The Egoscue Method of Health Through Motion

A Revolutionary Program That Lets You Rediscover the Body's Power to Protect and Rejuvenate Itself

Pete Egoscue, Roger Gittines

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780060924300
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062046529
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Physiotherapy, Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation

No one is immune. For people from champion athletes to desk-bound white-collar professionals, many simple acts of life--a relaxing evening stroll through the neighborhood, an exhilarating run along a sandy beach, just bending down to tie a loose shoelace-are often acts of torture. The walking wounded suffer from torn rotator cuffs, tennis elbow, jogger's knees, bad backs, stiff necks, sore feet, and swollen ankles. It could, without exaggeration, be called a modem epidemic.

In this brilliant book, renowned anatomical functionalist Pete Egoscue identifies the epidemic's causes and effects. By recognizing that the human body is dependent on adequate motion to maintain its full range of physical functions, he has revolutionized both the treatment of musculoskeletal pain and the techniques for training athletes to achieve peak performance levels.

Brimming with common sense and practical advice, the heart of this important book consists of twenty-two easy-to-do, highly effective exercises that stretch, strengthen, and relax the body, allowing a return to proper alignment.

1

For Form’s Sake

Imagine a man and a woman. Imagine a child, and a family with its concentric rings of youthful dreams and mature wisdom.

Does a picture come to mind? I’ll bet one does, and I’d say it’s probably a motion picture.

The man, the woman, and the child, all the generations reaching back at least ten thousand years, are in motion. Walking on a beach; running down a winding road at sunset; climbing a staircase under a crystal chandelier.

From birth to death, we never stop moving. Even asleep, we toss and turn; the heart beats. Motion—that’s what the human body is all about.

If you thumbed through these pages the way I always do before I buy a book, you might have come to the conclusion that you’re going to be reading about how to cure back, knee, or shoulder pain; how to play better golf, run faster, work more productively, or take a few inches off your hips.

All that’s in here. But between the lines, above and behind the lines, is a premise that is so important, so basic, that I can’t afford to treat it with subtlety. Just as I do with the patients who come to my clinic, I’m going to lay it on the line: You are not moving enough to keep your body and overall health from deteriorating. And when you do move, because this “morion starvation” is acute, the movement violates the design of the body with every step you take.

How do I know this without ever setting eyes on you? I’m taking an educated guess; one that’s educated by about twenty two years of experience as an anatomical functionalist. I’ve treated thousands of people who the demographers would identify as fitting the profile of those most likely to read this book: the educated and middle-aged, professional and recreational athletes, parents and teachers, white collar professionals and medical specialists, the elderly, and a huge number of individuals from every walk of life who suffer some form of joint or muscular pain.

I have learned that out of all those people, only a tiny fraction move enough to beat the overwhelming odds that one day this motionless modern lifestyle will catch up with them.

Here’s another thing that I’ve learned: There’s a lot written about dwindling nonrenewable, essential resources, and for man, motion is just that—an absolutely essential resource. It makes us strong, active, intelligent, and healthy. It renews and is renewable. But motion, as a resource, is becoming scarcer all the time. The way we live in the last decade of the twentieth century in the United States, Western Europe, Japan, and other parts of the industrialized world does not supply or require sufficient movement to maintain the body’s health and well-being.

We know that the body needs minimum daily requirements of vitamins, minerals, protein, and water. There are other necessities determined by biological fiat as well: shelter, warmth, space, companionship. If there is a “she who must be obeyed” (Rumpole fans take note), she is biology.

Disobedience to the biological imperatives results in disaster and death.

Have you ever stopped to think that movement is as much of a biological imperative as food and water? It is. There was a time, and not long ago, when it was easy, instinctive, to obey the biological imperative of motion. Man moved because he had to. Not anymore. Survival doesn’t depend on motion. We can sit at a desk, sit in a car, sit in front of the TV set, and live the “good life.”

But we are paying for this “good” life of ours with illness, disability, pain, and despair. What all of us must do is deliberately and systematically get our bodies back in motion despite a modern lifestyle that discourages movement, and even encourages us to believe that we can survive and prosper as sedentary beings who treat motion as an inconvenience that can be minimized with the help of technology. Just as we would perish without food and water, we will perish once our bodies are deprived of the movement necessary to maintain our vital physiological systems.

