Episode 124 – Movement Logic (with Laurel Beversdorf & Sarah Court)
Episode Transcript
Summary:
In this episode Whitney interviews Laurel Beversdorf and Dr. Sarah Court, co-hosts of the Movement Logic Podcast. They discuss numerous topics on movement, exercise, and rehabilitiation. Some of the key points include; the misconceptions surrounding strength training and its impact on flexibility and mobility, strength training for women, posture, movement re-education, and the importance of load management.
Key Topics and Time Codes:
– Misconceptions about strength training and its impact on flexibility (06:00)
– Overcoming resistance to strength training in the yoga community (08:00)
– The fear of injury associated with lifting heavy weights (10:00)
– The benefits of strength training at home (14:00)
– Starting strength training after developing a physical injury (16:00)
– The importance of proper technique and strength for manual therapists (18:00)
– The scope of practice for manual therapists in recommending exercise (20:00)
– The limitations of personal trainer certifications (22:00)
– Differentiating between scope of practice and scope of expertise (24:00
– The shift towards loading and strengthening in tendon rehabilitation (32:00)
– The impact of posture and load on the body (34:00)
– The importance of considering individual goals and abilities in posture (38:00)
– The role of elite athletes and their unique movement patterns (40:00)
– The social and hierarchical implications of posture (46:00)
– How to connect with Laurel Beversdorf and Sarah Court (48:00)
Whitney Lowe:
Welcome to The Thinking Practitioner Podcast.
Til Luchau:
A podcast where we dig into the fascinating issues, conditions, and quandaries in the massage and manual therapy world today.
Whitney Lowe:
I’m Whitney Lowe.
Til Luchau:
And I’m Til Luchau.
Whitney Lowe:
Welcome to The Thinking Practitioner.
Til Luchau:
Welcome to The Thinking Practitioner.
Whitney Lowe:
And welcome to The Thinking Practitioner, where Books of Discovery has been a part of the massage therapy and bodywork world for over 25 years. Nearly 3,000 schools around the globe teach with their textbooks, e-textbooks, and digital resources. Books of Discovery likes to say learning adventures start here, and they see that same spirit here on The Thinking Practitioner Podcast and are proud to support our work, knowing that we share the mission to bring the massage and bodywork community thought-provoking and enlivening content that enhances our profession.
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I would like to welcome everybody to a Thinking Practitioner. I have two wonderful guests with me here today who are co-hosts of a wonderful podcast that I would also like to encourage you to take a listen to the Movement Logic Podcast. So, welcome very much again, Laurel Beversdorf and Sarah Court, to the Thinking Practitioner. And I want to thank you for joining me and just ask you all to mention just a little bit about yourselves first before we get into some interesting questions we’re going to look into.
Laurel Beversdorf:
Sure. I’ll go first.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Laurel Beversdorf:
Laurel here. It’s actually Laurel Beversdorf.
Whitney Lowe:
Beversdorf. I’m sorry. Okay.
Laurel Beversdorf:
No, it’s okay. It’s okay. Yeah. I am a yoga teacher and personal trainer. I started teaching yoga around 2007, switched to also teaching strength training around 2019 right around the time where… a little bit after the time I started to have some hip pain that I thought maybe was the result of my yoga practice, realized I needed to be doing more than just yoga.
Started training with personal trainers and then decided I would like to be a personal trainer myself. And I am currently, I like to say, in cahoots with Dr. Sarah Court with our Bone Density course Lift for Longevity, where we are offering barbell education in a six-month progressive program where women, largely women, our audiences, mostly women, come to learn how to lift heavy with barbells to improve their bone density. So-
Whitney Lowe:
Oh, cool.
Laurel Beversdorf:
… that’s what I’m about.
Whitney Lowe:
Okay, great. Thank you, Laurel.
Dr. Sarah Court:
Yes, and I’m Sarah Court. I’m a doctor of physical therapy, but I started my movement career as a yoga teacher like Laurel in New York in 2005. We were swimming in the same yoga pool at that point, although I’m not sure how much our paths actually crossed until a little bit later until actually I was… I had left New York. I live in Los Angeles, and I am now a physical therapist. And I focus a lot both in the sort of rehab work that I do in the clinic on just encouraging people in general, women specifically, to be a little bit less afraid of heavy weight lifting and the way that it can be impactful for their rehabilitation.
And then in the sort of broader sense, just encouraging people in general that are of my age range and have maybe spent most of their lives doing things like yoga and Pilates or dance classes or things like that to start to actually bring in some of that heavier weight lifting because it’s so important for our future requirements and things like osteoporosis and muscle atrophy and all of those things. So, as a PT, that’s sort of a bit of my focus, I would say, emphasis, but I work with all kinds of conditions. Neurologic, osteoporotic… Or sorry, excuse me. Not osteoporotic. Orthopedic.
Whitney Lowe:
Uh-huh.
Dr. Sarah Court:
So many words. And yeah, Laurel and I have been working together as Movement Logic since 2017. And apart from the Bone Density program that we’re running at the moment, we have a whole library of other tutorials for movement teachers to check out.
Whitney Lowe:
Wonderful. Thank you both. I want to start asking with a question that had come up to me listening to a lot of the episodes of your podcast. And again, I have really enjoyed a lot of the things that you’ve been saying on there, and this is an area where I’m not very familiar with because this is kind of outside of my area of sort of working.
But with… in the crossover between sort of the yoga and strength training processes, it seems like I’ve heard you talk about there being sort of perceptions of like, “Well, you can either do sort of one or the other sometimes.” Work on flexibility. Work on everything. But strength training doesn’t always seem to kind of come into the mix as much. I’m a little curious about how you see the crossover there, and what do you see the benefits being of people who really engage in that process, focusing on strength and flexibility processes?
Dr. Sarah Court:
I was going to say one of the biggest misconceptions is that strength training is going to negatively impact your flexibility or your mobility when, in fact, research has shown that it can improve your flexibility or your mobility.
And sometimes the issues you’re having in your body can’t just be stretched away or taken care of with a yoga pose or even manual therapy, that actually the pain is there because of a strength deficit. So to start to broach the yoga world with that concept is always a bit challenging, I would say. Laurel, what are your… what would you say?
Laurel Beversdorf:
Well, I think challenging because of how yoga is marketed to people. And I think we could also say how Pilates is marketed to people, which is that it’s the only format you need for all of your musculoskeletal exercise and fitness needs. So I know for me, I took my teacher training around 2007, continued on with the more advanced training, but I think I constantly was hearing this message, or at least getting this impression that yoga was all I needed.
And so what I think is now starting to change, although not everywhere, is this understanding of exercise science and what we need as people for true long-term health, a prevention of chronic disease, right, longevity, which is that we actually need a type of stress placed on our body that is probably a little bit higher than what people are experiencing yoga as it pertains to strength training and as it pertains to cardiorespiratory endurance training.
