by Pete Egoscue with Roger Gittines, 1992
Neighbor Sue loaned me this book, mostly for Wayne and his back pain. Wayne had already bought and studied “Built from Broken” from Justin. That has given him good exercises to do.
Good beginning – stressing how modern Americans no longer move and that is our problem in a nutshell. We sit almost all day and our bodies are changing as a result. Then, we try to start exercising and we experience pain.
Stanford did a study on his method and found that 17 people experienced a 31 percent decrease in pain levels after 2 months (May 2017).
He looks at his clients to determine what category they fall in:
Condition 1 reminds me of Tyler – feet everted (angled outward), knees out, pelvis tilted forward, sagging gut, head tilts forward and down, chin drops.
Condition 2: head angled off-line to one side, shoulder drooped forward and down, back of hand showing and may be hanging lower than other hand.
Condition 3: Head juts forward; rounding, drooping shoulders; S-curve of lower spine flattened out, both hips tilted under.
D-Lux is ideal: Everything is aligned and parallel: Shoulder joints, hip joints, knee joints, ankle joints, feet pointing forward, weight on balls of feet. Head erect and straight chin level. Hands hang alongside body, thumb and index fingers visible.
When people come to him in pain, he has them do three exercises until they no longer have pain: Static back press, supine groin stretch, and air bench (wall sit). Once the pain goes, you start with a series of exercises, up to 22 of them, in order, every day. There are different exercises depending upon which Category you fall into. If you have some characteristics of more than one Category, start with the exercises for Category 2 or 3 and then move to Category 1.
The Static Back Press is lying flat on your back with your knees and lower legs resting on a box or platform knee high. Right and left hips both flat on the floor. Breathe in and out deeply.
The Supine Groin Stretch: lie on your back with one leg resting on a block at 90 degrees and the other leg stretched out with something to prop the foot and keep it from flopping to the side. Not really easy to understand but the idea is to keep the hips level and the back completely flat on the floor. Breathe deeply and keep lowering the extended leg (???) until the hip flexors are relaxed (????).
Air Bench is basically a wall sit: press the small of your back and your hips against the wall. Feet shoulder width apart and far away enough so that your knees are above your ankles, not your toes. “If you have pain in the kneecaps, slide up the wall a bit.” Breathe, and to come out of this, push off with your hands against the wall and walk around for a minute.
For a D-Lux body type, you do all 22 exercises in this order: Arm Circles, Elbow Curls, Cats and Dogs, Isolated Hip Flexor Lifts, Cats and Dogs, Abdominals, Downward Dog, Triangle, Extended Lateral, Push-ups, Foot Circles/Point Flexes, Quadratus Lumborum Stretch, Runner’s Stretch, Upper Spinal Floor Twist, Cats and Dogs, Spread-foot Forward Bend, Hip Crossover, Hip Lift, Air Bench, Frog, Static Back Press, Supine Groin Stretch. To save time, he says you can do the following in order in 30 minutes: arm circles, elbow curls, cats and dogs, abdominals, foot circles/point flexes, downward dog, runner’s stretch, upper spinal floor twist, cats and dogs, air bench, static back, and supine groin.
He hears a lot of people say they have Neuropathy. “It happens, but not that often.” He can usually cure their pain or their complaint easily with a few exercises.
“When the sciatic nerve rings and there’s pain shooting down the leg, they know one of the disks in the vertebrae is impinging on the nerve root.
“If nerves, muscles, and bones add up to a single unit, the idea of going after one of the unit’s components doesn’t make much sense. Just as the sciatic nerve isn’t causing the pain, neither is the disk. Yet the common surgical practice is to remove the disk and fuse the spine. The call got through, but the message was misunderstood. The disk may be gone, but the problem still remains elsewhere in the unit.”
In the Q & A chapter, one of the questions is if pain killers are justified. He says they are if there has been a traumatic injury, and only for a time. “But when it comes to chronic pain, the situation is not nearly as impressive, and pain killers are nothing but trouble. They louse up the body’s internal communications network. The messages that are being sent out never get through.”
He recommends people who sit all day to get up every 30 minutes and move around. He also recommends being hydrated. And breathing correctly.
He says a person with a herniated disk or a slipped disk can be cured without surgery – by getting the pelvis into the proper position (Category 3 people have a pelvis position that has flattened the s-curve of the spine). “If we remove the dysfunction by getting the pelvis positioned properly, the disk will go back where it belongs.”
Runners or Tennis players who do not have the D-Lux body should not run or play tennis. Their dysfunctions will eventually take a toll on the body.
He considers Basketball almost the perfect sport because it uses all parts of the body.
The only sports you can do with one of the dysfunctional body types are: Softball, Cross-Country skiing, Weight Lifting, Fencing, Dance, Bowling.
The only reason running is “hard on the body” is because people who are Category 1, 2, or 3 are running and it eventually takes a toll on the body. Best get your body in order first (D-Lux) and then run.
The problem with swimming is that there is no gravitational load. Our bodies need to feel the force – the gravity-the impact – to function properly.
Regarding Tennis: “Tennis players are fun to work with and are they ever predictable! When their games start falling apart, they get a new racquet or a new pair of shoes.”
“Serious tennis is very unforgiving toward dysfunctional bodies. … Dysfunctional tennis players, by definition, are unbalanced. They are always hitting off the back leg; the weight transfer, instead of going from right hip to left hip, is torquing wildly through the upper torso with every forehand and backhand stroke. In the days of the old wooden racquet only the very best and totally functional tennis players could get pace and put top spin on the ball because they were the ones who were balanced and transferring their weight properly.” He fixed Mary’s tennis elbow pain by having her stand pigeon-toed and squeeze her shoulders back–not up. He squeezed her elbow and there was no more pain. “One of the exercises on Mary’s menu was gravity drops with scapular contractions, which she tells me she now uses at parties to wow any of her tennis pals who are complaining about tennis elbow. She takes them to a staircase and has them do three sets of twenty contractions, and then gives them a replay of my lecture on the ball and socket versus the hinge joints.”
He was working with a family who had a baby who was refusing to crawl. They were worried the baby was retarded. He had them take off her shoes and set her down on her butt on the ground. It wasn’t long and she became interested in something across the room, rolled over onto her hands and knees and crawled over to something. Babies need to be barefoot to be able to use their toes to help them crawl.