As a species, particularly those of us who live in the industrialized world, we are getting closer and closer to the edge, and that’s why I developed the Egoscue Method. It is a way to provide each person with sufficient motion, motion that is no longer built into the daily pattern of our lives the way it was just a few decades ago; and it is a way back to motion that is in accord with the body’s design requirements. Motion doesn’t just happen anymore. From now on we’ll have to work at it. The Egoscue Method is your tool box.

STEP BY STEP

I mentioned design requirements. I’ll explain what I mean. Most of us have disobeyed the biological imperative of movement for so long that when we do put our bodies in motion, what should be motion of the most routine sort causes pain or forces the body to compensate in ways that drain away our energy levels, undermine our physical and athletic ability, and will one day bring on pain. The design of the body is being violated with every step we take, and that simply does not have to happen.

THE REAL EXPERTS

I want to explain the Egoscue Method to you, so that you can live the method and make it work. But we can’t just leap right in and start doing a series of exercises. There’s more to the method than a workout program or a series of pain suppression procedures. First, we’ll need some background on human anatomy and evolution to understand the body’s design, functions, and requirements.

In my clinic, I’ve found that too many patients honestly believe that their musculoskeletal system is so complicated that a) it’s fragile and prone to breakdown, and b) it can’t be comprehended by laymen.

Let’s start, as we do in the clinic, by unlearning a demoralizing lesson taught to us by the “experts.” I hear this comment all the time, it could almost be the mantra of the twentieth century: “It can’t be that simple.” We don’t believe our own eyes and instincts anymore. Motion? It can’t be that simple.

I suppose the preoccupation with complexity is a by-product of education and knowledge. The more we know, the more we must know. Technology adds to the confusion by accelerating the learning process and removing us from a direct, hands-on relationship with many facets of life that were once readily experienced and understood. The interest in natural childbirth and the hospice movement for the terminally ill are attempts at reclaiming birth and death from technology. But those are small toe-holds.

Technology has many long, powerful tentacles reaching our to grasp the great and small aspects of life. I think it’s a shame, and more than a little disturbing, that in a few more years cars will be so technologically advanced that it will be impossible for drivers to repair their own vehicles. Another fragment of self-sufficiency will disappear and at that point transportation will become a mystery, complicated and incomprehensible to all but a few.

I can just imagine the typical driver of the year 2020: “Why doesn’t the car start?”

“Maybe it’s out of gas.”

“It can’t be that simple.”

It’s an ironic twist. We’ve become smart enough to realize we aren’t smart enough. We’ve been outsmarted by the experts and by the technology they serve.

I am about to reclaim a small piece of captured territory from the experts and from technology. Small, but big enough for a kingdom. The human body.

Its royal motto is a variation on the old populist battle cry, “Every man a king.” When it comes to the human body, everyone is an expert. We don’t need technology to understand our own bodies and the biological imperatives that drive them. By tapping our own expertise, we can unlock the maximum potential that lies within each of us, with immediate and enormous benefit to the lives we lead, the work we accomplish, the sports we play.

THE BODY OF KNOWLEDGE

In all the years that I have been helping people overcome pain and physical dysfunction, and to make the most of their potential and talent, there has not been a single individual who could not tell me what was going on inside that marvelous machine we call the human body.

Most did not have a command of the specialized vocabulary familiar to the medical community, but they knew.

“After my wife and I had kids there was no time. None,” a patient told me at our first meeting. “1 stopped doing a lot of things. Softball, for one, went by the boards.”

“Play a lot?” I asked.

“Before we got so busy it was a couple of times a week. I thought I’d go out for the company team this spring but after the first game I starred with this stupid stiff neck. Guess I’m a little rusty.”

Rusty. He knew, and so do you.

However, the lack of a specialized vocabulary and formal schooling makes us uneasy, living as we do in a complicated world; there’s a tendency to defer to those who know all the right words and phrases, and have all the impressive letters after their names.

Right here, right now I want to share with you my experience. The design of the human body is so complete, so complex in its interrelationships, so prepared for its world of motion that it allows for its function to be very simple. Foolproof, really. And it’s a good thing. We don’t have the brain power to consciously oversee incredibly intricate processes like digestion and respiration and locomotion. All we have to do is move and keep on moving until we die. Along the way, poetry gets written and pyramids are built.

