Don’t Let Your Tower Topple: The Jenga Science of Human Alignment

Have you ever felt like your body is just "one wrong move" away from collapsing? In this episode of Healthy California, we’re diving deep into our posture. Joining me is Rob Kopitzke, a physical therapist with nearly 40 years of experience helping everyone from elite cyclists to those of us battling "sitting disease."

We often think of posture as just "standing up straight," but Rob explains it as a symmetrical alignment of our foundation. Like a Jenga tower, we are a stack of blocks; when one block is out of place, the entire system becomes dysfunctional. We discuss why "ideal" posture is rare but "functional" alignment is essential for longevity, breathing, and even digestive health.

Key Takeaways:

• The Wall Test: Can you stand with your heels, glutes, shoulders, and head touching the wall without effort? If not, your connective tissue may already be adapting to a "flexed" pattern.
• Sitting Disease: Learn how chronic sitting shortens our tissues, leading to a "double whammy" of tightness in the back and weakness in the front.
• Motion is Lotion: Rob shares why your body is like a cement mixer—if you stop moving, the "fascia" starts to harden.
• The Power of the Core: Discover why "core" isn't just about six-pack abs, but the foundational stability of the transverse abdominis and pelvic floor.

Actionable Steps:

1. Move Every 20–30 Minutes: Get out of your chair to keep your "cement" from hardening.
2. Seek a Baseline Assessment: Why seeing a PT once a year (at any age!) is just as vital as your annual physical or dental cleaning.
3. Find Your Team: Whether it's Pilates, yoga, or manual therapy, don't wait for the "tipping point" to start rebuilding your tower.

Resources:

• Visit Rob at Body Concepts in Folsom, CA.
• Check out Episode #46 for more on Bone Health and Osteoporosis.

“This is a journey, not an assignment, so be kind to yourself. Stay strong, stay aligned, and stay healthy, California!”

Thank you for listening to Healthy California.

If you have tried all my suggestions and are still having trouble with your health, and would like an appointment with me, please email me, text, or call me via the contact information below.

My contact:

Linda Brown, MPT, Doctoral Candidate Functional Nutrition

916-426-2543

linda@heal-throughfood.com

www.heal-throughfood.com

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to Healthy California Podcast. My name is Linda Brown, and I am the host of Healthy California, where my goal is to help educate you on your daily choices so we all can become healthy. I believe you, your family, your neighbor, and your community are all looking for better ways and simple ways to return to being healthy. Many of you have health issues or have family that's going through tough times that seemingly have no answers. It's frustrating.There are questions about health, environment, foods, exercise, and lifestyle, and it can be all overwhelming. And who do you believe? And where's the science behind it? This podcast will unravel the mystery behind being unhealthy and talk about little things that we can do in our lives to make a positive change in our health from all angles. So to be healthy, we need to have physical health, mental health, environmental health, financial and social health, and of course, spiritual health. Let's answer some of these questions to get healthy. What good is just listening to a podcast? I will give you resources as well, ways to take steps and make positive changes in your life to becoming healthy. This is a journey, not an assignment, so be kind to yourself. 

00:01:17 Linda 

Hello and welcome back. This is Linda Brown, your physical therapist, functional nutritionist, coach, educator, and host of Healthy California. I am so glad you're here today because we have an expert talking to us about why it is important to stack your body in a way that doesn't collapse, like a Jenga set. Rob Kopitski has been a physical therapist for almost 40 years. He's the owner of Body Concepts in Folsom, California, and is the person I go to if I need physical therapy. He specializes in many things, but is known for working with elite-level athletes in cycling, running, dancing, and he uses Pilates as one of the ways to strengthen core for athletes. His team of therapists at Body Concepts specialize in pelvic health, Pilates, running, posture, gait, orthotics, and manual work. So grab your water, tea, or matcha, and let's talk about the importance of standing tall. All right, Rob, thank you for joining me on Healthy California. And so today we're talking about posture. 

00:02:30 Linda 

And for those of you who are listening to this, Rob is the person I would go to, if I had anything to go to him for, I would go to Rob for. So a few years back, it's been easily a decade at this point, I had a pretty bad neck injury and the only person that I would let touch my neck was Rob. So Rob is someone that I've known for a very long time. And as a physical therapist, he is my go-to for a physical therapist. Okay, Rob, we're talking about posture today. 

