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102: The Problem with Moralizing Movement
4 Playsin 4 hours
In this episode of the Movement Logic Podcast, Laurel explores how we’ve come to assign moral value to certain movement concepts—like compression, flexion, anterior tilt, and instability—and why that language does more harm than good. She unpacks how terms that are neutral by definition often get rebranded as “bad,” “dangerous,” or “dysfunctional” in movement and rehab spaces.
Rather than offering a list of “better” movement cues, Laurel invites listeners to step outside of binary thinking. This episode explores how our wiring, combined with marketing and group identity, fuels a polarizing narrative—a red-X/green-checkmark mentality that pits “functional” against “dysfunctional.”
Whether you’re a teacher, coach, or curious mover, this episode offers a reminder: biomechanical concepts are just descriptions of what’s happening—not value-laden truths. And when we let go of moralizing movement, we open the door to more creativity, exploration, and individualized problem-solving.
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Resources:
The Truth About Good vs Bad Muscles - Results Not Typical Podcast
98: Capacities for Longevity Part 3 - Cardio
94: Capacities for Longevity Part 2 - Power
90: Capacities for Longevity Part 1 - Strength
89: Is Dead Butt Syndrome Real?
80: Posture Panic Pt. 3 with Author Dr. Beth Linker, PhD
79: Make Yoga U Make Sense
78: Behemoth Knee Myths
76: Posture Panic Part 2
74: McGill We Go Again
73: Posture Panic Pt. 1
67: Popular Explanations for SI Joint Pain are Wrong, Says Science
66: Dismantling Long and Lean Pt. 3
63: Dismantling Long and Lean Part 2
62: Make McGill Make Sense
58: Alignment Dogma - Shoulders
54: Alignment Dogma - Spine
48: Alignment Dogma - Pelvis
19: Oh, NO! Nose Breathing and Nitric Oxide
Review: Effect of training and lifting equipment for preventing back pain in lifting and handling: systematic review
Review: Stoop or squat: a review of biomechanical studies on lifting technique
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Transcript
Introductions and Mission
00:00:00
Speaker
I'm Laurel Biebersdorf, strength and conditioning coach. And I'm Dr. Sarah Court, physical therapist. With over 30 years of combined experience in fitness, movement, and physical therapy, we believe in strong opinions loosely held. Which means we're not here to hype outdated movement concepts.
00:00:15
Speaker
or to gatekeep or fearmonger strength training for women. For too long, women have been sidelined in strength training. Oh, you mean handed pink dumbbells and told to sculpt? Whatever that means, we're here to change that with tools, evidence, and ideas that center women's needs and voices.
00:00:32
Speaker
Let's dive in.
Value Judgments in Biomechanics
00:00:46
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic Podcast. I'm Laurel Beaversdorf and I'm here with a wee in-betweeny for you. Today we're going to talk about the language we use to teach or describe movement, even if we aren't a teacher or a coach.
00:01:00
Speaker
So specifically, how we tend to take biomechanical concepts and intentionally or unintentionally assign value judgments to them, even though they're really at baseline just ways of identifying what's happening.
00:01:14
Speaker
But our human brains love to convert them, I think, almost automatically into... this binary of a good thing or a bad thing, right or wrong, of heroes or villains, or if you've been on social media and you're in some movement profession, the red X and the green check mark.
00:01:33
Speaker
So we assign value to these biomechanical concepts almost without realizing it, I think. So let me give you some examples. In fact, let's run a little experiment, okay? I'm going to say some words. These are concepts from biomechanics or even physics or physiology.
00:01:47
Speaker
And you decide, are the these sending off a positive or negative vibe. Just really let the word, kind of like a Rorschach test, how does it make you feel? all right, here we go.
00:01:59
Speaker
Compression. Lengthen. Stress. Anterior pelvic tilt. Stable. Strain.
00:02:13
Speaker
Multiplanar movement. Flexion. Neutral.
00:02:20
Speaker
Compensation. Asymmetry. Nose breathing. Mouth breathing. Symmetry.
00:02:33
Speaker
Unstable. Okay, that might have been fast. Hopefully you weren't too buffeted about by the emotions that arose while hearing those words. No, I'm just kidding. But maybe you felt some kind of way.
00:02:44
Speaker
Many of these concepts, I think, in our mind and in our narratives become characters. They become superheroes and villains. And the superhero's name is functional and the villain's name is dysfunctional.
00:02:58
Speaker
And so what if, though, I told you suggested or reminded you or just announced that at baseline, none of these concepts are actually inherently good or bad or benevolent or evil.
00:03:13
Speaker
They're all neutral. at baseline, really just ways of talking about what's happening. And actually, without any of them, except maybe symmetry, we'd have some issues. We'd be less capable of moving or being in our body or experiencing real life. And if we try to force ourselves into an alternate reality where we only did the good ones, we wouldn't be living in reality Now, maybe you don't live in this binary world, but I think as we unpack each of these terms, you'll see how they do tend to be used to convey some type of value often.
00:03:48
Speaker
And I think this is because our brains have been, in essence, wired toward this binary reality of you're either alive or dead, right? Right. And let me be ultra focused on the things that might make me dead so that I can be alive. Because that life and death is like a true binary, unless you have some other spiritual beliefs that would lead you to believe otherwise. But I digress.
00:04:12
Speaker
Trademark movement systems. Let's talk about
Influence of Movement Systems
00:04:14
Speaker
those. I find that trademark movement systems are some of the biggest purveyors of... this binary in terms of how movement is discussed, right?
00:04:24
Speaker
They are the biggest purveyors of this green checkmark red X, good versus bad narrative, right? Whether it's about movement that is functional or dysfunctional,
00:04:35
Speaker
Muscles that are the ones that we want to pay attention to because they will benefit us if we learn to activate them or strengthen them. And then the ones that we want to just deal with because they're always in our way and causing us problems. Good and bad muscles, right?
00:04:50
Speaker
Posture, right? There's this postural tendency that is positive or good and then this postural tendency that is positive. ah potentially gonna, you know, you'll pay for that later, cause you problems.
00:05:00
Speaker
Better that you learn to be in your body in this way. Learn to move better. Okay, so I talk a little bit about my history with YogaWorks, right? I was a YogaWorks trained teacher. I was a YogaWorks teacher trainer.
00:05:14
Speaker
I was taught in the beginning as a trainee, ah teacher trainee in my 200 hour, my 300 hour, was taught that certain body parts were deemed risk factors. And so literally the body part was categorized as a risk factor.
00:05:26
Speaker
The risk factors were the knees, the low back, and the neck. And these were considered to be areas of the body that needed special protection with our cueing. So we were always considering in every single pose How our cues or how our way of aligning the pose or teaching the sequence would protect the risk factors.
00:05:44
Speaker
We unpack this mentality and also a lot more in our series about alignment dogma, which I will link in the show notes, as well as in our behemoth Nemeths episode. All right.
00:05:56
Speaker
Then I also spent some time in the trademark movement system called Yoga Tune Up. We were always rolling out muscles and we were moving in certain ways that would target these problem muscles that were causing us all this pain, right? That were gunking up the works basically for our neck and our shoulders. And I walked away, for example, believing like the pec minor was responsible for basically... most things that were maybe not going well for my shoulders and neck. In reality, the pec minor is a muscle among 600 plus other muscles that attaches to bones and moves those bones like levers so that our limbs can move and so that our ribs can move and all kinds of good stuff. And it's
00:06:35
Speaker
pretty neutral, like it's just another muscle. But I really left the yoga tune-up method with this narrative of, oh, the pec minor. See, it's probably the pec minor that's responsible for whatever you've got going on in your shoulders. And now let's actually roll it out because that's what I know how to do.
