Slumping? It’s Entirely Natural! Can Pilates Help?
While sitting in my local park recently it struck me, as it has before, that when left to relax, almost everyone sits in a slump. How can it be that 99% of the population, when left to their own devices, (or these days, when looking at their devices) sits on the “wrong” posture? This question intrigues me, along with other assumptions about our bodies that are often made by those in the body oriented therapies. (See below for further examples.) To someone trained in philosophy, that is, in the art of nit picking, blanket statements like good and bad seem overly simplistic, and decontextualize any statement that follows. I wanted to dig a little deeper, to find out how we got this way, and what could be driving these tendencies. I turned to evolutionary biology to see if there might be some deep primal instinct that drives us to sit this way. What I discovered in the case of posture and energy is that indeed, context is King. Turns out, there isn’t much in the way of direct investigation into how our past may have shaped our sitting posture. However, there’s a plethora of information about the need to acquire energy in the form of hunting and gathering of food, and of the vitality of retaining it, by means of minimizing
energy expenditure. In fact, the dominant theme running through our evolutionary history according to Harvard Professor Daniel Lieberman in “The Story of the Human Body” is the necessity of collecting and storing energy. Energy has profound implications for our survival and our evolutionary development. Our ability to store large amounts of fat compared to other primates enabled us to grow bigger (and more voracious) brains for example, brains that use 20% to 25% of your body’s energy budget. Like money in the bank, fat reserves enabled us to stay active, maintain our bodies and even reproduce during lean seasons. Unfortunately, natural selection never prepared us to cope with endless seasons of plenty, let alone fast food restaurants - more on “mismatch” diseases later. So what does the importance of storing fat have to do with poor posture? Both it seems are related to our primal instinct to conserve energy, and explain why most diets fail and only 3% of people will take the stairs if an elevator is available. It seems that we have, as a consequence of our body’s evolutionary history, (a history of struggle for survival and total uncertainty), a deeply ingrained, adaptive, primal instinct to conserve energy. Given this fact, it