A son often stands and walks like his father. If the father stoops, chances are the son has also developed a stoop — or at least shows clear signs of developing one. So yes, stooping is inherited. The real question is: “How does the inheritance work?”
Is stooping inherited genetically?
Whenever we talk about inheritance, we tend to assume it’s a genetic thing, encoded in our DNA. However, genetics is not the only mechanism for passing characteristics from father to son. A complete list of kinds of father-to-son inheritance would have to include at least:—
- genetic inheritance
- ideas that the father has taught his son
- mannerisms the son has copied from his father
- traits they share from living in the same environment
- legal inheritance of money and possessions
Which of these is the mechanism for inheriting a stoop? If you think about it enough you’ll see ways in which all of them could be. Even inheritance of possessions (or the lack of it) could cause the son to copy his father’s stoop!
So which is the most common reason for inheriting a stoop?
The real reason why we stoop
We all constantly pick up quirks and mannerisms from the people around us: accents, facial expressions, reactions to common events, food tastes, personal preferences — and postural habits.
Picking up such mannerisms is as natural — and difficult to avoid — as breathing the same air, eating the same foods and drinking the same water. If the people around you walk with a stoop, you will naturally copy them unless you do something to prevent it. Usually, by the time you realise there is a problem your habit of stooping has become so much a part of you that it is virtually impossible to get rid of.
Debunking the “stoop gene”
So why do people immediately tend to imagine there must be a “stoop gene” that some have and some haven’t? Two reasons:-
- People who have developed the habit of stooping rarely find out how to get rid of that habit again. That permanence can easily seem a good enough reason for believing in the inheritance of a “stoop gene”.
- A lot of so-could thought is itself just a mannerism, a “thought-tick” that people catch and copy from the people around them. Such mannerisms often gain credibility from the mis-application of well-known scientific theories. The “a gene for everything” explanation of inheritance is one such mannerism. It takes a little real thought to realise that the idea of a “stoop gene” is not as well-founded as it appears on the surface.
Discovering the habitual, non-genetic nature of stooping requires more than a little careful consideration. Do you agree?
The person who does semi-supine eighteen times a day can progress nineteen times as fast as the person who doesn’t. They will progress even faster than that if they do it even more often. And you can speed your progress like that even though you only lie down for one single minute each time. You can see the math at the end of the article.
What is this semi-supine? Semi-supine is the Alexander Technique lying down procedure, also known as “Constructive Rest”.
When you learn the Alexander Technique, you learn that your existing bad habits of movement overuse many muscles and under-use others. You learn how to stop overusing tense, over-used muscles and you start putting the muscles you haven’t been using back to work.
Even sportsmen have under-used muscles
What happens to a muscle when you don’t use it? It becomes weak, it wastes away. Convalescent people who have been bed-ridden through illness for three months are doing very well if they manage to sit up for as long as ten minutes at first. That’s because their muscles have grown so weak from disuse.
Even very physically active people such as professional sportsmen have the same problem when they start to bring under-used muscles back into play. They may have the stamina to keep going all day when moving in their old less-efficient way. Still, when they bring muscles they normally don’t use into play, those under-used muscles tire just as easily as the convalescent’s. Their wonderful stamina counts for nothing. Their under-used muscle don’t have that same stamina.
More efficient movement uses those under-used muscles
When those sportsmen start to practise moving in the better way they will learn through Alexander Technique lessons, they will need those under-used muscles.
- They can fall back into their old patterns of movement and allow their strong muscles to take over again. This is the default option, the option people usually take. It has four undesirable effects:-
- They revert to their bad old ways of moving
- As a result, their weak muscles continue to get very little exercise and basically remain weak forever.
- Not getting in much practice moving in the new way, they don’t progress well with learning the Alexander Technique. You can’t progress well with any skill just by learning the skill: you have to practise it as well.
- The better option is to give tired muscles the rest they need — as often as they need it. Only a very short rest each time will revitalise thos muscle and enable you to go back and use them again.
Maximising your potential
Every moment of your waking life could be an opportunity to practise and perfect your new better movement. But only if your unused muscles are not too tired. Semi-supine makes that possible and it does so simply by giving them the necessary rest.
Lets do the math: say for three hours you lie down for a minute every ten minutes in between normal activity. During this activity you’re tuning in from time to time and giving attention to your Alexander technique. Over those three hours, that’s eighteen mini-rests using semi-supine. That’s eighteen times you get to allow yourself to move as well as you currently know how. Now let’s say you never do the semi-supine exercise. Now you have only that one first ten minutes when you can move as well as you know how.
