 Looking back on it, I think that my back trouble arose because I was in a sedentary occupation. And even though I was an athlete, as an amateur athlete and got lots of exercise, I spent too much trouble at the desk hunched over. Initially, when I would go on stage, I would forget my pain. But then it became so hard for me that even after it would take about 20-25 minutes to forget that I had this back pain, then later on it became so bad I could not even sit five minutes without pain. Well, I know that working at the computer isn't the way that I was doing it. It wasn't working for me because I was like, I bought a sit stand-up desk. I mean, I bought, you know, ergonomic keyboard. I bought a thing to put my monitor. I mean, I got one of those chairs that you kneel on. And through it all, I would, after 15 minutes, I would slump over because I was tired of whatever and end up with my body tired. And I actually literally didn't want to get up and sit at my desk. Not because my work is so hard, but because it was hard to sit at a desk. I know at first I thought I must be the only person who's having this. Like, there must be something wrong with me that I'm having back pain at this age. So I wasn't like discussing it openly with my friends or anything. It's not, it's definitely not something that like comes up in a day-to-day conversation even though it seems like it's something that's affecting a lot of people's day-to-day lives. So there's no question that we sit really poorly. This is pretty typical C-shaped spine. It begins very early in life. Like day one, coming home from the hospital, we put our babies in this kind of shape, car seat. And we're pretty much training them that that is sitting. And then they go to school and not surprisingly, they sit that way, C-shape. It's all, you could be dramatic and say we're training them to self-destruct. And then that shape gets carried into adulthood. And this is in all layers of society. And we have data that shows that we suffer from our sitting. Increased risk of metabolic syndrome. And you actually are going to increase your mortality. You're like, it causes death. So the media goes to town on this, you know, sitting kills and sitting as the new smoking and so on. So what are our solutions? You have to do something about this. And one of the solutions that we've come up with is standing desks. Many people think that they should never sit. It's evil and they are at standing desks. So there are problems with this too. So standing for extended periods of time causes increased hospitalization due to varicose veins. You have an increased risk of atherosclerosis. And there are also some things you can't do very well standing, like certain kinds of thought and certain kinds of fine motor skills. And there's research showing that after about a month, people at standing desks tend to return to sitting. So it doesn't work. So other solutions we've come up with are, you know, some people have sort of become aware of like, oh, maybe posture is a problem. And then the way we try to fix it is by advising our kids, sit up straight, stand up straight. And we have buzzy toys that do pretty much the same thing. You know, you see it in the ads and people are sitting and now they're sitting straight. Yeah. And that is a problem as well, because most people are switching out one kind of poor posture for another kind of poor posture. You know, the C-shaped relaxed and slumped posture is problematic, but so is the arched backwards. And that shows up in the data too. I was an invetret swayer and I was trained to sway by being a gymnast. Ta-da! You've all seen, you know, every final position, especially for the women's routines. And there's more pressure on women, interestingly, sex industry too, to stick out your chest, stick out your bum, and pretty much be swayed, be arched. And so that's my MRI from a much less happy time, mid-20s. And you can see I had a very enormous herniation at L5S1 that started me on this journey. So people know that, you know, this kind of approach to posture doesn't work. And then you get articles like this. This is in a UK journal, like surprising new evidence that slouching is actually good for you. Right. So let's take stock of a few data points here. So the one thing to realize is that people have been sitting for a very, very long time for extended periods. People have been making baskets. They have been weaving cloths. And this takes hours of being seated. They prepare food. They meditate. Almost every meditation approach has a focus on seated meditation. And if you look at the data, hunter-gatherers do a lot of sitting. So this is a study, a recent study, the Hadza. And they put an accelerometer on the thigh and discovered that they are spending about the same amount of time in seated postures as modern Westerners, like nine plus minus one hour. So that's interesting. So I don't think it's sitting per se that is the problem. People have been sitting for a very, very long time for about the same amount of time. But they also get up and are vigorous. Like these same people spend like 150 minutes a day doing moderate to vigorous exercise. You know, they're