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Episode 73: Posture Panic Pt. 1
1.5k Plays5 months ago
Welcome to Season 5 and Episode 73 of the Movement Logic podcast! In this first part of our much-requested three-part series "Posture Panic," Laurel and Sarah dive into the history of posture. They discuss Beth Linker's book, Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America, providing insights and context to how posture has been perceived and addressed through history starting around the turn of the century up until now.
You will learn:
- The origins of "Posture Panic" around the turn of the century.
- How Darwin's theories influenced the medicalization of posture.
- The fear that human spines weren’t "ready" for bipedal stance, contributing to back pain and other issues.
- Why we believe it’s important to move like animals and babies, and where these beliefs came from.
- The intersectional impact of posture panic, affecting different races, classes, ages, and genders.
- The critique of evolutionary anthropology and its perpetuation of race science.
- The parallels between historical posture scrutiny and current fitness and diet trends like paleo, primal, and Crossfit.
- How "primitive" and "natural" marketing terms are often used inappropriately and simplistically.
- The evolution of posture surveillance from top-down to peer-based monitoring, emphasizing self-surveillance.
- The controversial practice turned scandal of nude posture photography in colleges.
- The historical use of posture as a symbol of civility and its implications for modern fitness standards.
Sign up here to get on the Wait List for our next Bone Density Course [https://mailchi.mp/8c60a64eba9b/waitlist] in October 2024!
Reference links:
Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America, by Beth Linker
Episode 62: Make McGill Make Sense
Episode 60: Dismantling Long & Lean Pt. 1
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Transcript
Introduction and Mission
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic podcast with yoga teacher and strength coach Laurel Beaversdorf and physical therapist Dr. Sarah Court. With over 30 years combined experience in the yoga, movement, and physical therapy worlds, we believe in strong opinions loosely held, which means we're not hyping outdated movement concepts.
Fifth Season and 'In-between-a-sodes'
00:00:22
Speaker
Instead, we're here with up-to-date and cutting-edge tools, evidence, and ideas to help you as a mover and a teacher.
00:00:38
Speaker
Welcome to season five of the... movement Welcome... he right All right, here we go. Let's get the crust off. Okay. Welcome to season five of the Movement Logic podcast. I'm Laurel Beaverschorf, and I'm here with my co-host, Dr. Sarah Court. Sarah, it's season five. It's amazing. It's so exciting. I know, it is. All right, so quick update. We did some in-between-a-sodes, or in-betweeties, as Sarah calls them.
00:01:09
Speaker
Between seasons, in the in betwezen the season between season four and season five, we had three in-betweenies. I like to think of these in-betweens like the seven and a half floor in the 1999 movie Being John Malkovich. You never know what you're going to get there. So we kind of did like a little grab bag of topics and I thought I thought it was really satisfying. How'd you feel about the in-betweenies? Yeah, it it was really fun. I mean, I love these our actual longer episodes because we get to research and look into and think about and and, you know, do some critical analysis on, you know, big, big topics. But it was kind of fun just to jump in and be like, here's a little thing. Bye. And yeah it was it was sort of sad. It was like a like nice little snack.
00:01:54
Speaker
Yes, yes, and less work. That's true. That's true. All right, so we're now officially in season five, and our episodes are back to being every other week. However, around mid-season, we're shifting to every week. Why,
New Course and Posture Series
00:02:09
Speaker
you ask? Because we're launching bone density course, and we want to make sure you don't forget about it, because we only run this six-month progressive barbell course for bone building and becoming ridiculously strong every six to 12 months. By the way, October, the month we're launching it is just around the corner. It's already the middle of summer. So it's nine o'clock. Do you know where your children are? And are you on our wait list? That was just two pop culture references in the first like five minutes of this episode, the John Malkovich movie and the you know, the like commercial from the 90s. I mean, I think I'm like stepping it up this season. I was gonna say I when I read the notes and I saw both of those references, I was like, holy shit.
00:02:51
Speaker
I know. Moral with pop culture references. What? I know. I mean, i I realize it's an area of improvement that I need to be working on. So I'm working on it. I mean, I don't know if it... I don't know if I would call it an area that you need to be working on. But I'm... I i find that I'm... Well, I'm working on it, Sarah. Okay, good. I mean, I find myself to be a just remembering stuff and I'm like, why is that taking up space in my brain when more important things are falling out of my brain? But I could still sing you the lyrics to you know Total Eclipse of the Heart with no problem. So yeah. But that's what I that's what i love about you. Oh, thanks. All right. This episode is part one of a three-part series we're calling Posture Panic, where we'll delve into the history and science behind posture.
00:03:42
Speaker
We often discuss posture on this podcast, but it's typically in relationship to other topics. In this series, we're looking at posture as a topic in and of itself, specifically looking at the history of posture. The history is what we're gonna be covering today in this episode, but then in part two, Sarah will talk about what current research says about posture and its relevance. And then finally, in part three, with the history and science in mind, we'll explore how posture is still addressed today, specifically in Pilates and yoga.
Insights from 'Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America'
00:04:10
Speaker
For today's episode, I'll be drawing heavily, almost exclusively, from Beth Linker's new book released this year, Slouch, Posture Panic in Modern America. Sarah and I both devoured this book, and so I'm thinking of this episode like a publicly aired book club between the two of us.
00:04:30
Speaker
I know we have a lot to discuss, and so I'll start off by speaking for myself. For me, this book provided a backstory and gave credence to a lot of feelings I've had around the topic of posture over the past couple of decades of my life in the yoga and fitness worlds, namely how posture is talked about and treated in these communities. as well as in the PT world or medical world, depending on who you're listening to, or just generally the way people talk about posture, I think to kind of subtly position themselves as like saviors, personal saviors, using posture to explain something that a person might be struggling with, using posture to kind of tell a story about it, and then correcting their posture to save them from these painful problems, or like almost like talking about posture like you're a disapproving parent,
00:05:21
Speaker
suggesting that like some aspect of someone's posture is inappropriate or unacceptable in some way, or I find this one especially cringe, how people think they can kind of know what someone is thinking or feeling or even their character based on their posture or the way they, quote, carry themselves. Listen, you know to not sound like a total hypocrite, I was also into judging people's posture in a big way for a while as a yoga teacher because I thought of myself as someone who helped people have better posture to stay safe, to not get injured, so you know to protect them. And um you know wittingly or unwittingly, we all know naming the problem is the first step in marketing your solution or marketing yourself. Ultimately, you know I've come to realize that
00:06:06
Speaker
That's not who I want to be. That's not how I want to think about posture. I know better now, so I've changed. But to be totally transparent, I also kind of bought into this posture panic. Now I still you know teach alignment or or form and technique, but more as a way to kind of work on a particular movement skill and whatnot. Sarah, what did you get out of reading this book and and what did it bring up for you? I mean, the the book is fascinating and I highly recommend that you go get this book and read it because ah what what I really got out of it was how far back and how embedded it is in our, how far back on a timeline ah perspective, and then also how embedded this you know posture, good posture versus bad posture, how embedded it is in all aspects of our culture, of our
00:06:55
Speaker
religion of our sense of civilization, this emphasis on morality and posture and all these. I mean, there are so many like fascinating slash what the fuck details that we're going to talk about a bunch of them. One of my favorites was, you know, this idea that as human bipedal, you know, standing upright creatures, that because we originally were a quadruped, when we stood up, suddenly our spine was not capable of supporting our organs. Yeah. And I was like, well, what? just any sense at all But that was like a really firmly held belief in one camp of the sort of posture, posture police ah back in the day.
00:07:37
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. There's so much like that in this book. yeah So for background and to give credit where credit is due, Beth Linker, the author of Slouch is formerly a physical therapist and currently a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science, which I feel like is right up our alley. Yeah, seriously. In her book, Slouch, she examines the history behind how poor posture became a feared health issue in the United States and how this fear led to wellness programs and fitness campaigns aimed at correcting and improving posture, many of which have survived up until this day or are simply, as we say, same but different.
Posture and Social Implications
00:08:16
Speaker
Linker's scholarship explores how posture science, um that's in quotes, positioned posture as a marker of people's health and character, and how this led to a systematic politicized and institutionalized monitoring, evaluation, and correction of the posture of millions, potentially maybe just thousands but lots of Americans, starting around World War I. Additionally, she exposes how, quote, posture science was used to discriminate against those with bad posture, excluding them from opportunities for education and employment, and therefore from positions of power and privilege. Linker's book, Slouch, is a must read for movement educators and is linked in the show notes.
00:09:01
Speaker
So Sarah, as people who teach or taught, I'm not sure you still teach yoga or consider yourself a yoga teacher, we've been on a big learning curve as it pertains to posture, I feel. I used to believe I kept my students safe by evaluating, correcting their poor or dysfunctional or suboptimal posture. Sarah, did you take this approach as a yoga teacher when you taught yoga? um How about as a physical therapist? Did you used to kind of focus more on posture or think about it differently and have you changed your beliefs about posture over the years? so Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, certainly when I when I was a yoga teacher, the sense was always like the adjustment, the the alignment, quote unquote adjustments that we were making were not simply because that was the aesthetic of the pose, but it was the correct place to put your body and if you were not in the correct place, you were going to injure yourself. Right. it So there was a lot of like, quote unquote, injury prevention, or like,
00:09:51
Speaker
pain prevention or you know sort of wrapped around all of these ah some very specific, like your foot goes here, your arm goes here, cues. And so I absolutely, as a yoga teacher, sort of bought into that story. And and you talked about this as well, I think, when we were on Conspiratuality, where as we grew as yoga teachers, we kind of just replaced one dogma with another dogma, which I also did. And then eventually you start to realize, wait a minute, um and But then even, you know, when I was a physical therapist, there's still a ah certain amount of emphasis sort of depending on who, which PT you talk to, but there's certainly still an emphasis on posture, posture correction, posture, what they call posture faults, right? who um Oh, yeah, no, that language is still still used. And ah I, you know, when I started as a PT, I knew less than I do now. And so yeah, I definitely worked on
00:10:45
Speaker
correct, you know, quote unquote, correcting people's posture. and And patients come in sometimes and they're like, I have bad posture and I want to work on it. So sometimes it's a matter of like, you know, give the man ah a blue coat, he wants a blue coat, give him a blue coat. about But nowadays, I would say the biggest difference is when people come in and and say something like, I have bad posture, I need to work on my posture. I talk to them more about like, having strength and mobility to be able to put your body in a multitude of places versus we're all supposed to fit into this one shape. Right on. Yeah. Posture is actually, after reading this book, I realize a huge topic encompassing ideas that we are both enmeshed in like this idea of there being a correct alignment and you know also
00:11:32
Speaker
ah stuff like kind of tangential to that like standing postures, but that these ideas are also broadly relevant to you know areas like the workforce and everyday life so like optimal sitting and standing for ergonomic um purposes And then the ergonomics of furniture. um These both have relevance to productivity and work related injury and pain. But there's also a whole section in her book about clothing and shoes and corsets. And then of course there's the relevance to public health.