If two people learn the Alexander Technique and practise it regularly, the person who follows that lying down routine will get nineteen times as much practice moving well compared with the person who doesn’t do the lying down. Why nineteen? That’s once when they’re fresh out of bed plus the eighteen more times when they’ve just done the lying down.
The person who does the semi-supine is able to use their Alexander Technique to progress nineteen times as fast as the person who doesn’t.
Go here to learn how to do semi-supine.
Which would you rather be, a gnarled oak or a creaking gate? A gnarled oak can continue to flourish, bent over, for hundreds of years. A creaking gate gets creakier every time someone lifts it up and moves it. If I had to make the choice, I know what I would choose.
More than that, a gnarled oak magically sprouts mighty new growth, just by being itself.
But what’s this got to do with straightening a bent back?
How not to straighten a bent back
If your back is bent and you continually try to force it straight, you actually re-enforce both the muscular pulls that are bending your back and the habits that produce those muscular pulls. The more you try to straighten up, the more crooked you’ll end up.
Instead, you need to be yourself and listen to the inner forces that know how to grow you into what you are meant to be.
Find yourself
Because if you don’t listen to those inner forces, that essence of you-ness, you will be trying to please everyone who comes along and tries to tell you what’s good for you. Every time you listen to them, you’ll end up falling a bit lower, a bit more out of tune with your real self.
So don’t struggle like a creaking gate, soon destined for the farmyard bonfire. Be a gnarled oak. Enjoy feeling little buds develop into wide, strong new branches.
Yes, if you can do it. No if doing it is a strain.
Slumping
What is better for a person who, though normally active, sits slumped: To continue as he is or to force himself to sit straight?
If he continues as he is, he will get progressively more and more slumped and eventually develop back pain. Not good — but at least he’s still able to do whatever he is able to do. What about the obvious alternative?
The obvious alternative
The obvious alternative is to make the effort to pull himself up and sit straight. If he does this, he is likely to look better but he will inevitably be stiffer. While he’s making the effort he will become stiffer, less mobile and even less alert. Of course, if you believe in sitting up straight, you won’t believe what I just said. If that’s you, here’s a challenge for you: make a point of watching people closely after you’ve asked them to sit up. (Let me know if you don’t see what I see).
Becoming stiffer, less mobile and less alert is a poor reward for making the effort to sit up straight. Worse still, if he is needled often enough that he keeps renewing his effort to sit up straight, he will get used to his more limited mobility and develop back pain even more quickly. It seems he’s stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The third choice
Is there a third, better alternative? Sure there is. The alternative is to learn how to stop pulling himself down:-
Stiff posture is bad posture
The truth about posture
Four reasons for NOT sitting up
Posture that works
This Feb 12th Newsweek story: “The Price of Pain” is just one example of a life devastated by not knowing what to do to solve a simple problem of back pain.
It quotes the Journal of the American Medical Association: “In 2005 Americans spent $85.9 billion looking for relief from back and neck pain”. What it doesn’t say (because, like most people, neither the JAMA article nor the Newsweek article authors know about it), is that this suffering and enormous expense is avoidable.
We Alexander teachers have been saying so for years but, until they come and find out for themselves, nobody believes us. Now, however, there’s top quality medical research published by the British Medical Journal that fully backs us up. The research was found to be so important, it’s actually on the cover of the BMJ’s August 2008 issue, as you can see here.
Do you know anybody who needs help for their back problem?
Then show them this gold standard medical research. Show them that real, honest-to-goodness help is available. Here’s a link to the research: British Medical Journal medical trial of Alexander Technique
And do you know why this research happened, why a seasoned, medical researcher decided to undertake it? It was because his wife and his wife’s mother both had Alexander Technique lessons and he saw at first hand what a huge difference it made to both of them.
So please read the evidence — and please show it to your friends and family. Anywhere you post online, please mention it — and link to this post.
Do it now. Do it for their sake.
Don’t try to haul yourself up like a sagging wall. The more you push and pull on a sagging wall, the more likely it is to collapse altogether. Instead, you need to find out how to shore it up.
Finding the material to shore up your scoliosis
If you’ve been reading my posts, you’ve already seen many examples of the Tube Principle showing you to work constructively to free up a tight, misshapen body.
Each time you want to coax your body back into shape, you need to find the place where it bends away (the convex side of the bend). In stoops, hunchbacks and swaybacks, the convex side is either in your front or your back. In scoliosis, it is on your left or your right side. That’s the only important practical difference between a scoliosis and those other problems. Let’s take a lean to the right as our example.