00:02:59 Linda 

Can you define for us what you would call posture, a good posture? 

00:03:06 Rob 

Good posture, I look at as the body being in a symmetrical alignment. So I'm looking for symmetry. Are the curves of the spine in balance? Are the shoulders positioned symmetrically forward, sideways and elevation. Is the pelvis correctly aligned? Kind of our pelvis and our core is kind of a foundation of all of our posture. So that's a key area that I look at. And then from the legs, that can be influenced from above, but a lot of the leg alignment has to do with foot positioning and how are we aligning our foot ankle complex. 

00:03:55 Rob 

Because that's kind of how we interact a lot in our environment when we're on our feet is the foot is the thing connecting us as our base. So we're basically stacking, if you've ever played the game Jenga, we're stacking all of these blocks and we're trying to line up those blocks in as much symmetry and stability as we can to allow us to move efficiently and effectively. 

00:04:24 Linda 

so just like Jenga, you can get a pretty tall Jenga stack, doesn't necessarily mean it's stable. It just takes one wrong move and everything falls apart. So a lot of us are walking around that way. We seem to be stacked okay until that one thing happens. And then you've heard this many times. Well, it came out of nowhere. I don't know why this happened. And then you look at them and you're like, oh, it didn't just come out of nowhere. It's been a long time coming. Yeah. 

00:04:54 Linda 

So when you look at someone's posture, you look at the pelvic alignment in the shoulders, what exactly are you looking for? How do you know that it's aligned? 

00:05:03 Rob 

Well, there's ideal. You know, if you look at a Netter's Anatomy book and you've got this drawing and they've got this perfect plumb line that comes from the ear, lateral shoulder, comes down through the trochanter, which is the hip, half the pelvis. 

00:05:22 Rob 

it lines up slightly forward of the ankle. So that's from the side looking at posture. And then from the front, if we hang a plumb line, we're looking at coming straight down the nose, center of the sternum, belly button, and centering between the ankles. So we're kind of that's our foundation as we're taught. And every single person, you could almost use it as a fingerprint. We all have differences in our posture. 

00:05:52 Rob 

And like you said, you know, we have all these little blocks that we're moving around and we're functional. That doesn't mean we're ideal. And it can become dysfunctional where you take that one block out, the tipping point and the whole stack collapses. You know, I've been looking at posture in clients for 40 years. I don't know if I've ever seen a client with perfect posture. 

00:06:17 Rob 

But that's kind of part of why they're coming is because there's some dysfunction, right? Yeah. If we think of like a dancer or an Olympic athlete or the symmetry and the balanced body is at least in their ideal form, is kind of what we're looking for. So it's optimum performance of the human body. And that doesn't happen unless we have good postural basis. 

00:06:46 Rob 

If we put up a house and our framing is a little out of kilter, that's going to start affecting things. You're going to get cracks in your drywall and you're going to hear all this weird creaking. And one of these days, the roof falls off or whatever. Somewhat like the human body, we're looking at, are we following the blueprint of what the ideal positioning is? How close can we get to that because no one's perfectly symmetrical. 

00:07:15 Linda 

And especially if they're in a sport where they are, it's like a one-sided sport like tennis, even though they may be strong there. 

00:07:24 Rob 

Yeah, exactly. Tennis, at least you're hitting from both sides, unlike golf, where you're always golfing in one direction. And it could be not even a sport. It could be all of us sitting at our desk, which we're doing right now. 

00:07:40 Rob 

That's putting us into a certain position. Our hips are flexed. I might be leaning into the screen a little bit because my glasses aren't working right. My shoulders are reaching forward for the keyboard. I'm going into this what we call upper cross pattern positioning and I'm starting to slump down into my chair. I'm losing my pelvis and low back alignment. So it doesn't even have to be a sport. It can just be a quote unquote normal thing that we do. 

00:08:09 Rob 

And with sitting postures, we call it sitting disease, there's all kinds of elements that result from that chronic positioning. When we were back hunters and gatherers, we moved a lot. And now that we are more sedentary, it's becoming more and more problematic posturally. 

00:08:29 Rob 

If you've seen the shirt, you know, where we crawled out of the mud and then, you know, we became a four-legged creature and then we became an ape and now we're humans. We're starting to devolve into chair posture. It's hard to find someone that's really upright anymore. 