digging up tubers and they're doing very vigorous walking and so on. And they also punctuate their movement. They're sitting with movement. They get up, they walk around. And the way they walk around is also very important and underappreciated for its nuance. So I'm going to invite everybody to stand up one more time. And this time we're not going to be doing samba, but we're going to be doing walking. And instead of going back with the leg like we did for samba, we're going to go front with the leg and we're going to land up in exactly the same position or more or less the same position. The front is going to be bent. The back leg is going to be straight. Your body is going to be roughly in line with the back leg. Your heel is going to be close to the ground. And we can exaggerate and say let's leave it on the ground. So here's this position for a stride. So I took this photograph in Orissa two and a half years ago. And now if you have space, step into the next stride and try to find the next stride. And many of you will notice, oh you're landing some other way and now you have to fix it. So this will be homework for all of you to practice hitting this position directly. And if you don't have space just do one step and then do the other step. So there are several things that need to happen here to replicate what she is doing that I consider to be a very important piece of sitting. We think of sitting, maybe we think of posture when sitting. But I believe that packaged in with sitting we need to look at how we're walking because the way she is doing it, she is stretching out, she's doing lots of things but she is, among other things, she is stretching out her psoas muscle, P-S-O-A-S. You people know about the psoas? So here it is. It starts in the front of your lumbar spine, bones, discs on the sides. And then it goes behind all your pelvic organs, it rides over your pelvic rim and it attaches to the inside of your femurs. So that's quite a trajectory. And when you walk the way that woman was walking, you are majorly stretching the psoas. Everyone see that? Yeah, this on the back leg. Because that point is taken far back and far away from its origin deep in here. So you're taking the insertion point far away from the origin. Now, if you don't do this well, and this is a lot to digest, don't oblige yourself to digest all of this in a few minutes, but if you don't watch it, if you have a short tight psoas from sitting all day, you are in danger and you don't have the habit of maintaining your torso shape, then you're in danger of arching your back with every step you take because this point of the psoas is being pulled away. This point is getting pulled on forward and it will tend to arch your back. And if you don't have the sensibility and the strength and the skill to hang on to the shape of your back, which is done with your internal obliques, way too much to digest, I know, but hang on to that. Now you are stretching your psoas. So with every step that woman was stretching her psoas by maintaining her torso and pulling away the insertion point of the psoas from the origin. If you don't do it the way she is doing it, then you might be walking like this. And I'm going to demonstrate what that does. So I have, in our company, we keep developing new ways to show people what's going on with their body. So I have, this is one of the things we developed in the last five years. So we got sensors on my back and it is talking to an iPhone app and it gives me a real time read of the shape of my back. So I'm facing this way and when I bend forward it's going to bend forward. When I bend back it's going to bend back. But this is hard to see so I'm going to let you see it here, which is easier. Okay, and so I've marked what I think is a pretty decent shape for me when I'm standing around there, okay? So I marked that and I could mark it again. I think this is good, approximately good. Let's say standing, target, good. Now to show you what's going on on the inside of me we're going to show you a simulation. So this is a picture of my spine simulation, okay? And the discs are looking pretty happy. Now if I take a big step and I don't anchor my rib cage, this is what happens, okay? Arch, arch, arch because I'm letting my back be pulled forward by a short tight psoas that happened from a lot of sitting without resetting the psoas if that makes sense. So what I need to do is hang on to my rib cage and walk in a way that preserves the shape of my spine. You get the idea. So that's part of the very, very important package that needs to be included in sitting. Other things are the shape of the back. Like this woman is going to spend quite some time quaffing her friend and the way she sits I'll describe the spine as a J. It's not an S, it's certainly not a C, it's not a melted into herself eye either. It's a J like a hockey stick, like a kind of modern J if you will. Yeah, will you go along with that? So you can stand up on this kind of chair like you have and like I have. If I sat back here halfway, it's not only not encouraging my pelvis to be in a good antiverted position, tipped position. It's actually working against