So it’s not though uncommon for people enmeshed in certain yoga communities that can be actually quite insular to believe that, “Well, yoga gives me all the strength that I need. It gives me all of the cardio that I need, and so why would I go to these other places and these other movement cultures and start strength training or start doing my cardio when I could just go to my yoga practice?”
And I think that because of the indoctrination that’s taken place in teacher training is the way that yoga is kind of marketed subtly or overtly as being this one-size-fits-all or one-stop-shop type of a thing for all your fitness needs, it’s incredibly difficult to convince women who overwhelmingly make up the population of people practicing yoga. I would say they’re definitely a majority. It also tends to skew toward older women. It’s difficult to convince them that they should actually step outside of their yoga practice to work on getting stronger.
They should step outside of their yoga practice to actually challenge their hearts and their circulatory systems to a high… to a greater extent because they’ve received and absorbed this messaging. And that’s kind of what they want to hear too because, let’s be honest, a lot of the environments where we do go to strength train are, to put it lightly, just not that friendly toward women, right. They tend to be hypermasculine, sort of toxic masculinity-
Whitney Lowe:
I was going to ask about that. Yeah,
Laurel Beversdorf:
… types of environments.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Uh-huh.
Laurel Beversdorf:
And women don’t often see themselves represented in various forms of media as being the type of person that lifts heavy weights that gets strong. There’s also a lot of internalized misogyny as well as externalized misogyny around what women should look like. And then there’s this fear of putting any muscle on your body will make you unattractive and unappealing and, therefore, have less value in society. So goes really, really deep.
But to put it maybe in simple terms, it’s hard to convince women to step outside of their yoga practice because that’s where they feel accepted, that’s where they feel safe, that’s where they feel like they’re surrounded by people like them, where they’re not threatened in the same ways that they rightfully feel threatened in these other exercise environments.
Sarah and I are trying to change that, for example, with our course… Bone Density course, where we’re meeting with women who have barbells in their living rooms. They don’t have to go to the gym. They meet with us online, and we’re coaching them, and I’m walking them through the process of lifting barbells and their identity is not surprisingly starting to shift toward this identity view, “Okay, I practice yoga. I’m a yoga teacher. I’m a Pilates teacher, and I lift heavy things.”
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Uh-huh.
Dr. Sarah Court:
I would say the other thing that gets in the way for women is there’s so much fearmongering around how lifting something heavy is going to injure you.
Whitney Lowe:
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Sarah Court:
And to this point, I posted a video recently on social media of me doing a deadlift and that I did a PR, which means is my personal record is 150 pounds, and my mom is also on Instagram, which sometimes I’m like, “Ugh, mom, why are you…” But anyway, so because she’ll then just talk to me in person about what I posted.
I’m like, “This is not… That’s not how we…” But she goes, “150 pounds,” just kind of out of nowhere. And I knew what she was talking about, and I was like, “Uh-huh.” And she’s like, “I was just worried you were going to hurt your back.” And it’s so ingrained this idea that lifting heavy, especially for women, is going to be damaging to your body. And so that’s another reason why you shouldn’t do it.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Laurel Beversdorf:
And in reality, the opposite is true, that strength is protective, and that’s why any athletic program worth its salt has a strength and conditioning specialist on staff training their athletes with basic strength training principles, not necessarily sport-specific even, so that their tissue capacity and their tolerance levels are raised up to a degree to which they’re going to be able to tolerate the forces of their sport. So strength is protective.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. I was wondering, as we were talking about this, maybe if you could give our listeners some helpful advice because I feel like we have to grapple with this all the time. The fact that the majority of our listeners are massage therapists and bodywork practitioners doing a very physical type of work all day long, and we have a very, very high level of burnout in our profession from physical exertion.
And I think a lot of that goes back to improper conditioning and improper preparation for that level of physical activity. So if somebody is feeling that way, like you said, and I’m really glad that you brought that up about, “I don’t want to have to go to a gym. I don’t want to have to get a membership going.” What kind of things could people do to help lengthen their occupations in this field and prepare themselves for this type of work? That could be maybe simple things they would do at home that would be valuable for them.
Dr. Sarah Court:
Absolutely.
Laurel Beversdorf:
Sarah, do you want to speak to this?
Dr. Sarah Court:
Yeah. Yes. I was going to say, I recently… I mean, I do a fair amount of manual therapy with my patients as well. I recently went through a bout of really… I got trigger thumb which is basically a way… I mean, you probably know what it is. I’m sure plenty of listeners are like, “Yep, I’ve given myself a trigger thumb or a trigger finger.” But it’s when one of the tendons in your thumb is not gliding properly. And so it kind of makes this clunking noise and sound, and I had to do a lot of leave… start doing all my manual with my other hand or all of that kind of stuff.
And it also… I did various exercises to help it get better, but in the… the ideal obviously is to be able to have done enough preparatory work and prehab, right, so that you don’t have to rehab anything. And I think all the sort of targeted… I mean, I do a fair amount of wrist mobility and grip strength work to keep my hands, in particular, from getting just too unhappy. I’m also hypermobile, so my joints have a tendency to move a little more than they need to in my hands, which is not ideal for manual work.
But I would say beyond that, I mean, we’re all taught, I’m sure you’re taught in various manual therapy schools as well, we’re taught in PT school how to apply manual therapy by using the strength of your body, not just by trying to beat down someone’s glutes with the strength of your tiny intrinsic hand muscles. And so apart from, and particularly conditioning wrists, forearms and all that with strength and grip and all of that, I think for my job, I lift heavy, not just because I like it, but it’s what allows me to do my job.
I’m moving people around all day long, and I’m sure you guys run into this as well, where it’s like I have to pick up somebody’s leg maybe and shift it over, and sometimes it’s a big old person, and that leg weighs probably 70 pounds, right. So half of what I do in my own personal working out is to keep myself in the kind of condition I need to be in to be able to do my job. And to your point about people not wanting to go to a gym, I totally get it. I mean, I’m less intimidated by the gym, which I know is sometimes what people don’t like, but for me, it’s more like I go to work, I go home. The last thing I want to do is leave home again, go somewhere, get in my car and drive and the whole thing.
So it’s actually possible to set up an entire… Obviously, you can buy kettlebells and dumbbells and things like that to have at home. But it’s also possible to set up an entire barbell system at home for not that much money and for actually a great… a huge longevity in terms of a tool that you can use, and you don’t have to get the huge rack, and you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars. And so you can equip yourself at home to have the kind of stuff that you need to be able to maintain the appropriate strength throughout your body so that your job doesn’t burn you out too soon.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. One other thing on that, just to kind of go a little further, but I think a lot of people get into this place of feeling like, “Well, I didn’t really learn that much… didn’t learn that well about how to take… Well, it was taught to you, but you didn’t really get it in school how to really take care of yourself.”