00:08:47 Linda 

Yeah, we have. That was going to be my question is like, what is causing people to be out of posture, to have poor posture? Some of it is just how we spend our life. at a desk or doing a sport one-sided or in driving. Like we're sitting on a desk, what is it that causes that to become chronic? Like tightness is on one side, weakness is on the other. Yeah, right. 

00:09:10 Rob 

Any activity that we do, whether it's sedentary or some activity, our body responds to the stress we put on it. If we're in a position or not. Right, exactly. But sitting has a stress to it. 

00:09:27 Linda 

Yeah. 

00:09:28 Rob 

If we look at interdiscal pressure, sitting is harder on our body than laying down or even standing positions. So sitting, just because of the nature of it, we tend to roll our pelvis into a flexed posture. Our hip is in a flexed posture. And it's not so much the problem is occurring as we sit, what's happening as we're sitting is the tissue is adapting to that length. And so when we get up out of the sitting position that it really starts creating more problems and that our hip can't open properly anymore because it's shortened into that 90 degree flex position from our sitting. And so we go to stand, our hip doesn't open, and so we end up arching our back, low back. 

00:10:18 Rob 

Our pelvis stays rotated forward. We arch our low back. Because our low back is arched now, our thoracic spine, our rib cage, starts leaning forward to compensate. And if our thoracic spine is leaned forward, that projects our head forward. If we've got thoracic and head forward positioning, then our shoulder blades start to follow them forward as well. So if you've watched anyone in the retirement community, You can see what happens with chronic flexed posture. You're walking along and some of them get so bad that, you know, they can't even look up anymore because they're so rounded out. And that can be contributed with osteoporosis issues and those kinds of things too. But the basis of it is our flexed posture as a society. 

00:11:04 Linda 

Yeah. And I did talk about bone health, I think, two weeks ago. So go back and listen to that. But okay, so when we think about posture, we think that that's not us right now. I mean, I'm not looking at the floor when I walk. That's not going to be in the nursing home looking down. What can we do right now? I know there's a couple things that you do as a physical therapist to get people to get into a good posture. And I know that since we're talking about this, everyone listening is automatically sitting up tall. That's kind of just what we do. But what can someone do at home to see if they're headed in that direction. 

00:11:43 Rob 

A real simple test is stand up against a wall with your heels touching the baseboard, your rear end touching the wall, your shoulder blades should be on the wall, and the back of your head is on the wall. If that's-- Seems easy enough, right? Right. If that's taking effort to be in that position, you're already in that flex pattern. 

00:12:08 Rob 

And with time, it doesn't get better unless we're doing something specifically to change that. And one of the best things we can do is just move. Any kind of movement, get out of that static positioning is key. So we want to do something that moves our bodies in all kinds of different planes. So rather than being seated, go for a swim. Swim helps lengthen us out. Go for a walk, that's going to help open up that hip line. 

00:12:36 Rob 

take a yoga class, do some foam rolling, Pilates, anything that's posturally based and movement based where we're taking our body and we're moving it through its full capacity is kind of what we're shooting for. If you have a job that you're sitting for eight to 10 hours a day and you go out and ride a bicycle for two hours, Now you've got 10 hours of being in a flexed posture. So cycling isn't necessarily one of those. 

00:13:07 Linda 

Right, after you have had your 30 minute drive home and you're in that same seated position and then you go home and then you eat. So you're in that same position for lunch. 

00:13:16 Rob 

And how many of us sleep flat on our back? You know, a lot of us are side sleepers. And so we're curled up in this little fetal position. That's where when we do that for, we start seeing these postural changes even in our teens and stuff, right? You know, you're always telling your teenager, hey, sit up straight. What are all kids doing now? Video games and cell phones. We're collapsed into that same pattern. So the biggest thing is move and try to lengthen your body within that movement, whatever that is. So it's not bad to be, to go out and bike, cycle. 

00:13:57 Rob 

But we need to, when we get off the bike, go for a walk and get on a foam roll and lengthen, go for a swim, do something that you're getting out of that pattern. So we can't sit for eight hours and then go walk for an hour and expect that to balance out. It's better than not going for a walk and lengthening out. But ideally what we want to do is get out of that chair every 20, 30 minutes. So if you've got a sit, stand desk, or you're just do a lap around your cubicle, just get out of that sitting position. The more frequently we do it, the better. A lot of times I tell clients, it's kind of like your body is a cement mixer. If you watch a cement truck go down the road, the barrel is turning. And if it keeps turning, the cement stays liquid. As soon as it stops, it starts to harden. 