me. It's kind of making me sit on my tail and if I sit on my tail and I relax, I'm going to be like this. And if I want to be upright, then I have to do this sit up straight stuff, which is no better. So on a chair like this, you either need to put some kind of wedge or stand up and you want to externally rotate your legs. And there's a way to do this. I won't go too much for now, but your feet can be shaped in such a way that it encourages your legs to externally rotate. So your thigh bones are out of the way of your pelvis and of your entire torso. Now you can squat on the inside of your leg instead of running into your femurs. And now your pelvis can't go where it needs to go. And in this way, you can squat your way down to the lip of the chair right on the front, perched. If you went any further, you would fall off. And unless you have very flexible hamstrings and external hip rotators, I recommend legs angled down. So something like this could be legs out, could be one out, one under, something like that. Your bum is out behind. And if you succeed in finding the place that's just right, then it's really nice because now your upper body just relaxes. And stays upright. You no longer have to work to be upright, okay? And if we switch to my, I've marked on the iPad, I'm going to mark a sitting posture. So I've already marked an ideal, what I consider a target sitting posture. So let me work with that. A little different from when I'm standing. And I'm going to seat myself and I'm going to arrange. And good. Now I'm going to go to what I used to do. When you saw my MRI, this was me. Yeah? And you can see that's very different. So now all of these recordings can be marked in my account so I can see how I'm doing over time. And we can do research on it and so on. Also, it's nice with students. We like to show them why this makes a difference. So, you know, I can show them like, okay, oops, not what you want. You know, and this makes a big impression on people that don't want their discs being all red and inflamed. And then when you fix it, now the discs are happy. It's close to the target. So this is a target that teacher sets. And so you saw how my spine became much more J-y than it used to be. You remember my MRI? MRI, very curvy. Yeah? And I had to change that shape to get out of my, my saga is quite something. Surgery, re-herniated disc, all of that kind of not fun stuff. So if you look at these people, they're doing the J-spine. It behind behind and the rest of them stack. And it can be for an extended period. This woman is preparing food. She'll be there a while. Very nice J-spine. So people back in the day, you don't even have to go that far back, understood this pelvic position and stacking of the back so that you don't have to fight to be upright. So here you have two Portuguese horsemen. They're both relaxed. They sit very differently. And so the key difference, so this guy's upright. This guy's slumped of course. Key difference. Easy way to see it is imagine they both have tails. Then where's this guy's imaginary tail? He's sitting on it and this guy's imaginary tail is out behind. So that is one way to remember. You want your imaginary, you don't want to sit on your tail. And in the animal world that correlates with submission, depression, and it turns out to be similar in humans, not surprisingly perhaps. The other thing that's very helpful is to have furniture. If you're going to use furniture, you want it to be half decently designed. So for example here in this old Portuguese barge, you can see there's room for the bum. The behind is called a behind for a reason. When they coined this part, they knew where it went. And it's out back and it's not tucked like very many people are taught today. It's a very common bad direction in posture. When I designed my chair, I've only designed five things. And I had to get this part to be custom cast. It had to be the raw tie-in part, had to be custom made because all the commercial parts, it's called a back upright, come straight down. You just not generally recognize that a behind's behind needs some room. So if you're lucky, there's enough gap in here, often not. And if you have a kind of work chair, it's probably doing this. That's the conventional shape for this part. So another piece that I talked about is this external rotation of the legs. That is a really important piece of sitting. And things that destroy it are like fabric. Like umbrella strollers are such horrible implements, you know, because they do this. It's fabric. So if you're sitting on fabric, this is what's going to happen to the baby's legs or the toddler's legs. And you are training that kid to have internally rotated legs, and pronates the feet, which makes it hard for the pelvis to settle well. Yeah, it's kind of stuck now. And we continue this thing into mesh chairs. Very unfortunately, the manufacturer that won the cool race in office furniture has mesh chairs predominantly in. So you see that in every office. The chairs and now the adults are also being, you know, that tendency they had from childhood to internally rotate the legs is reinforced and adulthood in the offices with