On Walking

Today I walked again.

It's not like I've not been on my feet and getting from one place to another. I've done that, with relatively little pain, but enough to know that I shouldn't do it for too long.

Today I rediscovered how to walk without a pronounced heel strike. I went for a barefoot walk to our neighborhood library, stopping and starting occasionally when my rhythm broke or when I lost my feeling of gravity. (It's possible to do that, especially when you're small!)

Something I've noticed is that even people who run barefooted still heel-strike when walking. I think it's because we've made assumptions about what walking means, what it looks and feels like. I remember reading posts by bf runners talking about how they were trying to learn forefoot or midfoot striking for walking gait and how hard it was.

So here's something to try today:

Take off your shoes and stand with one foot slightly behind the other. Don't try to point your toes straight ahead. Shift your weight onto the front foot and see if you can drop the back knee so that the hip releases and the foot glides forward slightly. You may find that it doesn't go anywhere at all, or you may find that the free leg's foot doesn't know how to leave the ground. When I first tried this walk, I couldn't get the leg through to the front without tucking the toe off the floor, tightening the ankle flexors and then the hip flexors (which may be in very different places but have a pretty strong connection, don't they?). Don't let the foot flex. Just keep releasing that femur down from the hip joint and allow it to slide it through by responding to gravity through both sides. Let the standing ankle really soften as the body moves forward, although it's easier said than done. The key is both ground reaction force and core work, of course - not clenching, gripping, six-packy wackiness, but motion all through the center of the body from ground to head that encourages the glide of the hip joint, softening of the knee and ankle joint. When it's right, the foot is just slightly plantarflexed as it passes through, with the ankle joint blissfully relaxed, toes rising just enough to clear the ground.

It started off mentally difficult with not much forward motion. It was very hard to get my working leg through without grazing the ground with the bottom of the foot, which is generally something to avoid when barefoot. I'm sure that many a motorist was wondering what the slow-moving, tiny barefoot lady was doing with her stop-and-start progress towards some good books and a turn around the neighborhood. (Do I dare wonder what kinds of comments I'd have gotten outside of the Bay Area?) They can think what they like.

Yet another tidbit...

This just landed in my inbox. The Word of the Day is "talus."

http://wordsmith.org/words/talus.html

Ways to subvert traditional seating...

...sitting lotus-style on a classic wooden chair
...using the top of a rolltop desk to stand while you type
...sit on a ball instead of a chair to use a traditional table
...move around
...instead of "multitasking" on the computer, really multitask - partly on and off the computer, standing, sitting on knees and seat, lying down.
...take breaks

Cogito Ergo(nomics) Sum (part 2)

So, there I was, with my little diagram, my measuring tapes, clipboard and the orders to get everyone ergonomically satisfied as quickly as possible. According to this model it should easy to put a worker's body into correct positions and have everything fall into place!

Nothing in my paperwork prepared me for how little my evaluations would be appreciated. One of the guys in the office started calling me "The Posture Nazi" by the time I returned from the ergonomics orientation. The manager told me to get it done and over with. I realized that I'd been handed this duty because the manager didn't want an outsider coming in and making any big changes.

The first odd thing that I found was that just about everyone had pain, even though, for the most part, they already sat at the perfect combination of ergonomic angles. Everyone sat for their entire day, both for work, then for commuting and for relaxing at home. I measured their workstations and ordered tray tables. Someone needed their screen raised. Another person needed it lowered for their bifocals. We got a roller mouse for one woman and a wrist rest for someone else. The guy who called me "The Posture Nazi" refused any changes at all, but I suppose that was his choice, despite the fact that he suffered from more pain than anyone in the office. I started to teach some of the Pilates basics to one woman with back pain. After about a month sneaking in workstation alterations here and there, the only person with improvement in their pain was the one who started to take short breaks to do the very easy Pilates I showed her - constructive rest, pelvic clocks, bridges, upper abdominal curls and prone extensions. Something clicked. It was the way they worked, not the sitting position.

Then there's this obsession with chairs. I did an image search for "ergonomics" to see what came up and noticed that most of them were of people or stylized models of a human form in a chair. Everything in the office happens in chairs, and as work hours grow and personal time shrinks, more and more time is spent folded in ninety degree angles.

It made me think of something that both one of my art teachers and a dance composition teacher said about the image of a chair being a stand-in for a person. The image is potent even without a person in the frame. Chairs are a way to think of and contain the idea of a person, which has its good and bad points.

Enter any office first thing in the morning and there will be rows or cubicles of empty chairs. The worker chooses their station and sits, conforming to the shape of the chair. Each worker has identical working arrangements.

Imagine, then, what it means to see all these empty chairs at silent desks. It's probably a familiar image. I've always had this feeling that a bunch of empty chairs is almost haunted.

Then try this image on for size:

Imagine if offices had different areas and ways to work. The worker enters and sees two areas: a bright, open place where thinking on foot is encouraged and another section with seating and tables at different levels reserved for quiet activities. Balls are available, especially in the open area. In the quiet section stations with low tables which requires that people sit on the floor would be surrounded by low pads for knee and lotus-style sitting. A series of recliners where workers could read, view images or rest during breaks could be to the far side of the quiet area. There would be some ninety degree tables with chairs and some stations with tall tables for people who are standing. There might even be a platform and an adjustable table on a tall platform for those individuals who think best up high! Computing would be mobile, either with laptops or interchangeable drives so that a person could work in various places throughout the day.