00:14:51 Rob 

The same thing for our body. As soon as we stop moving, if we're in a static position, the fascia of our body, the connective tissue of our body starts to stiffen. And the longer it's in that position, the harder that connective tissue becomes. So it's harder to get it to move. 

00:15:14 Rob 

So the more frequently we move, the more elastic that connective tissue stays, which then allows our musculature to hold us in good position with less effort. So if you're standing against the wall and you're straining to get there, to be upright on the wall, it tells us that that soft tissue, that connective tissue is already shortened and we're struggling now to be in a normal alignment. 

00:15:43 Linda 

So if I am standing against the wall and I have my heels against the wall, my tailbone against the wall, the middle of my shoulder blades, my shoulder blades against the wall, but my head doesn't touch the wall, but I'm not in any pain, then who cares? Why does posture really matter? 

00:16:01 Rob 

It's the long term that's going to be the bigger effect. And while you may not be in pain yet, you're going to have tightness, right? So we might not call it pain, but it's a human head weighs 10 to 15 pounds. If it's not lined up properly, the muscles in the back of your neck are going to be under load. It's like holding a bowling ball in your hand slightly forward. How long can you hold that bowling ball there? 

00:16:36 Rob 

So it's going to fatigue at some point. And as it fatigues, it starts to cramp and spasm. And that's the tightness and stiffness that we feel as the day progresses. And if we do that for long enough period of time, then all it does is it pulls us into your upper neck goes into what we call lordosis or extension. 

00:17:01 Rob 

And at the same time we're tightening in the back of the neck, our postural muscles in the front of the neck are weakening. So we're relying on keeping our head positioned with our extensors and we're weakening in the flexors, which is part of why we can't get our head to come back into alignment again. So it's a double whammy in that we're getting tighter on one side and we're getting weaker on the other. 

00:17:25 Linda 

Yeah, you said that magic word earlier. You said yet. So we're not we're not in any pain yet, but that's what kind of keeps physical therapists in business, right? Because don't we spend a majority of our treatments working on people's posture and alignment and balance? 

00:17:44 Rob 

Yes, everything is keyed around alignment, mobility, positioning. It's all comes back to can we function in our ideal alignment? 

00:17:57 Linda 

Yeah. And that balance and that musculature. 

00:18:00 Rob 

Right. And the yet thing is like, okay, I can put a blindfold on the freeway and drive and I haven't hit anything yet, but I'm going to. Right. So it doesn't happen as soon with the posture. You know, I'm going to be, you know, doing really well if I haven't run into something in 30 seconds, driving down the freeway with a blindfold on. But our posture, it could take us 20 years, but you go to any school nowadays We're talking, middle schoolers. Their posture is horrible. It's not going to get better unless something changes in their activity levels. 

00:18:40 Linda 

In your practice, what type of pains do you see from people that just have a simple postural misalignment? What's the most, I guess, pains that you see that come into your clinic? 

00:18:55 Rob 

The most common thing, people come in with muscle fatigue, soreness, spasming, guarding because-- 

00:19:02 Linda 

Soreness and spasming where? 

00:19:05 Rob 

In the postural muscles that are keeping them upright because only half of the muscles are working. So in that forward head example, ideally, the muscles in the back of the neck, the side neck, and the front of the neck balance each other and keep the head centered over the middle of your spine. 

00:19:26 Rob 

As soon as our head starts traveling forward, the predominant musculature is going to be on the back of the neck, starts working harder. And the longer it works, just like holding a dumbbell in your arm, you're holding it with your elbow bent 90 degrees. At some point, your bicep is going to start to fatigue, even if it's a one pound weight. Now, I can hold a one pound weight a lot longer than I can hold a 50 pound weight. 

00:19:53 Rob 

But it's going to fatigue at some point being in that position. So the further ahead is out of alignment, the more those muscles work and they're going to fatigue. And we're going to get soreness just like we do in any other muscle that we fatigue doing something. So we have that initial muscle fatigue soreness. And then if we do it enough, chronically enough, repetitively enough, 

00:20:17 Rob 

Then we can start forming trigger points, which are highly densely spasmed parts of muscle that start tying into little nerve structures that reduces blood flow into the tissue. 

