Name: 【TEDx】Find your primal posture and sit without back pain: Esther Gokhale at TEDxStanford
Uploaded: 2015-11-04T12:10:19.000Z
Duration: 6 min 15 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

have really forgotten how to use our bodies.

Transition words & phrases

And we suffer a lot of aches, and pains, and dysfunction because of that.

most of the neck pain, and the plantar fasciitis,

and the repetitive stress injuries, and the back pain that we suffer.

And we can do it simply by restoring our primal posture

and they are both relaxed, but they are sitting very differently.

This guy is slumped, head forward, shoulders forward;

Now, what would most parents tell their children when sitting like this?

And he could do it, but it would take tension in his lower back.

And he'd probably last a short while, and then he get tired, maybe sore,

So most of us go back and forth between being upright and tense

which we think is good posture, but it isn't,

and then being relaxed and slumped which we all know is bad posture.

And what it takes is a well-positioned pelvis.

And the easy way to see the difference in their pelvic positions

Where would you say this guy's tail is? Under him. He is sitting on it.

And for our species, the natural way to have your tail is out behind you,

And if you have that, then your blocks, your vertebrae, get to stuck easily,

And when you breath now, your whole back can move,

It's like a little massage going on all day,

If you sit on your tail, you've got two bad options.

and here is the other, upright and tense.

So if tucking your pelvis is so problematic,

The answer begins early in life in the way we are carried

and the way we are parked in poorly designed baby furniture.

at which our neural pathways are getting set

So we carry those habits into adulthood where we continue to sit this way.

Then it doesn't help that most  of our furniture is poorly designed

and that we are instructed by our fitness experts and so on

to tuck our pelvis to protect our spines and so on,

when we were two, and that our ancestors had.

I call it a "J-spine" where you see how the behind is out behind,

and then the upper lumbar area is pretty erect and elongated.

that you find in non-industrial populations the world over.

These are the Ubang tribesmen from Borneo in Indonesia.

And you can see they have admirable ... well, butts

And you can see the shoulders are prominent, really beautiful.

So let's begin this journey back to our primal posture.

And I'm going to teach you an exercise I call "stretch sitting".

You are going to sit with your bottom well back in your chair,

Place your fists on the lower border of your rib cage,

and then gently push back so as to elongate your lower back.

maybe your arm rests or any other part of your chair,

and gently push the top of you away form the bottom of you, like this;

and now, hitch yourself to the back rest.

OK, now, ideally the chair would have some grippy thing mid-back to hold you,

like our stretch seat cushion, or folded towel;

something with friction to meet your mid-back

Since you don't have any implement, you might try

bunching up your fabric in the back of you,

and then hooking yourself there, and totally relaxing.

is the first baby-step towards elongating your spine,