00:06:50
Speaker
We, Sarah and I, talked to Nikki Nablivi on her podcast, Results Not Typical, in an episode titled The Problem with Good and Bad Muscles. So if you want to learn more about this narrative around good and bad muscles, that's a great episode to check out. And we'll link that in the show notes for you.
00:07:05
Speaker
All right. And then we have good muscles too, right? So what about the glute max, right? Gosh, glute max would just be so wonderful to have on board if only it would wake up and stop being sleepy or dead or amnesiatic.
00:07:17
Speaker
You know, if we can get our glute max to activate finally, right, to make it stronger, Our back pain might disappear because, according to some narratives, the reason your back hurts is because your glutes are asleep. I covered this myth in our episode about dead butt syndrome, which you can also check out in the show notes.
00:07:35
Speaker
Sarah and I unpack these narratives a lot where certain parts of the body, biomechanical concepts, ideas get framed in a particular way that this narrative develops around them and that we become a little bit lost in that narrative, which makes us maybe less equipped.
00:07:53
Speaker
to find perhaps better alternative solutions to the problems that we face, the problems we're solving as movement teachers, or just like a more complex, well-rounded and true perception of what the body is and how it works.
00:08:09
Speaker
This good and bad framing, it shows up everywhere, right? As a newer yoga teacher, I remember being told or conditioned to believe that fast-paced vinyasa flow classes were reckless and dangerous and that those teachers didn't really actually know how to teach teach, while the method I taught, which was slower and alignment-based, was safer, more intelligent, right, and just ultimately superior.
00:08:37
Speaker
The movement world, no matter what type of movement you teach, can really become like this microcosm of the macrocosm, I find, right? We are all just, you know, wherever we go, there we are. Humans behaving like humans, thinking like humans.
00:08:53
Speaker
And I think one of the ways you'll spot human thinking in these microcosms is we love a good narrative. We love a good guy and a bad guy. We love it to be binary and simplistic. But here's the thing. What tends to be true about these methods or trademark systems or styles, no matter what this perspective is called, they tend to not be as informed by evidence.
00:09:17
Speaker
Or if they are, they might cherry pick some over others so that they can further their brand narrative to create a story around their system that's coherent because Science can actually be a little messy, a little incoherent, a little contradictory, right? And it's sometimes hard to create this consistent message around your brand if you really are being evidence-based because there'll be potentially some studies or some findings that kind of throw a wrench in what you're trying to do. And you got to go, oh, maybe the way we're selling what we're doing isn't entirely the whole truth.
00:09:55
Speaker
It's not the only way to do it. It's not even maybe the best way to do it. And that can cause a lot of cognitive dissonance and also create this, again, negativity bias, this threat to your bottom line. Now I don't really have a pot to piss in, so I'm just going to double down on my claims. I'm going to stick to the narrative. I'm going to reinforce the narrative.
00:10:14
Speaker
And so whether or not like the people teaching these systems or the leaders of these systems are evidence-based or not usually What their survival depends on is their ability to tell their story in the most compelling way, in this coherent way, in this probably simple way, so that the customers listening to the story know like what they are getting and why they are getting it and what it's going to do for them, the promise, right?
00:10:42
Speaker
Okay, why does any of this matter? i think ultimately when we think of movement or when we think of what we're doing as coaches or teachers in this dichotomy of right-wrong, we want this, we don't want that,
Binary Thinking in Movement
00:10:55
Speaker
which is like very human. I do it all the time. i can't really avoid it, right? Like I feel like this is just part of our programming. It's our software, right? What happens is that I think...
00:11:05
Speaker
The more blinded to that binary style of thinking we are, the less aware we are of it, the more potentially our teaching becomes overly simplistic, the more we shut off possible avenues in which we maybe find better solutions, the maybe less we're willing to like really listen to our students or the people we're helping to like take into account what they're telling us, even when it contradicts our mental model of what we're doing and what we're here to do.
00:11:34
Speaker
It could be the case, like in my case, my teaching became very fear-based. It became very like a series of warnings about how to protect the knees, the low back and the neck, as opposed to exploratory or curious. I was constantly protecting rather than potentially helping students just get to know their bodies through movement without assigning areas that were off limits or without dichotomizing the body in this like good bad type way.
00:12:04
Speaker
So we're going to talk about each of the concepts that I listed at the top of the episode and how these concepts get moralized either as this is something you want and it's good or this is something you don't want and it's bad and how this might oversimplify the complexity of the body, discourage critical thinking, take useful options off the table, or just create this atmosphere of fear of going where you shouldn't go in your body or exploring some off-limits thing movement-wise.
00:12:32
Speaker
Okay, so we're going to go term by term. Let's start with the word compression.
Understanding Compression in Movement
00:12:38
Speaker
So let's start with the definition of compression. This is a very layperson definition, compression according to physics and biomechanics. So compression is a way forces can be applied where two surfaces push against each other.
00:12:52
Speaker
And In your body, there are a lot of surfaces. There are a lot of different tissues with surfaces that are constantly being pushed against each other. So your body is constantly experiencing various amounts of compression.
00:13:10
Speaker
Your joints get compressed when you stand up, when you walk. They get maybe more compressed when you carry a weight or carry an object like groceries. In exercise, you experience compression in things like squats with a barbell on your back, right?
00:13:25
Speaker
body weight plus the barbell will create compression through your spine, hips, knees, ankles, same thing in push-ups through your wrists, elbows, you name it. So basically any weight-bearing exercise probably involves some amount of compression.
00:13:42
Speaker
Compression is also potentially created not just by body weight or the weight of the thing you're lifting in strength training or in life, but also from muscles contracting.
00:13:53
Speaker
they can also cause bones to push against each other or cause tissues to push against each other. So compression is just happening all the time. It's pretty ordinary. And let me just do a quick aside here to share with you one of the reasons I'm talking about compression and really what sparked the idea for this entire episode, which isn't just about compression, was that someone actually left us a positive review. Thank you very much. And also requested an episode topic.
00:14:19
Speaker
And I promised on some episode that I would always honor those requests. And so I'm honoring the request of talking about compression right now. But anyway, I'm weaving in this topic of compression. because this person's review slash episode request noted how compression is really negatively framed in trademark movement system called gyrotonic. And so I think it might be helpful to compare the barbell back squat and gyrotonics as it relates to just so surfaces pushing against each other, which is compression, right?
00:14:51
Speaker
um So, for example, in a barbell back squat, we're experiencing compression. Sometimes this fear-mongered. Oh, back squats or squats in general are bad for your knees because they cause this compression, when in actuality, squats are not bad for the knees inherently, and potentially they're great for the knees.
00:15:10
Speaker
Compression is a force that your body can adapt to. It can become stronger as a result of experiencing it. Of course, it can also be a force that is greater than your body can adapt to and potentially cause injury. But here's where we could say it's not necessarily compression that's the problem. It's the dosage of compression that can sometimes be a problem. But at any rate, we know that strength training can make your body more tolerant of loads to prevent injury, to to create a stronger, tougher, more durable body that can resist injury better.
00:15:38
Speaker
But compression, apparently in this trademark movement system known as gyrotonics, is often framed as something that you want to stay away from. In gyrotonic, it seems that the language around compression frequently moralizes this experience, portraying it as something that you really want to avoid. It's sometimes framed as this restrictive energy blocking thing that's happening. This is a value-based framing. If we just come back to the idea that compression is happening all the time, it's a neutral force.
00:16:13
Speaker
It's neither good nor bad. That's what I mean by neutral. I think that in general, when we have a movement system, trademarked or otherwise, Attaching spiritual, moral weight to basic biomechanical realities, painting them within a narrative that's pretty binary, or mixing science with spirituality, it's a bit of a red flag.