And so they get into a place where they have now developed a physical injury from doing this work. Is it too late to start strength training is the big question that comes up for those people. Or, “Am I going to make it worse by trying to do this?” Or at what point can they do this and still get benefit from it?
Laurel Beversdorf:
Oh, Sarah-
Laurel Beversdorf:
… this was another one for you.
Dr. Sarah Court:
Yeah.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Court:
It’s never too late to start strength training. And that’s true for manual therapists. That’s true for people who are 75, 80, 85 years old. It’s literally never too late. There’s always benefit. Depending on the particular injury that you might have, you might have to spend a bit of time doing more kind of regressed rehabilitation work to your body… to that body part in order to help the irritated tissue heal before you can then really sort of ramp up the strengthening.
But you can, by all means, make the rest of your body a lot stronger in the meantime. And I had the same sort of thing. I mean, they did teach us about using your body for your work, but at the same time, then sometimes it’s just the sheer volume. You start working, and, all of a sudden, I’m working a eight-hour day. I remember when I started in… as a PTI, I would sometimes have to drive home using my left hand and my right arm I’d sit on the armrest with a ice pack on top of my wrist because my hand was so sore.
And I realized like, “Okay, well, this is me. I’m clearly not applying these techniques properly, and I need to change this. This is not sustainable.” But it can be hard the difference between the academic learning of it and then the putting into place, and sometimes it’s quite literal my hands had to get stronger than they were. That was just sort of like a basic requirement that had to happen.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Dr. Sarah Court:
But yes, there’s absolutely… there’s no reason why anyone shouldn’t strength training.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Excellent.
Laurel Beversdorf:
Yeah, it’s similar to if you think of manual therapists as a type of athlete. I know that that’s maybe not a word that your community uses a lot. It’s certainly not a word that my community uses a lot, but if we look at how athletes train, they’re training in sport-specific ways by playing their sport.
Whitney Lowe:
Absolutely.
Laurel Beversdorf:
And that’s how they’re actually going to best prepare their bodies to tolerate the forces of their sport is by playing their sport, but they’re also doing strength training, and they’re also doing some conditioning work as well, because that’s what’s going to give them this general physical preparedness. This GPP. This general physical preparedness, is this baseline of resilience, this baseline of toughness, this baseline of metabolic health, this baseline of mental health because we’re starting to see that there are a lot of mental health benefits to strength training.
And I know that there must be a lot of empathy fatigue in the manual therapy field because of how closely you’re working with people who are in pain a lot of the time. And so what can we do as a habit, like brushing our teeth, getting enough sleep, eating a nutritious diet? I mean, I think exercise is right up there with sleep and diet for longevity, promoting and chronic disease… defending against chronic disease as those two other habits of eating well and sleeping well.
So what can we start to introduce into our lives that’s going to have the most bang for your buck, or as Sarah and I like to say, for our Bone Density course, the most bang for your bones, that’s going to prepare us in a general physical way to have a high capacity as humans. And I think you just look to the CDC and the WHO and what their recommendations are, and it’s twice-weekly whole body strength training, and it’s a certain number of minutes of either moderate to high-intensity cardio, respiratory endurance training.
And so I think that what we… then when we can accept that, then we have to ask, “Well, what is it that’s going to get me enjoying exercise or wanting to exercise?” And so if one of the things is, “I don’t want to have to go to the gym,” that’s where equipping yourself at home is going to be important. But then there’s also community can be a real motivator. Personal accountability can be a real motivator. I mean, having listened to some episodes on this podcast, I’m certain you attract a very curious, intellectually curious community just based on the type of content you’re presenting.
And I have a feeling that your folks really like to learn. They like to understand something on a deeper level. So how can you find the coaches and educators that are going to bring alive some of the content of this strength training or bring alive some of the content of this cardiovascular endurance training that’s going to make you really intellectually curious about what it is you’re doing, but why you’re doing it and how it all works. So that’s why I’ll try to seek out the best educators in the industry to learn from in various ways.
And that’s what makes it so that I feel like it’s not only something that I know I need to do, which is like, “Okay, that’s good to know that you need to do it.” Which is why it’s important for yoga and Pilates teachers not to run around and say, “Yoga and Pilates is all you need, right.” But it’s also important to do it. And so what is it that’s going to make you want to exercise in these ways so that you’re a better prepared manual therapist athlete, or you’re just better conditioned to be able to do your job?
And that’s where I think we need to look to communities and to coaches for that interpersonal connection and support. So, yeah. But you can find those communities online now. Since the pandemic, right, these online communities have exploded. I mean, I know there’s more than just what Sarah and I have going on. I just know our community best and can speak more to the details of why it’s been so beneficial for the people who’ve come on board with us. But they’re everywhere now.
And so if you can swing learning online and you have at least a little bit of money to start investing some of the equipment that you would need for this stuff, the world is your oyster online for online education, especially with movement and exercise.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. It is so interesting to see that trend having developed toward that kind of thing. I’ve been involved with online education since the late 90s, actually early 2000s, so a very long time. And we were banging our heads against the wall for so long trying to get people to recognize they could learn things in that environment. And then, certainly, the COVID pandemic poured gasoline on that fire because everybody had to do everything.
Laurel Beversdorf:
Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Court:
Yeah.
Whitney Lowe:
So that’s been good that it’s really sort of opened up some of those doors for everyone. I want to get the perspective from both of you about sort of a two-part question, that this is something that I grapple with in the classroom with students all the time of trying to find good advice and guidance for them because these questions come up from everybody all the time. And the first part of this question is we speak about the work we do as massage and manual therapists, helping somebody decrease pain, and that can be beneficial to get them going in a certain direction.
But we also say, “Look, if you really want to get optimum health, after that point, you’ve got to go into some type of conditioning process to get the body back to being at its optimum condition.” And people don’t know where to send their clients. “Who do I send them to? Do I tell them to go to physical therapy? Do I tell them to go to a personal trainer? Do I tell them to go to Pilates? I don’t know where to send them.” So that’s part one.
And then part two of that question is we also grapple with people ask us questions all the time about stretching or, “What kind of conditioning things can we do?” And a lot of our practitioners are unclear like, what can I do that’s still within that scope that’s not outside of my scope of practice for giving people recommendations on exercise and things like that without performing outside of that field of specialty… specialization?
Laurel Beversdorf:
Yeah. So I mean, I know that manual therapy is part of a regulated industry, and so is physical therapy, but I’ll speak from the standpoint of yoga teaching and strength training, which are part of unregulated industries. So when we start talking about scope of practices is more like the second part of your question. When we talk about scope of practice in these fields, it’s less about maintaining legal standards for the profession and more really about the way that this self-regulated industry sort of regulates itself, right. So, in other words, the industry is more at the whims of market forces and competition between providers or between teachers or between personal trainers.