THE BONES; ANATOMY WITHOUT TEARS

The complexity of the body’s design is fascinating, and that’s precisely why we get so confused. There are 639 individual muscles (approximately 400 skeletal muscles) and over 200 bones in an adult human. A medium-sized muscle contains about 10 million muscle cells, which means a total of 6 billion in the overall musculature. These are described in the anatomy textbooks as contractile cells, because they are composed of bundles of parallel fibrils—some thick (myosin), some thin (actin)—which interact chemically and mechanically. Energized by calcium ions, the myosin fibrils rake or pull their actin counterparts upward to produce a visible shortening of the muscle tissue.

The fibrils under magnification appear to contain a series of ten light and dark “boxes.” The transfer of fluid among the boxes with resultant swelling and relaxation—sort of like the individual cylinders of an internal combustion engine firing in sequence—is what drives the muscle cell. Add this all up and we have a body which is propelled by a 24-trillion cylinder engine. Now there’s horsepower!

In just one paragraph, I Went from 639 muscles—a daunting study in their own right—to 24 trillion “cylinders.” What would happen if I began to focus in on each of the cylinders? I would be drawn ever deeper into a labyrinth of incredible complexity, which is precisely what has happened to medical science. Lost in the maze is the simple imperative of the body’s function: movement. Once we are disoriented and demoralized by all the twists and turns and blind alleys, movement seems inconsequential and hardly worth bothering about.

What a mistake. We get obsessed with the form, layers and layers of form, and forget about the function; forget that function dictates form. In other words, movement is a determining factor in how we look and how we feel. When we set out to discover what’s wrong or right with the body, isn’t that the logical place to begin?

I’ll show you what I mean. But I’m not going to do it with a traditional skeletal chart, which is like trying to learn how to type by studying the schematics of a typewriter. I prefer to use a simple stick figure instead; it doesn’t confuse with detail but shows overall design. You can draw it yourself on a scrap of paper: a small circle for the head—go ahead—put a smile on it and a couple of eyes; beneath the head, by about a half inch or so, add two points on the same horizontal line to form the left and right shoulders; a bit farther down the sheet put two more points in, the right and left hips exactly under the shoulders; beneath those, draw two points for the right and left knees; and finish with a final set of points for the right and left ankles and feet, again right under the knees.

As drawn, the perspective is head on, eyeball to eyeball. Not at all complicated, is it? If you draw straight lines through the horizontals and verticals, a series of right angles emerges, as shown in figure 1. Those right angles are the key to understanding the body’s design.

Figure 1.1.FRONT VIEW: THE FUNCTIONAL DESIGN POSTURE

The joints at the shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles maintain their right angles no matter what position the body assumes (short of a violent, wrenching contortion that destroys this natural design). The right angles give the body great strength and durability. We stand upright in the presence of gravity carrying our own weight on two feet—an achievement we take for granted, yet one unique to our species. What’s more, we are capable not only of defying gravity but of moving at the same time, and that with speed, agility, and endurance. From an architectural standpoint it is the equivalent of constructing a thirty-story office tower that could compete in the Boston Marathon.

We may not all have “the right stuff,” but we all do have the right angles, or at least our anatomical design calls for them. Those right angles provide a most important piece of anatomical information about the body and its functions: We are upright, load bearing, all-terrain, all-weather motion machines.

If man ever goes the way of the dinosaurs and our planet is visited by extraterrestrial paleontologists searching for clues as to the identity of Earth’s former inhabitants, they would surely recognize (just as we recognized from the shape and size of the fossil remains that pterodactyls were designed to fly) that whatever else the mysterious bipeds may have been capable of doing—speaking, tool making, reasoning—they were intended to walk, to run, to jump, to dance—to move.

What I call “the four socket position,” the right angles at the shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles, is irrefutable evidence that man was designed to move.

Move we do, and move we must.

ON TWO FEET

The extraterrestrial paleontologists would probably also be fascinated by man’s spinal column. It is an engineering marvel. Figure 2 is a side view of the stick figure, which stops being a stick figure when the spine is considered. Our “backbone” forms a gentle S-curve which distributes the weight evenly from head to hip. The movement of the indi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword by Jack Nicklaus
• Introduction
• A Different Disclaimer
• 1 - For Form’s Sake
• 2 - Function Junction
• 3 - The Two R’s—Relevance and Responsibility
• 4 - Self-Diagnosis
• 5 - Restoring and Maintaining Function and Flexibility
• 6 - Quiet Desperation, Quiet Hope
• 7 - The Games We Play
• 8 - Modern Maladies and Our Children, Our Elders, and Ourselves
• 9 - Volume Control
• Notes and Sources
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright
• About the Publisher