00:20:29 Rob 

And we get these trigger points, and those trigger points can start radiating nerve pain throughout the body. So we call 'em trigger points because they trigger pain hazards. So oftentimes we find those in the neck, back of the shoulder blades are very common. The low back is another area that we get these little trigger points. 

00:20:51 Linda 

Yeah, the low back is very common for pain. What can someone do for their posture to help their low back? 

00:20:59 Rob 

So that all starts in the core. If our core is functioning, it goes a long ways to keeping the pelvis and rib cage connected in its proper alignment. 

00:21:12 Rob 

If the pelvis starts rotating forward out of alignment, because our core, and by that I mean in a simple way, the abdominal wall musculature, there's other things involved besides that, but it's basically the abdominal wall if we want to simplify it. 

00:21:29 Rob 

If the abdominal wall isn't supporting, your back is going to go into extension, your low back, your pelvis is going to rock forward. And our vertebrae are built so we've got these big bony blocks that all of our body weight is supposed to be sitting on. 

00:21:44 Rob 

When we go into that extension in the low back, the pelvis rocks forward, instead of your weight being on that big bony block, what's called the vertebral body, the weight gets transferred backwards into the joint of the vertebrae, which is called the facet joint. And with chronic loading of the facet joint, it becomes arthritic. 

00:22:04 Rob 

So if you think about arthritic fingers and how painful those are, the same thing happens to the joints of our spine as well if we're not lined up well. It leads to early degeneration. The cartilage in the joint structure breaks down. We get bone spurring, and the facet joint is right next to the nerve that exits out of the spine. 

00:22:28 Rob 

So if we get inflammation of the facet joint, then we can get nerve pain, which then can create sciatic pain or referred pain down the front of the leg or something like that. It just depends on where it is. But it basically, poor lumbar posture, low back posture, is typically going to lead to degeneration of the joint structures, more so than a disc injury. 

00:22:53 Linda 

A lot of times people think, well, I have back pain. The last thing I want to do is exercise because I don't want to create more pain. What would you tell that person? 

00:23:04 Rob 

What we have to find is the baseline of where we can start with mobility, exercise, postural awareness, because not doing anything is going to result in worsening, 100% guaranteed. So the physical therapist or, you know, body worker or chiropractor, whoever you're working with, their job is to teach you where that foundation is for you to start at, that we can start rebuilding that tower of blocks. 

00:23:41 Rob 

We're reassembling the Jingo Tower. Their training is all about teaching you how to put those blocks back in place. And they can assist, but they can't do it for you. So we're coaches, we're mentors, we're guides. We can give you the work to do, but ultimately it becomes the work of the client that results in the success. 

00:24:10 Rob 

And if the degeneration has gone far enough, then you might be looking at a surgical intervention where they've got to fuse your spine or do a laminectomy or do some other type of procedure. because the damage is gone so far. And then we're looking at all kinds of other complications that come with surgical intervention. 

00:24:35 Rob 

But it's always tell people it's kind of our last resort of having to go to surgery because surgery is not like putting a bandaid on and it heals. It prevents ideally further damage, but it doesn't mean that you're going to be fixed. You're just trying to stabilize the severe dysfunction that has occurred, you're trying to prevent it from getting worse. 

00:25:01 Rob 

Now, that doesn't mean you can't get better, but it's not a magic tear that you have surgery and all of a sudden you're all better and you can go back to your poor posture ways. Because guarantee that you come back. 

00:25:17 Linda 

Right, because you have, now you have an injury, a severe injury because of the surgery, the surgical site. And if you don't continue to try to improve yourself, then you haven't solved the problem. So that's part of the reason why I started this podcast is because there are simple things that you can do now, right now, to prevent that, to prevent surgery, to get to that point. So it's kind of my quest in life to just give people simple ideas, simple things that they can do right now to prevent that type of stuff. And it's not rocket science. Yeah, it's just, it can be simple things. Yeah. 