00:12:06
Speaker
and the alleged link between posture and pain, which I'm pretty sure we're going to get into in part two of this series with you, Sarah. um But Linker addresses all of these topics in detail, uncovering in a way I've not yet seen or heard done quite so evisceratingly, but professorally, the ableist, eugenicist, racist, classist ideals, and gender norms that undergirded the ways posture was scrutinized and used, ultimately serving as a sorting mechanism. to reinforce and strengthen existing power structures and social hierarchies. But for this episode, we're going to focus on the intellectual foundations of some of the still persistent beliefs about good and bad posture. And we're going to kind of talk a little bit more about the stuff relevant to movement teachers in the book. We'll discuss ways as well that posture was evaluated and still is, the meaning it was given then and now, and the implications this had and still has
00:13:05
Speaker
for different populations. We'll also discuss the medicalization of posture and how it was used as a way to classify and segregate the able body from the disabled. Throughout, Sarah and I are, of course, going to jump in with our two cents and share about thoughts we've had, experiences we were reminded of, and relevant parallels we drew from the experiences so um we've had during our combined few decades in the yoga, fitness, and physical therapy worlds. So to start off, Sarah Linker points out right off the bat that $1.25 billion is spent annually on posture-enhancing devices and fitness programs. So it's clear that posture panic is pretty profitable. Why do you think that is?
00:13:47
Speaker
I mean, it it is, I think, such a deeply held conviction at this point among pretty much everybody that their posture is supposed to be a certain way. And then all the marketing around this is that classic sort of you know fear mongering, you've got a problem, we've got the solution, right? So you're something's wrong, you need to buy this thing to make it better, right? we still, on a basic level as a society, whether we are aware of the history of posture and all of its really kind of, I mean, it's just it's just wild every time I realize how much capitalism impacts literally everything, including our fucking posture. yeah um But whether or not you understand this to that level, or you just have a sense that if I don't have good posture, I'm going to have pain down the line, which
00:14:31
Speaker
It might happen, might not happen is a very, it depends kind of situation, but we there that is a very deeply held belief. People do think I have bad posture, therefore I'm you know not a bad person, but they're like, I need to do better, right? I mean, just recently I was looking up a police, a police? No, I was not looking up the police. Hello, are you the police? i was looking i was I was trying to look up a piece of equipment for a patient to possibly purchase in their home and I was on Amazon and it did one of those things underneath where it was like, you know, other things we think you'll like. And it was those um
00:15:11
Speaker
I guess they're like t-shirts or like jacket kind of things that you put on that like holds your body in the right posture. And like some of them buzz if you like get out of the right posture. Oh my God. Or you don't know about these? Yeah. People wear them and then and then it's like, if you slouch, it's like, I don't know if it rings a bell or it buzzes or something. I'm just like, oh no, I'm slouching and you have to get up straight again. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think Linker talks a little bit about that stuff at the end of the book. Yeah. It's endless, the amount of stuff out there to be bought for your posture. I think that's part of it as well because if this thing didn't work for me, oh, okay, well, I'm going to try this other thing and then if that didn't work, well, I'll try this other device. There's just so much out there all yelling at you that your posture should be better.
00:15:54
Speaker
right so How could you not be spending all your money on it? Yeah, I mean, I think whenever we're talking about an extremely profitable industry, like the posture enhancement industry, I think i think it's a good idea to get into the habit of asking whose needs are at stake in either the success or failure of that industry. And often the answer isn't straightforward. Like the pharmaceutical industry, I think is a really good example. It's not so straightforward because pharmaceutical companies, they rake it in. They do. And also pharmaceuticals save millions of lives. So there's a big benefit to both the companies and the consumers. But if we contrast that with the posture enhancement industry, do both sides benefit mutually, like the people profiting and the consumers? What's at stake for both sides? If everyone decides posture isn't as big of a deal as it's made out to be. Well, it's no good for the posture enhancement industry. No. Great news for the consumers who cannot spend all their money. Yes, spoiler, spoiler. Yeah, i love I love this quote from the book. So I wrote it down, quote, history requires close scrutiny of the ways in which culture and politics
00:17:00
Speaker
have come to inform certain scientific endeavors and, in turn, how widely accepted scientific facts influence the social fabric of everyday life. It requires adopting a critical stance when faced with seemingly self-evident claims." Conventional wisdom is a word I use a lot. It's another word for self-evident claim or a claim that seems obvious and clear, like so obvious and clear, it doesn't need any further explanation or proof or inquiry, right? it It's truth is like immediately recognized by anyone considering it. Two plus two equals four. A red apple is red, right? Sarah, do you think that this conventional wisdom that posture matters is self-evident? Yeah. I mean, you know, I remember my dad when I was little, putting his finger in the middle of my back and pushing it so I would sit up straight. you know like There was a lot of like, well, this is just how it is. Of course that's right. And bad posture is wrong. like it's not It's unquestioned. Do you think we should question it? 100%. Everyone's like, yeah, of course. Posture matters. like You should fix your posture. But when we dig a little deeper into the history, but also the research, right we see that
00:18:12
Speaker
it's not such a self-evident claim, right? It does require potentially a more critical stance, right? and Two plus two equals five in this case because all signs do not point to posture being as important as it's often sold to us as being. And what I love too, you know from the reading of this book ah is to recognize that oftentimes conventional wisdom of of any kind not always, but often it's just perpetuated beliefs of those in power. And its purpose is ultimately to kind of shape societal norms of what we have accepted as being just the the case, right? The sky is blue and posture
Challenges in Teaching Alternative Posture Views
00:18:56
Speaker
matters. And so you can kind of like teachers who are sort of on this train of focusing less on posture, more on capacity, more on exercise, more on just being more active and moving more and and and building yourself up to be able to tolerate more and less about like what your body looks like or the posture of it. um I think they're they they are often running up against resistance from students or resistance from like the mainstream in in that like they're it's almost like they're speaking a different language just know that a lot a lot a lot of people out there just based on the followers of certain posture enhancing influencer accounts on Instagram like
00:19:30
Speaker
A lot of people think that like the solution to pain, the solution to health, the solution to a lot of like the good stuff they want in their life and in their body has to do with their posture, and it's like still very, very prevalent prevalent belief. so But let's hear some conventional wisdom we hear around posture, advice, or adages, or things that people think they need to be doing with their body. I'll go first. Sit up straight. Yeah. i get I get shoulders back and down at the clinic a lot. people Everyone thinks their shoulders need to be back and down. Right. Don't slouch. huh Neutral spine. Yeah. Never reach neutral, right? Never lift their lift with your legs, not your back. Right. God forbid you round your back ever. Yeah. Don't do that. Find find the natural curves of your spine. it's We hear this stuff all the time. According to conventional wisdom, let's now contrast what good and bad posture would look like in standing. like Give me an example of what good posture looks like.
00:20:22
Speaker
So yeah, so so it's, you know, head is like, it's that whole plumb line idea, right? As if there's any straight lines in your body, but we're supposed to line up like so your ears go right over your shoulders. And that that also is supposed to line up depending on who you talk to with your ankles or your midfoot. And you know the shoulders are are back. They're not rounded. The chest is a little bit lifted, but not too lifted. right And the pelvis is ah ah pelvis is ah not anteriorly nor posteriorly tilted. It's just living in this perfect middle ground. And you know your knees are straight, but not hyperextended. And you know your arms sit naturally by your sides, all these sort of things. right this sort of like it' It sounds like I'm talking about a robot.
00:21:06
Speaker
Yeah, but you know, yeah well so like we've all seen the diagrams and like the teacher training manuals, those of you who have done like yoga teacher trainings are like, you know, just like pictures in books about like, correct posture and correct posture. and like My daughter does dot two dots that connect the numbers to make a shape kind of a thing. And like, good posture is always like straight up and down like the ear is a dot the side of the shoulder is a dot the side of the hip is the dot. you know the the ankle is the dot god forbid god forbid like there's a crooked line where like oh god forbid if your ear is in front of your shoulders or your the you know side of your hip is in front of your ankle or what if your hip is your side of your hip is behind your ankle and or your knees hyper extended in the side of your knees behind your ankles like all these
00:21:49
Speaker
um visuals that we have in our mind of like how the body should kind of look like a skyscraper or something right and like oh if it's a little bit crooked like that's bad. I don't know what image listeners have in their mind but I'm sure we've all been taught in so many ways like what good and bad posture looks like. Let's set what someone's posture looks like aside and outline some of the conceptual origins of posture that Linker tells us about in her book, starting with early Christian thinking. So I found it fascinating, as someone who is raised religious, when I read in the book that upright posture was seen as a sign of divinity. If you stood more upright, you were closer to the angels.
00:22:26
Speaker
And um it kind of like i was my brain was flooded with all these images that I was like constantly seeing as a child. It reminded me of all the religious images of like the people looking up to the heavens and you know Jesus is sending into heaven and the angels looking down at us mere mortals from heaven and there's usually like when you go to church there's a cross on the at the altar and it's like way up above and everyone has to look up at the cross and you know lots of important things in the bible took place on mountaintops and there's jacob's ladder and all that imagery and mythology just like rushed into my head and i was like of course of course that's what people believed about just standing up uh i had a similar rush but it was my art history background not my religious background although i was a little bit real i mean i i wasn't i was raised slightly religious for a while and then we just kind of gave up but you know in religious iconography yes it's it's also a a left and right as like and a little bit of an aside so the the holiest thing is always at the top and to the right of the piece of art and the devilish the evil is always down and left and so then you could trace like okay well where did each of these individual important like angels where are they on that positioning up to the upper right you know all of that kind of stuff but the idea that like if you stand up taller you're closer to God right because God is above it's so wild
00:23:34
Speaker
yeah Yeah, Linker points out how there is this fundamental idea that up is good and down is bad built into our language that influences how we interpret the world. yeah And so what are some examples of that language? like Just like layman's like everyday language. like Yeah, like a good upstanding person, right? A good upstanding so civilian. i'm going to take I'm going to take the high ground on this one. Yeah, yeah. Upward mobility. h Those are always always good. That's the way you want to go. i got I have the upper hand in this one. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. And then what are the what's the opposite of that? I mean, you know isn't isn't Satan a fallen angel or something, right? Yes. So he's fallen down yeah to the ground. Yes. He's fallen down dirty scoundrel. I'm on ah i'm on a Doward spiral. Yes. I've hit rock bottom. Yeah.