00:16:38
Speaker
It's typically... Difficult, though, for insiders of these trademark systems to see that it's happening because they might it might be all they know. It might be a situation where they're encouraged to only do gyrotonics, to not strength train. For example, that these two ways of moving are incompatible. This is sometimes what's communicated. I know as a yoga practitioner for a long time, I thought that I really should avoid strength training because I would get too strong and therefore less flexible.
00:17:06
Speaker
We know that strength and flexibility are not opposites, but I didn't know that at the time. Ultimately, you can become closed off to outside information that might be more science-based.
00:17:17
Speaker
So a lot of these insiders, they hear this type of framing and it ends up becoming their mental model for what is actually happening. So compression becomes the scary thing that you get from these other ways of exercising, but that you overcome with gyrotonics, right? And then that becomes the way that it's framed to their students as well.
00:17:35
Speaker
But generally, if you can recognize that within whatever particular movement community you're currently operating, if the narrative is spinning this good-bad dichotomy especially when it's getting spiritualized. This is a red flag, something to be aware of.
00:17:51
Speaker
It typically signals a lack of exercise science literacy. It sometimes could point toward cult dynamics. It generally just creates unhelpful limiting, even harmful narratives around movement, around the way people relate to their bodies. Okay, compression. So within the yoga and rehab worlds, even spinal compression in particular is framed as something that's dangerous.
00:18:17
Speaker
We're not talking about the dosage here. We say compression and we immediately think that's something we don't want. Pain can be attributed to compression. Oh, your back hurts because it's compressed. compressed, usually with no evidence connecting compression to the pain.
00:18:34
Speaker
It's just an assumption. Here's the reality, and I alluded to this when talking about the squat. Cartilage benefits from compression. Joints benefit from compression. It's how nutrients within the blood get pressurized through this fluid exchange, this nutrient exchange. It could be a little bit like squeezing a sponge, right?
00:18:52
Speaker
This exchange can be beneficial, like a form of nourishment. to cartilage, we've seen that cartilage can actually become thicker and stronger as a result of exercise, exercise that would induce compressive loads to the joint with the said cartilage.
00:19:07
Speaker
So when we moralize compression as bad, when people have this perception that just any kind of compression is bad, we create of of load that's very misplaced.
00:19:19
Speaker
And we might start to associate squats or strength training with compression. And we've decided compression is bad, so now we're going to avoid squats and strength training. We are missing the fact that the body adapts to applied forces like compression.
00:19:32
Speaker
Tension. Tension's another word, right, that needs a better PR firm behind it. yeah um And I'm not talking about tension today, but consider tension in the same category as compression. Tension is applied load when something's being pulled on, right?
00:19:46
Speaker
It's neutral. It's neither good nor bad. The dosage is what matters. But when our body experiences these forces, compression and tension, it can, if dosed appropriately, become more resilient, right?
00:19:58
Speaker
So compression builds tolerance and protects us from injury potentially. So when we hear compression, we shouldn't assign value to it immediately. We should not use the word as something bad, right? We should try to reframe it in our mind and understand that it's the dosage that would make the benefit or the detriment, the the poison or the medicine, right? And just as, yes, too much compression could potentially result in injury, too little compression can also result in injury, right? If I'm bedridden or overly sedentary and then I go to, i don't know, do a little yard work and I experience some compression from lifting a bucket of water and I injure myself, it wasn't necessarily the bucket of water that instigated the injury as much as it was the fact that I hadn't
00:20:51
Speaker
prepared my body to lift the bucket of water. So dosage can, yes, be too much causing injury. It can also be the case that we're under, we're under loaded, right?
00:21:02
Speaker
We're under compressed. We're under tensioned. All right. So compression, not bad. Neutral. It's a way forces are applied. It's a pushing force. We shouldn't immediately jump to bad, nor should we immediately jump to good. We should ask how much and for whom.
00:21:18
Speaker
And here's the other thing. The question won't always have an answer because whenever we're talking about compression or tension, we want to consider how much, right?
Individual Solutions Over Assumptions
00:21:25
Speaker
It's the dosage. We can never really know how much compression is the knee joint experiencing in a squat. Like,
00:21:30
Speaker
What would you have to do to someone's knee to figure that out? I don't know. But making bold, declarative, confident statements about compression in general is tough. And it's better to maybe not get too hung up on it.
00:21:42
Speaker
It might be the case that you're focusing on the wrong thing, which is a common refrain on this podcast. So let's let's ah maybe... Let compression be it a thing that we know is happening all the time. And if someone's having some issues with their movement practice that's causing them some pain, we don't need to necessarily jump immediately to this idea that something's being compressed too much, because how would we know?
00:22:03
Speaker
Maybe just try to work with that person individually to find a more tolerable way to do the thing. Let's slip to another word.
Rethinking Aesthetic Focus in Practices
00:22:13
Speaker
Lengthen.
00:22:14
Speaker
Lengthen is a word that gets used a lot in yoga and Pilates and dance, probably because all three of these formats tend to have an aesthetic agenda in that the teacher is often looking for students to appear a certain way as feedback that the student is executing the exercise or pose correctly.
00:22:35
Speaker
And this has everything to do with athetic aesthetics. But we know that people can look many different ways doing an exercise and all be benefiting, right? They all don't all have to look a specific way.
00:22:48
Speaker
We have our Posture Panic series that looks extensively at the role that posture has played in various forms of discrimination throughout history. You might also like our Long and Lean series that looks at this long or lengthened aesthetic ideal and how Pilates specifically has been taught in this way that sort of dog whistles, uh,
00:23:15
Speaker
body composition ideal or even a body type ideal, promising that if you do Pilates correctly, you too can achieve this lengthened look.
00:23:25
Speaker
Okay. In this case, though, in yoga especially, lengthen is typically a verb used to cue some action of the spine. It often means taking the two ends of the spine, so you say the top of the neck or the head even, and the tailbone and moving them further apart, which would result in reducing The curves of the spine, right? So you actually look like you're standing up taller because you've taken some of the curvature out of your spine. In physiology, it could also mean lengthening a muscle.
00:23:55
Speaker
Muscles can shorten and lengthen. It could be an eccentric contraction where the muscle contracts and lengthens. It could be passive length of the muscle, passive static stretching where a muscle is brought into length. In kinesiology, it could mean joint extension, right? But I guess lengthen is a very vague term is what I'm trying to say.
00:24:11
Speaker
It's not really... doesn't have a real concrete definition in science, so can mean all of these things, but it tends to be the thing we want, right? We want to be longer, longer, longer muscles, longer spine, long and lean, right?
00:24:25
Speaker
But here's the thing, okay? As I just mentioned, this spine tends to have some curves. They actually absorb compressive forces. Those curves serve a purpose to reduce compressive forces. in the body.
00:24:36
Speaker
And then there's the whole like, let's stretch to lengthen our muscles, but muscles don't stay long indefinitely. They don't permanently change lengths. When you hear lengthen, it's not necessarily a good thing. You can lengthen, you can shorten.
00:24:49
Speaker
You can lengthen your spine, you can shorten your spine. You can lengthen your muscles, you can shorten your muscles. You can stand up taller, you can slouch. It's good to be able to do it all. Movement is just a changing of positions.
00:25:00
Speaker
Let's stop moralizing length. When you moralize length, You demoralize this.
00:25:09
Speaker
We should consider length as just this measure of distance. Lengthen is neither good nor bad. doesn't really mean much, actually. all right, strain. Okay, strain is a word that carries some negative connotation to it. In biomechanics, though, strain refers to you deformation, which also has a negative connotation, but deformation and strain words that represent how much a tissue changes shape when stress is applied.
00:25:33
Speaker
Okay, so it's a normal and necessary part of moving, being able to change shape. When you bend your knee or stretch your hamstrings, your soft tissue strains. It changes shape. It deforms and then returns to form. It lengthens and then goes back to its resting length, right?