00:25:55 Rob 

And the simple things are a lifestyle. It's not, oh, I got to do this for six weeks and I'm good. The simple things are something that we do our whole life if we're going to prevent this from being a problem. And if it has become a problem, we work on rebuilding the tower and then we got to keep, we have to do maintenance on it. So just like the maintenance on a house, right? There's always something that's breaking. We have to do constant maintenance. So it isn't something like, hey, I'm going to work really hard on this for three months and then I'm good to go for the next 20 years. It's like these foundational exercises, a foundation of keeping our core healthy and our mobility and our joints is something we need to think of as a lifestyle rather than as a quick fix. 

00:26:41 Linda 

Right. A daily, you don't have to do the same exact exercise for the rest of your life, but you just have to do something to keep yourself strong. 

00:26:50 Rob 

Right. 

00:26:50 Linda 

Yeah. 

00:26:50 Rob 

And that's where you're kind of looking at, okay, can I start doing a reasonable yoga class that's just part of my routine? Or can I do Tai Chi or Pilates or anything that's very movement based where you have to think about how you're moving as part of the exercise, a dance class, anything. It can be taken to extremes. So I've had my fair share of yoga clients because they went crazy on trying to do some wild and unique pose. And too much flexibility can be just as much of a problem as too little mobility. So we're doing it too soon. 

00:27:34 Linda 

Yeah. So when people have a pain someplace, their neck, their back, and they go to a massage therapist. And I love massage therapy. I think it's great. I go to a massage therapist. People have their team. And I think that, you can get a massage and it can feel good and it might decrease your pain, but you still have to strengthen and balance. Same thing with chiropractic. Every feel and even counselors, I just feel it's important that everyone has a team working for them of either a counselor, their primary care physician, a chiropractor if that's what works for you, acupuncture if that's what works. 

00:28:12 Linda 

And then of course, physical therapy, because we're physical therapists. Yeah, people need to create that team, but you can have the biggest team in the world, but we're all going to support you, but you still got to do the work. You can't massage your way out of a weak muscle. We were talking about simple things we can do. What are like three postural tips that someone can do today to help them in the future? 

00:28:42 Rob 

I'd say first and foremost, where we need to start is really learn how to activate your core, and that's connects the rib cage and pelvis together. You really need to understand how to use the musculature that joins the lower body and upper body together. It's the foundation for everything else that you do. And that doesn't mean you do some kind of crazy burpees or something to do your core starting out. You really need to start at the basics of how does my transverse abdominis and pelvic floor muscles work in conjunction with my diaphragm to create a foundation of stability. 

00:29:32 Rob 

It's not going to the gym and, and doing these crazy ab routines until you're ready for that. But you have to start at a, at the foundation of it. And I think that's where Pilates has a type of exercise, if it's well taught, its foundation is in the core. I like their approach to starting with core work. But get somebody, you know, whether it's a very well educated personal trainer, a physical therapist, somebody that really understands how the core functions and have them teach you how to use them. 

00:30:16 Linda 

And Pilates instructors would be a Pilates instructor would be a good person for that as well, because they do a lot of core work. 

00:30:23 Rob 

Yes, but just like anything, there are different levels of education and Pilates instructors. So you really want somebody that has experience, that has worked with people a lot. If you're going to a class format, it is really challenging for any instructor, regardless of their experience in a class format, to address form for the whole group and make sure everyone's following good form. 

00:30:53 Rob 

So I just recommend if you're going to do a Pilates class, start with privates. until you feel and your instructor feels you have a good foundation of what your core is doing. And then you can go join a class. 

00:31:05 Rob 

Yeah. So core is going to do the first tip. And then the second tip is you need to get your shoulders and your hips moving. So you need to have good mobility of your shoulders and hips. Yin yoga class or something like that is a good starting point, especially if you have a lot of stiffness starting out. It's slow, it's low intensity, longer duration. It's really getting those deep connective tissues to move again. You'll get more out of it if that's where you're starting. 

00:31:43 Rob 

If you've got decent mobility, doing something that's more of a dynamic warmup that we do every single morning.  If you end your day that way, even better, you get into a foam rolling routine or something like that to help open up and get the mobility. But those big joints, that's where our foundation of movement comes from is we have core first, and then we have shoulders, and we have hips. If they're not able to move, you're not going to be able to have good posture and you're not going to perform at your best in whatever activity you're doing. 

