Structure and Stricture

Pain Free for Women: The Revolutionary Program for Ending Chronic Pain
by Pete Egoscue

"Women today not only deserve but should expect a pain-free, active lifestyle, no matter their age, no matter their previous experience.v

Pain Free for Women

In his famed San Diego clinic, Pete Egoscue has taught women of all ages and from all walks of life how to use the Egoscue Method for safe, effective, and permanent relief from chronic pain without prescription painkillers, physical therapy, or invasive surgery. Now he shares his specially adapted "Pain Free" program for women to use at home.

Whether you suffer from back or neck pain, joint discomfort or sore knees, or need more stamina, improved balance, and extra strength, here is a revolutionary and proven approach to self-care that promises optimal health through a simple set of exercises that will transform the way you move and feel - forever!

Egoscue shows women how to take back their bodies by recovering and restoring a precious health asset - full, free, flexible motion - that he believes has been drastically reduced by our modern lifestyle.

As Egoscue explains, motion not only develops a woman's body but also maintains and rejuvenates it. Yet as her motion-deprived muscles disengage and weaken, it is common for a woman's body to lose alignment, leading to repetitive stress injuries, persistent pain, and general bad health. Even the simplest activities - how she sits, stands, walks, works, lifts, and sleeps - can trigger problems.

Focusing on proper alignment, posture, and muscle engagement, Egoscue provides simple but powerful techniques to restore flexibility and function while at the same time boosting energy, revving up the immune system, even raising the body's metabolic rate.

The remarkable "E-cises" included within have also been linked to improved ability to fight disease, cope with aging, and recover from accidents and injuries. The "miracle" cure Egoscue offers is, simply, correct motion.

Organized by the seasons of a woman's life, Pain Free for Women pays particular attention to age-specific concerns such as puberty, childbirth, and menopause, as well as special issues such as arthritis, PMS, and depression.

At the same time, Egoscue shows how women can build a framework of healthy movement that will prevent illness and maintain pain-free good health throughout the journey of life.

According to Egoscue, reversing the effects of poor musculoskeletal fitness provides astonishing benefits, including:

• Better balance, posture, and breathing, as well as increased resiliency
• Effective and safe weight management
• Healthy bone density and visual acuity
• Heightened sex drive
• Delayed symptoms of aging
• Peace of mind and general tranquility

Extensively illustrated to demonstrate proper placement, posture, and movement, Pain Free for Women offers women of every age the possibility of feeling better than ever before.

Chapter 1

Look at the drawing of the human skeleton in Figure 1-1, and tell me whether it is male or female.

Take your time.

Give up?

It would require a lucky guess or specialized training to know you're looking at a female skeleton. Likewise, the drawing of the human musculature, in Figure 1-2, is also difficult to identify as female. I'll spare you a third illustration that makes the same point about the central nervous system.

What is my point? Muscles, bones, and nerves - the three major components of the musculoskeletal system - and the way they are assembled, are nearly identical for both men and women. The word nearly here isn't a loophole: it means we are roughly 99.99999999999 percent the same. Out of all our many bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, joints, and neural axons, only two bones are slightly different in men and women: the pelvis and the femur.

The female pelvis is broader than the male's, with wider and deeper inlets and outlets, and it has relatively less overall bone mass. (Technically the pelvis comprises four bones, but I'm considering it as a single entity since these bones are fused in adults.) As for the femur (thighbone), its head end - the one that fits snugly into the socket of the hip joint to form the body's strongest joint - forms the connection at a more pronounced angle, giving the pelvis more leeway to tip into the birthing position. Because of the broader female pelvis, the female femur also has a slightly greater angle of incline as it descends to the knee.

That's it.

Anything else that you've heard or read about differences in joints, ligaments, and such is pure unproved conjecture. I won't even call it theory. I'm not knocking conjecture; I resort to it myself. But solid, undisputed evidence exists only for these two structural differences.

As for the skeletal muscles, they have no gender-specific shapes, composition, or locomotor functions. An artist illustrating a medical text would probably have to include genitals or a profile to clue readers to whether they were examining a male or a female.

Gray's Anatomy, first published in the mid-nineteenth century, recognizes that the human musculoskeletal system is the same for both males and females. Most of the illustrations in the 1901 edition, for example, are genderless. Intricate black-and-white line drawings powerfully convey the ruggedness of the human biomechanical structures that are common to both sexes. Looking at them, you could be reading a blueprint for an immense and revolutionary machine possessing the sheer might and ingenuity to change the face of the world - and, in fact, you are.

Unfortunately, the Gray's example is not widely followed these days. The latest edition of a classic kinesiology handbook has only five or six illustrations using female models, compared with dozens showing men as examples of strength and overall function. The same is true of a thick human anatomy and physiology text that describes itself as intended for students in health, medicine, and biology programs. Perhaps those authors and publishers were chary about displaying the unclothed female torso; if so, we need to start growing up. I'd like to think that when Brandi Chastain exuberantly doffed her jersey to celebrate her team's 1999 World Cup soccer championship playoff victory, the gesture made the pages of anatomy texts safe for sports bras.

Farewell to Tarzan

The suggestion that men are the gold standard of musculoskeletal fitness and function does triple-barreled mischief. For starters, it helps mislead women to believe that no matter what they do, they'll never achieve strength and functional parity with men - or even come reasonably close. This leads to a "Boys are strong, girls are weakv mentality that reinforces stereotypes that help deny women access to their aspirations.

Second, the notion that a woman's body is substandard or abnormal invites pharmaceutical and technological means to come to her aid and to correct these shortcomings.

One orthopedic clinic I know runs a newspaper ad that features an eye-catching illustration of a shapely, sexy leg - with the knee surrounded by construction scaffolding. The product is - what else? - reconstructive knee surgery for women. The ad even hints that beautiful knees are the work of a surgeon's scalpel. Inevitably, with more than 50 percent of the population as potential customers, the medical marketplace tries to provide a stream of new products to remedy the ever-widening circle of women's health problems and supposed design defects, like the "accident-prone" female knee.

The notion of female design defects leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a woman is persuaded that her knees and muscles and bones are not designed to be strong and functional, the positive health benefits of having such strength and function will be lost to her. She will be frail, sick, and accident prone. No medical product ever devised can take the place of a healthy musculoskeletal system. But without a healthy system, there can only be a downward spiral of breakdown-intervention-breakdown-intervention. On that prediction, my crystal ball is absolutely clear.

The third piece of mischief is the supposition that men are stronger, fitter, and more functional than women. The male models in anatomy texts may seem that way, but their standard is a false one, because the vast majority of men have no material advantage. On average, men are somewhat larger (about 10 percent taller - big deal!), have less fat tissue (15 percent - how thrilling!), and more muscle mass (an underwhelming 15 percent) than women. These few small distinctions do not add up to significant differences.

Copyright © 2002 by Pete Egoscue with Roger Gittines.

About the Author

An anatomical physiologist, Pete Egoscue has worked with hundreds of clients who had pain associated with computer use. He has also been consulted by some of the biggest names in sports. Practicing full-time since 1978, he is now working out of his clinic in San Diego, California. He is the co-author of Pain Free, along with Washington, D.C.-based writer Roger Gittines.