00:25:47
Speaker
In a yoga class, that might mean the lengthening of the hamstrings in a forward fold. In strength training, it could be the tendon lengthening under the tension of a deadlift.
00:25:59
Speaker
Too much strain too quickly, sure, that can lead to injury. But as like compression, so can too little, right? So we adapt to the loads we experience and we atrophy when we don't experience enough loads.
00:26:15
Speaker
Without adequate strain, without adequate shape shift, without exposing our body to movement, tissues can lose their ability to tolerate the forces that cause the strain. so We'll talk a little bit about stress, but strain is happening all the time.
00:26:33
Speaker
We're always straining. It's not bad. It's a mechanical response. The question is, how much is the tissue straining? How fast is it straining? How often is it straining? And this is where this is where, again, we come back to the dose makes the medicine or the dose makes the poison. Because in clinical settings, a muscle strain can refer to a tear.
00:26:52
Speaker
in a muscle or a tendon, and it's usually graded by severity. But in in biomechanics, I think it's interesting to note that strain is really a neutral term. It's just a concept that's describing tissue deformation.
00:27:04
Speaker
So without clear definitions, we can confuse the injury with the thing that we're doing all the time, which is tissue length change, right? Tissue shape change.
00:27:18
Speaker
So, you know, when you encounter the word strain, hopefully now you can reframe it as changing form, changing shape. Your cartilage strains under compression, right? Your muscles strain under tension, and it just means that they change shape. And then when the force is taken away, they will return to their resting shape. but All right, so let's actually now talk about stress, right?
00:27:41
Speaker
Stress.
Stress and Adaptation in Exercise
00:27:42
Speaker
Oh, I'm so stressed. It's a bad thing, right? And again, are we talking about psychological chronic stress or are we talking about stress as in the internal force per unit area in a material? Of course, I think it's important as people who are interested in exercise to understand this biomechanics definition.
00:28:03
Speaker
In addition to the way that it's used a lot more colloquially, which is I'm under so much stress, I have so much psychological stress, so much chronic stress, right? So we're talking about, in this case, when we reframe stress as like not necessarily a villain, but a internal force per unit area in a material, we can understand why the dose makes the poison. We can understand why we need exercise stress in order to increase our fitness.
00:28:31
Speaker
With insufficient exercise stress, our fitness reduces. But we can also injure o ourselves with exercise when exercise stress overwhelms the tissue's capacity. Stress is neither good nor bad.
00:28:45
Speaker
It is merely the internal force per unit area in a material. So in your body, when you experience walking uphill, carrying a bag, doing a lunch, you are experiencing stress.
00:28:58
Speaker
Stress and strain are related. Okay, so stress is the force applied. Strain is the tissue's deformation in response. So if you have more stress, you might get more deformation.
00:29:11
Speaker
If you get too much stress, you might get a deformation that exceeds a threshold and end up with an injury. If you have too little stress, you get too little deformation and maybe you get some atrophy.
00:29:23
Speaker
So if you hold a heavy bag, that load applies stress to your shoulder. Your tissues strain accordingly. Maybe that bag was heavy enough to actually challenge your tissues just slightly beyond their capacity to help them repair and be stronger after recovery. Maybe it's too much and you end up with a sore shoulder the next day.
00:29:43
Speaker
But this relationship between stress and strain hopefully can help us understand why the dose makes the medicine or the poison, especially as it pertains to exercise. So when you hear that deadlifts are dangerous because they stress your lower back,
00:29:59
Speaker
What's implied there, of course, is that stress is bad. But hopefully now you realize that what should have been added to that sentence is when you deadlift a weight that you were unprepared to deadlift because it was heavier than what you'd ever really built up to appropriately, you could injure your back.
00:30:16
Speaker
But you could also say deadlifting stresses the back and makes it stronger and less likely to be injured. We're often made to think that stress is something we should be reducing all the time.
00:30:29
Speaker
We should be avoiding it. But stress is how your tissues adapt. Bones respond to mechanical stress by growing denser. That's Wolf's Law. Muscles grow bigger in response to stress. Tendons remodel and get stiffer slash tougher in response to stress.
00:30:42
Speaker
Stress in the right amount is what keeps us actually durable, robust, injury resistant. So when we demonize stress or when we just muddy terms, when we don't clearly define the type of stress we're talking about, we risk encouraging people to be afraid of exercise and to seek out modes that are overly cautious and underloading them as opposed to robust forms of exercise that will actually stress them enough to make them stronger, to increase their capacity.
00:31:13
Speaker
We might focus a little too much on making the form really perfect before we're allowing somebody or allowing ourselves to actually add a little load to it. um We have this fragility narrative of be careful or watch out or your body really can't handle that.
00:31:29
Speaker
And we rob people of the confidence that they should feel when approaching any type of progressive exercise that we're going to we're gonna exercise. We're going to see how it feels. We're going to adapt based on how it goes. And we're going to get stronger in the process.
00:31:46
Speaker
Stress isn't bad. Stress is the internal force per unit area in a material. It can be too much. It can be not enough. Hopefully it's just right. And we are better for it.
00:31:58
Speaker
You've heard that strength training is great for bone density, but where do you even start? The Bone Density Mini Course, Barbell 101, is a free, no-nonsense introduction to lifting heavy with confidence.
00:32:09
Speaker
You'll learn exactly how to set up and use barbells, racks, and plates without second-guessing yourself. We'll walk you through the squat, bench press, and deadlift, and show you how to avoid the most common mistakes that can hold you back when you're just starting out.
00:32:24
Speaker
Maybe you're wondering, how do I even set up a barbell at the right height for my body before I start lifting? What's the difference between a squat and a deadlift? And how does that impact the muscles I'm training?
00:32:35
Speaker
Why focus on a five-rep max lift instead of higher reps? How long should I rest between sets? And why is that rest so important for lifting heavy? What exactly is rate of perceived exertion and how can it help me pick the right weight every time?
00:32:52
Speaker
How do I warm up for and build up to lifting a heavy weight safely? If you've ever had these questions or if you're not sure of the answers, this course will walk you through everything step by step so you can start lifting with confidence. Did we mention that it's free?
00:33:09
Speaker
Strength training doesn't have to be overwhelming. It just takes the right guidance. Get the free course now via the link in the show notes and start getting strong AF.
00:33:22
Speaker
All right, let's talk about anterior pelvic tilt. Dun, dun, dun. So in biomechanics, this is when the front of the pelvis tips forward and the back of the pelvis rises up um relative to the floor and standing, right?
00:33:36
Speaker
This movement happens actually at two joints. It happens at the lumbosacral joint where the lumbar spine connects with the sacrum, the base of the sacrum. And it happens at the hip joints where the acetabulum or socket of the hip on the pelvis meets the ball the head of the femur, the thigh bone.
00:33:54
Speaker
When the pelvis tilts anteriorly at the lumbosacral joint, the lumbar spine extends. So we see an increase in the lordotic curve. At the same time, the hips flex, and they're allowing the pelvis to rotate downward toward the thighs.
00:34:11
Speaker
Posturally, when someone's pelvis is described as being anteriorly tilted, their lumbar spine is in ah more of a static extended position rather than a neutral position, perhaps, or rather than a flexed position, and their hips are slightly more flexed versus neutral or extended.
00:34:31
Speaker
So to simplify, think of the pelvis. It's like a bowl. It's suspended between your lumbar spine and thighs. An anterior tilt in the bowl is like your pelvis is spilling the cereal onto your toes. so In real life, many people stand this way.
00:34:45
Speaker
It's common in pregnancy. It's common amongst individuals just as a postural characteristic that they have. It's also a movement. It's a movement that the pelvis should be able to do that is important for things like walking, for running.
