Back pain is proving to be recalcitrant to understanding and treatment. This workshop will offer a new approach to the assessment and treatment of endemic low back pain via Archetypal postures of repose, allied with exercises that are derived from the floor to standing transition - the Erectorcises. For millions of years humans have spent many hours a day sitting on the terrain to rest and work, and then to erect from the terrain to standing. It is a developmental sequence we have all mastered as babies. A modern chair based lifestyle has had a profoundly deleterious effect on our musculoskeletal health by avoiding floor postures that the human physique has embedded both structurally and functionally. As a society if we are to counter our endemic back pain we need to revalue floor based rest, and train the exercise sequences involved in the floor to standing transition - that most basic of movements for an ape derived from Homo Erectus. This advice and the exercises described are applicable to all but the most infirm.
Context for the workshop will emerge from three perspectives.
▪ The first perspective is evolutionary via a brief account of the vertebrate transition from the lateral undulating of a fish to a walking bipedal ape.
▪ The second perspective looks at the embryology of musculoskeletal development, and the subsequent childhood development towards walking and running.
▪ The third perspective is anthropological - all people, all cultures, across all time frames have found ease and rest on the floor, and maintained the strength to erect from the floor throughout their lives.
How to assess and facilitate ease in the floor postures and how to erect from the floor with good form and safety will be demonstrated in the workshop with the participants themselves adopting the postures.
All biological systems have self-corrective mechanisms, which in this context are deeply embedded norms of rest, these postures are then functionally coupled with anti-gravity biomechanical patterns that then lift us from the floor. As a society we need to place a value on floor based rest. Deceptively simple advice can make a significant contribution to biomechanical ease.
The Contractile Field model of human movement will be introduced.