Okay. So this is interesting because we do still have a scope of practice. There still are industry standards. And I think that, in general, if you’re just not meeting those industry standards, you’re not going to be competitive. Sarah and I also speak about something that we call… we like to call the microscope of practice. And this kind of pertains to your question, which is that I think that we’re operating under this scope of practice in an unregulated industry. But the consequences of not operating under the scope of practice are not… the consequences are not that high because it’s not actually regulated.
But if we want to operate at high level and be competitive, probably our best bet is to operate underneath the umbrella of that scope of practice. But then we come down to this idea of microscope of practice and what we feel is within our zone of competence to teach. Okay. So if you feel that it’s within your specific zone of competence to, for example, as a yoga teacher, to teach headstand, which we acknowledge is a much riskier pose to teach than, say, warrior two because you’re standing on your head. Some teachers would maybe opt out of teaching headstand because it’s not a part of their microscope of practice, not within their zone of competence yet, or ever to teach that pose.
Whereas some would say, “You know what? This is within my microscope of practice. I am going to teach headstand.” But according to industry standards, it’s within every yoga teacher’s scope of practice to teach headstand because headstand is a yoga posture. Likewise, with barbells. Personal trainers who have never used barbells may want to think twice from an ethical standpoint but also from a competitive standpoint of whether they want to just introduce barbells to clients without ever having worked with barbells themselves because it’s probably not going to go well, right. They’re also potentially setting their clients up for things to go wrong in a kind of injurious way.
So even though using barbells teaching with barbells is within every personal trainer’s scope of practice, it’s just another tool that allows you to administer resistance training. It may not be within everyone’s microscope practice. So with regards to your question about a manual therapist teaching stretching, or let’s say they’re a manual therapist, they’re not a certified yoga teacher, but they do some yoga, and they want to share these yoga poses with their clients, I actually personally don’t find that there’s anything wrong with that because teaching stretching and teaching yoga poses is a part of an unregulated industry.
I think that what you would want to ask yourself is, is it within my zone of competence to share these movements or these exercises with the people that I do manual therapy on? And I’ll also share that I was personally training people before I had my personal trainer cert, and I felt that it was within my microscope of practice because I had been personally with experts for several years and studying it by reading textbooks and the like before I got my certification. I quickly got a certification.
It didn’t wait too long before getting the certification, but then came to understand that getting certified to be a personal trainer was really about memorizing information in a textbook to pass a multiple-choice test. Nothing that I was tested on really truly evaluated my ability to offer a safe and effective service because a lot of certification tests in unregulated industries measure what’s easy to measure, not what’s-
Whitney Lowe:
Exactly. Yep.
Laurel Beversdorf:
… important to measure because the industry itself is governed by market forces. The reason that it’s not regulated is because public safety is not a major concern, right. We see regulated industries in healthcare and finance and aviation and, of course, we want there to be regulations there, manual therapy as well, right, because you’re putting your hands on people. There’s a higher risk to the public health with these industries. With movement, with stretching, with exercise in general, there just isn’t. It’s actually very safe.
But I do still think a manual therapist who has a strong moral compass would first ask themselves, “Okay, I want to give this client an exercise. I want to give this client a stretch. How knowledgeable am I about this? How well am I able to teach it? Does it align with the person’s goals?” I think that if you’re operating within your zone of competence, you should absolutely feel totally free to share movement tips with people. I think it’s a really good thing that movement is not regulated for that very reason, right?
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Right.
Dr. Sarah Court:
Yeah. I agree. I mean-
Whitney Lowe:
We often… In the classroom, often, I speak to students about kind of what you’re talking about with the microscope of practice and refer to it as the scope of practice and there’s a scope of expertise. And something can be within your scope of practice and outside your scope of expertise. And I think that’s really similar to what you were talking about there.
Dr. Sarah Court:
Yeah, I mean, I agree with Laurel completely. It’s in a lot of yoga teacher trainings, for example, we are taught things like adding a little bit of gentle neck traction in Shavasana, or pressing down on the student’s shoulders, or something like that. But I couldn’t walk out of that and say, “Well, I’m now a trained manual therapist, and I can go ahead and say I give massages.” There’s nowhere near the amount of training, right.
And frankly, massage therapists, for the most part, have more anatomy training than your average yoga teacher. So frankly, I’m not that concerned about a manual therapist giving some suggestions post-session, like, “Here’s a stretch that I really like for quads. Or you might find that child’s pose feels really good after you go for a walk or something like that.” And then that’s a way that you can really add value and enhance your client’s experience without overstepping any sort of professional boundaries or giving the impression that you are diagnosing anything.
I mean, what I see that does become problematic is when there’s this kind of stepping outside of the manual therapist’s scope of practice and giving diagnostic language to your clients, like saying, “You have a lot of inflammation in your tissues,” or saying that your-
Whitney Lowe:
You have X condition or something like that.
Dr. Sarah Court:
Yes. You’re, “Oh, I can tell that you have piriformis syndrome, or your this is whatever.” And so the reason that matters so much, I mean I’m sure that your listeners know this, is diagnosing is a clinician activity because we’re trained in differential diagnosis because people can come in with all kinds of conditions that look like they’re musculoskeletal, but actually are not, and could be as serious as something like cancer.
Whitney Lowe:
Right.
Dr. Sarah Court:
And I’ve caught things before and it’s kind of scary when it happens. So if we’re at a level of, “I’m going to suggest a couple of things for my client to do,” I think there’s nothing wrong with that at all. I think it just becomes sort of, again, a question of how we frame it and how we’re delivering the information.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Court:
And then to go back to your first question about they’ve done their manual therapy, and I agree completely. All of… One of the things I highlight to my patients is that, “Your rehab has active and passive components. It’s not only passive components.” So passive being things that are happening to you, manual therapy, acupuncture adjustments, all of that. As far as where they should go for the active component, I would say… I mean, there’s sort of a few options.
I would say your safest bet is to send them to a PT specifically because of this differential diagnosis component because, let’s say, you give them… they do the manual therapy or you’ve been doing some sessions with them. And it’s like, “Well, it feels better afterwards, but then three days later, it’s back to where it was,” that kind of a thing.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Court:
There may just be… It may just be a question of, “Okay, now this person needs to see someone who’s going to teach them movement, right.” And in that sense, it’s like, “Well, maybe you could just send them to a trainer.” But there also might be something completely else going on that neither a personal trainer nor a manual therapist have just been trained to look for, right.