Reevaluating Anterior Pelvic Tilt
00:35:00
Speaker
In exercise, you'll see anterior tilts potentially in movements like backbending or deadlifting or various yoga poses, cat, cow, right?
00:35:11
Speaker
Moralizing anterior tilt, like just using the word as though it carries the implication of being bad or dysfunctional or pain-causing or something to correct is a problem.
00:35:24
Speaker
Because in reality, it's just a movement your pelvis can do. It's a position your pelvis can be in. And it's incredibly necessary. Like a pelvis that can't anteriorly tilt is a spine that can't move and a hip joint that can't move.
00:35:37
Speaker
It's necessary. It's definitely not inherently harmful. And can there be such a thing as pain due to an anteriorly tilted pelvis, posturally speaking? Absolutely. Any movement done repetitively without variation could be a risk factor for overuse injury, but the same could be said about posterior tilting the pelvis or a neutral pelvis.
00:36:03
Speaker
All right, let's talk about two terms now. Let's talk about stability, which is often a hero, right? And then instability, which is often the villain. We want stability, right?
00:36:15
Speaker
We don't want instability, right? Stability in physics means the ability of a system to return to equilibrium after a disturbance.
00:36:26
Speaker
Okay, so the system, maybe it's the joint, right? In biomechanics, stability is the ability, say, for your joint to be able to maintain its position during a movement or under load, okay? If it can maintain its position, that's leaning more toward the characteristic of stability.
00:36:46
Speaker
But is a joint that's unable to maintain its position during a movement or under load an unstable joint? Like, I might lift a barbell off the ground in the deadlift and my lumbar spine might not be able to maintain position under load after lifting it up.
00:37:06
Speaker
That doesn't mean that my joints are now unstable, right? And lifting that barbell off the ground potentially will contribute to my increased strength. and durability, right? I think it's common to conflate instability in the environment with instability at a joint, but they're not the same.
00:37:24
Speaker
So true joint instability, like a shoulder that dislocates or a knee that subluxes, is a serious clinical issue. It's definitely not the same thing as someone saying, do a lunge with this particular alignment to increase or decrease your joint's stability. A truly unstable joint is a joint that can't hold itself together, right? And when it comes apart, when it subluxes, you're in need of somebody to put it back together.
00:37:50
Speaker
This is not the same thing as saying, if you do plank this way, your low back is less stable. Typically, when people talk about joints being unstable in an exercise like plank or deadlift or squat, They're really talking about the joint potentially being in a position where the muscles can't work as efficiently to move the bones, right? Or they're talking about the person's alignment not meeting an aesthetic agenda.
00:38:15
Speaker
Their joints, though, in the exercise are not about to sublux.
00:38:20
Speaker
Additionally, we can manipulate variables to challenge our ability to remain balanced in order to challenge different systems. So we shouldn't automatically assume that we always want to be stable.
Stability and Instability in Training
00:38:34
Speaker
Sometimes there's benefit to making ourselves unstable. We also shouldn't assume that being unstable is going to result in pain. Sometimes the goal is to be unstable so that we then have to fight to return to equilibrium.
00:38:51
Speaker
And the benefit is in that struggle. So in training, we grade stability all the time. We use it as a dial to turn, right? We can turn up the stability, turn down the stability. Holding a heavy object close to your chest is probably more stable than holding it overhead with one arm because the heavy object is closer to your center of mass, which makes it easier for your system or systems to return to equilibrium after a disturbance.
00:39:17
Speaker
These shifts in stability, like purposely making ourselves less stable or more stable, depending, can allow us to challenge different systems in our body. Like we could challenge our proprioceptive system maybe a bit more by making the exercise less stable. Or we might challenge our muscular strength in a different way by making the exercise more or less stable.
00:39:39
Speaker
We could change the surface and do an exercise on an unstable surface where now the ground is creating perturbation. It's moving underneath us. Think about exercises done on a BOSU ball. These variables create different demands on our body. A single leg squat is inherently less stable than a bilateral squat.
00:39:57
Speaker
But that doesn't mean that a single leg squat is riskier. It doesn't mean that the bilateral squat is safer. It doesn't mean that we are going to get more stable joints from doing one versus the other. It's just single leg squat would challenge our balance more. And conversely, we can actually be stronger in exercises where there's more stability. So if we want to actually be able to lift more total load,
00:40:25
Speaker
Ideally, we make the exercise as stable as possible. We eliminate the challenge to our equilibrium as much as we can. I often encourage people who are working on their strength in a single leg squat variation to hold on to something so that they're not fighting to stay on their feet. And they can be more stable, which then allows them usually to be able to complete more reps or lift more weight, which ultimately will cause them to potentially create more strength in their body in that exercise over time.
00:40:54
Speaker
So how you manipulate stability will depend on the goals you're going for. it All this being said, stability, the hero with the big F of functional, tends to get treated like the holy grail, like the thing we're constantly trying to achieve in every exercise. Do this to make your this more stable, right? To enhance stability.
00:41:15
Speaker
And then instability is demonized as this thing that, oh my gosh, you're so unstable and let's like avoid that. But the irony is we use instability all the time strategically to create meaningful changes to our stability.
00:41:28
Speaker
It's a training variable, not a dangerous signal. And stability and mobility, I think it's also useful to know, exist on a a spectrum, especially when it comes to bone morphology, right? The more mobile a joint is, right, the shoulder, the glenohumeral joint being the most mobile joint of the body, the less inherently stable it is. So are we going to say then that the shoulder is in trouble just inherently for being a shoulder because it's less stable?
00:41:54
Speaker
No, it's good that it's less stable because that means it's more mobile. We can put our hand in all kinds of different places and we wouldn't be able to if our shoulder were more stable.
00:42:05
Speaker
Likewise, the SI joint, incredibly stable, not very mobile, which is ironic if you listen to a lot of the messaging around the SI joint because it sounds like the most unstable joint ever. Listen to our episode on the SI joint linked in the show notes.
00:42:21
Speaker
Yeah, your SI joint, incredibly stable, not very mobile. We want it to be a stable joint. When thinking about like the relative instability of the shoulder, hopefully don't immediately go, um my God, the poor shoulder, it's so risky. And oh no, what a disadvantage. Because obviously it's a huge advantage that the shoulder is unstable, that it's mobile.
00:42:42
Speaker
all right I think that if we saw stability and instability as neutral concepts, as variables that we can manipulate with exercise as just points along a spectrum, we'd potentially be able to have a better conversation around what to do and why as it pertains to movement and exercise.
Movement Decisions Based on Science
00:43:02
Speaker
We'd potentially have more effective solutions to problems. We'd start thinking more about the individual in front of us and what they need rather than this sort of absolutist way of viewing the body as being either in the realms of good or bad or stable or unstable and limiting our ability to think more strategically, to more skillfully manipulate the parameters and variables that we
00:43:27
Speaker
can manipulate with extra exercise. One of those is stability. In the end, movement-based decisions shouldn't be moral decisions. ah They hopefully shouldn't be fear-based decisions.
00:43:39
Speaker
They should be based on ah sound understanding of exercise science, which will involve some understanding of physics, and it will involve some understanding of anatomy and physiology.
00:43:50
Speaker
Do we have to be experts? No. But I think generally speaking, whenever we're talking about the body, if we can stand outside of moralization, i think we're probably making ourselves available for understanding a little bit more accurately what is going on.
00:44:07
Speaker
I'm going to leave that there. All right, let's now talk about multi-planar movement. Multi-planar movement. Multi-planar movement. This is a term that I think became popular in the yoga world as a blowback against Iyengar yoga. Honestly, I think that's where the blowback was because Iyengar yoga does tend to be, I would say, a little bit more rigid yoga.