mesh. I really don't like mesh, not on the bottom and not on the back either. So, you know, like carrying, there's a lot of research showing that when kids are carried like this on the hip or on the back, hips form better. All kids are born with immature hip joints. So you organize their legs like this and now it's doing its thing in the background. That's me with my baby number three by baby number three, which by the way, I was only able to have baby number three because of all these things that I now teach because, you know, when I had my surgery and I had the repeat herniation, I was told not recommend no more kids. So I was very lucky to discover all these things in time to have baby number two and three, which will give me great pleasure. And a lot of you, I think, met baby number three, Monisha White, she came to Montana last year and presented and she now works with me. So there are other ways that, you know, would be nice to start a kid well with external rotation. And this is the African technique where they mold a baby just as you're preparing to sit and you're a little wobbly but you want to sit, you're crying on your back because you want to be part of adult society but you don't have it together physically quite to do that. This is what they do in that phase in Africa. They mold them. You stuff the baby and you're pretty much teaching it how to have fantastic posture and you put them out of this and now they have fantastic posture. So I didn't know this for baby number one and two but she got this. This is baby number two. He and he got some things like that you want to have a pelvic antiversion and stack well. So rather than put them in some shape like this, you guard their J spine and that's Monisha. And you can see that, you know, they grew up together but she was held in this way and kind of molded and so it is habit for her. She doesn't have to think about it which is really, really nice and that's not that hard to do, you know, to inculcate good habits in little ones is not hard. You just need to know a few things but it's best to learn them in your own body than you can transfer them so much better. And it's never, never too late. We work with 100 year olds and we have, it's very, very effective to make these changes, to teach the pelvis where it goes, teach the rib cage where it goes, teach it how to hold on to it, the back shape when as needed against various stresses and tensions. So how does all of this help? What does the J spine help? One thing it helps is your discs, yeah? So this comes from a modern anatomy book. It's the standard S shape that is considered to be a normal shape for the human spine. I think it's the wrong paradigm. I think it's as wrong as saying that the earth was flat. You need to have a j... This comes from an older anatomy book published in 1911 and this is what I think is the correct paradigm and it makes sense in so many ways. Like all these discs in here are cylindrical. They're like little hockey pucks. So that's a nice fit. What are these cylindrical discs doing in this kind of shape? It makes no sense. Like at baseline they're already loaded? Why would... That's weird design, right? This disc in our species, the L5S1 disc, is wedge shaped, yeah? So when you have your behind-behind, when you have a pelvis that's anti-verted, now you got... I should stand this way. This is the front of the person. This is the back of the person. And now you got a nice wedge shaped home for your wedge shaped disc. That's a fit. Everyone's happy in there. Unlike my L5S1 disc previously when I was taught to tuck and so on and it was extremely unhappy as you saw. It herniated and that is not fun at all. There are lots of other features of this that just make way more sense than this. So it makes sense for the bones to be well stacked. Now you have weight bearing exercises, putting stress on the body of the bones that prevents osteoporosis. We like. It does not put weight on the edges of the vertebrae. That's a recipe for arthritic changes, hypertrophic lifting, all kinds of stenosis. You don't want that, yeah? There's no stress on the edges of the vertebrae. We like. Makes so much more sense. And I recommend you adopt this paradigm and keep it as a filter when you're judging exercises or furniture or your bed or your position. So what else does this do besides preserve the discs? It also allows your muscles to relax. This J spine, when you are well stacked, you can actually relax. It's for many people astonishing that they could be upright and be that comfortable, be that relaxed. So we actually measured using EMG sensors. And we used our spine tracker as well to look at different kinds of sitting. And this we did in conjunction with someone who does biofeedback. And he was very surprised. He could tell that the readings were so low on muscle activity in stacked sitting. So here are the results. So there's slump sitting, which, as you would expect, is very relaxed. The muscles are not tensing. They're not doing anything. The problem with it is what's happening in the discs. You have arch sitting. And now you've got a lot of activity in the erector spinae muscles here alongside