Correcting a lean to the right
If you lean to the right, there’s a part of your left side that sticks out more than the right side. In fact, your right side is hollow at that point. That’s the convex side of the bend. As always, you need to allow that convex area to soften and, as it softens, to spread around your body to the front and back.
You can’t do that while you’re struggling to haul yourself up straight, so first stop struggling to be straight.
As your left side spreads, your front and back can begin to ease slightly over to the right (because you have created a little bit of slack by allowing your left side to soften and spread). You’ll be reluctant to do that because your habitual tendency is to try and tighten that area and pull yourself up by main force. But you don’t need me to tell you that that really doesn’t get you very far. Now’s the time to do what does work: begin to soften and ease your bump around to the left.
What do you do with the bump as it begins to inch around rightwards?
The final step in putting the Tube Principle to work for you, is to draw together the slack that you’ve gathered from easing the front and back of your body-bend over to the right. As you do that, it will tend to push the top of your hollowed right side up. It will finally begin to shore you up as it should have been doing all along.
Do you see now what was happening before? The bit of you that should have been holding your right side up was dragged over to the left leaving you clinging on to the overhang, desperately trying to prevent yourself from toppling over.
The more you cling on to the overhang, the more you draw your support out from underneath yourself. The more you draw the support out from underneath yourself, the bigger and heavier the overhang you have to cling on to.
Is it any wonder that your efforts so far have never brought you any success?
Now that you know what you were doing wrong
Now that you know why your efforts couldn’t be successful, just get to busy practising what does work. Whatever you do, don’t let your past failures get you down. I’m not telling you you’ll get amazing results quickly. You might but it’s unlikely. You really need to work at this — and you’ll progress much better if you have a guide.
Don’t wait until you find a guide
Start now. As long as you don’t go back to trying haul yourself up, as long as you begin to put the support back under your sagging right side, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t start your journey back towards greater health and ease right away.
When you need a guide, call an Alexander Technique teacher. They’ll know how to help you. And don’t forget that, whether they realise it or not, your guide will be showing you that it’s not a wall you’re learning to shore up: it’s a tube.
If you felt like you were leaning forwards at an angle of 30 degrees or more. What would you do?
I’m betting you’d lean back.
When I give an Alexander lesson, my pupil often ends up feeling like they’re leaning forwards at an angle of 30 degrees or more. So what do they do?
They try to lean back — but I don’t let them. Instead I put them in front of a mirror and show them they are standing upright. They see it. They remark on it. They’re generally bowled over by the difference between how they feel they’re standing and what they see in the mirror.
So what do they do next? Surely they don’t try and lean back again?
Yes they do. 
Why is your kinaesthetic sense so weird?
Actually, your kinaesthetic sense (your feel for what your body is doing) isn’t weird at all, it’s your interpretation that’s wrong.
Your kinaesthetic sense is not really telling you what you’re doing: it’s telling you what you’re doing differently from usual. So if you usually lean backwards, it will only comment when you stop leaning backwards. When you stop leaning backwards, it will tell you you’re leaning forwards of where you usually are.
You will only think you’re leaning forwards because you thought you were straight when you were leaning backwards as usual. And you’ll feel like the difference is far larger than it really is, hence the 30 degrees.
Have I taught you something 
or just confused you? 
Let me know.
P.S. Here’s more about kinaesthetic weirdness.
Breathing really isn’t the problem.
The real problem is not not breathing.
Huh?
Breathing happens. Whether you like it or not, it happens. If your breathing doesn’t flow, you’re still breathing, even if you’re in the middle of an asthma attack.
That’s not where the problem lies.
The problem is that your breathing doesn’t feel right
Maybe you feel that you’re not breathing. So you try to breathe.
Maybe you feel that your breathing should be less like this. So you try to stop breathing like this.
Maybe you feel that your breathing should be more like that. So you try to breathe like that.
In every case, you’re trying to breathe and you don’t need to try to breathe because you’re already breathing.
If somebody’s already breathing, why on earth would they try to breathe?
The answer is: “Because it seems to them that, if they didn’t try, they wouldn’t breathe, or they wouldn’t breathe well enough”.
Why does it seem like that?
The breathing you get when you try to breathe is probably all you know. There’s never been a time when you didn’t try to breathe, except when you’re asleep. If you stop trying to breathe, even for a moment, your breathing changes. It becomes unfamiliar, your feeling tells you you’re not breathing. Quite likely, you begin to panic. Your experiment with not trying to breathe is immediately quashed. And, apart from that panic stricken moment, you’ve still no experience of breathing without trying. (Time spent breathing peacefully in your sleep doesn’t count because you don’t remember that).