00:44:31
Speaker
the way that people are taught to enter into and exit the postures and do the postures, there's not as much ooey, gooey, flowy, spirally, arky, bendy, modern dance-looking like movement happening in a younger yoga class.
00:44:45
Speaker
So then the trend became all about teaching multi-planar movement in a yoga class or like playing up the spiraling, arcing, swirling, curving, circular movement.
00:44:58
Speaker
I've definitely done that. And I actually enjoy the creative challenge of creating a class that is themed around circles or arcs or spirals. It's fun. But yeah, multi-planar movement has, I think, been packaged and delivered in a sort of moralized way, praised as functional, praised as a better way to move, as a more human way of moving. So what what is multi-planar movement?
00:45:21
Speaker
I think what is implied with multi-planar movement is movement that's happening in more than one anatomical plane. Now there's lots of mundane movements that happen in more than one plane, like walking, right? When you walk, there's rotation, you know, transverse plane movement and sagittal movement happening at the hip. There's also rotation and sagittal and side to side movement happening at the spine, right?
00:45:49
Speaker
Sagittal coronal transverse. But as I said, generally in the yoga practice, Iyengar yoga appears to approach movement on a grid almost, like lining the body up with straight lines, 90 degree angles, moving in a uniplanar way.
00:46:03
Speaker
Like we're either going to move directly out to the side or directly in front of us, and then we're only going to rotate, right? Multiplanar movement means movement that happens in more than one anatomical plane. So most of life is happening multiplanarily, right? When you put groceries in your car, when you play pickleball, when you take care of a child, when you pick up around your house, your movements are going to be multiplanar.
00:46:27
Speaker
It's also true that in maybe format like Iyengar yoga, there is a sagittal plane dominance and also in strength training, right? So if we look at exercises that are quintessential to strength training or even heavy strength training, we look at exercise like the squat, the deadlift, the bench press.
00:46:46
Speaker
I think especially in the squat and deadlift, we could say that the sagittal plane predominates in terms of the most amount of range of motion change at joints is taking place. In the sagittal plane, that's the plane ah forward and back movement, right? So when I deadlift, flexing my hips, flexing my knees. Same thing in the squat, right? When I squat down, my hips flex, my knees flex, my ankles dorsiflex.
00:47:07
Speaker
In the bench press, it's not quite as clear. But at any rate, I think one of the reasons that strength training tends to be sagittal dominant is that there is this ability in these more sagittally predominant movements to load up the body with more weight, probably because of the fact that we get greater mechanical advantage from our muscles in those directions of movement. And why would that be? Well, we are forward moving creatures, right? We're not crabs. We don't walk sideways. We don't have eyes on top of our head. Our eyes are in front of our head. So yes, much of our movement, human movement, predominates in this forward backward direction.
00:47:47
Speaker
in addition to side and rotation. So evolutionarily speaking, there has possibly been ah development in our bodies, in our physiology, to support that forward-backward movement.
00:48:01
Speaker
Therefore, we have greater mechanical advantage, muscularly speaking, in a forward-backward direction. Therefore, when we go to make our muscles stronger, the biggest bang for our buck a lot of the times in terms of how much we're able to lift, right?
00:48:13
Speaker
is exercises that predominate in the sagittal plane. But then we have this idea of multi-planar movement in yoga coming in. And the idea is that, well, we've gotten so stuck in the rut of moving our bodies in this grid-like way, repetitively in strength training, or grid-like in Iyengar yoga. And the idea is that, like, oh, our movement is more complex. It's multi-planar. We should move in all these different ways. And the reality is we're already moving multi-planarly.
Multi-Planar Movement in Daily Life
00:48:41
Speaker
All the time. And deciding to take a different aesthetic perspective on yoga and move in an aesthetically different way that, yes, will apply a different stress to the joints and stretch the muscles differently and maybe even leave you feeling different. This is great, but it doesn't actually make your way of moving better.
00:49:02
Speaker
It's just different.
00:49:05
Speaker
Now, many of you are like, but when I started moving that way, I felt better. That can be true because as we know, repetitive movement of any kind without variation is a recipe potentially for overuse issues.
00:49:19
Speaker
If you only did this one type of class, the same sequence every time, and that's all you did for exercise and you did it every single day, right? Think primary series in Ashtanga, but multi-planar.
00:49:33
Speaker
you might have some issues because multi-planar movement isn't inherently good for you. It's a way you can move. It's a way you're mostly moving all the time. Here's the thing. Here's how I want to end this conversation about multi-planar movement. but Just like any body is a bikini body if you put a bikini on it, any movement is functional if it helps you function the way you want to.
00:49:53
Speaker
Iyengar yoga is just as functional as multi-planar somatics-based movement. Headstand is just as functional as squats. Functional doesn't really tell us anything about the value of the movement on its own.
00:50:07
Speaker
But we keep slapping that label functional dysfunctional or implying that things like moving in a multi-planar way are beneficial. And we're not going to move in a grid-like way and do a yin-gar yoga or limit our movement to the sagittal plane and exercise.
00:50:22
Speaker
because that's dysfunctional. Ultimately, whether or not it's functional is functional. It should be based on the person doing the thing, right? Is this way of moving adding something to their life and helping them function better?
00:50:33
Speaker
I know a lot of people have benefited from doing Iyengar yoga. I was definitely one of them for a while. I had great Iyengar teachers, which is why. Shout out to Keri Owerko. But based on whether we've deemed a movement, good or bad, has no bearing on whether or not it's actually good or bad. It's just the way we've placed a value judgment on it.
00:50:55
Speaker
And when we can stop placing value judgments on whole areas of the body, whole muscles, whole ways of moving, applied forces, I think that we exit the religions.
00:51:07
Speaker
We exit the cult.
00:51:10
Speaker
But just in a less serious way, right? We start to pay attention to evidence, which could be what the person in front of us is showing us or telling us that they might like, need, benefit from more.
00:51:24
Speaker
And we stop overriding that with our agenda based on our beliefs, which are value-laden around things that are really just neutral concepts. Okay. Flexion. Flexion is another one. Typically, we want to avoid flexing our spine, but spinal flexion is central way that our spine can move. And it's also like really contradictory to go, don't ever tilt your pelvis forward, which might extend your lumbar spine, but then also never flex your lumbar spine. So basically never move your lower back.
00:51:52
Speaker
Remember that the dose makes the poison and the medicine in that and then an under dosage of movement, of stress, of strain can be the problem.
Neutral Spine and Compensation Redefined
00:52:02
Speaker
All right. Neutral. Neutral is like the thing we want, right? Don't ever anteriorly tilt your pelvis to, therefore, extend your lumbar spine, but simultaneously don't ever...
00:52:11
Speaker
flex your lumbar spine, find the neutral position. Here's the thing about that. What counts as neutral varies wildly between people and activities because our bodies on a bone-shaped level are so different. Variation is the norm, right? We might see two people posturally speaking that look like they're both in a neutral lumbar spine. But then when we like maybe take an x-ray or have some fancy lab equipment showing that like the person who looks neutral is actually super duper extended or flexed or whatever. It's very deceiving to the naked eye where neutral even is. And it will vary person to person.
00:52:45
Speaker
And it doesn't matter ultimately if someone has a neutral spine. What matters is are they tolerating the thing they're doing, right? is it Is it a problem? No, then don't make it one.
00:52:59
Speaker
Here's a better way to think about it. I think, too, is like neutral is a zone. It's a moving target. It's not a home base. It's certainly not a moral ideal. We talk a lot about this in r episode, Make McGill Make Sense.
00:53:12
Speaker
And McGill We Go Again, where we look at Dr. Stu McGill and his entire persona and narrative around flexing the spine. I think he is one of the reasons, one of the influences behind this idea that we should avoid spinal flexion. He's been very influential in propagating that narrative.