00:24:27
Speaker
Totally. Yeah. Yeah. So a couple of linguists quoted in the book, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson contend that this inherent positive valuation of the word up and this inherent negative valuation of the word down is deeply connected to our upright posture as bipedal beings, a trait that quintessentially separates us from many other animals. so Can I jump in for a second with another thing? so and this is This also made me think of this. When you are teaching someone who has is maybe like post-op hip replacement or knee replacement, when when you're teaching them how to go up and down stairs,
00:25:06
Speaker
You have them step up with the uninvolved leg, because that's going to be the stronger leg. And you have them step down with the involved leg, because then the uninvolved leg is the one on the step above and carrying all the weight. But the way you tell people to do it is step up on the good foot, step down with the bad foot. Ah, interesting. Right, so it's that good and bad up and down again. Yes, yeah, interesting, interesting. Yeah, and then there's this ah from the book. ah by the early 1940s in the United States, quote, straight, connoted heterosexuality, while, quote, bent, signified homosexuality. So, ah yeah.
00:25:46
Speaker
I that blew me away. Yeah, blew me away. I mean, I obviously, we don't use the word bent. I'm not nobody should be using the word bent for homosexuality. But as a slur, it's not you don't hear it as much. But so that's why I think the the straight versus bent. I hadn't really thought about very much. But I read that and I was I think I literally went holy shit. Yeah. you know what Yeah. I mean, what did what did it used to be a slur like to call us gay bent? um Yeah, it did. Yeah, because I've never heard that before. Okay. There's actually a play called Bent that is about oh um gay people who are, it's in it's set in ah Nazi, in World War II, Nazi Germany, gay people put into internment camps as another group that needed to be eliminated. It's horrible, but yeah, it's wild.
00:26:35
Speaker
So, yeah, most of what Linker calls posture panic or the poor posture epidemic started around the end of the 1800s and was in full swing around the turn of the century, all the way like into the Cold War and you know up until now, but like things were a little bit more out of hand back then I like to think. what I guess we'll make that decision when we're done with the episode. but It was around the beginning of the 20th century when poor posture became medicalized and this medicalization of posture was attributed to the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
00:27:12
Speaker
In 1859, as well as The Descent of Man in 1871, these two books changed the world and inspired new interest in evolutionary science and the ways our upright human posture tells the story of our evolution. Prior to Darwin, it was widely accepted that the development of the human brain, so human intellect, were smarties, right? That this is what drove our evolution. But then Darwin chimes in and he starts arguing that actually upright human posture preceded the evolution of all other distinctive human characteristics, including our intellect. And this is because, according to Darwin, humans descended directly from a group of primates through the process of natural selection. This was called Darwin's posture first theory. I feel like posture first might also be a brand name somewhere out there in the world, I'm not sure.
Historical Views on Posture and Evolution
00:28:01
Speaker
it sounds like trade dar sound like one probably is So this theory created a lot of fear and intrigue, specifically among the ruling classes because of what it suggested, which is that the only thing separating people from apes was this physical difference, their posture. So the origin of species kind of sparked the origin of the posture panic. And one of the anxieties that started developing, which you kind of hinted at at the beginning of the show, was this idea that maybe our spine wasn't actually ready for the task of supporting us in our bipedal stance, as if like natural selection was like just a bit hastily undertaken or something and like, whoa, whoa, whoa, I don't know if we can do this. This is too upright. And so this this uprightness was this,
00:28:48
Speaker
kind of inherent fragility of our spine. And this is what was used to explain a lot of our unique problems that it seemed like we had as humans, stuff like back pain and organ prolapse and the like. And meanwhile, it was thought that quadrupeds had like this ah anatomical advantage over us that made them less likely to suffer these problems that were observed in humans. So in a way, over the course of history, humans have in some respects revered and glorified moving like an animal, which is to say, moving like an animal that is quadrupedal. And I loved this because I was like, oh my God, it's so true. Like all the different exercises and exercise formats still to this day that are animal inspired, right? Like do any come to mind for you, Sarah? I mean, yeah, the obvious first one is animal flow, right? That's like, I feel like there's so many of these similar you know methods that involve a lot of crawling around on hands and and feet, right? Like getting down and crawling is a big deal. And then I was also thinking about you know a lot of, there's yoga poses and Pilates exercises that are named after animals, right? so Yeah. I thought of Supple Leopard, the book by Kelly Starrett. Yeah. There's a system called MOVE NAT, ah which is all about natural movement, which we'll get into.
00:30:03
Speaker
Capoeira, I think, draws from like just kind of movement that's ah like animal-adjacent. Parkour is, I guess, like sometimes described as like running around ah an urban environment like an animal. um So yeah, it's not making any type of judgment call on this. like I think it's just it's fascinating. like When you read a book like Slouch, you're able to make all these connections of like the present to the past and be like, oh, so this isn't just like some random thing. like It's been going on for a while. And there's this like human need that drove it, like this human fear, this human anxiety, or like this human desire that like initially kind of created this idea that like and moving like an animal is important, right?
00:30:43
Speaker
um And then it also kind of reduces the preciousness of it. You know what I mean? Where you're like, oh, so this just came out of like people being afraid that they were like, this is this is just about people being afraid of their fragile spines. And like this idea that right moving like an animal was somehow gonna Make them their spines better human spines or something when in fact we don't you know, we are upright bipedal creatures What's gonna benefit my spine is loading it in upright bipedal ways, right? Right. I mean right nothing wrong with crawling. I love it. It's fun. It's hard. It's good for you Yeah, but it's not fixing what what they thought was the problem which was you know, my spine can't handle being upright and Right. And it's it's it's like just not, it's not a silver bullet. it's It's not like this precious sacred thing, you know? So Linker also fascinatingly points out the connection between moving like an animal.
00:31:32
Speaker
and something called the theory of recapitulation. The theory of recapitulation posits that the development of an embryo retraces or recapitulates the evolutionary stages of its species. That is, during embryonic development, an organism passes through stages that resemble ancestral forms or that mirror the sequence of developmental changes and adaptations that have occurred in a species you know, through natural selection over successive generations. It's important to note that this theory of recapitulation, this is very important. It is viewed more as a historical concept, and it is not a current nor accepted scientific theory, although it's often talked about as such. Yeah, it's astrology.
00:32:21
Speaker
Kind of, yeah. Yeah, basically. So, Sarah, this whole discussion made me think of all the ways that I hear functional movement or developmental movement patterns discussed, right? Have you encountered this idea that we should explore developmental patterns or just, you know, like, again, move like animals because these ways of moving have this inherent or intrinsic or special value for our motor patterns or our posture or spinal health? Yeah, I went immediately to so there's a system that we were actually taught about in PT school ah called DNS, that's complete aside, but I when i was I was trying to there's so many things that have three letters in their name that I'm after a while I'm like, what is this DMX? Like, what was the thing? So I couldn't remember it. I was at work. I asked my friend clinician who was there I was like, to me I was like, what's that one where it's all about like,
00:33:10
Speaker
going through the movement patterns of a baby. And she's like, I don't know, but I remember that it's taught by someone named Claire. So I looked at Claire, Claire baby movements, and I found DNS and dynamic. And she was in fact, right, it's Claire Frank. But so this thing called dynamic neuromuscular stabilization, It's this idea that you you might have sort of missed once you're out of the womb and like learning to you know roll over and pull yourself up onto your side and then get onto hands and knees and then stand up and all of those things. Potentially the issue in your movement is that you either like you know kind of skipped over one of those or
00:33:47
Speaker
didn't you know envelop it into your understanding of the motor control of your body. So it's literally a whole bunch of positional movements that you just kind of move through and then the the PT or the whoever is assisting you. And it's it's it's interesting sort of, but it's to me it's like, well, this is this is up there with like, everybody needs to crawl. Like maybe I did, but maybe maybe I can just do some squats and that'll fix it. a little more easily than having to go through this very complicated and like, yeah you know, postural-based thing. yeah And then there, and I thought this was interesting because someone named, I don't know if it's pronounced go-kale or go-kale, I don't know. I've always say go-kale in my mind. um So there's something called the go-kale method. Some people are gonna be like, it's not go-kale, but anyway. I think that Linker talks about this person in the book. yeah Yes, yes. Her name's Esther. That's a lot easier to pronounce.
00:34:43
Speaker
um So this method, they call it primal posture for a pain-free life. A lot of the language they use, I thought it was really interesting. They talk on the website about like, we have inherent grace and strength like every other creature on the planet. ah Most pain can be attributed to how we hold ourselves and how we move. ah you know we've we've lost Since we aren't born with a user's manual, we rely on our culture to guide us. About a century ago, our culture took a wrong turn. So we lost sight of what constitutes healthy posture. In fact, many popular guidelines for good posture are just plain wrong. ah However, we can relearn what we once knew. Our ancestors knew how to move without pain. um Babies know how to move without pain. I mean, some of them, some cultures still know how to move without pain. Do they? Right? So it's this very kind of like,
00:35:38
Speaker
we yes civilization has ruined us. We have to get back to this primal, oof like basic human developmental movement and and particularly posture. We have to hold ourselves in the kind of posture that we'll make sure we never have pain. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good one. That's a really good example. Yeah. um Yeah, so some some some that came to mind for me is the Feldenkrais method, which I love. I love Feldenkrais. It was developed by Moshe Feldenkrais. It's a system of somatic education that uses gentle movement and directed attention to improve and enhance human functioning, which is very general. um But the method emphasizes increased self-awareness and mindfulness of one's movements.
