To Decompress

Finding Length and Space — Part I

Hello friends,

If you are in Canada, I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving long weekend.

My title today ‘To Decompress’ is in reference to the spine. We forget that since the day we were born, gravity has had a compression affect on our bodies to keep us on earth. Over the years, this force compresses the spine — because as your disks move towards your pelvis, they have nowhere else to go.

It then makes sense to stretch the spine in order to find some hidden length that has been compressed away over the years, therefore adding some space back in-between each of the disks to keep them healthy.

I should take a step back here and share what I think is the basis of my fitness philosophy, which is alignment of the skeleton. I’ll explore this more with you in future posts but for now to help explain this, I’ll use an analogy:

I see our skeleton as being like the frame of a house…and you can whack on as much plaster/brick/paint (muscles/clothes/make-up) as you please but if you want a really good, strong, straight house that can stand through anything, you must get the framework right.

Back to the spine, remembering that our environment has a compression affect — I mentioned gravity but simply sitting too long can also hinder it’s length. With that being said, it’s easy to assume most of us have a compromised spine structure, that is, our body’s underlying framework is not optimally positioned.

I think this is important to address, not only for aesthetic or muscle performance reasons, but also because your spine acts as the protective channel for your central nervous system.

Going back to the house analogy, within your house’s framework is all your wiring. You want to make sure that wiring is protected otherwise simply - bad shit can happen. Same goes for your body. If you’ve had a pinched nerve, you know how debilitating it is. But even if you’re not at that extreme, ideally you want your wiring i.e. your central nervous system, to be able to do it’s thing so that you make full use of your brain and five senses.

I see a lot of people who do, let’s say core work, but they haven’t taken the time to decompress and find length in their spine. This means there is diminished space in-between their disks especially in their lower spine, which then leads to poor alignment of the trunk. They then go ahead and work their trunk muscles (those in the abs and the lower back) and instead of doing something good for their body, what they’re actually doing is building muscle around a misaligned framework. Depending on the individual, this can contribute to many (avoidable) issues down the track.

Putting it like this hopefully shows why it’s important to decompress your spine before doing any core work. I personally would go so far as to say it’s important to stretch the spine before any type of workout because even though a workout is physical, there’s obviously a huge mental component.

Now, if I take this exercise philosophy of decompressing your spine and use it as an analogy for life…

When we make decisions about what to bring into our lives — our desires and goals for example — it might be worth taking a moment to decompress. Decompress, find some space, to pause and ponder why we want to add these things.

I’m going elaborate more on this in Part II, but for now I encourage you to find a kid’s playground out in the sunshine somewhere and hang, literally, from a monkey bar!