a two year hiatus and my foot strike is now mid foot not heel. I’ve even gained an extra half inch back in my height with my spine better supported!

Now my family, office staff and Haitian friends are accustomed to my  airbenches, cat-dog postures and standing shoulder shrugs. I am continuing to make these postures a part of my routine before my work day, before running and other workouts. This is an incredible team of caring and gifted health workers. Their skills and their motivation will keep you going in the right direction until you are as healed as you want to be.

Dr. Greg Gelburd

 

 

 

HERNIATED DISC

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HERNIATED DISC

 Just the other day, one of my favorite clients called me to cancel her appointment.  She told me she bent over to pick up her purse, got a little twinge of pain in her back and then could not stand back up!  All she could do was lay flat on her back.  Her husband took her to the emergency room where she was diagnosed with a herniated disc.  She was sent home with muscle relaxers and after seeing her physician the next day she was advised to rest with no exercise.  Sounds scary, doesn’t it?

 What is a herniated disk anyway?  Our spine is designed so that each vertebra is stacked one on top of the other.  There is a fibrous disc that acts much like a washer in between each vertebra that helps cushion the space between the bones as we move, bend, twist and stretch.  If the spine is pulled out of alignment, then the pressure will cause the disc to squish out to one side pressing on the nerve – the herniated disc.

 My client is fit, has been exercising all her life with few exceptions and had never had this happen before – what could have caused it?  After we talked awhile, she explained that she had been in the car for two days prior coming home from a fabulous vacation.  She hadn’t been doing her e-cises on vacation and was feeling the effects – a little sore and tight everywhere!  The fact that she had not been keeping her body in alignment with her menu of e-cises and had been stuck in that misalignment for two days in the car, caused her muscles to really tighten up.  When she bent over to pick up her purse, the tight muscles pulled her vertebra to one side, causing the disc to protrude and press on her nerve.  Ouch!

 The doctor’s prescription for a muscle relaxer really helped my client out of her initial spasm.  We certainly understand the “rest and no exercise” advice too, however, Egoscue e-cises are not the same typical back stretches or strengthening done other places.  That’s what is so great about Egoscue!  There are many resting positions in the e-cise repertoire that can help facilitate getting the spine back into optimal alignment without stress or strain involved with normal “exercise”.  These e-cises dovetail well the doctor’s advice and can actually speed up the process of getting back to normal.  My client came on in for her appointment and we gave her some very simple resting positions including the following that I want to share with all of you.

Click below on the Static Back link to watch the video.  It’s  a simple resting position that uses gravity to gently encourage the spine to re-align by easing the muscles out of spasm!

Static Back

 

 

Do You Have Knee Pain?

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Do You Have Knee Pain?

Do you have knee pain?  One of them is stiff and aches in the morning. Or you get knee pain going up stairs or walking downhill. You don’t cross your legs anymore because that knee hurts.

So, you ask your doctor about it and she says that extra ten pounds puts that much more pressure on the knee. Or maybe, she says it just goes with getting older. My question is this:  how come that extra weight or age only affects one knee??? The answer is: because your knee pain is not the problem—your knee pain is the symptom but the problem is your alignment!

If you stand in front of a full length mirror, look at how your hips, knees and feet line up. Are your hips level?  Do your knees point straight ahead? How about your feet? Do they splay out or point straight ahead?  Probably one foot points out more than the other. If your feet and knees point in any other direction than straight ahead, then at some point you will get knee pain.

It is really very simple; the knee is a hinge joint so if the feet and or knees point off to the side, you’re putting a torque or twist at that joint. With every step you take, you’re asking that hinge joint to take on a twist under a load that it is not designed to handle. A couple of years of that twisting and you’ve got knee pain.

So, they’ll tell you to lose some weight and next they’ll want to replace the knee. I just saw an ad on TV about a new knee replacement—to sell you on a knee replacement! Of course, sometimes it’s necessary, but for most of us that original is just fine—the design has been around for a few thousand years! Either way, new knee or the ones you were born with – the advice is the same: fix your posture and your alignment and you won’t have knee pain!

Are you ready to have a life free of knee pain?  Do you want to get back to doing the things you love to do without pain?  If you answered “yes” to either of those questions, let’s find out what Egoscue can do to help. You can reach us by phone at 434-296-0600 or via email at painfree@painfreeperformance.org. If you aren’t in the Charlottesville area, no problem!  We work with folks from all over the country via Skype. We can get you the help you need without you ever having to leave your house! To free yourself from knee pain, you have to get your body balanced. When you do, you can get back to doing all the things you love to do, PAIN FREE!
QUESTION: What activity have you stopped doing because of your knee pain?

Stop Holding Your Stomach In!

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Stop Holding Your Stomach In!

I know most of you women (and a lot of you men) will think this is sacrilege when I say this, but for the good of your health and your posture…..

LET YOUR STOMACH RELAX!!!!

So, STOP HOLDING IT IN – LET IT GO – BREATHE!  Feel your belly expand as you take a breath.  Forget all that stuff you’ve been told (over and over and over) about zipping up the abdominals and strengthening your “core”. Your core is a lot more than your stomach! In fact, there are about 70 different muscles that make up your core and if you hold the stomach in, most of those other muscles cannot do their job of stabilizing your spine and pelvis. You are asking the 4 stomach muscles to do the work of 70 muscles and they cannot do it.