00:36:21
Speaker
and claims that it can lead to better posture alignment, overall physical health, and one of its aims is to improve posture by fostering this better understanding of how the body moves. and and how it aligns itself in various positions. There's also Alexander Technique, which my ballet teacher in college was an Alexander Technique, either student or teacher, I'm not sure which, but she would kind of take us through these, they kind of felt like meditations actually. um And it was developed by Frederick Matthias Alexander, right around the time of the posture panic, right at the turn of the century. And so Alexander Tengig is still around today. Linker talks about it in the book. It's a method that focuses on improving posture, movement, and body alignment. And it emphasizes correct alignment of the head, neck, and spine, and claims this better posture can reduce strain on the body. There's also body-mind centering, which was developed by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. And this approach explores the relationship between mind and body through
00:37:20
Speaker
experiential anatomy, movement, reeducation, and touch, and this technique explores and utilizes developmental movement patterns, such as those seen in infants to inform and enhance adult movement, coordination, and physical expression. So this stuff is all still like alive and well. um This part also reminded me of you know Stuart McGill, a person we tend to always We hate to record an episode without naming it. So McGill frequently compares the human spine with the spine of quadrupeds, such as dogs or horses. I tried to find it in Back Mechanic. I couldn't find it, but I know I've heard him talk about it in podcasts and stuff.
00:38:00
Speaker
he'll He'll point out that the spine of a quadruped versus a biped function differently due to their horizontal posture and the different distribution of mechanical loads, um you know, compared to our vertical bipedal posture. He then uses these comparisons often to illustrate how certain postures and movements humans do categorically and negatively affect their spinal health. So there's this idea, again, that we are just not quite prepared to handle those loads. you know, slow down natural selection, give us some time to catch up. yeah He then, of course, um you know, he'll offer better strategies. And these often involve maintaining a neutral spine, bracing the spine, um and in in order to prevent and manage back pain. Can I can I ask a question just about this whole idea that natural selection has been rushed?
00:38:45
Speaker
Well, it's like we're not ready, like our spine's not ready. Rushed by what? like what what It was being chased by a fire? like Natural selection is a process that takes place over millions and millions of years. cycl what is it's not Nothing rushes it. No, no. It chooses. It's the opposite of rush, right? it's It's really just a process of being ready, right? It's survival, right? The the ones that are most fit are, yeah you know, can handle the challenges of the environment and have the most advantage survive, yeah.
00:39:17
Speaker
So additionally, McGill and others like him frequently um downplay the evolutionary advantages of bipedalism, right our upright stature, things like improved visual surveillance, increased efficiency in covering distances, and freeing the hands for tool use and manipulation. And they really play up the potential vulnerabilities or the alleged vulnerabilities of the human spine, especially in the context of modern lifestyle. So Sarah, have you heard Not just from McGill, but like in other places have you heard the spine explained just like this inherently fragile thing because of our bipedal State and and like have you used have you heard it um explained as fragile using this evolutionary context? Honestly, no, I really know I don't hear it explained that way as a part of evolution I heard much more explained that modern-day civilization
00:40:07
Speaker
is too much for our spines, right? So, sitting at the computer, driving, texting, all of these things yeah are not, our are what's destroyed, like our spines are too so too fragile to be able to withstand those things. yeah But that's why I was so like front like, the whole thing about quadruped to bipedal and suddenly you're your guts need, are they gonna fall out of the front of your body? I was like, what are you talking, what? yeah this isn yeah no sense Yeah, it was a real fear back then according to like Linker's research. Yeah. um Yeah. And so much of what McGill claims about what are often, you know, the way he talks about it, they they're kind of characterized as these inherent risks of movement to the human spine, like things like never flex your spine. Or there are there are people with thick spines that are more at risk during twisting, apparently, or the new
00:40:55
Speaker
the need for a neutral spine and heavy lifting at all times, even though that's impossible and a lot of lifts, as well as the superiority of the McGill method you know for reducing back pain, allegedly. um you know that that The fact of the matter is, robust bodies of research have called all of these assertions into question. right But anyway, we spoke in depth about McGill in episode 62 of the Movement Logic podcast, Make McGill Make Sense. If you haven't listened to that one, check it out. It's linked in the show notes. Then our friends on Conspiracy Pod also invited us on to speak more about McGill, and we'll also link that episode from their podcast in the show notes as well. Here's really where the connection started to be made for me, because one of the aspects of McGill's approach that you really highlighted in the writing of that episode, Sarah, is that he frequently moralizes posture and movement.
00:41:41
Speaker
The way he talks about posture movement is very value-laden. He draws a good and bad movement line in the sand um or a line between heaven and hell. Deadlifts, yoga, Pilates are in so many words, according to McGill, bad for people with back pain. While neutral, spine bracing in neutral, the McGill Big Three are all good. And this parallel was interesting to me because reading slouch Linker touches frequently on the presumed morality and cultural meaning behind good posture or upright stance, and how when we look back in time at the long history of posture improvement campaigns, it, and I'm going to quote here, becomes evident how value-laden they are, how the presumed morality and cultural meaning of upright stance often masquerades as scientific and medical facts, unquote. um So Miguel, completely aside here,
00:42:32
Speaker
Personally, I love anatomy, and I think it's really interesting to compare and contrast the anatomy of different animals with human anatomy. That's fun. I like finding bones in the woods and trying to figure out what vertebrae is this, or is this a sacrum, or is this a pellet? What is this? It's like, you know. You're finding human bones in the woods? What are these bones you're finding in the woods? Dead animals, like coyotes, deer. No, but I bring them home, which is sort of creepy, but I put them in hydrogen peroxide. Yeah. Isn't that beautiful? For whatever reason, I'm totally down with that, but then I was like, what are you finding? I know. it's That's why we're friends. but um you know the thing It's interesting to compare animal and human anatomy, but the conclusions drawn from these comparisons is where I think we should examine those comparisons more critically.
00:43:17
Speaker
in light of all these potentially still lingering societal stories that may you know may kind of be in our in our subconscious, our collective unconscious. Throughout history, posture was used as a way to sort the fully human from the not fully human, the able-bodied from the disabled, the attractive and youthful, from the unattractive and old, the trustworthy from the deviant or suspicious, the genetically superior from the genetically inferior. So when we start comparing anatomy of the spine, let's be careful of what we' well like conclusions we're drawing from that. So many bad conclusions have been drawn in the past. All right.
00:44:00
Speaker
ah What are some examples that you remember from the book about the way posture was used as a sorting mechanism, as a way to sort of like say, okay, because your posture looks like this, this means this about you. Yeah. the the I mean, there's so many, but one of the ones that really struck me was about scoliosis and how people with scoliosis were seen as like, you know, deviant. They were disabled. they were it It made them, you know, they were untrustworthy because they couldn't stand up straight. um And this this continued like not just in the the early 20th century, like well into the mid like 1940s, 1950s, you know,
00:44:42
Speaker
ah yeah I remember reading about this one person who was like, I didn't want to go swimming anymore because I would have to show my spine would be on view and people would like, you know, point and stare kind of stuff. But yeah, yeah that that one really, really kind of stuck for me. Yeah, yeah. She, she notes that even today research shows that prosecutors still use poor posture as a reason to exclude African American men from being selected for juries. She also quotes Trevor Noah's autobiography in which he writes about growing up in South Africa, and shares that quote for centuries colored people were told blacks are monkeys don't swing from the trees like them learn to walk upright like the white man unquote linker notes that during this time
00:45:27
Speaker
and Both social Darwinism and eugenics, surprise, surprise, were popular and that they were fueling the, quote, white masculinity crisis. in And this is kind of a side note, but kind of not. Are we seeing a resurgence of the white masculinity crisis today, Sarah? I started wondering this when I used to listen to Andrew Huberman, another guy we love to mention in every single episode. I wasn't totally sure at the time that he was a quack, but I suspected it. like something was like I had like this feeling. Every episode he'd go on and on about testosterone levels in men and like optimization. and But I was like, what is that happening here? What's going on with these guys?
00:46:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think we're absolutely seeing it. I mean, I feel like that was a ah leading question. um Not just someone like Huberman, but in all of the things like, like the soy boys and like the, you know, that there was that dating show with the guy with the hat where it was all about you needed to nag on women and like, you know, that there's a thing going around Instagram at the moment about like, women are saying they would rather be in the woods with a bear than a man. And all the men are like, What is that? Have you not heard this? Never, ever. oh No, so so on Instagram at the moment there's been this question like would you rather be stuck in you know in the woods with a bear or with a man and women are Overwhelmingly selecting the bear and all these men are like I can't believe it was it because they felt safer with the bear. Yeah. Oh
00:46:50
Speaker
so so Yes, so the idea is women feel safer with a bear than with a man, and then all these men are getting like hyper aggressive online about like, why don't you feel safe with me? Maybe this is why. So yeah, this kind of hyper masculinity as a way to try to you know be, that it means you're like a real man kind of a thing. and and i think the i mean this is a whole separate topic for a podcast, but I do think the more there is a section of the population that feels threatened by that, right? And so then everything's about like, get be more, you know take your testosterone and also like, don't date a girl who won't cook for you and you know all that kind of thing. Right. Right. Yeah. Like it this like reversion to what's it called? 1950s idea.
00:47:40
Speaker
ah In the reading of this book, I came to better understand the difference between Darwinism and social Darwinism. I don't think I ever really thought about it. so Darwinism is an accepted foundational scientific theory of evolution. In contrast, social Darwinism is a social theory that arose out of Darwinism around the turn of the century, and it's very related to eugenics. and you know The eugenicists were like, oh, this is awesome science to prove our fucked up We talked about eugenics in our long and lean series. So eugenics is a social movement and a pseudo scientific theory advocating that society should improve itself by controlling who can have children and who cannot based on certain traits ah that they deem better or superior for creating a population.
00:48:23
Speaker
Eugenics is some classic Nazi bullshit, but then there's also something called soft eugenics, which refers to practices or policies that indirectly influence reproduction or population genetics without explicitly coercive or restrictive measures, often through social or educational incentives rather than legal mandates or sterilization.
Posture and Social Hierarchies
00:48:46
Speaker
So Linker notes that this white masculinity crisis arose at the height of the popularity of eugenics and social Darwinian theories. Do you remember where the ways that good posture around this time was incentivized and bad posture was disincentivized in this like soft eugenics kind of way? Yeah. So having good posture just indicated that you were a better person, right? It was kind of like just like a cheat code.