Whitney Lowe:
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Sarah Court:
So the absolute safest bet is to send them to a PT. The PT then themselves might end up… I’ll get patients all the time where I’m like, “You know what? You don’t need to be with me. I do rehab, and I can train you, but basically, I’m a very expensive trainer. You’re much-
Dr. Sarah Court:
… better off going to here’s three people that are trainers that I really like that will take great care of you and cost half as much and that’s appropriate for you.” Or sometimes, I send people out to other types of physical therapists.
I might send someone to a pelvic floor physical therapist because I’m like, “You know what, this is outside of what I do in my scope of expertise.” So I do think a PT is a good sort of catchall place to send someone because they can then kind of be the decision maker as to where does this person need to go next.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Right. One of the other things along these lines that I really would like to kind of hear from both of you about as well is one of the things that’s interested me a lot over the years, I’ve done a fair amount of work with interprofessional education, which is trying to teach ourselves in our professions about what other professions are doing so we can work together more effectively. And I do think we have a tendency to live in these silos in many instances, just sort of with blinders on about what’s going on outside of ourselves.
And so I’m always curious to interact with people from some of these other fields and find out, for example, what are some of the kind of misconceptions or things that you hear that you think other professions may not know about your field or think about your field based on the things that they’re hearing and saying that we can, for example, have this opportunity for a massage therapists to learn a little bit more about what each of you really do or don’t do in your profession that you think might be some of those misconceptions.
Dr. Sarah Court:
Well, I’ll say this. One of the biggest misconceptions about physical therapy is that it’s only manual therapy.
Whitney Lowe:
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Sarah Court:
And there’s… Especially among potential patients, there’s still quite a few people that are very surprised when their PT is actually trying to do things like give them homework exercises to do or educate them around life choices in terms of how much time are they spending in one posture all day long, or how are you sleeping and what’s your sleep hygiene and all that kind of stuff. They tend to sometimes just be like, “Okay, that’s all very nice. But I thought you were going to… Are you going to rub my leg or what?”
So I think that’s often a misconception outside the field of PT. And I would say from inside the field of PT, what I see a lot of is underloading, I would say, where the idea of rehab is that it somehow stops at the five-pound, maybe the 10-pound dumbbell, and it stops at the red TheraBand. And then past that, it’s not rehab anymore. And I just had this happen recently. I had another patient in who’s been going to a different PT for many months and is not getting better. And I’m looking at her, I’m like, “They’re just not… They’re not loading you. There’s no effort going on here.” And…
Whitney Lowe:
And so what’s the hesitation to move forward past that point? Is it…
Dr. Sarah Court:
Yeah. Well, in this instance, and I think often in a lot of instances, the… And I can’t… I don’t know this PT, so I can’t say this is what they were doing, but what it seemed to be, from what the patient was explaining to me, is that, so, for example, to do a dead bug, when you lie on your back, you pick your arms and your legs up, you maybe curl your head and shoulders up and just work on core. It’s a really nice way to work on just isometric core strength for someone who couldn’t do a plank, for example.
So I have someone comes in, they’re having shoulder issue, neck-shoulder issues. I’m like, “Let’s do some dead bugs.” And she was like, “Well, the other PT wouldn’t let me do that because my ribs weren’t tucked all the way in.” And I watched her do it, and I was like, “This looks fine. I don’t know…” So I think the issue is, and we still see this in the PT world, that people are working off of a posture-focused treatment plan where the most important thing is to get their patient into the best, quote, unquote, possible neutral posture first before you add any sort of resistance or stress or load to the system.
But what we find in the real world is that quite often, and I hear this from people all the time, adding more load makes the exercise easier to do, and adding more load actually engages the muscles that you’re trying to engage in the first place. So I think there’s often a hesitancy among PTs to allow their patients to deviate out of any sort of very narrowly defined, appropriate position or posture. And one of the things we see in the weightlifting world, proven over again in research, is like you can do a very ugly deadlift, quote, unquote, ugly.
Your knees can be caving in, and your back can be rounding, and it’s literally fine. There’s not any additional risk. You’re not more prone to do an… tear your ACL. None of those sort of fearmongering things are true. But I think, potentially, if I had to spitball why this is so much the attitude of PTs, I say, people are coming into us, and they’re already in pain, and potentially they’re already injured. The very last thing you want to do is make it worse, right, or give them a new injury or new problem.
So I think, in some ways, that might create some of the hesitancy that I see among other PTs, but we have to be really sort of thoughtful and mindful of the fact that we’re more likely doing our patients a disservice by underloading them. And where it’s very unlikely that we’re actually going to… if it’s done appropriately and progressed appropriately, it’s very unlikely that we’re going to injure them, and it’s much more likely that we’re just going to prolong how long it takes for them to feel better.
Whitney Lowe:
It seems like there’s been a shift too in the research literature of things like tendon pathologies moving towards loading and putting more load on these tissues in the rehabilitation process, as opposed to trying to treat tissue and do something and resting and staying off things. And so that seems like that maybe is consistent with what you’re saying.
Dr. Sarah Court:
Yeah, absolutely.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Court:
Absolutely.
Whitney Lowe:
Laurel.
Laurel Beversdorf:
For me, in the yoga and Pilates worlds, I feel that I kind of already spoke to this a little bit. But the misconceptions about strength training from this community that I’m very familiar with, yoga and Pilates, is that strength training is going to make them bulky, that it’s going to reduce their flexibility to the point where they’re not going to be as skilled in their yoga practice, their Asana practice, that strength training is dangerous, that it somehow just doesn’t align with their values as yogis, that it’s too masculine, too aggressive. But then I don’t know what then might produce a little bit of cognitive dissonance would be to then take a strength training session with a yoga teacher and find out that it’s none of those things.
And actually, over the long term of progressively overloading, they might discover that, “Oh, actually, my flexibility has improved because I’ve increased my strength or strength training is not only not dangerous, it’s protective, and now I have less pain as a result of my yoga practice.” So I think that’s a misconception. I also think the reverse is true. From the standpoint of people in the strength and fitness community, their idea of yoga and Pilates is that it’s for women only, that you have to be flexible before you do yoga, that Pilates is just about training your core. When I’ve taken Pilates classes that are a lot more about the other areas of your body in addition to your core.
And so I think that both communities would benefit from stepping outside of what I feel can be very insular communities where there’s kind of an echo chamber of information being shared and step into other communities of practice and other places that information is being shared from a different perspective with different bodies of knowledge informing the movement. And I think it can only be helpful to kind of cross-train or cross-pollinate in that way. I certainly have found that to be true for myself as a multidisciplinary movement educator, someone who teaches strength. But I also teach yoga, but I also teach self-massage that they are all informing each other. But I would say that those are the common misconceptions.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Great. So I want to go on a slightly different track here now, and something I also that I really wanted to ask you both, and this has come from listening to you… a number of your podcast episodes and also a lot of the debates that we have in the classroom and in our fields right now in some of the research literature, this is around posture for a moment and talking about postural change. So we know from the research literature that there’s not a consistent correlation between posture and pain.