00:32:17 Rob 

So core and then hips and shoulders. And then third thing I would say as a tip is you just need to move. get out of those static positions. You have to keep changing your positioning. There's nothing wrong with sitting. You just can't sit too long without moving because I've seen some really bad standing posture as well. So if you're standing like a gunslinger from the Old West, that's not good standing posture. And it can be as bad for you as sitting in a chair all slumped over. The movement element would be the third tip is just do something that gets you moving. 

00:32:58 Linda 

The saying in physical therapy, motion is lotion, movement is therapy. So for the people who are taking these notes down and they don't know what a transverse abdominis is, they don't know what a pelvic floor is, and they feel like they're moving, but they maybe aren't moving well, where can someone find you or what should they, if they're not anywhere in your area, what can they tell or ask the physical therapist. 

00:33:26 Rob 

Sure. So I'm located in Folsom. There are many physical therapy clinics out there and our training probably more than any other is movement based. So it's a very good place to start getting at least an assessment by a physical therapist on your posture. Where is the biggest breakdown. And they can show you two or three exercises like, okay, here's the biggest bang for your buck. You do these three exercises and it will address the biggest dysfunction in your posture now, okay? 

00:34:02 Rob 

And they can also kind of give you a reference point on, okay, based on what I'm seeing, this is how long it's likely to take you to get where you want to be if they've got some experience with working with people. You can do Google searches, look at Google reviews or. 

00:34:22 Linda 

Well, you can ChatGPT it now. 

00:34:24 Rob 

Yeah, well that too. Right. So, right. So every physical therapist should be able to do a good postural evaluation and give you some good exercise. 

00:34:35 Linda 

We're biomechanics experts. That's what we, that's what we do. 

00:34:39 Rob 

Exactly. How does the body move and how does it, how is it supposed to be aligned? 

00:34:44 Linda 

Yeah, I think that it's important that everyone, especially everyone over 40, 45, sees a therapist at least once a year. I mean, to get, just to make sure that they're staying balanced. And, if you have a baseline of where you started, I haven't seen a physical therapist for many, many years. 

00:35:04 Linda 

Why do I need to go once a year? To go and see your physical therapist once a year, it doesn't need, you don't need a referral for that. And if you have to pay out of pocket, one visit with a physical therapist can save you so much money in the future because being out of balance and being unhealthy is more expensive than one assessment with a physical therapist once a year. 

00:35:28 Rob 

And what I'd say is that I'd move that age group way earlier. Because by the time you're 45, 50, you're well into your patterns. 

00:35:38 Linda 

Yeah. 

00:35:38 Rob 

So if we can get people, I think it should be, you know, you go to your doctor once a year for your annual physical, right? Right. And they're mostly checking on, you know, blood work and blah, blah, blah, right? They're checking what's going on under the hood. We're checking what's going on with your shock absorbers and wheels and, you know, whether your windscreen is clear and those kinds of things. 

00:36:03 Rob 

So we're, I think that idea of going once a year to get the tires kicked and just see how do we have any patterns? Do we have any trends starting? And it can be very simple. It isn't like you're going to have 40 exercises that you need to do every day. If you catch it early, it's so much easier to prevent than it is to catch up 20 years later. Right. So I would say even, you know, your general practitioner, when they're starting to see issues in their once a year visit, I would love to see the whole medical community work together more on that. 

00:36:45 Linda 

Right. 

00:36:46 Rob 

Here's another huge issue, post-pregnancy. What does pregnancy do to a female body's posture? 

00:36:52 Linda 

Yeah, yeah, Yeah, that's a big thing. 

00:36:55 Rob 

And there's no follow up on how to get your core and pelvic floor to work again afterwards. And most of the population thinks it's perfectly normal to have urinary incontinence or pelvic pain, those kinds of issues, which don't have to be there if they're addressed when the problem happens rather than later. So that's another whole basket to look at. 

00:37:27 Linda 

Yeah, I think that's even, you're right. That's even more important if you had a baby. That's even more important. 

00:37:32 Rob 

Your center of gravity is thrown off for months. You're going to be in this really lordotic posture. Your ligament structure is loose, things move around, and your core muscles have expanded how far, and then they don't just snap back, so it's the Birthing process is a traumatic event, and we should. It's super hard on the body, yeah, right. 