00:49:14
Speaker
where I was like, I stand up straight, automatically people are going to think I am civilized, which was important. They also believed that having good posture made you less likely to develop diseases later in life, um which is wild. ah You know, it it differentiated you from the disabled, right? Which was a big, you know, you didn't want to be disabled because disabled people were deviants, right? So it was a really easy way to differentiate yourself from from disabled people, it denoted you as like ah an upstanding moral character. right We already talked about that a little bit. It separated you from from the animals, right? But then also, this is the part that I, and where I know we're talking about this some more, but
00:49:54
Speaker
you know You didn't want to be an animal, but also there was this belief that all these aspects of civil society were were damaging your posture, like the corsets and the shoes and the chairs. um If you're a person of color, you may get an advantage in, you know quote unquote, civil society if you have good posture. right you're You're in a way differentiating yourself from the other people of color who might be more, you know quote unquote, animalistic or whatever. um And then having bad posture was disincentivized because it means It was this the opposite of all those things. Your your moral character was was questionable. You were more likely to die from tuberculosis somehow. yeah But then also, again, there was this um sort of subcategory of the super rich in the early 20th century. And there was this that's this posture, this pose called the debutante slouch, right? Where it was actually you wanted to kind of lean off to the side and cock your hip and whatever, because that indicated
00:50:52
Speaker
that you didn't have to worry about your posture because you led a leisurely lifestyle because you were so wealthy, right? People who worked had to worry about their posture. So it was I thought it was really interesting ah that there was also this kind of like little asterisk around like, oh, but if you're super wealthy, you actually want to be slouching. Yeah. Yeah. People were denied entry to colleges and universities. There were certain prestigious institutions that would conduct physical examinations that included posture assessments. and We're going to talk more about
00:51:23
Speaker
Some of those soon. ah But applicants with poor posture were denied entry, or they were required to undergo corrective exercises, h where have we heard that phrase before, to improve their posture as a condition of acceptance. um Yeah, and like you mentioned, scoliosis was a full on disability. is it Sarah, is scoliosis considered a disability to today? I mean, only in the most severe cases where there is the potential for organ damage and when somebody's going to have surgery for that reason. But I have scoliosis, probably so to use somewhere a little bit. like it's It's just a spectrum of you know places that your spine can be. It is not a disability. It's normal human variation. Yes. Yeah. yeah People were also denied jobs. Many employers, especially in industries like manufacturing and office work,
00:52:10
Speaker
would also conduct physical examinations that included posture assessments, and candidates with perceived poor posture were dropped, they were rejected, or they were, again, required to undergo these corrective measures. Immigrants were denied entry into the country based entirely on their posture. There's a part in the book where this guy working as an immigration agent in charge of granting or denying entry to immigrants was like able, he thought he was able to assess um like some absurd number of immigrants per hour and he he said he did it by making like a snap judgment or whatever like they would walk into the room and he would just like give them a glance and be like nope yep nope yep and because he thought he thought that he he could tell if someone would get tuberculosis or had tuberculosis or was like just gonna be a good citizen just based on like just like at a glance like
00:53:00
Speaker
Nope. Bad posture. Got to go. Go back. I know. It's fucking crazy. So crazy. Also flat feet. we all we We are still hearing all about flat feet today, right? Flat feet was a disqualifying condition for military service in the United States during World War I. I think they turned away like, oh my God, was it like 30% of people were turned away who were applying? well I don't know if it was that much, but it was like tons of people were like, I would like to fight for the US in the world war. And they were like, no, your feet are flat, sorry. Well, but then what it turned into is an excuse for people in the future to get out of military service like a certain form of president.
00:53:39
Speaker
who avoided military service in the Vietnam War because of his, quote unquote, flat feet. Yeah, I guess now it's like it's considered a consideration for why someone wouldn't be allowed to serve, to to fight, but it's not like an immediate no, but like they still look at feet and are like, and also like there's these three checks that you had, like X's you have against you and also you have flat feet, so no. Right. right um Yeah, flat feet posture panic. How many times Sarah? If you had a penny for every patient or student that would just unprompt it, offer up the fact that their feet are flat, and also I have fat feet. Flat feet, they're flat and fat. My life is over. you know As if as if if they're flat feet mean that like they're they're deficient in some meaningful way or they definitely explain something else that's going on in their body. Oh, maybe all the problems I'm having.
00:54:32
Speaker
Yeah, everything is because my feet are flat. Yeah. People people definitely come into the clinic. with the sense that their flat feet are a problem. And if they've consulted Dr. Google and the 10,000 flat feet fixes that are out there, they've probably come to some sort of conclusion around what it means for their posture and or their pain. Generally, they may not put it together all the way that it's like, oh, my flat feet are why my back hurts. But they're like, my back hurts. Oh, and also I have flat feet. Right. You know, like, oh, this is also something that's wrong in my body. Yeah. She doesn't really go into it. But she kind of notes that
00:55:04
Speaker
the poor posture crisis reminds her a lot of the obesity crisis. This idea that like you know because your BMI is whatever, that means you're unhealthy or whatever. i don't know Do you have any thoughts on that? BMI is a such a garbage measure, but it's still used to determine you know, what they call obesity, but it's basically it measures your height and your weight and combines that and it determines whether or not you're obese, but it's automatically biased against people like athletes. It's biased against certain races that tend to have denser bones, which make them heavier or more muscle mass or more muscle mass. Exactly. There's a panic about something that may not actually be that meaningful. There's a an American Olympian rugby player, Ilona Mayer, on Instagram that you should follow because she's hilarious. She calls out all her trolls. But she posted recently about how she's 5'10 and 200 pounds, which technically makes her obese.
00:55:57
Speaker
and that her whole life she has been technically overweight and she was made to feel a lot of shame about it. But her lean muscle mass is something insane like 85% of her total body mass. She's quote unquote overweight because she's got muscles for days, days with a V. So while yes, there are more overweight people in this country and that is something we need to look at, that the BMI measurement tool is putting way too many people in that category that don't belong there. Yeah, and also our friends over at E3 Rehab shared a great slide. There's three big predictors of longevity, which are you don't smoke, you exercise regularly, and you eat a varied nutritional diet, and two things that are not. And one of those was BMI. It's like, nope. Or and the other one was drinking alcohol, which I was like, oh, really? Oh, OK. You're like, awesome. ah I think I'm still going to try to watch it, but OK. But BMI, I was like, yeah, thank you. Yeah.
00:56:57
Speaker
Okay, so the scrutiny of posture, it appears, was a larger effort to cultivate this idealized vision of the American body, definitely. And I and i feel like the scrutiny of weight, BMI, body composition is kind of functioning in many of the same ways today. Linker notes frequently the importance, too, of understanding posture panic through an intersectional lens, and that privileged white men, for example, weren't the only ones worried about being physically weak or disabled. African-American doctors were also concerned about posture problems among the less wealthy, among them. And upper-class blacks, as you mentioned, used posture as a way to kind of differentiate themselves from lower-class blacks as well. She notes that, quote, the intersection of race, class, age, and gender often determine the degree of poor posture's disabling effects. A middle to upper-class white person with postural abnormality would have a greater chance of securing an education and gainful employment
00:57:53
Speaker
than a non-white." There are some other subtle ways racist thinking guided an understanding of posture and fueled posture panic. This one really got me thinking and I have to say I do feel like I was largely ignorant about this one. So one that Linker focuses on a lot is this idea of, quote, diseases of civilization. So diseases of civilization refer to health conditions that are believed to be more prevalent or exacerbated by modern industrialized societies. These conditions often include chronic diseases,
00:58:27
Speaker
heart disease, obesity, diabetes, mental health disorders even, which were perceived to be linked to sedentary lifestyles, but also processed diets and stress and other factors associated with urbanization and modernization. Okay, when we got into the gospel and promise of Long and Lean in our three-part series last season, this claim that you'll be Long and Lean from doing Pilates or Bar, this thing that you know we'll hear a lot in these communities, we'll link the series in our show notes. In part two, I referenced the book Burn, by evolutionary anthropologist Hermann Ponser. And we looked at his book to better understand how metabolism works because we wanted to critically analyze this claim that exercise formats like Pilates and Barr can make you leaner. Ponser has done a lot of work with modern day subsistence farmers, which he calls hunter-gatherers.
00:59:12
Speaker
One example is this community called the Hadza in Tanzania. And he studies these people to understand how and why they do not get certain chronic metabolic diseases, like the ones I named heart disease and diabetes, for example. And these diseases are very prevalent in our modern Western industrialized society. So he wants to understand why that is. He notes that, and I'll take this quote from Byrne, quote, these cultures, like the Hadza, have a lot to teach us in the developed world. But it's not the caricatured version of hunter-gatherer life popularized in much of today's paleo movement. My colleagues and I have learned a great deal in the past few years about how diet and daily physical activity keep these populations free of the, quote, diseases of civilization that bedevil us in modernized, urbanized, industrialized countries, unquote. So I'm reading slouch.
01:00:06
Speaker
And meanwhile in slouch linker informs us that the phrase quote diseases of civilization was popularized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries right around the time of the posture panic right by medical and public health professionals who were observing an increase in chronic ailments in our western industrialized societies. And they contrasted these conditions with what they perceived as the relatively healthier lifestyles of indigenous or non-Western peoples, often referred to as quote, primitive or savage races in the racialized rhetoric of the time. um So yeah, I was like, oh shit, this concept of diseases of civilization, she's explaining reinforced this idea that certain health problems were intrinsic to modern urban life.
01:00:55
Speaker
and that Western societies need to adopt this more natural, less industrialized lifestyle to improve their health outcomes. And I was like, God, that makes me think of so many things. and What do you make of this? Like, OK, first of all, do you think Linker is saying there's no such thing as diseases of civilization? No, I don't think that's what she's saying, but I think she is saying that posture isn't a disease the way it's been purported to be. In my opinion, the biggest diseases of civilization are those that are sequelae, follow-ups of things like insufficient exercise, not posture. People are more sedentary. They are getting less movement overall and also less movement variety. And this is much more damaging to your health long-term in terms of things like cardiovascular health, bone mass, strength, balance loss, depression, anxiety. you know I can go on and on. So it's not the posture that's the issue. It's the fact that we're just not moving enough as ah as a society.