the spine. This is not healthy. And then you have stacked sitting, which gives you the best of everything. There's not tension in the muscles. The discs are not loaded. Thumbs up. Very nice. Check, check. This is healthy for the discs. It's healthy for the muscles. It's a relaxed baseline. And here we have more data. All the positions that traps remain relaxed equally. We just happen to measure that, too. Here's another thing that is very cool about stacked sitting and all these other J-spine and so on, that it helps people with pain. And that is our main draw as a company. We are known for being a back pain intervention. And this is a crowdsourcing website reviewed by Stanford. And we actually, it's now 300 and some, and we're 4.4. We are by far the best rated intervention among 45 for lower back pain. So it helps pain. And I'm going to just let people speak for themselves. After getting to know Esther and getting instruction from her, I learned not to sit that way anymore. And I learned to stand and walk and sit in a way that was healthy for my back. And that was priceless. Right, like after my first lesson, I felt amazingly better and that was only like, oh, I just need to not tuck my hips so much and I need to keep my shoulders back and maybe my back should be a little bit straighter. Just the littlest things have huge, huge consequences. So I think that awareness is one thing that would be really cool to see everybody have. Last one. It's like, you know, I sometimes pinch myself and say, am I really without pain? Especially when I get up in the mornings, I have this stiff back and then even to move a little like this or like this was such a problem 10 days ago. And now I just get up and I do things. I do whatever I want. My back is not stiff. I cannot believe that has happened. I'll take questions. So thank you. It's very helpful. It's really helped me. I'd like to know, is this similar to Alexander technique? I have a lot of respect for Alexander technique. He was an actor. He used to lose his voice. Tremendous amount of intuition, looking in a mirror, discovered microtentions that were making his voice disappear just as he was going on stage. A bit of a problem for an actor. So fantastic work. It's entirely kinesthetic. What I like about our approach is that we use kinesthetic hands-on. We use visuals. We carry, it's a huge visual cortex. Why not put that to good use? And we got all this great matter around all day. Why not use that too? So it needs to feel right. It needs to look right. Make sense. And then change is much more rapid and efficient. And you have many more ways to hang on to it. And we keep evolving more ways, like with technology and reminders and all kinds of stuff. We'll take every arrow in the quiver. And what is your thought on bare shoes, like flat shoes, and sleeping not using pillow and the way one carried the head, like the neck tucking? So bare shoes. So, you know, flat shoes, I think it's very important to be barefoot for some of the time to give yourself a chance to do natural foot things. So I didn't introduce that here. That would have been way too much. But there's a thing that your foot needs to do with the ground. It's not made this complex to be used like a prosthesis, right? And so once you've learned what you need to do and you start strengthening the muscles then you can do more and more. Barefoot, yeah, healthily. But I don't like to start people, like throw them into the deep end of the pool and maybe they'll swim. You know, that's not my favorite approach. I like building it. I like people building their strength and so on. And the same with calf flexibility because that's the issue with the heel. If you've got short calves, and that's almost everybody, because we don't squat, because we don't leave our heel down long enough, and now you've got short calves, now you wear a negative heel or a flat heel, and now your short calves are making other distortions happen that could be worse than, you know, so it's very custom. It depends on your situation. What's your thought on the way this is a good direction for the head to go but there's much nuance in that, too. You know, there's a rotation, there's definitely a lengthening that almost everyone can use. There's also, you know, like, your head is like a car parked out in the driveway sometimes out on the street and it needs to back into its garage but it also needs to do a few other things. I have a question over here, too. Over here. Sorry. Can you talk about cars? A lot of times in cars. How do you put this into practice in a car? You know, my stretch-sit cushion was originally made in cars. You don't want to be stacked sitting up front. Absolutely not. That you risk your life. Yeah? That's the most important thing to protect. So I have this... Car seats are made really badly. I made the stretch-sit cushion to provide traction. So especially when you're driving in their bumps and jogs. So some cars are so bad with deep bolsters and with the headrest that does this to you that you need like extra layer. So sometimes a car is a two-layer. I put my jacket behind. But I like to get traction as I sit. And there are videos