00:53:28
Speaker
Compensation. Here's another word that sounds bad, right? Ah, you're compensating. You're taking shortcuts. You're using sloppy movement. If only you were disciplined or educated, you'd move cleanly. You'd do the hard work of moving smarter and better and you'd stop taking so many shortcuts, you lazy bastard. Yeah, compensation, defined in research, is when the body adapts joint or muscle use to be able to accomplish a task when the preferred pathway, like the pathway they maybe were able to do before, or yes, maybe the more efficient pathway, is compromised. So this is just another way of saying it's the way we make do with what we've got.
00:54:06
Speaker
It's the way we, despite challenges we're facing, get the job done. It's how we keep moving despite injury or despite there being maybe a more efficient way to do it.
00:54:18
Speaker
I think where compensation can turn problematic is, again, through that issue of there being repetition without variety. If you are compensating after an injury and still favoring one leg that you had to favor while the other leg was injured, yeah, that's repetition without variety over time. That might cause you some issues and you go to PT and figure it out.
00:54:38
Speaker
If you always move the same way, right, in the same activities to achieve the task, your habitual compensation, it's like it becomes your default track. That repetition for you, even though it might be the one that's well-worn and efficient, it might limit your adaptability or usher you towards some overuse. So variety can be helpful. Working on skill in movement can be helpful because it will hopefully pull you out of these more repetitive patterns to put you in these more novel patterns that ultimately can just be beneficial for creating novel stress and strain in the body, giving your body something to adapt toward, like improving your proprioception. This all can be good stuff.
00:55:20
Speaker
But I don't think that compensation should be viewed as an inherently negative thing that's happening, right? A lot of times this word is thrown out there as just a way of placing a value judgment on someone's movement pattern or alignment or posture.
00:55:36
Speaker
For a long time, and I think still to this day, the message was that in order to pick something up off of the floor safely, there's this very specific posture you need to have where you, quote, use your legs, right, and you squat down and you bring your center of mass closer to the object than you stand up as though from a squat.
00:55:58
Speaker
And this quote-unquote wrong or dangerous or compensatory way that you might instead lift the thing off of the ground and with would be to stoop or to round your spine or to hinge, right, a But there's evidence, we'll link in the show notes, that actually there's no evidence. This review found no evidence that squat lifting actually prevented low back pain. One large study found low back injury rates didn't change after workers were taught proper lifting technique.
00:56:27
Speaker
So yeah, repetitive compensation. Having a movement pattern that looks less efficient or is less efficient isn't actually inherently bad because keep in mind the individual will adapt and get more tolerant of that posture, of that way of loading their body with repeated use of that posture or that strategy.
00:56:46
Speaker
Chronic compensation over a long period of time might signal some value in exploring a new movement pattern if it becomes an issue, but I think we waste a lot of energy, right, when we chase this mythically correct movement that we feel should always replace some type of compensatory pattern that we've identified.
00:57:10
Speaker
Because sometimes it's just the case. 20 different people can perform a task 20 different ways and look 20 different ways doing it, and they can all be just fine.
00:57:22
Speaker
Even though you might go 19 of them are compensating and there's only one person doing it right, That is more about your agenda and your value-laden assessment of movement than it is about how the body works in response to loads.
Natural Asymmetry in Movement
00:57:38
Speaker
Symmetry versus asymmetry. The reality is biologically we are deeply asymmetrical. Our organs aren't mirrored. Our liver and heart aren't centered. Most of us have a dominant hand, leg, eye.
00:57:49
Speaker
Perfect symmetry doesn't really exist in biology. It's maybe more theoretical than reflective of reality. It certainly isn't necessary.
00:58:00
Speaker
If you have ever taught yoga, you've probably woken up at some point in the middle of the night and realized you forgot to teach the second side. I think it's probably happened to all of us. It's definitely happened to me. I was thinking about this and I was like, wouldn't it be interesting if we had some way to, while we're teaching a yoga class, to randomly allocate whether or not we we're going to teach the left or the right side so that like students came to class knowing that they were for sure not going to do both sides of the body. They were going to do ah random allocation of right or left side depending.
00:58:33
Speaker
I think that would be fun. Like it could be like a picking it out of the hat thing like warrior two and we're going to be doing the left side only and now next we're going to do triangle and only the right side. i actually think that it might be more beneficial to teach a yoga class in some ways, not in all ways, it might drive us all crazy, but it might be more beneficial to teach a class where there's a random allocation of right versus left in the poses for the general population?
00:58:59
Speaker
Because as a population, we tend to use the same side of our body over and over again in daily life to accomplish certain tasks. So wouldn't it be beneficial variety to break free of that habit? Not always do both sides in a yoga class, knowing that we're probably doing mostly one side out in real life. i don't probably just some weird rabbit hole I went down. but Can you imagine there was like a like a lottery every pose of whether or not we're going to do right or left?
00:59:28
Speaker
Okay, let's talk about nose breathing and mouth breathing. This topic warrants an entirely separate episode. And we are going to be talking more about breathing because Sarah and I recently attended a free webinar from Yoga U called Yoga for Osteoporosis, Breathing for Your
Critiques on Breathing Techniques
00:59:45
Speaker
Bones.
00:59:45
Speaker
Yep, they're at it again. um For more background on Yoga U, listen to our episode, Make Yoga U Make Sense, linked in the show notes. But they, Yoga U, an online yoga education platform, frequently misrepresents research to play up the benefits of yoga for bone health.
01:00:04
Speaker
And this, unfortunately, yet another way that they're continuing to do that. Anyway, during this talk, Eva Norlick-Smith, who I believe is, I'm just going to call her the head honcho because I don't know what else to call her at Yoga you Not sure the structure of that company. But anyway, she seems to be the boss.
01:00:18
Speaker
She shared in the webinar, so Sarah and I are on this webinar, we're listening. She shared that she used to have to breathe through her mouth during cardio and shared this characterizing it as like a bad thing, like that this was something, unfortunately, that she used to have to do.
01:00:32
Speaker
She had to breathe through her mouth while doing cardio, but that she somehow trained herself out of that to now only breathe through her nose as if that was like a more desirable thing to do. And let me just say that it made me think two things. One, that even Norlick Smith probably doesn't engage in high-intensity cardio.
01:00:49
Speaker
And two, I felt a little sad because I've heard this in running circles as well, this an idea that it's better to breathe through your nose when you're running, like, as a really just another unrealistic...
01:01:01
Speaker
expectation or another gate, right, to close that are gatekeeping, that makes exercise just feel that much more inaccessible. Oh, I can't do cardio without breathing through my mouth. Therefore, I'm not getting the benefits.
01:01:17
Speaker
Therefore, why bother? Or, oh, before I'm able to challenge myself with cardio, first I have to make sure I can breathe through my nose. I really don't think that's true or helpful.
01:01:27
Speaker
Okay, let's clear this up. Breathing through your mouth while you're exercising, especially at higher intensities, first of all, that's not the same thing as, quote, being a mouth breather.
01:01:39
Speaker
And being a mouth breather isn't necessarily a life sentence or a guarantee of chronic problems. Now, there is this book called Breath by James Nestor, who basically shares this extended anecdote and that many people reference as a sort of authority on the perils of mouth breathing and the benefits of nose breathing.
01:02:03
Speaker
And it's not an evidence-based text. We'll BRB on that. But for now, let me just make this point. When people are both breathing and they have their mouth open, what the vast majority of people are doing in this circumstance is their oronasal breathing, which just means that they're using both their nose and their mouth, both orifices, to inhale and exhale.
01:02:29
Speaker
If they're not, if they're not doing oral nasal breathing and their mouth is open and they're just breathing through their mouth, it could indicate that their nasal passages are obstructed for some reason.