01:01:53
Speaker
yeah Yeah, and Ponser talked almost exclusively i think exclusively about this lack of exercise. He didn't really talk about posture at all. um But yeah, I thought about him because there's more to this. So Ponser's teacher is actually the famed Harvard evolutionary anthropologist Daniel Lieberman, who's the author author of many popular books on human evolution. And you know a couple of them are in my Kindle. So for background, Lieberman, okay so Daniel Lieberman, Ponser's professor. He's very famous, ok very respected. His theory is that culture has evolved at a much more rapid pace than natural selection. So here's where he's like, no, it's not that natural selection was hurried. right That's not a thing. He's that culture is evolving so rapidly. And it's leaving humans in bodies that have not yet been able to adapt. up
01:02:50
Speaker
to our rapidly changing environment. So these culturally inheritable conditions, these diseases of civilization, these are things like poor posture, back pain, obesity, these are all Lieberman's ideas. They all belong to a group of diseases that he calls, quote, mismatch diseases, mismatch diseases, as in our bodies are mismatched to the environments that we're in. And this is why we have some of the problems we have. And so in order to solve this problem, Lieberman studies subsistence farmers, he calls them hunter-gatherers as well, in sub-Saharan Africa to better understand their habits and physical activities. And so then Linker writes critically of Lieberman. She names him. She's like, he is, quote, ostensibly unconcerned with the problematic history of physical anthropology and its perpetuation of race science, unquote. OK.
01:03:47
Speaker
so i was like Oh shit she's going after lieberman oh damn okay real quick just roll on the same page race science was a thing it's a discredited field of study. That attempts to categorize and differentiate human populations into distinct races based on physical characteristics genetics and other attributes it promotes the idea that some races are just. naturally better or worse than others. It has also been used to justify harmful practices and ideologies such as racism, colonialism, and eugenics. Now, this is, okay, this is really potentially kind of confusing to people who are white like me, all right? And it can be kind of hard to understand, all right? Because typically when we think of racism,
01:04:29
Speaker
We think of the group in power, white people, typically right, denigrating, demeaning, or belittling, quote, the other. And these are typically people who are brown, black, indigenous. However, another much subtler form of racism, a form it can take is when the group in power idealizes, romanticizes, or glorifies the other. This tendency to idealize is connected to the racist trope of quote, the noble savage. The noble savage is a stereotype portraying indigenous or primitive peoples as naturally good, pure or noble compared to modern civilized societies. This idea originated during the age of enlightenment, which overlapped with the age of European colonization of other parts of the world.
01:05:17
Speaker
And this trope idealizes non-European cultures as morally superior due to their perceived closest to nature and their simplicity. So in the context of colonialization, this idea was used for a lot of shitty things, like it was used to justify European expansion and domination over these, quote, simpler cultures. Europeans then also viewed their own societies as more advanced and rational compared to the quote uncivilized or quote savage societies they encountered in Africa, the Americas, and Asia. And this perception led to the belief that it was Europe's duty to civilize and uplift these societies by imposing their cultural norms,
01:05:59
Speaker
and structures and and religious beliefs. But when we idealize a group of people, we simplify them in a way that reduces them to basically a stereotype. It's stereotyping. It can be infantilizing. It basically like makes them less human and erases the richness and complexity of their culture, which is every bit as rich and complex as our own. um If we are the dominant group and I feel though that this form of racism cut it's really subtle right Sarah Yeah, it's it's a very bizarre sort of cognitive dissonance because on the one hand we are supposed to be yeah Embodying the kind of upright posture that denotes, you know civility godliness it separates man from beast but then at the same time we are denouncing the outcomes of this civilized society like
01:06:51
Speaker
furniture and clothing and shoes that are making our posture worse in theory, right? And instead we should be copying the quote unquote noble savage that does not have any of these problems of civilization and has a natural posture that that we want. So on the one hand, we should have chairs because they indicate our civility, but on the other hand, we should have the posture of people who don't use jurors. But we are also trying to separate ourselves from those people to prove our greater worthiness as humans like total mindfuck. Yeah, it's like one of those drawings where those drawings where like you go up the stairs and suddenly you're going down the stairs and it's just like a Escher drawing. I mean, this is the thing, it's racist. So you can't make it make sense. It doesn't make sense. Right, right. So there's no amount of explaining that that does make it make sense.
01:07:35
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. We've got Linker and Lieberman, right? They're academics, and they're deep thinkers, and they've done a lot of research and a lot of work, right? And my husband's an academic. and We talk sometimes about like how brutal academia can be. It's both brutal and good that in academia, there's a lot of smart people who are doing a lot of very deep study. These people are trying to get at the truth about a particular topic. and They're devoting their entire life to studying this like one thing, and that's great. But what happens is that when the people studying the same thing realize that one of their peers got it wrong, they won't let them know about it. Sometimes in a really public way, like putting them in a book
01:08:13
Speaker
or like the whole idea of peer reviewed research is this, right? It's so fucking harsh. But it's also a form of accountability, something that is so sorely lacking from some influencers and gurus out there spreading falsehoods in so very many online communities. Like this accountability is really good. And so I'm learning so much from both of them and their work. And Linker's like kind of publicly calling them out. Lieberman is a big dog. She's kind of punching up. But anyway, she goes on to list A couple of more influential individuals in her book who have described indigenous populations as exhibiting this quote, primal posture, like this posture guru who you mentioned in Silicon Valley, go Cal or Esther, go Cal.
01:08:57
Speaker
who exoticized the potters, the basket makers, the weavers, the head carriers, she grew up around in India, all while admiring their spinal health. Gokal also took a posture therapy training with a person by the last name of Peres, or Peres, who was notably the first European student of BKS Iyengar. And so Peres, Peres, must be Peres, went on to open her own yoga studio in Paris. And BKS went there to visit, and he told her that her students were inherently misaligned, which prompted her to study the spines of non-industrialized people in several rural regions of Africa. Okay, so let's say let's discuss this appeal, this appeal to the primal, this appeal to paleo, or just this appeal to this natural
01:09:51
Speaker
way of doing something is like healthy. This healthy way of doing something is kind of equated with being primal, paleo, natural, posturally or otherwise. It's interesting to think about how this plays out in how we talk about posture and movement. So how often, Sarah, have you heard the phrase, You know, we should do this how blank is naturally designed to blank. What does this make you think of? In so many, and and this sort of goes back to all of those functional, regain the hips you had of a child, who how it's designed to move freely. Look at this baby squatting naturally. I'm like, that baby doesn't have any fucking kneecaps. Like, let's let's breathe here for a second. Look how big that baby's head is. Yeah, I mean, come on. Go either center of masses. So yeah, this idea that like,
01:10:37
Speaker
we need to reclaim our natural fill in the blank the way that we were designed to be before society ruined us, you know? There's also this like way that we're designed, right? This appeal to like there being a maker, a creator. Yeah, so much appeal to nature. I couldn't help thinking about, for example, the fad diet, paleo, and how everyone thinks they're eating like a hunter gatherer, but nobody has any idea what hunter gatherers ate. And They were a lot of the time starving to death, and they died a hell of a lot earlier than we did. and like There is no single paleo diet that's not a monolith, but yet there's this like really clear i idea in people's minds that like this is what paleolithic people ate. It's like, are you sure? Are you sure? yeah Based on whatever. Also, even if it is, is definitely not the right thing to do? Yeah, are you sure you want to like eat what they ate when they died when number twenty they 20? They didn't make it that far. Yeah, they yeah they really did.
01:11:26
Speaker
um There's like all the references or appeals to paleo primal primitive that you see out there. um I think that CrossFit's line of clothing is called prim primal or primitive, one of those. um CrossFit comes to mind, of course, because I do CrossFit. I think CrossFit has since moved away from paleo diet as a recommendation, but it it was advocating very hard for the paleo diet. There's literally hundreds of other ways these ideas of primitive, primal, natural, natural, like that has to be the most commonly used word to market anything ever, right? But it's appealing to antiquity. It's appealing to nature, which is a logical fallacy. just because something happened a long time ago and just because you encounter it in nature does not make it good, right? Arsenic is encountered in nature and you know lots of horrible things happened in antiquity that probably don't happen as much anymore at all. ah So like this idea just that it's like if it's ancient and natural, it's good. I don't think it's always the case that this language is used in a in an appropriative or racist way, but I think it's often used
01:12:32
Speaker
in a subtly appropriative and racist way or in an unchecked, unevaluated, appropriative, racist way in people's heads, right? They're like thinking, oh, I'm doing this primitive primal movement without realizing it. They're just associating this with indigenous people. And this idea of indigenous people becomes this monolith, this really simplified, romanticized ideal in their head, all the while it's being used to reinforce their own overwhelmingly white identity. And Linker just does an absolutely amazing job of pointing this out. What I love about Slouch throughout this book is that she uses posture really as a way to have a conversation about other things we can't see or even think about until we have a historical context
01:13:17
Speaker
through which to understand and talk about them. And it kind of reminded me of proprioception, but in a different way. Like proprioception, proprioception helps us to understand where our body is in space, and history helps us to understand where our society and its ideas and our language come from. And both give us a deeper awareness of our position in physical space and then in the flow of time and culture. I think with slouch linker, you know, she's trying to tell us, she's trying to explain to us why so many middle class professionals in the US s believed that poor posture was an epidemic and it was real. But in doing this, she also helps us to question how these groups in power even acquired the authority to label certain groups as primitive to begin with.
01:13:59
Speaker
noting that this entire notion of poor posture is, quote, rooted in the logic of settler colonialism and empire, unquote. She also points out that the simplistic evolutionary explanations for back pain, its insistence that a, quote, natural posture exists in other times and places, that this coincidentally appeals largely to a white upper and middle class consumer. the target demographic of today's multi-billion dollar worldwide fitness industry. How convenient. um Linker suggests we should be skeptical, too, of the idea that back pain is this like brand new thing, right? She troubled that notion with some evidence that, like, no, back pain has been around maybe for as long as humans have been. Yeah. So so she talks about how there's evidence from from fossilized bones of early hominids.
01:14:52
Speaker
um that shows degenerative changes to the bones of their spine, right? Which could mean that they experienced back pain. We don't know. and We also have no like, this is just me, not her. We have no written records. People weren't sitting around being like, wow, my back really hurt today. So we can't say for sure that they did or did not. yeah yeah We don't know. Yeah. And so, you know, we have this idea that like this natural pain-free posture is found in in less developed regions of the world. But she says that's something we should be really skeptical about. Like,
01:15:23
Speaker
She talks about a medical anthropologist working at a clinic in Nepal who treated villagers for different ailments and said that, you know, no one complained of back pain. But then when he got a translator, he found out that they indeed did have a great deal of back pain, but they just accepted it and didn't feel the need to mention it. Their cultural relationship to pain was just totally different than his. Yeah. There was an ethnography that looked at people in rural Botswana and it noted hardly anyone complained of back pain, but then they realized people were just calling it something different. They were calling it waste pain, which they indicated using their hands around the back of their pelvis. So they were just saying, it's my waste. And people were like, oh, well, nobody has back pain.