And what has been sort of the driving narrative in a lot of our for many years is we have to change people’s posture because they have neck pain because they have forward head posture. They have back pain because they got exaggerated lordosis, whatever it is, lower cross syndrome, whatever. So now that we’re seeing a lot of this come out in the research literature saying that there’s not really a good consistent correlation between those, but they do seem like they can matter in certain instances. My question really is… Well, again, another sort of two-part question I’d like to hear from you both.
Can we change posture, first of all, with exercise or manual therapy, or does it need something else like movement re-education by the individual in addition to those things? And then also, when does it matter? When does postural change really matter? You can have something where maybe you’ve got a postural shoulders, higher heads, forward valgus knee, whatever it is, but it doesn’t bother you. Do we need to change that, is sort of the question with people? How do we make the determination when we need to do something about it?
Dr. Sarah Court:
Laurel, do you want to go first?
Laurel Beversdorf:
Yeah. My understanding of changing someone’s posture as they present passively in standing or in walking or in sitting is really hard to do. And I don’t think that we do it through these sort of mechanistic interventions like massage, or really, I doubt that we even do it through progressive overload in making certain muscles stronger and certain muscles maybe a little bit more tolerant to stretch either, right.
And I think that’s because posture, when we’re just doing other stuff, thinking about other things, not micromanaging our posture, being vigilant of our posture, which hopefully we aren’t for the vast majority of the day, thinking about our posture. I think that that is actually a really counterproductive place to be putting your attention most of the time unless you’re engaged in some type of postural practice.
Maybe you’re focusing on meditating in a particular posture or doing yoga, right. So that’s a postural practice where you are actually using posture as a form of meditation. But when you’re working at your desk or going around the house doing. I don’t know that we need to be hyper-vigilant about posture. And I feel like when we are, oftentimes, this can have a negative effect on our sense of self-efficacy and fragility and robustness. We maybe don’t trust our bodies enough to be able to be safe in whatever posture it’s naturally going to adopt.
But understanding posture is that it’s regulated by the autonomic nervous system. And if we really wanted to change our posture, we’d really want to be working on that level of the nervous system. Okay. So I’ve heard people say, “Yeah, the best way to change your posture is take a vacation.” Relax, reduce the whatever psychosocial stressors are happening in your environment. I really think that this resting presentation of posture is very psychosocial, but a lot of times, there’s this mechanistic approach that’s taken, and I think that it is a bit of a waste of time.
Which leads us to the second part of your question, just that, no, I don’t think that the way that you naturally stand when you’re not thinking about it, the way that you sit when you don’t think about it, that’s also going to depend on the furniture obviously. And standing is going to depend on the shoes you’re wearing too, in addition to everything else going on around you, right. I don’t think that we need to start making changes to that. And when we do, we start asking people to be hyper-vigilant with their posture at all hours of the day. And again, I think that’s really counterproductive.
I think we can start to let go of this idea that we need to permanently change people’s posture. In fact, I think that this idea has been around for a while. We just did an episode on it called Posture Panic Part One, where we looked at Beth Linker’s book, Posture Panic, or excuse me, Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America. This idea that we do need to change people’s posture is rooted in a long history of discriminatory practices around posture, where posture was actually basically a sorting mechanism to separate the disabled from the able-bodied and the fully human from the not-fully human.
You can listen to that episode. It’s episode 73, and read her book, Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America. So I think not only can we step away from passive presenting postures, and standing in cities is something that we need to fix in order for people to be pain-free and healthy. I think we should, in light of the problematic history that posture policing has had in our country starting around World War I, which I was not aware of until I read the book, it’s pretty… I would say a pretty…
Dr. Sarah Court:
Eye-opening.
Laurel Beversdorf:
It’s a pretty groundbreaking…
Whitney Lowe:
That’s fascinating. Yeah.
Laurel Beversdorf:
It’s a pretty groundbreaking-
Dr. Sarah Court:
Yeah.
Laurel Beversdorf:
… book that I think would be incredibly relevant to your audience to take a look at.
Whitney Lowe:
And what is the name of that book again? I want to make sure that gets into our show notes.
Laurel Beversdorf:
Yes. Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America by Beth Linker.
Whitney Lowe:
Okay, wonderful.
Laurel Beversdorf:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Whitney Lowe:
There’s something else that I heard you all say, and I can’t remember which one of you said it. But on one of your podcasts, when you were talking somewhere around these issues, said something that I thought really struck home and made good sense to me. “It’s not just posture, but it’s posture plus load.” And that seems like that’s when it starts to matter more in some instances, I think.
Dr. Sarah Court:
Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that is challenging outside of the incredible… I mean, we cannot stress enough how good this book is and how useful it is for people to read because not only, as Laurel said, separating able-bodied from disabled people, but it’s incredibly… posture has an incredibly racist, religious, eugenic history, right.
Whitney Lowe:
Wow.
Dr. Sarah Court:
And so, yeah.
Whitney Lowe:
Didn’t know any of that.
Dr. Sarah Court:
I didn’t either. And then I know it’s wild when you start to, you’re like, “Oh my, this seems insane. How is this less than a hundred years ago that this was happening?” So one of the things that sometimes where people can be hard is somebody comes in and they have neck pain, and you’re like, “Okay, well, what is it?” And they’re like, “Oh, you work at a computer. What’s your sort of position you’re in all day?” And they show you, and then they’re in this position, their head’s, quote, unquote, out of place, and you’re like, “That must be why.” And the solution… The thing is, that might be why that their neck hurts. It entirely might be, right.
Not because that’s the wrong place for a neck to ever be, but because the tissues of their neck are not prepared enough for the load of their head, right. So that’s when I, when I work with somebody, and they come in, they’re like, “I sit at a computer all day, and I really want to work on my posture.” I am like, “Oh, okay, we got to… This might be a long conversation because I might have to dissuade you from an idea that there’s a good place and a bad place to be.” But generally, what I try to educate patients on is that rather than saying, “Instead of being here, I should be here,” because I see a lot of patients who come in having done very posture-based trainings or courses or things where they’re like, “This is the alignment, and you have to put your bodies here.”
But then they’re also still in pain and incredibly weak because they haven’t trained a body part or their whole body to have resilience for all kinds of different positions and all kinds of different loads. So for that example of the person who’s sitting at a desk and working at a computer, what we work on instead of, “Here’s the correct position, and here are these corrective exercises to put you in this one position, and this is the position you should always be in, and you should never deviate,” instead of that, we find a potpourri, we find a pu pu platter of options, right.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Court:
And I say like, “Okay, fine. Yes, this is what your work demands of you, but let’s have you… here’s 10 different ways you could sit. Here’s 10 different things where once an hour, you’re going to stand up, and you’re going to move your body like this, and then you’re going to sit back down, and the next hour, you’re going to move your body like this, right.”