Secondly, if you hold any muscle in a constant contraction, it gets shortened and weak.  Muscles need movement – contraction and release – to gain and maintain strength. Think about what happens to your bicep when you keep your arm bent at 90 degrees (as happens with a broken arm). It gets weak and immobile. The stomach muscles will do the same – become weak and unable to move.

It also prevents your pelvis from moving as you walk.  Each half of your pelvis should go through a few degrees of flexion with each step (heel strike to extension as you push off of your toes). Holding your stomach in keeps that from happening, then you compensate in some way, for example twisting or elevating your hips, which leads to even more trouble!

And last, but not least, holding your stomach in effects your breathing!  As you inhale, the diaphragm should drop down to pull air into the lungs.  As it drops down, the stomach and low back need to expand to accommodate that movement.  If you are holding your stomach in, the diaphragm shuts down and you use only the accessory breathing muscles (the small muscles between the ribs and around your shoulder blades). Your breathing becomes very shallow and your oxygen intake is lessened by one-third!  In a normal day, we breathe up to 25,000 times so that’s a lot of oxygen lost.  Furthermore, the small muscles trying to do all the work without the diaphragm tire fairly quickly. They need help from the shoulders and neck to do the work, creating strain, pain, or tightness.  The muscles are exhausted and we are exhausted!!

So please, please let your stomach relax and take a nice deep belly breath!!! You’ll feel less stressed, you’ll feel less pain, you’ll give every cell in your body what it needs!

Shoulder Pain Connected to Hips

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I have shoulder pain…..Why are you working on my hips???
When a client comes into Pain Free for an Egoscue session, the therapist will look at the position of the bones. We evaluate:
1. head position
2. neck position
3. shoulder position
4. hip position
5. leg position
6. foot position

Why does this matter?
You can have back pain that comes from a misalignment somewhere else in the body. You can have shoulder pain that comes from hips that are misaligned.  You can have neck pain that comes from your back being flexed forward. You can have any number of combinations of imbalances causing pain somewhere else in your body. The point is,  focusing on the area of pain will help treat the symptom but it will not treat the real problem. [Read more…] about Shoulder Pain Connected to Hips

New Years Resolution

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So….. it’s almost February and most of us have decided we should eat right and exercise more now that the holiday binge season is over!  That is all well and good – but be cautious.

If you go to the gym and are weight training a body that is out of alignment then you are setting yourself up for an injury.  How, you ask?  Well … if a body has muscle imbalances then some muscles are working harder than they were designed to and other muscles are not working hard enough.  When you go to use the weights, the stronger muscles will do more work than the weaker ones and in the long run you end up strengthening the dysfunction.   The result will be back pain, neck and shoulder pain or a million other pains that you were really working to avoid! While weight training has many benefits…you need to GET STRAIGHT … THEN STRENGTHEN. 

The best way to do this is to have an evaluation by one of our Egoscue therapists.  Let us determine where and why the imbalances are in your body,  correct them so that you can go to the gym and exercise a functional body – pain free!  The Egoscue Method works….. we are offering free screens this month.  Call us to get scheduled.  434-296-0600

NECK AND SHOULDER PAIN RELIEF!!!

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Is your neck and shoulder pain becoming debilitating?  Perhaps you are constantly twisting your your head side to side, shrugging your shoulders, trying to find a neutral position to take you out of pain.  Maybe you try to stand up straighter, you get your spouse to rub your shoulders at the end of a long day, you take an Advil (or three), and it all helps – for a little while.  The next morning you have the same pain and you start all over again.  You wonder what you “did” that made you hurt.  Did you lift something too heavy, twist a funny way, reach for something, or was it sitting hunched over at your desk all day?  Most likely, even if one of these scenarios brought on your current discomfort, the real answer is found in one word:  balance, or in this case, imbalance!  Not the kind that the gymnast shows while traversing a balance beam, but the balance in your musculo-skeletal system, the alignment of your body.
How do you restore balance to your body and relieve your pain?  The Egoscue Method.  Pete Egoscue developed this method as a result of pain he suffered with after serving our country in Vietnam.  He was unable to find anything but temporary relief through typical channels; doctor visits, medication, traditional hands-on symptom based treatments.  Sound familiar?
Egoscue began thinking about the actual cause of his pain and determined that if the body is  aligned properly, it becomes pain free.  He also created this method to be a self-treatment approach — empowering all of us to keep our bodies in optimal alignment and function!
So, what is the Egoscue Method?  It is a series of positions, stretches and strengthening exercises that help reposition and realign your musculo-skeletal system.  This allows the load-bearing joints to line up along the line of gravity.  After a thorough evaluation by a trained Egoscue Certified therapist you are prescribed personalized programs for your body issues.   You actually train your body to rest in vertical alignment.  So, like breathing, you don’t have to think about standing up straight or moving a certain way — you just do!   As your body becomes aligned,  your pain subsides.
If you’d like to learn more, give us a call at 434-296-0600!  We even have  free screening appointments available if you’d like to see our studio space, meet us and learn more about Egoscue!
In Good Health,
Cindy Meyers