on YouTube on our website about this. And if anyone wants to talk to me at the book signing, talk to me and I'll send you other resources. Are there recommended sleeping positions that you recommend? Sleeping position. You don't need to make a big who-how about the mattress. Like nobody needs to spend 10K on or Europeans this, that and the other. What you need to learn is what to do in your body. And the most important characteristic is ad length. You know, if you've done mischief during the day, arching, rounding, pulling, whatever, then at least at night you get to reset. And it's not hard. So page 59 of my book. You hoist yourself up on your elbows and then you dig in and you piecewise lengthen. You put one piece, then the next piece, then the next piece. Pillow needs to go here, need to lengthen. It's all in photographs, step by step guide. So ad length is the most important. And then the next thing nice to have is shape as well. And that gets more complex. Which is why we do most of this in small group courses, hands on. Because, you know, I can say don't stick out your chest, but most, many, many people they'll go here and I'll say, okay, don't stick out your chest. It's the back we want to lengthen, it's the front and they'll start and then they'll start, you know, they'll go back to their habit of sticking out their chest. It's really strongly ingrained in us. It used to be in me. Well, my question is if your method changes at all or the efforts change at all and someone has like ligamentous laxity or L. O. Stano syndrome or hypermobility, if there's a lot of looseness in all the joints, I feel like I have to work so much harder to... Totally. I've worked with a lot of people with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and so then the emphasis, you know, there are many pieces to this. There's strength, there's length, there's reshaping, remodeling, and there's an order in which you want to do these things. You don't start, if you're making a pot, you don't start by kind of shaping it. You first massage the clay and make it all warmed up and amenable to shaping. Similarly with the body, you need to do things in order. You need to lengthen first to make it safe to remodel. Now with someone with Ehlers-Danlos, for example, you would do much more emphasis on strengthening before you started remodeling so that you have a good pack of muscle around whatever joint you are, you know, considering changing things for. Okay. Hello. Could you comment? Could you comment on the lag positions and the feet? Can you comment on the leg and feet positioning and how that acts as a counterbalance? The leg and foot position? Yeah, the leg and foot position because it seems to make a difference on how easy it is to stack it. So, you know, there's, again, a lot of nuance, you know, people come every which way, you know, and one of the things you want is external rotation. And that, I like to begin that process in the foot. The foot is very... it's one lever and you affect everything on up, like the whole lower quarter of your body, think Barbie doll, all the way up into here. So, you are influencing every joint in the foot, knee, hip, SI joint. Yeah. So, that's how I like to start. Now, there are so many other things. You know, the foot is made to grab the ground in certain ways. It's made to, once you've grabbed, you know, there are other things to do with the foot. There's a lot. It's of complexity that people in a hunter-gatherer society would just get by mimicking and from the way they were held. And, but, you know, it's kind of fun to learn because it's a lovely mix of museum art pieces that inspire you and uplift you and nice feelings in your body that you haven't had in a few decades. So, the journey in all this complexity is very fun and textured. I have a question because about dynamic movements. So, for example, in dance, you're told to tuck in your pelvis and keep it in. So, how can we maintain balance? But how can we compensate for that when many teachers are teaching? So, it's only in modern dance. Modern dance then influenced ballet, modern ballet, yeah? If you look at classical ballet, if you look at the Ballerous and Diaghilev and all of these characters, they had exactly J. Spines and they were doing exactly what I'm describing. And it's only in very recent times that we have this notion that we should be tucking the pelvis and I do understand where it's coming from because if you're swaying, you know, tucking the pelvis can feel good because this muscle has been overused and is short and now you tuck and it gives it relief. But it's not a legit way to give that muscle relief. What I like to do instead is suppose you have a sway. This is what I used to do all the time. Instead of tucking the pelvis and now putting the hip joint into a really bad position and setting your neck up to go forward and doing all kinds of mischief in your L5S1 disc and so on. Instead, what we teach is don't tuck your pelvis, tuck your ribs, yeah? And now you got that J spine. Yeah, and you've left your behind out behind in a place where the bum can work, among other things. So you have to modify very, very possible.