So it’s really much more about maintaining all kinds of range of motion and strengthening in all kinds of different ways so that your body can tolerate what is being asked of it. And certainly, there are some things that are… If you’ve ever been on a flight that’s over 12 hours long, you say, “No human body is supposed to feel this. This is not… We didn’t… We weren’t… Natural selection did not select for this, right.”
Whitney Lowe:
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Sarah Court:
But overall, yes, there are things in our daily lives that can be irritants, but it’s generally if you’re… you just haven’t prepared your body for it.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Laurel Beversdorf:
Yeah. And this is where that idea of general physical preparedness also comes in where, yes, your next position is your best position. I’m not sure who said that, but it’s absolutely the case that no, there is no monolithic optimal posture that everyone should find. And then everyone’s going to be good for here until eternity. It’s that, no, we need more movement in general. Humans need to move to be healthy. But humans also need to be regularly, on a weekly basis, stressing their bodies above a certain threshold in order for their bodies to be the most capable of… the most prepared for the loads of their quotidian lives.
The loads involved in sitting at a desk for a long period of time, right, which does involve a certain amount of muscular endurance. The loads involved in carrying your groceries in from the car, the loads involved in picking up your kid. You want to actually be prepared for those to the point where you’re much, much stronger and have much higher level of endurance for those quotidian activities because then you have your bases covered. So exercise is important.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah, can… Laurel, can you back up a moment and just tell me that? You said some kind of activities. I didn’t catch what that word was. Quotidian or something like that.
Laurel Beversdorf:
Quotidian. Daily. Yeah, daily
Dr. Sarah Court:
It’s French.
Laurel Beversdorf:
But the activities your-
Whitney Lowe:
Oh.
Laurel Beversdorf:
… daily life.
Whitney Lowe:
Okay.
Laurel Beversdorf:
Sorry. Yeah.
Whitney Lowe:
Quotidian.
Dr. Sarah Court:
the daily bread.
Whitney Lowe:
Okay. All right.
Laurel Beversdorf:
The activities of your daily life, the things that you’re doing just to survive, right. And something that’s potentially also interesting that pertains to loads being maybe… Let me back up and say something that might be interesting to note about some research that was done on the importance of posture when underload.
Okay, so if we’re talking about exercise, we’re talking about loading the body with weightlifting, or maybe it’s sprinting or running or whatever is we’re doing, right, that there’s this idea that kind of what Sarah has hinted at talking about the way that other physical therapists approach progressing their patients, that before you are allowed to load this exercise more, you must be able to demonstrate this optimal posture, which I consider to be the safe posture for you. But there was a meta-analysis done, I believe, in sports medicine in 2022 about the relationship between technique and injury in exercise, so specifically in weightlifting.
And what they found is that there’s a growing amount of evidence showing that we can step away from this hyper-focus on having perfect form. And in fact, it might be counterproductive. My opinion of why it’s counterproductive is that it prevents people from actually exercising, right. So we have physical therapists not allowing their patients to load and exercise more, to stress their bodies more, to be better prepared for the loads of their quotidian lives, right, because they feel that whatever posture their patient exhibits in the exercise is suboptimal and dangerous, that this is counterproductive.
And I call it a form of gatekeeping. You’re basically a keeper of the gate of who gets to exercise and stress their bodies to gain resilience and who doesn’t, right. And it’s all kind of coming down to this posture policing. Okay. And so this meta-analysis show that actually, it’s really counterproductive to do that. And where you maybe want to focus more, where you should place more of your focus, is actually on progressive proper progressions, progressive overload, like taking someone from where they are now and what they can tolerate now, having them work within that window of tolerance, and then very systematically and gradually progressing the load beyond that point as the weeks and months go on.
And then also proper load management, which is a subset of this idea of progressive overload, which is that it doesn’t matter what posture you’re in, whether it’s deemed optimal or suboptimal by whoever’s deciding, any posture held for too long will probably start to cause some discomfort, right. So we can take ballet dancers as an example of this. I think most people would say that ballet dancers have the ideal posture, just beautiful to watch aesthetically pleasing because, let’s be honest, when we’re talking about good posture, we really are just talking about aesthetics at the end of the day.
But this population of people is oftentimes spending a lot of time with physical therapists and with other pain management experts because they’re, despite their beautiful posture, in an awful lot of pain. Why? Load management, right. They’re just doing a lot of ballet.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Laurel Beversdorf:
And they may have progressed to doing certain beautiful, wonderful, amazing moves a little sooner than their bodies were ready to be able to handle the loads of those wonderful, beautiful high jumps and bendy moves. So this meta-analysis-
Whitney Lowe:
And aesthetics may not be the most mechanically or physiologically efficient thing to be doing with your body.
Laurel Beversdorf:
But that is… Especially with ballet dancer aesthetics, right
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Uh-huh.
Laurel Beversdorf:
Absolutely. And so I think that what this meta-analysis kind of showed is that we can maybe let go of micromanaging posture and technique. We can let it be a little ugly. We can let people lift with a rounded back. We can let people have their knees caving in a little bit. And you know what?
They’re probably going to be okay as long as we’re keeping track of how they’re progressively overloading loads within those exercises and how they’re managing loads that their body is subjected to. Maybe they’re also runners, and maybe they also like long hikes, and maybe they also drive six hours a week. And then, on top of that, they’re doing the strength training. Look, we have to take it all into consideration when prescribing exercises when prescribing volume, right. And so-
Whitney Lowe:
So is there a point at which that would start to matter? I’m thinking, for example, of super high-level athletics where that 20,000,000th of a second makes a difference between the gold and the silver. And you look at all the little pieces that you might tweak about movement, performance, or techniques or things like that. Is there a point at which that actually would start to matter?
Laurel Beversdorf:
You’re actually hitting on what I see to be a massive gap in understanding between two sides of this argument. Okay. There’s the group saying, “Posture doesn’t matter in the ways that you think it does.” In other words, people can lift ugly, and people can have suboptimal technique or form and still benefit from an exercise or from a sport. Okay. You have people on the other side of that argument saying, “Posture absolutely matters because if the form and technique isn’t precisely this way, there will be less efficiency in the movement, and they, as an athlete, will be less competitive.”
But can you understand that we’re actually having two different conversations here? We’ve got one group arguing what is required for elite athletic performance, and we have another group arguing what is required for musculoskeletal health or metabolic health. Okay. I think it’s fine to talk about elite athletic performance. I think it’s fascinating. I mean, just look at how much money the NFL and the NBA bring in every year, right. We love to watch high-performing movers, and I totally understand that. And I also like to watch high-performing movers.
