What is Spinal Hygiene? Can you really brush and floss a spine? Well not exactly, but there are ways to care for your spine so that it remains stronger for longer.
The very tenet of traditional chiropractic is based around this concept – of maintaining a flexible, strong and aligned spinal column which houses the spinal cord, through which the brain and body communicate to maintain homeostasis and thus health.
Dr Stewart McGill mentions 5 simple ways to maintain your daily spinal hygiene:
- Standing: Failing to align and stack the spine creates chronic muscle contractions. This results in cumulative spine stress and muscle pain.
- Sitting: Many people in both chronic and acute back pain tend to sit in their pain trigger – ie many flexion-triggered people sit in flexion!
- Sleeping: Sleep posture, mattress selection, time spent in bed can all influence daytime pain.
- Walking: Daily walking is crucial for back health. As a culture, we walk and move only a fraction of what our ancestors did. And we tend to have forward heads, slouched thoracic spines. We often don’t swing our upper arms enough, we lock our knees, walk too slowly and don’t engage our core muscles.
- Daily Activities: Simple tasks such as sitting on a toilet, bending forward to brush your teeth or to wash dishes, bending to pick up the baby or a bag of groceries – these all need to be performed as carefully as if you were a weight lifter!
I mentioned the works of both Esther Ghokale and Jean Couch in an earlier blog. These are both Postural Systems which teach the student to stack their bones in all the above activities. For further information, visit http://www.balancecenter.com and https://gokhalemethod.com/ . In addition to Posture, Yoga is a complete strength, alignment and flexibility system that can literally change your body and your life outlook. That said, there are many different approaches, and I will speak more to that in a future blog.