00:38:01 Linda 

We go to the dentist once or twice a year. We go to our, we go to a follow up appointment for a doctor once or twice a year. We take our car in, on a regular basis. Exactly. And then we don't do anything for ourselves. So I think there needs to be a shift in the way people think of taking care of themselves on the physical side of it, not just your mouth or your, you know, or your car or whatever. You just need to be more. 

00:38:27 Rob 

You buy a new car, it comes with an owner's manual. Maybe did it come with an owner's manual, right. 

00:38:33 Linda 

Yeah. 

00:38:34 Rob 

Where in our education system are we spending the time to educate people on how their body is supposed to function, right? We have, what, one class in high school on, you know, basically sex ed, but, you know, is, you know, I guess PE is supposed to be the area where you learn more about this, but basically in PE. We mostly learn to play a sport, not how to move our bodies ideally, or what kind of conditioning would make your life better 40 years from then. 

00:39:12 Linda 

Yeah. Right. Well, first of all, I want to say thank you for spending time with me and explaining all this. I feel like I talk about physical therapy every now and then, but don't focus on it. And to get the take of another physical therapist besides myself, I focus mostly on functional nutrition these days. But posture is so important and stretching, strengthening, balancing the body out is so important. And I hope that people learned something today. So I want to say thank you for spending time with us. 

00:39:44 Rob 

Yeah, if you go into a physical therapist for any kind of injury problem, If they don't start by looking at your posture, walk out the door. 

00:39:55 Linda 

You're right. Not every therapist is going to be a good therapist, but in general, all physical therapists are biomechanics experts, and that's what they should be doing. 

00:40:05 Rob 

They've been taught how to do it, and they should be doing it with every client that walks through the door. 

00:40:11 Linda 

However, people that have gone through pregnancy don't expect that every physical therapist is just going to be a good pelvic floor physical therapist. I mean, we each have our specialties as well. So people should be doing their research on where to go for specialties in physical therapy as well. 

00:40:27 Rob 

And pelvic floor physical therapists, a lot of people go, well, it's going to be a bunch of internal work. I'm not comfortable with that. Physical therapy, in my opinion, for pelvic floor issues, post-pregnancy issues, should start as any other orthopedic issue. You have to start by getting the core active, start to realign the posture again, and it doesn't need to be a lot of internal work. So if you're uncomfortable with that, there are physical therapists out there that do pelvic floor therapy without having to do a bunch of internal work. 

00:41:02 Linda 

Yeah, and I think that if you had gone through some pregnancy, that's definitely something to consider, especially if you're having low back pain or pain anywhere in the pelvic area, abdominal area, back area, that would be definitely something worth seeking out some help for that, because that isn't normal. And I think women are just conditioned to think, well, of course, I'm going to have pain. It's just how it's going to be. And it doesn't have to be that way. 

00:41:24 Rob 

And men as well, you know, post prostate surgeries or anything else. If we've had some kind of physical, mental abuse, it affects how our pelvic floor functions. So those are elements that go in too. And yes, by and large, it's going to affect the female side of the population more, but we see men in with pelvic floor dysfunction as well. It's not just women when it comes to pelvic floor issues. 

00:41:53 Linda 

Yeah, it doesn't always have to be a trauma either. It could, I mean, like a physical trauma. It could have just been a fall off a tree when you were a kid or a motor vehicle accident. It could be anything, just even something you're not even really considering. But any sort of pain in the pelvic area definitely needs some eyes on it to figure out what's going on. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you, Rob. 

00:42:16 Linda 

So as we wrap up, I want to leave you with one final thought, and this comes from Galatians 5.25. And it says, if we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. And this is talking about alignment. It's talking about spiritual alignment. And today we are talking about alignment. We're talking about alignment of the body. So if we're walking in alignment spiritually, we have to also be living in a way that is aligned. And same thing with our body. 

00:42:52 Linda 

We have to keep ourself in good alignment to be healthy and to be strong so that we can live longer and live in a better quality of life. It affects our breathing. It affects our circulation. It affects our bowels. And it all just needs to be working properly. Our body depends on us to be in good alignment in order for things to be working properly. So this passage from Galatians 5.25 is talking about spiritual alignment. And today I was talking about physical alignment. And they're both very important. So I just want you to think about that for a second. And I also want to thank you for joining me today. This is a journey, not an assignment. So be kind to yourself. Stay strong, stay aligned, and stay healthy, California.