But at the end of the day, if we’re really focused as people engaged in therapeutic practices or helping people move for health and longevity, the vast, vast majority of the people we’re actually dealing with are not elite athletes. They’re just people trying to exercise to be healthier, to live longer, and to have less pain. And so, why would we be gatekeeping posture when it’s not necessary for those. If you are coaching Simone Biles, absolutely, I think that you should care about every little micro-movement that her joints are doing, but you’re not probably.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Court:
Well, something I would also add is a couple of things. One is sometimes these elite athletes are elite specifically because they have some bizarro way of doing something that is absolutely not the prescribed proper way to do it, and yet somehow they’re winning gold medals. There’s plenty of stories of coaches coming in and trying to change people’s running patterns-
Whitney Lowe:
Yes. Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Court:
… and that it actually screws them up in a huge-
Whitney Lowe:
Screw them up.
Dr. Sarah Court:
… way.
Whitney Lowe:
Yep. Uh-huh.
Dr. Sarah Court:
And that they’re better off doing that wackadoodle thing that they’re doing with their knee, but it works for them, right.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Court:
And also sometimes I’ll have athletes, I mean, I’ve worked with a few athletes, like major athletes here and there, who come in because they’re having some sort of pain, and it’s like, “Yeah, you are the gold winner of the open water swim in the Olympics, but your shoulder mechanics are nuts.”
Whitney Lowe:
Right.
Dr. Sarah Court:
They don’t always
Laurel Beversdorf:
Which is probably precisely one of the reasons why they’re the gold medalists of the open water swim.
Dr. Sarah Court:
Exactly.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Court:
Exactly.
Laurel Beversdorf:
Right.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah.
Laurel Beversdorf:
They’re kind of freaks. Elite athletes are freakishly good at what they do because of their structural human… structural variations that are kind of skewed toward giving them these performance advantages.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. I remember my mentor and colleague, Benny Vaughn, who was a sports massage specialist who was working with the University of Florida’s swim team for many, many years, and he would bring in manual therapy practitioners to come sort of observe what they were doing down there. And this is back in the 1980s or so, and many of these people were coming from those systems that said, “We got to get ideal structural alignment and posture and all this kind of stuff to just get perfect.”
And he’d look at especially… This was the Women’s Swim team, and especially you’d look at them standing on the pool deck, and you’d see this upper thoracic kyphosis and forward head posture and knees bent backwards and all kinds of really aberrant things. And some of these people are like, “Man, you got a lot of work to do on these people.” And Benny would just laugh because he said, “Do you know what happens when that woman is horizontal in the water? Look at the shape of a dolphin’s back.”
Dr. Sarah Court:
Right.
Whitney Lowe:
“That is super hydrodynamically efficient and that’s why she’s a world champion. That’s why she’s got that kind of capability to move through the water fast because of that aberrant posture.” So yeah-
Laurel Beversdorf:
I would…
Whitney Lowe:
… you go in and try to change it and mess some stuff up.
Laurel Beversdorf:
I would also ask them to consider the difference between her VO2 max and your own, right.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Probably. Yeah.
Laurel Beversdorf:
And VO2 max is the number one gold standard indicator of how long someone’s going to live, right.
Whitney Lowe:
Uh-huh.
Laurel Beversdorf:
This woman has, by probably anyone’s standards, about what it means to have good posture, bad posture, but her metabolic health, her VO2 max, even just her baseline of strength because of how active she is and how she has to be pretty much above average baseline of strength, even just to be an endurance athlete at that elite of a level, I think we’re talking about the wrong things.
Whitney Lowe:
Yes. Uh-huh.
Laurel Beversdorf:
I don’t think when we talk about posture, we’re not talking about what people really care about, which is feeling good, living a long, high-quality life. We’re talking about what people are afraid of, which is what they look like because that’s how we’re evaluated and placed into certain strata of the social hierarchy. And that’s how posture has been wielded as a sorting mechanism, separating those in power from those who have been kept out of power.
Read Slouch. But I really think that we’re talking past each other a lot of the time. But if we could recognize what the research is overwhelmingly suggesting about the role that posture plays in the things that I think we agree or important, it’s just not as important as we would think it is based on how much it’s discussed, and micromanaged and talked about and fearmongered.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. Wonderful. Well, I’m noticing that I have only scratched the surface of a whole bunch of questions that I want to really go over with y’all, so I’m going to have to hope that you would come back and visit with us again on another episode.
Laurel Beversdorf:
Absolutely.
Dr. Sarah Court:
Would love to.
Whitney Lowe:
Yeah. But I want to let people know also if you can tell us a little bit about how people can find out more about you all and the Movement Logic Podcast, the work that you’re doing with the Bone Density course, things like that. Where can people connect with you?
Dr. Sarah Court:
On social media, we are @movementlogictutorials. Laurel is @laurelbeversdorf. I am @sarahcourtdpt. Our website is movementlogictutorials.com, and you’ll find information about the Bone Density course just right on that front page. You can join. We have a waitlist for people to join if they’re interested in the course to receive a discount, and they also get some fun freebie goodies along the way. And yeah, that’s the best way to find us.
Laurel Beversdorf:
We’re also launching the course in October, so in a couple of months.
Whitney Lowe:
Okay, wonderful. So go check that out. And again, just my outside recommendation, I really would encourage people to go take a listen to the podcasts. There’s some wonderful episodes on there and things that are very relevant to our community of massage and manual therapy practitioners as well. So, thank you again, everyone. The Thinking Practitioner Podcast is supported by ABMP, the Associated Bodywork and Massage Professionals. ABMP membership gives professional practitioners like you a package, including individual liability insurance, free continuing education, quick reference apps, online scheduling and payments with PocketSuite, and much more.
ABMPs CE courses, podcasts, and Massage and Bodywork Magazine always feature expert voices and new perspectives in the profession, including from Til and myself. Thinking Practitioner listeners can save on joining ABMP at abmp.com/thinking. So thank you again to all the listeners for joining us here today and to our sponsors as well. You can stop by our sites for the video, show notes, transcripts, and any extras. You can find that over on my site at academyofclinicalmassage.com and over on Til’s site at advanced-trainings.com.
If you have any comments, questions, things you’d like to hear us talk about or just record a quick voice memo or the old-fashioned way, send us an email at [email protected] or look for us on social media. You can find Til under his name, Til Luchau, and mine also under Whitney Lowe on social media channels over there as well. If you’ve got a few minutes, we would love for you to rate us on Apple Podcasts, as it does help other people find the show. And you can hear us wherever you listen to your podcast, whatever app you’d like to listen to them on. Please do share the word, tell a friend, and we will see you in the next time.