The second office seems like a more natural place for free-flowing ideas to me, partly because people can simply be mobile and also because they can sit or stand in ways that support them as productive workers.

During that same year that I started on ergonomics I found an amazing book by Galen Cranz, called The Chair, which says that human beings are not ninety degree animals. Human bodies were meant for squatting and perching, and not designed to sit for long periods. She talks about the larger cultural picture of how and why people sit the way that they do. Ironically, she teaches in the Department of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley.

Here's a terrific interview with her:
http://bodyconsciousdesign.com/uploads/interview_galen_cranz_portland.pdf

I began to rethink the idea of the seated workplace, in what now seems like a very unnatural position. We sit at computers for so long when we work. Our minds, forearms and hands are so active that it's as if all of our surface consciousness moves into those places. When we think hard for a long time we fall into gestures and patterns that come from a very deep place, like a favorite sleeping position that we only find when we are completely unconscious. Heads cock to the side, feet leave the ground and find perches under chairs or tables, or get propped up on the desk so that the chair gets pushed back into a lounging position. Our weight shifts to one sitzbone, causing us to curve to one side. We slouch, or we lean forward. I have caught myself in a twisted position with left foot tucked under the chair leg, toes turned under, the right leg straddling the corner of the chair, foot braced to the side as if I were trying to escape, all my weight on my right sitzbone, leaning forward into the computer as I typed, as if my body were making subconscious commentary on my commitment to a particular task.

Ergonomics, at least the flavor of it that was handed to me in that folder, had very little to do with the rightness of the body. It had everything to do with wringing the most efficient work out of a body in the shortest possible time with as little kvetching from the body's owner as possible. It was a way to conform the human being to their task instead of adapting the job to the person. "Posture Nazi," indeed.

Cranz talks about how the active body should lean forward, while the passive one leans back. My later training in Judith Aston's work also confirmed that, as did what I found over years of working with clients and myself. A slouch is not only a natural position, but also a correct one for certain tasks and states of mind. The problem is that the seated worker who uses a computer is a strange mixture of passive and active. "Sitting up straight," then, does not solve the issue and potentially creates more problems. Many of the other peculiar habits that show up are also important to a person's physical and mental function. In some ways those habits are ways to adapt to the unnatural position that the ninety degree chair forces the body to take, as well as the long hours spent in it. 

No matter what a person does, their body is along for the ride and is constantly in some sort of motion. Even asleep, every part of the body continues to move, down to the smallest fascial cells. If there is an answer to the question of how we change our working culture it may be to honor the human need to move and rest according to the needs of the body and mind. We need to get up, to think on our feet, to sit low and relearn how to squat or sit on the floor, to shake it out and bounce on a ball or to pace.

Another way to think of a chair (at least on this blog!) is as a platform for our sitzbones to be the primary receptors of gravity instead of our feet. (See? I did get there eventually!) In this case, a "supportive" chair is as misguided as "supportive" shoes.

Throwing away our ninety-degree office chairs is very much like getting rid of our shoes and touching the ground once more with our feet. It's another way to say that the ground is, in some ways, all we need to define who we are and where we stand...or sit.

(Chair image by Quinn Dombrowski.)

Cogito ergo(nomics) sum...(Part 1)

Or not, as the case may be. 

It's taken me a few days to get the time to finally write this post. It's stewed a bit. Slow-cooked ideas work for me, on the whole, so it's probably a good thing.

A little history is necessary first.

I have taught Pilates since 2003. Before that I had a whole other life.  Several, actually. I performed with ballet companies from the late 80s until 1992. I was a graduate student in 1995-1997. I started to make performance art and experimental choreography during my graduate degree, and still do so. I stumbled into on-line journalism from 1997 until 1998 and then wound up as web designer/programmer/analyst for The Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley from 1998 until 2003. 

It's the last job that gave me the most food for thought, actually. I was working at UC during the tech boom, and then during the beginning of the bust. I was there on September 11, 2001 and experienced the first Bush II administration through the lens of the university system. 

Initially there was a lot of money for technology and the people who specialized in it. Then as the national mood soured, the administration began budget cuts. Then came the hiring freeze. (I hesitate to say the year - 2001? 2002? Some time around then.) Finally they announced "Tidal Wave I and II." In polite language, the administration intended to bring in an extra large student body to be matriculated in two enormous stages, but had no plans to hire more support staff to take care of the extra work that would result. Although nothing was mentioned, everyone knew that the tuition would also be hiked hugely and the teachers' assistants would be used even more for extensive but underpaid work. 

So there we were, with no extra personnel, exploding inboxes and job description mission creep. Like many workers there I took on a couple of extra assignments, the biggest one being "Ergonomics Evaluator." 

"Ergonomics Evaluators" were a new thing at UC. Our offices and what was in them often dated back to the thirties or before - unadjustable boxy desks from long before the computer age and old swivel or heavy wooden classroom chairs in various states of dilapidation. The hours that people were required to work meant that injuries were a constant presence. Even as a part-timer I often packed 30-40 hours into three days of work. That was when my ten-year back injury started and when it got unmanageable. 

By 2002, though, I'd healed quite a bit from my injury through bodywork and taking Pilates lessons. I also began a certification program in Pilates. When the manager, who knew about my work with my own injuries, heard that I was learning to be a Pilates teacher she gave me a bunch of documents to read and told me to start evaluating peoples' workstations.

(more to come...)