You’ve still never left your breathing to do itself.
Once you get past that moment of panic and allow your breathing to do itself, you will find that you’re no longer breathing at all: your breathing is just something that’s happening to you.
It probably won’t feel right because it’s not what you usually do. But it will be. Maybe for the first time ever, it will be right.
So it isn’t your breathing that’s the problem. Your breathing never was, and never will be, the problem. It’s your trying to breathe that’s problem. What’s the solution?
Learn how to not-breathe
Until you start to not-breathe, your problem will remain:
You’re not not-breathing.
Not yet. 
Do you get pain in your shoulder joints? Especially when you lift something?
Then here’s how to use the Tube Principle to get rid of the pain. It’s actually very straight-forward. Just imagine someone taking hold of the very top of your arm with both hands so that their thumbs are on your shoulder joint and their finger tips are in your armpit. Imagine them gently spreading and softening the shoulder muscles under their thumbs and bringing the freed-up muscle around toward the arm-pit.
That’s it.
If you were holding your shoulder joint tight, that should free it up and ease it. If you had pain from the tight muscle it should go (at least until you tighten it up again).
The intention is enough
There’s actually no need to have anybody take your shoulder for you. All you need is to remember to allow the outside of your shoulder to soften and spread into the arm-pit.
Having said that, if you’re used to holding your shoulders tight, it helps a lot if somebody does it for you the first time. That way, you get to know what a free shoulder feels like.
If you learn how to apply the Tube Principle like that wherever you’re holding your muscles stiff and tight, you can be as happy and care-free as this young man.
By the way, carrying your shoulder bag with the strap across your body like that also helps.
Put your hand on your hips. No, stop reading and put your hands on your hips — please.
Good, thanks, I see no problem there.
Now bend at your hips
Did you bend where you had your hands? Yes of course you did.
Is that where you usually bend? Yes, of course it is.
Is it where you should be bending? No it isn’t. Why not? Because your hips are not your hip joints. Your hips are nowhere near your hip joints. Stand up and stretch your hand out as wide as you can (as though you were trying to play a really big chord on the piano). With that stretched-out hand, put your thumb-tip on your hip and reach down your leg with the little-finger-tip. Where your little-finger-tip is, that’s where you should be bending.
Do I hear you protest? “But you’re asking me to break my thigh bone in two!”
At first sight it would seem so, wouldn’t it?
Maybe we should check
Here’s how to check. Get two small sticky labels (or two bits of sellotape). Now stretch your hand down your right thigh again and find where your little finger reaches. Stick one of your labels there. Now do the same on your left thigh with the other label. Done that?
When you’ve done that, lie down on the floor. Keep your knees bent and your feet on the floor.
Now put your fingers on the labels on your thighs and raise your right foot. Raise your right foot until it’s about foot-stool-high off the ground. Then put the foot back beside your left foot and raise it again. Do that a few times. Notice where you are bending when you do that. Is it where your hips are or is it where your sticky label is?
Congratulations, my budding Uri Geller, you’ve just learned how to bend your thigh bone. 
On second thoughts, that can’t be right. What you’ve really done is (drum-roll please): you’ve discovered your hip joint. No I’m not making fun of you. I just want to make sure you remember how unexpected it was finding you had a joint down there. Because, if you remember your surprise at finding your hip joint down there, you’ll also remember where your hip joint really is. Otherwise, you’ll forget.
So the reason you shouldn’t bend at your hips is that your hip joints aren’t there. Your hip joints are about eight inches lower down.
But you do bend at the hips
Yes you do bend at your hips. It’s normal to bend at your hips: normal but a really bad idea. It’s a really bad idea because your hips are not your hip joints.
So what were you bending? You were bending your spine. Every time you bent for any reason you bent your spine. You bent your spine hard.
That doesn’t sound like a good idea, does it? So remember: eight inches lower down (that’s twenty centimetres).
So what are you going to do about it?
Do I hear you say “practise bending at my hip joints”? I do hope so.
If you find it easy to bend at your new-found hip joints, good for you. I anticipate that you’ll find it difficult — just as difficult as you found it to believe that your hip joints were down there in the first place.
If you find it difficult, I can help, just ask. (If you’re a subscriber, just reply to your email, otherwise, there’s a contact form in the side-bar).