01:16:02
Speaker
ah And there was also, under the systems of slavery and colonialism, there was just this idea that black people didn't feel pain, or they didn't feel it the way we feel it, or they don't feel it as much, or they lie about their pain, they're not having pain, right? so That's still a thing in the medical world. Yes, people not taking women seriously, people especially not taking women of color seriously. yeah you know Stories of ah older women, older women of color having to go to the hospital, and if they do their hair, they get treated better. And if they didn't do their hair, they get worse treatment. you know African Americans are under-prescribed pain medication. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's like well well-supported in the research. Yeah.
01:16:45
Speaker
Okay, let's talk about posture surveillance, which I feel like I was definitely a participant in. At a point in my career, I was i was definitely a posture surveyor. For much of the 1900s, Americans were told that bad posture could cause serious health problems. Okay, this started around 1917. with a study called the, quote, Harvard slouch study, which found that 80 percent of students had significant posture problems. This was around the time that posture officials were using what's called a schematograph. Sarah, tell us what is the schematograph? Yeah. So the schematograph was created in 1915 by a woman named Clelia Mosher, who was in she's part of this group, the American Posture League. And it was a way to to draw
01:17:34
Speaker
an outline of a person's body using a reflecting camera and tracing paper. So you would you would somehow using this camera and tracing paper, you would be able to follow the outline of their body. And then what they liked about it is then because it's on tracing paper, you could overlay the ideal posture on top of it and be like, you're here, but you should be here, right? And then you could have the person work on specific exercises to get them closer to that ideal posture. And it was also the the pre precursor to what I like to call the nude photo scandal that we're going to be talking about in a second. and yeah Yeah, because of this perceived scourge of bad posture, in 1914, a group of physicians and educators in the US created the American Posture League. So the woman who created the schematograph was a member of that. And so this was in existence all the way up until the end of World War II.
01:18:27
Speaker
and it it disbanded in 1944. The APL, the American Posture League, focused on preventing poor posture, which at the time was basically considered an illness. How was poor posture considered an illness, Sarah? um Well, it just that it it set you up for all of these other illnesses to follow, like tuberculosis. i don't That's the one. I'm like, so i'm like what? like why did they why was Why? I know. Like, why? How are we drawing a line? It's like, it's like the idea of natural selection being chased by a fire.
Historical Beliefs and Posture Monitoring
01:19:03
Speaker
Like, why is posture? Why is there a straight line between posture and tuberculosis?
01:19:08
Speaker
I mean, I guess because it's like airborne and and this idea of like, if you have bad posture, it's going to negatively, it's going to make your breathing worse. And that opens you up to other disease or like your organs are compact. I don't, I don't know. Yeah. um But yeah, I mean, we've talked about this already, but you know, scoliosis was was considered just a full on disability. Yeah. um So it was it was considered like, this is going to lead to worse illness in the future. It was basically one of the things that we would consider today, like a comorbidity. yeah I don't know if they had that language back then, but yeah that's sort of an idea. Yeah, there was this idea that people believe that poor posture doesn't give your organs enough room, and that this opens you up to other diseases of those organs. but You're like squishing them. Or this one's really common, that it negatively impacts your breathing, okay which might be true. i'm I definitely can't breathe as well in some postures as others, but that this negative impact on your breathing
01:20:05
Speaker
opens you up to other diseases. right So to prevent poor posture, the APL initially used top-down surveillance to monitor people showing these early signs of disease or disability. So in this context, top-down means that The surveillance and monitoring efforts were directed and controlled by higher authorities or institutions, government agencies, public health organizations, ah posture experts that were placed in schools. So the person who started the APL, her name was Jesse Bancroft. She founded it and named herself president.
01:20:39
Speaker
In 1914, she asked a bunch of her buddies to join her, people in the medical profession, physical culturists, and then also a bunch of people in other industries, not at all associated with medicine or physical culture. But all these folks were like super high mucky mucks, you know, really important people. They probably all had a lot of money. Before becoming the director of the American Posture League, Jesse Bancroft was assistant director of physical education for New York City public schools, starting in 1904. And she was this really big proponent of this idea that We've heard this before, the human spine was just not ready to support us and that it was basically a quadrupedal spine set hastily on its end. So she believed there had to be. That in order to be healthy bipeds, we needed to attend carefully to our spine. She was particularly interested in the nation's youth, thinking they were, quote, closer to the evolutionary process. And that if you got them early,
01:21:33
Speaker
Those bad postural habits could be nipped in the bud. She fully, fully bought into the theory of recapitulation. right That's this idea that the embryo you know passes through these evolutionary stages and believed that acquisition and repetition of childhood developmental patterns were all important to reinforce in her lesson plans. The American Postural League gave students an A rating. and a, quote, posture pin, right? You got a little badge. But this posture pin, this is, it had an image of a Lenape man on it. That's a Native American tribe. ah So yeah, Native Americans, you know, we often assumed that they were just naturally endowed with good posture because they, quote, lived active outdoor lives. Even though in reality, many indigenous children at the time were being removed from their lands and families and forcibly sent to boarding schools. so
01:22:28
Speaker
Remember when they used to tell us to sit Indian style, Sarah? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Well, now, and then they realized that's not good. And then it was crisscross applesauce. That's right. This is a quote from the book. Quote, Indians came to be regarded as disembodied symbols and, quote, ironically, symbols of white American identity. It's so bizarre. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, also, you know how walking with a book on your head is considered good posture training? I'm working on my posture. Did you have to do that as a model when you were modeling? No, no, but my mom went to like this kind of finishing school in Philadelphia in the late 1960s, and she's in the brochure, which we have. And it's all about you know being the best housewife you can be, you know or perhaps ah a flight attendant if you you know had to have a job, and looking your best, which was, of course, learning comportment, right how to carry yourself with good posture. And i I'm pretty sure there's a picture of a woman walking with a book on her head. Because that's one of the qualities that makes you good marriage material is having good comportment. Wait, so why is it called finishing school? Can I ask what? the web has Because your life is finished. No, because but after this point, your life doesn't matter. And it's all about being a wife and a good maker of babies. No, it's the idea that you were it was finished almost like um
01:23:47
Speaker
It's like you're being polished to be like, you know, you the most, the most, uh, how to sit and stand and walk and hold your body and have polite conversation and have a drink waiting for your husband through the door. And don't start talking to him, right? You know, all that kind of stuff. ah Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's a whole bunch on that in the book slouch as well about how, you know, having good posture was associated with, you know, being attractive. Good wifey material. Yeah. Yeah. Well, ah about carrying a book on your head, that actually also comes from indigenous groups that practice head carrying. But of course, they got to make it white and middle class. So they traded the baskets for books for people with, quote, leisure time and resources, not only to engage in posture training, but also to read books, unquote.
01:24:34
Speaker
Yeah, Bancroft prized the plumb line. How often have we heard that word plumb line? Which she considered a biomechanical ideal. And it became a scientific standard that could be used and started to be used by all school districts. She found this quote test, this plumb line test that she would run to be this go-to heuristic, this simple test that even teachers who are not necessarily experts in posture or physical education Could start administering for their students and then pretty soon it became a way students could administer it on each other and themselves and so now now we're going from this top down surveillance to this bottom up surveillance where everyone is looking at everyone's posture.
01:25:17
Speaker
and evaluating it and measuring it and deciding if it's good or bad and here's what she wrote was ideal quote ideally the head neck trunk would form a straight line the plumb line so that the front of the ear would fall on the same vertical axis as the ball of the foot unquote. She was on a mission to make this top-down surveillance a bottom-up thing and develop people's quote eyes for posture so that they could surveil their peers and themselves. And she felt like posture scores, you would get a score, right, were as important as academic scores.
01:25:51
Speaker
and she even set up this thing where classrooms were pitted against each other or schools were pitted against other schools to see who could get the best posture score and then there's the part in the book do you remember this where the students actually beat up a kid because he was bringing their score down yeah it's nuts it's like full-on like lord of the fly shit Yeah, about posture. But like, okay, how many pictures though of people with this plumb line drawn have you looked at? I mean, so fucking many. And i've I think I don't want to misquote who does this, but I think it's PRI, Postural Restoration Institute, that has actually not just a plumb line, but a grid, like a ah
01:26:33
Speaker
a whole grid, ah like ah on a wall that you then stand up in front of and are photographed and then you can see like, Oh, look, you know, the shoulders are tilted and then this is this way and like, and then it's, you know, the draw all the red arrows all over it for like, you know, yeah how bad of a person are you because your posture is so poor? Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. Full disclosure. I used to think I had this trained eye for postural patterns myself as a yoga teacher and a yoga teacher trainer. And I can remember this being like a badge of honor. I was somehow more experienced or better at my job because I could spot all these little nitpicky things about people's posture, the way they moved or the way they walked. And I remember going to work teacher workshops and the person leading the workshop would have us do posture labs, break out into groups and whatnot. And we would look at each other doing whatever. And I remember cause it's a bunch of teachers, right? And it becomes this pissing match to see who has the better eye, who could basically nitpick another person's posture the most like kind of like shivers thinking about it. Yeah, absolutely. And then there were also always the people that you know didn't have as good eyes and then they felt really bad about themselves. right They're like, i don't so I don't see what you see. Yeah, i'm i can't I can't teach yoga. i do i kid I don't know what you know. Yeah, totally. ah Yeah. And then also it's not just in yoga. I ah was in a recent rehab Pilates training and it was
01:27:49
Speaker
a lot of like, you know let's pick apart the faults for the example people. and And I remember they're doing something on me and it was all about my my pelvis and whatever. And then this one person pipes up like, and her elbows are hyperextending. And i you know it's always hard in a situation like that because I don't want to be a dick. inside my head I do. yeah But out loud to my peers, I don't. So I think I said something like, all right, let's calm down to try to be like funny about it. And some people laughed, but I was like, also, let's calm down. It doesn't matter. Yeah. It's not a moral failing. you know Still fucking happening, right? And like there's whole like schools of movement teaching people to do this. Still, still, right? Absolutely. um It's so easy to look back on the past and be like, Oh my God, there's like so out of hand. And then you're like, start to think about it. You're like, wait a second. It's it's we're still doing this shit. Oh, yeah. Okay, Sarah, tell us about the nude photo schedule. I just think we should for our listeners. ah The reason why we're laughing about this is Laurel had texted me something along the lines of when we were preparing for this episode.
