A Curve That Keeps Us Straight

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

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In Chapter 4 I'll explore more fully the differences - real and mythical - between men and women. In the meantime, we need to know more about the body's response to a force of nature that all humans must cope with: gravity. We tend to think of splitting the atom and landing on the moon as great feats of human genius. But they are nothing compared with our first conquest that took place about three million years ago, when Lucy knocked gravity on its butt.

Lucy is the name given to the fossil remains of our earliest known hominid ancestor to walk upright. She probably wasn't really the first, but with her demonstrated staying power, she can keep the gravity buster trophy until someone with a better claim comes along.

Gravity is a useful service: it keeps animate and inanimate objects from whirling off into space. But it also creates a problem for the animate objects, which have to animate themselves. To accomplish the job, they have evolved intriguing skills such as crawling on the belly, swimming through the sea, and taking wing to fly. The one that most fascinates me, though, is the one that involves hoisting a heavy three-foot-long pod containing a couple of buckets of blood and gurgling tissue up onto a pair of jointed stilts that are secured to two small platforms that any novice engineer would see are too tiny to balance the weight. Performing this feat of animation would be quite a challenge in its own right. But contriving to lift and swing those platforms forward one at a time with a roundish eight- or nine-pound canister, the skull, riding precariously on top is truly astounding. Yet not only does this antigravity package stay upright and moving, it will shake its bootie and dance the Watusi (if it's old enough to remember 1960s dance crazes).

Truly, just standing up and walking is a biomechanical marvel that we take totally for granted. Try it. Stand up, walk across the room, and come back.

Savor the experience.

You've just used a vehicle that makes a Boeing 757 seem as primitive as a skateboard. The 757 can only taxi down a runway and fly. You can run, jump, stretch, bend over at the waist, punch with your left, jab with your right, tap a keyboard, throw a fastball, paint water lilies, or play a Chopin étude. You have these myriad abilities because you were born with the necessary equipment as well as the potential for using it.

The soul of this machine - its core - is the spine. Its characteristic S-curve is what defeats gravity. A backbone that was absolutely straight and rigid would likely have kept us on all fours, or left us stiffly upright, able to move forward but not back or to the sides; once we were knocked off our feet, it would be nearly impossible to rise. As you can see in Figure 1-3, the S-curve creates a center of gravity that runs on a straight line from the head through the rib cage to the hips and down to the knees and ankles. It brings all the skeleton's heaviest components into balance and links them together in a way that yields vertical stability and horizontal flexibility on three cardinal planes of motion.

The spine and the pelvis are the musculoskeletal system's dream team. The spine rides on a pedestal formed by the pelvis's V-shaped sacrum, just above and around the bend from the hip-joint sockets. A head-to-toe connection is created. Working together, the pelvis and the spine allow us a range of motion that is unequaled by any other living creature. Without the spine we'd win the Olympic frog jump, but that's about it. Sans pelvis, we'd be second cousin to the rattlesnake.

The spine's S-curve configuration is produced by the shape and placement of the individual vertebral bones. Each is sized and molded to bring about the necessary overall angle to allow for a gentle flowing curve that's thicker and heavier at the base and lighter, tapered, and more flexible at the top. The vertebrae are stacked like poker chips, each separated by a small spongy pad, or disk, that acts as a cushion between them.

Although the bones of the spine hook together, after a fashion, what really keeps them united and able to hold the line of the S-curve is muscle power. The back has as many as five layers of muscles; the deepest are the spinal erectors, whose assignment is to keep us standing tall. But this assignment isn't easy to fulfill, given the persistence and power of gravity. The spine and its musculature need help from the rest of the musculoskeletal system.

That help comes mainly in the form of a superstructure that surrounds the spine on all four sides, like scaffolding. Stand up, and I will show you what I mean. Make sure that your feet are pointing straight ahead, parallel with each other, about twelve inches apart. Imagine a horizontal line running through your left shoulder joint and on through your right shoulder.

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.