What Toddlers Can Teach Us About Back Pain & Healthy Aging
Toddlers may need grown-ups to teach them how to tie a shoe and use the potty, but when it comes to knowing how to sit, stand, bend and walk with ease, toddlers become the teachers. Moreover, toddlers, in spite of their tender age, hold the secret of how to age comfortably. Sound crazy? Read on.
All healthy babies teach themselves how to stand and walk by discovering how to align their bones along the central axis or “plumb line.” A comparison of people who age into their 80’s and 90’s with long spines and no back pain with the typical American who experiences chronic back pain reveals that the back pain sufferer is far more likely to have veered off from alignment along this axis. The shocker is that true natural alignment is surprisingly different from what your mother may have taught you about sitting or standing “up straight.”
5 Things Toddlers Know that Most of Us Have Forgotten
1. Toddlers don’t “tuck their tails” as many people in our society are taught to do. Tipping the pelvis back like this disrupts the angle of the sacral platform on which the spine sits.
2. Toddlers don’t have “killer abs” or sucked-in bellies. Their superficial muscles are relaxed, which allows breathing to be free and natural and deeper “core” abdominal muscles to function as an “inner corset.”
3. Toddlers do not actively lift up their chests, nor do they slouch. To do either would cause them to lose their balance.
4. Toddlers do not pull their heads up and back. The fact that their heads are proportionately larger and heavier at their age forces them to discover how to delicately balance the head on the spine (somewhat like a bowling ball on a stick).
5. Toddlers don’t breathe into their upper chests, but experience a gentle natural breath in the lowest and broadest part of the lungs that not only fills the abdomen, but fills the back, as well.
Children are losing their natural alignment at increasingly younger ages. Much of this is due to being put in poorly designed strollers, car seats and school desk chairs, along with many hours slumped in front of television and computer screens.
5 Things You Can Do to Align Like a Toddler
While specific instructions for how to your bones is beyond the scope of this article, a few simple explorations can help you get started. Keep in mind that the steps outlined below may feel awkward, weird or just plain wrong at first, especially if your muscles are accustomed to doing the work of holding you up.
1. Locate your sit bones or “butt bones.” Sit on a firm, level surface. Slide your right hand, palm up, under your right buttock. Let your weight come down onto your hand and roll around until you feel a boney “knob” pushing into your hand. This is one of your sit bones (there’s another one on the left side). A baby or toddler always sits perched on the front edge of these sit bones.
2. Park your pelvis in neutral. Bring your weight onto the front edge of these bones. You can pull each one back manually, or you can lean from one side to the other as you “walk” them back behind you. Your “pubic bone” should be aiming down, into the seat. Lifting the pubic bone up away from the seat will cause your spine to collapse.
3. Relax Your Belly. This can be one of the most difficult things to do when we are told constantly to “suck it in.” However, tightening the “abs” (rectus abdominis) interferes with natural breathing. Give it a try. Suck in and hold your tummy in for a few seconds, long enough to notice that you’ve stopped breathing. Now relax your belly ever so slightly, then a little more and a little more, and you will experience how breathing returns quite naturally. Ironically, this surface muscle must relax for the deeper “core” abdominals to be firmed.
4. Let your breastbone (sternum) settle “in.” This can be hard to accept if you’ve been taught to sit up straight by lifting your chest. However, lifting your chest not only arches the spine, it compresses the spinal cord through which every nerve in your body passes. For many people, longstanding back problems are resolved almost immediately when they imagine the breastbone floating back and up behind them. Pay attention as you do this to sensations of increasing width coming into your back as muscles release tension. Note: It is essential that you park your pelvis in neutral first (Step #2 above) or moving your breastbone back will result in slouching.
5. Let your neck be soft and free. Lift your chin and notice how the back of your neck (and your cervical spine) shorten. Next, extend your chin forward and notice how this only worsens the compression. Now slowly drop your chin and imagine the back of your neck ever-so-softly floating back to meet a scarf that is held just behind it. You should feel your spine straightening and lengthening inside your neck as you do this. It can feel “weird” when you begin to experience new ways of inhabiting your body. Put the emphasis on how much more relaxed and lengthened the neck feels, instead of what you think you should look like.
Slouching and sitting “up straight” represent two opposite, extreme positions that interfere with an ability to live in the relaxed center. This simple fact explains much of the tension and pain experienced by millions of people today. By remembering what you once knew when you learned to stand and walk (in other words, embracing your inner toddler!) you will be able, once again, to rely on the underlying framework of an aligned, living skeleton to provide all the support you need be naturally strong, easily flexible and pain-free throughout your lifetime.