01:29:00
Speaker
so it was something like, do you want to talk about the nudity? And I, for whatever reason, I don't know if it was like out of the blue or we, ah but I had, I was like, my initial thought was like, who's naked on Instagram? Like I was like, there's some sort of scandal happening right now where somebody's, I was like, is this like a Kim Kardashian? Like what's happening? And then I realized she was talking about something in the book. So we've been joking about the nude photo scandal. But this was a real thing. So in 1995, there was a New York Times article that broke and it uncovered the fact that there
01:29:37
Speaker
were at the time thousands of nude photographs in the Smithsonian archive, which meant you could just go in and request a viewing if you wanted to. and these right That's what an archive is. you the the These photos were you know some just random people, but also famous people like George W. Bush, Meryl Streep, Diane Sawyer, Hillary Clinton, and more. and you know People were like, oh my God, where did all these bizarre nude photos come from? so These pictures were taken you know decades earlier, when so not in 1995, but when all of these people were in college. Because prior to the 1970s, it was a ah requisite, and a lot of colleges that you had to you know go through a posture evaluation, and this was done. right This is comes after that schematograph,
01:30:32
Speaker
of the the earlier 20th century, now we're using photography to capture posture. And people were generally totally naked for these pictures, which I found a bit bizarre because you could also put someone in a leotard and you would see the exact same things. like There was really no need for them to be nude. um So it did stop in the 1970s. And after the scandal, you know they they destroyed all of these photographs. But you know when I started PT school in 2014, the very first semester, we all had to strip down to sports bra for the girls and shorts to be photographed front, side, and back in order for us to then look at these photographs up you know up on the screen at the front of the class and examine each other's posture and find the faults.
01:31:26
Speaker
so In some places, it's still going on. Yeah. Wow. I remember it. And I remember it being a the sort of like medium traumatic, like people were not happy about this at all. No, no, no. And but you know you were wearing like you were wearing your sports bra, right? Like these people were naked. Naked. Naked. Yeah. full frontals yeah and profiles and backside like what the fuck and so so so then what happened was that
01:31:59
Speaker
that like, yeah, they were like, oh, shit, we got to get rid of these pictures, right? Yes, it was a huge scandal. And, you know, the these ones in who knows, ah but those were destroyed. And then like a lot of colleges ah had to then go through their own archives and be like, whoopsies and also, you know, destroy the photographs that they had. And then some of them were missing. Like they were stolen. Men got their hands on women's photos and were like dealing them like like like trading cards. Not just random men, other college attendees. like It was a way to pick your next girlfriend. like You would go pull out the pictures of the Yale girls and like see which one you wanted to date. Or they would like compare them and make really cruel statements about them. And it was just, ugh.
01:32:41
Speaker
And then Linker is like talking about how they did manage to anonymize a lot of them and do studies to see retrospectively, this is what their postures looked like. Did they ever end up with pain? like Did the ones with bad posture end up with more pain or not? I think there was like one person who was successfully able to convince these institutions to let her use these photos. Anything that at all conveyed the identity identity of the people was like completely removed from the photo, so they could just look at the posture and and then contact these people and be like, did you ever have back pain or did it at all? And I think that they did find out, like no, there there didn't appear to be a relationship between the so-called bad posture people and like pain and and whatnot. But then what happened is that they wanted to continue to do these studies to look at more photos, to like go further into the research of trying to understand, could it could it actually be used to show that posture is
01:33:31
Speaker
or isn't related to pain. I don't know if they're currently in talks about this or if it's just been decided that like no all these photos will be destroyed like we're not allowing you to use these photos for further investigation even if the identity of the people photographed is completely removed like no they're just going to be destroyed and on one hand I'm like well okay yeah because like if I had a new photo of me out there I'd be like fuck that no you're ripping that shit up But Linker's point is like, oh, of course, the most privileged of society get to decide their image that was used in this really irresponsible way. Or people had this terribly wrong idea about why they were doing what they were doing and the explanations they had for it. Like, of course, they get to decide that, no, you can't use my image anymore. Like, we can't do any further investigation with this, even if you remove my identity and no one knows it's me.
01:34:19
Speaker
because they're in positions of privilege. They went to schools like Princeton or Harvard or Yale or whatever. And meanwhile, nobody else in lower positions of privilege really ever gets asked that question or ever got asked that question. It was an interesting twist for her to be like, no, we should still be able to use these photos. if the identity is removed, because what we can then do with these photos, we can actually go back and ask these people. We can interview them about their lives. We can find out, is there does there appear to be a relationship? So she's like, it was really a missed opportunity. um And I thought that was like a really interesting twist on it. And I was like, yeah, yeah, I kind of see her point. But on the other hand, I'm like, I kind of see why people want these fucking photos to strike too, because that's pretty frickin' traumatic. Sarah,
Critique and Humor in Modern Posture Trends
01:35:01
Speaker
yes we you know were like,
01:35:03
Speaker
talking about how messed up all this stuff was that was happening at the turn of the century. And we're like, oh my God, they thought posture was related to tuberculosis. What the hell? But today we still see a lot of silly bullshit, as Adam Eakins would say, out there about posture, posture enhancing apparatuses and ideas and movement formats. And let's go back and forth here. What are some of the most ridiculous posture enhancing items that you've seen lately, Sarah? Well, I did mention the one in the beginning, like the posture t shirt thing that either like buzzes or yeah, it kind of it's sort of like a corset. It's like a modern version of a corset where you you know, you put it on and that's supposed to like hold you upright. um Online, there's always this hyper focus on asymmetries.
01:35:43
Speaker
Like this hyper focus on like, is your pelvis level or your shoulders level? And I know that that doesn't seem like ridiculous bullshit until you start like looking at the research and you start realizing that asymmetries are a part of normal human variation. We don't have to get so caught up in the fact that someone's pelvis is not level or their shoulders are not level. We can really just start to talk, like you said, we can start to talk about like what their strength is like and on one side or the other. And maybe if there's like a discrepancy in strength, we can make that side. that side that's weaker, a little stronger. um There's still like, there's still whole systems of movement devoted entirely or quite a bit to posture enhancement, right? There's still a Alexander Method, PRI, like a lot of, and it's not all Pilates teachers, NPT, not all,-A all Pilates teachers, but there are still quite a few Pilates teachers and yoga teachers who are pretty caught up in the correct posture. There's this Instagram page that I've been sharing with you that's just
01:36:38
Speaker
Of course, I i followed it, so I'm seeing it. And now you're getting a whole bunch of other posture pages suggested to you and you're like, God damn it. Yeah, posture guy Mike. I mean, in a way I kind of want to see because I want to see what's out there. sure So posture guy Mike at posture guy Mike, he sells this posture enhancement program for seniors, um which is according to his reels, ah gentle stretches to improve their strength. Oh, of course. And prevent them from getting, and he'll point down to a picture of a woman with hyperkyphosis, which is often a sign of advanced osteoporosis. So you don't look like this. Right. So this here here we've got this guy selling gentle stretches to strength train to avoid advanced osteoporosis. Sure. um Or the $150 pair of AI-controlled shoes he sells that track your balance.
01:37:31
Speaker
that help you help you know if you have good balance. um There's no strength training on his page. He has almost 1 million followers, and it's like super fear mongery. Aren't you going to know that you don't have good balance if you're you just falling over a lot? I mean, or you could just like do something about your balance that will actually make a difference to your balance. Yeah, why do I need shoes to tell me whether or not I have good balance? Yeah. I think I probably know about it. And certainly gentle stretching, as we all know, is the number one way to get stronger and to defeat osteoporosis. So um yeah, that seems that seems very scientific. Yeah, something that's sort of confusing and subtle, sort of like the racist trope of the noble savage or appeals to nature is is when people who appear to be helping, like their whole brand is wrapped up in offering solutions to what are considered to be self-evident problems like posture.
01:38:24
Speaker
are actually harming because they're distracting people from focusing on the stuff that will actually help them. And in many ways, working to make their audience or students fearful of movement and therefore dependent on them for the solutions.
01:38:42
Speaker
Yeah. Look, it's why it's why you and I will never be out of work. Yeah. Unfortunately. Yeah. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. ah We're like at two hours here. I hope you've enjoyed this episode and and that you are doubling down on perfecting your own posture and those of the people around you as well, let them know. i mean Basically, we got to do our part to be good patriots and to get closer to Jesus and to avoid a lifetime of pain and misery. So great watch out watch out for your posture there, people. keep yeah If you see something, say something.
01:39:25
Speaker
That's right.
01:39:30
Speaker
Definitely say something. You know what people really like is when you criticize them about things that they have not asked you about. Yeah. Yeah. I think posture ends up being one of those things a lot of the time. Check out our show notes for links to references we mentioned in this podcast, of course, including Beth Linker's excellent book, Slouch. Finally, it helps us out. If you like this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, don't forget to get on the wait list because you train the train is leaving the station. The strength training is leaving the station.
01:40:06
Speaker
The strength train is leaving the station. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. um Sarah, can we please change our sign off to See You in a Fortnite? It's giving it's giving like epic, high drama like vibes, kind of Game of Thrones-y. I like it. I'm feeling it. Sure. Fortnite. See You in a Fortnite. Yeah, I mean, I didn't... I grew up in England people saying Fortnite. I didn't think it was something used very much here. Sorry, maybe it's just giving British vibes and that's... I think it does. But as long as everyone knows, I'm not trying to be condescending here, but as long as everyone knows that Fortnite means two weeks.
01:40:42
Speaker
I mean, I didn't and then I looked it up. Our our enormous Gen Z audience might be confused because Fortnite is actually a very popular video game. We want to sort of see you in a Fortnite, not see you in Fortnite. We're not getting off and then going gaming. Yeah, we can say see you in a Fortnite. See you in a Fortnite. Okay, here we go. Ready? See you in a Fortnite. That was pretty good. Yeah. Okay.