01:02:41
Speaker
Additionally, oral nasal breathing is how we are able to meet the increased demands for oxygen when we're exercising, specifically at higher intensities. Just like exercise isn't fully aerobic or anaerobic, which we discussed in our Capacities for longevity, cardio episode, breathing with your mouth open isn't just mouth breathing.
01:03:01
Speaker
It's nose and mouth breathing. It's oronasal breathing. So framing the entire breathing debate as happening only through your mouth or only through your nose is a false binary at baseline.
01:03:12
Speaker
Most people are toggling between both depending on what the activity demands, just like our body toggles between both aerobic and anaerobic energy systems depending on what the energy requirements of the task demands.
01:03:24
Speaker
It's not a dichotomy usually with the body, okay? Basically, our body is complex and brilliant and very good at self-organizing to be able to accomplish the thing that we're trying to get it to accomplish.
01:03:35
Speaker
And it's not typically doing this in an on-off switch kind of a way. It's usually a both and, not a this or that. Now, if you are unable to breathe through your nose and relying excessively on oral breathing or mouth breathing, that might be a reason to seek out help from a medical professional. But it's not the case that people who breathe with their mouth open are necessarily even mouth breathing.
01:03:59
Speaker
And it's also not the case that is necessarily an inferior way to breathe. In fact, it's superior, especially if you're doing high-intensity cardio. Wow. demonizing mouth breathing or evangelizing nose breathing.
01:04:10
Speaker
These are misguided narratives, falsely framed as open means mouth and closed means nose. Open could mean oronasal. Yes, there's some research research showing that nasal breathing can reduce things like exercise-induced bronchoconstriction.
01:04:27
Speaker
That nose breathing can help regulate breathing rate at a given intensity. That's great, but the benefits aren't life-changing. Just like taking creatine isn't life-changing, the big benefits are going to come from resistance training. And in the case of regulating your breathing rate at a given intensity, I would say that's called cardiorespiratory therapy.
01:04:47
Speaker
fitness, right? Make some improvements to that and you'll be better able to regulate your breathing rate at a given intensity. As for Nestor's book, Breath, if you're in the yoga world or honestly, if you've been alive in the last five years, you've probably heard of it.
01:05:02
Speaker
It's become a kind of bible on breathing, especially among yoga teachers, and it's played a major role in what I'm calling the moralization of nose breathing and the pathologizing of mouth breathing. Breath makes a lot of claims that simply aren't backed by strong evidence,
01:05:16
Speaker
things like mouth breathing can cause cardiovascular disease, sleep disorders, anxiety, or even bone loss, or that breathing slower or through your nose can dramatically improve endurance, health, or body composition.
01:05:30
Speaker
These are really big claims, and they're mostly built on weak or cherry-picked data, anecdote, or vague references to ancient wisdom. If you want a solid overview of what's in the book, Sarah actually recorded a great episode Back in the very beginning of our podcast, when we were podcasting babies, that walks through many of Nestor's main points.
01:05:52
Speaker
Now, if you listen to this episode, just know that at the time, Sarah and I weren't really approaching our podcast episodes quite the same way that we are now. We weren't applying quite the same level of skepticism.
01:06:05
Speaker
to the episodes we were writing and recording, as we do now. Sarah does is push back against a few of the claims in Breath, but overall, her tone is much more exploratory rather than critical.
01:06:18
Speaker
The episode is still a great primer on the book, And so if you're not familiar with the book, go ahead and give it a listen. But listen with your critical thinking cap on. Now, we've got a lot more to say about breath, as well as Yoga U's webinar titled Yoga for Osteoporosis, How Breathing Affects Your Bones. You better believe they cited breath quite a bit in that webinar.
01:06:38
Speaker
We're going to have a lot more to say about this good, bad narrative framing of mouth breathing versus no nose breathing in a future episode. But for now, we'll just leave you with, when you hear mouth breathing, ask yourself, is the person describing someone's mouth being open while breathing?
01:06:55
Speaker
And in which case, what they're calling mouth breathing could just be oronasal breathing, right? Nose and mouth breathing. Or is the person evangelizing nose breathing while citing breath by James Nestor and no other resource? Or Is the person exaggerating the benefits of nose breathing? There are a few, but they can't be applied universally across all contexts. Are they potentially overplaying the benefits of nose breathing and simultaneously pathologizing breathing with your mouth open?
01:07:26
Speaker
In general, I think it's... probably going to create more confusion, be less helpful to frame nose and mouth breathing in this way, mostly because we might be simply misplacing our energy and taking it off of other things that might matter a lot more.
01:07:44
Speaker
All right. This might be my longest in-between yet. Sarah is going to lose her mind when she hears how long this one was. I probably shouldn't have covered as many words as I did.
01:07:56
Speaker
It's the sunk cost fallacy. I start recording these and I'm like, I've only gotten through five terms and I have 10 more to go. And I could just shorten my plan and edit it down and do less recording where I could lie in the bed I made or make my bed and now I got a lie in it. What is the word?
01:08:13
Speaker
Dig my hole and get out of it. I do what I say I'm gonna do and sometimes that's not a good thing. Sometimes I need to redo what I said. But hey, here's to really long solo episodes that were supposed to be 30 minutes and are actually 90. I don't know how long this is gonna be after I edit it, but it's too long.
01:08:30
Speaker
But that's me, again, assigning a value judgment on length. Maybe it was just the right length. Moralizing movement concepts. So let's go back to why i recorded this episode. Basically,
01:08:41
Speaker
ah We live in a very polarized world. Maybe we always have. Maybe it just feels that way because of social media and politics and the way that information is communicated online. I don't know, but I think we're missing a lot.
01:08:57
Speaker
When we set ourselves up to have to follow through on a really simplistic narrative, of right, wrong, good, bad, hero, villain, especially when it comes to the nuanced, individually relevant conversations that we can have, discoveries we can make, creativity we can express with movement.
01:09:17
Speaker
I think we ask better questions and we find more relevant solutions when we step outside of a value-laden agenda and we start to perhaps see the concept for what it really is,
01:09:31
Speaker
which is just a way of talking about what's happening, a way of describing reality, a way of identifying and understanding the material world. Because from there, we can potentially have new ideas.
01:09:43
Speaker
Not be so afraid. Stop moving for purpose of obeying and start moving more for the purpose of discovering. and When we moralize movement, when we assign value to terms that are neutral, we shut down questions. We shut down creativity.
01:10:02
Speaker
We potentially gatekeep. I like to think of it like when I used to play with Legos, I would play with my brothers, hand me down Legos, and the instruction manuals were gone. So all I had was this mishmash of Legos from different sets.
01:10:16
Speaker
And since I didn't have any rules, like I had no way of knowing the right way to put the pieces together, half of which were probably missing at that point. I created my own things, my own houses, my own spaceships, my own weird Frankenstein-like vehicles and sculptures. And I came up with new ideas.
01:10:38
Speaker
And Legos became a form of expression rather than rule following. And this isn't a perfect analogy, but I think that movement can be a similar exploration when we drop the narratives, when we let go of the binary of good and bad.
01:10:52
Speaker
when we let our movement be exploratory, less religious, when we let it be more creative, artistic, or informed by science. At any rate, that's all I have for you today. i think I'm officially done talking about this topic.
01:11:06
Speaker
Let me know if you would like to request an episode for future recording, leave it in a review. I will find a way to to bring it in and perhaps create a long episode about it but yes rate review subscribe we super appreciate it when you do that it helps get our work into more people's ears and head into the show notes for a link to our free bone density mini course which is a starter kit for how to use barbells in some important mostly sagittal plane oriented exercises the squat the deadlift on the bench front
01:11:41
Speaker
All right, folks, that is all. I will be back in your ears in several weeks. Sarah's up next with an in-betweeny in two weeks, so she will be with you then.
01:11:53
Speaker
Bye.