205: Dismantling Movement Dogmas (w/Laurel Beversdorf & Sarah Court)
We have a real treat today for listeners who love all forms of movement, especially yoga and strength training.
Derek and Julian talk to Movement Logic hosts, Laurel Beversdorf and Sarah Court, who navigate the curvilinear path of creating irreverent yet high quality science-based movement content that sets teachers and students free from dogma and fear-mongering. Our two podcasts intersect by looking into fallen gurus, pseudoscience health claims, dodgy alignment dogmas, and cults of personality susceptible to the dangers of conspiracism. And this week we’re diving into a recent Movement Logic episode on back pain specialist, Stuart McGill.
Yet, as this conversation shows, all hope is not lost, and all physical culture is not a pipeline into body fascism, or worse—multi-level marketing. There are still intelligent and grounded educators who share the love of movement, infused with the logic and humility of science.
Laurel Beversdorf is an international yoga educator, a certified kettlebell specialist, and a strength coach. Sarah Court is a Doctor of Physical Therapy, movement mentor, and yoga teacher trainer.
Show Notes
Movement Logic
Episode 62: Make McGill Make Sense
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Well, there was one suggestion about, you know, a lot of it was very sort of McGill-esque, posture is everything, stay in one place kind of thing.
And he said something along the lines of, to keep your neck in a safe place, you should press your tongue to the roof of your mouth.
And so I instantly put my neck all over the place and I discovered that I can press my
tongue to the roof of my mouth pretty much anytime I want with my neck anywhere I want.
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality where we investigate the intersections of
conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian
extremism. I'm I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Julian Walker.
I'm Laurel Beversdorf.
I'm Sarah Court.
We are on Instagram and threads at Conspiratuality Pod, and you can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes over on Patreon.
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As independent media creators, we appreciate your support.
Dismantling Movement Dogmas with Sarah Court and Laurel Biefesdorf.
We have a real treat today for listeners who love all forms of movement, yoga and strength training especially.
I'll include myself in that category along with practices like dance and somatic movement.
For yogis especially though, Our podcast, emerging as it does out of the arc of the yoga industrial complex and new age spiritual marketplace of the last few decades, has often been about disillusionment, fallen gurus, pseudoscience health claims, dodgy alignment dogmas, and cults of personalities susceptible to the dangers of conspiracism.
But all hope is not lost.
All physical culture is not a pipeline into body fascism or worse, multi-level marketing There are still intelligent and grounded educators who share the love of movement infused with the logic and humility of science.
As our title suggests, we are joined today by Sarah Court and Laurel Beversdorf, the hosts of a podcast called Movement Logic.
The subtitle of which I really enjoy, Strong Opinions, Loosely Held.
Yes, I love that subtitle, and we don't have one, and I think we need to invent one, Julian.
Well, that'll only take about four weeks of arguing in Slack.
That's being generous.
Maybe we've streamlined the process at this point.
In a moment, I will ask our guests to tell us more about what they do.
But let me start by reporting on what the internet has to say.
Laurel Bevesdorf is an international yoga educator, a certified kettlebell specialist and a strength coach.
Sarah Court is a doctor of physical therapy, movement mentor and yoga teacher trainer.
Together, I think, They navigate what I'll call the curvy linear path of creating irreverent and yet high-quality science-based movement content that sets teachers and students free from dogma and fear-mongering.
Does that sound about right, you two?
I think you pretty much nailed it, Julian.
That sounds exactly right.
Thank you.
I'm glad.
I'm glad I really enjoy your stuff.
I was especially excited to invite you both on.
We have several friends and colleagues in common, and Sarah, we've crossed paths in real life several times, most notably at a six-day cadaver dissection class.
So long ago!
So, so long ago, yes, as I was holding that scalpel looking at that body.
I've been enjoying listening to your podcast, and Laurel, we've interacted through various online connections in what I think of as the out-of-the-box yoga world.
Yeah.
And I've been finding some fascinating overlaps from listening to the podcast with what we do here at Conspirituality, like debunking pseudoscience and its guru-esque proponents, analyzing historical and political themes and movement culture, and valuing scientific method as a way of discovering practical If provisional or loosely held truths.
Like us, you create your episodes from opposite coasts.
Sarah is in LA and Laurel, I know you were formerly in New York, but you're now in Huntsville, Alabama.
That's right.
Yeah.
So for anyone unfamiliar with your work, perhaps you could tell us how the Movement Logic Project started.
And what got you here?
Sarah, would you like to start?
Sure, I'd love to.
And I just want to say thank you so much for that introduction.
It's always nice to hear someone else describe your work and really just get it absolutely right.
So thank you.
Absolutely.
So yeah, we began Movement Logic in 2017.
And at the time, our mission was really about helping Students or teachers bridge the gap between physical therapy and getting back to the activities they want to be doing.
And so we then created six continuing education online tutorials.
Low back, pelvic floor, hips, shoulders, neck, and foot and ankle.
And then in early 2023, we took a big sort of switch, change direction.
We created a totally different kind of course.
We built a six month bone density course called Lift for Longevity, which was about online strength training with barbells.
And we had over 90 women enroll from all over the world, which blew our minds.
They were all between the ages of 35 to 75.
And the reason we created this longer form strength training course is that we saw just a massive void in online strength training for women, specifically the kind of heavy lifting that improves bone density and muscle growth as demonstrated by the research.
And we really wanted to fill this gap for women.
Yeah, and we knew we were going to have some barriers that we were up against in terms of getting women around our age to invest in barbell equipment for their living rooms, join their local gym, because there are a lot of myths.
First of all, there's this pervasive fear that if you strength train as a woman, you're going to get bulky or bigger in any way, shape or form.
Which is why so many women stick to lifting tiny weights, you know, like pink dumbbells, or they shy away from lifting heavy enough weights to make meaningful gains in their strength.
There's also such a thing as gym intimidation, which is basically that gyms are just not always terribly friendly environments for all folks.
I think the bro-iness of them can be a real turnoff for many women our age.
They don't feel like they belong there.
They don't feel as welcome like they do say in their dance fitness classes, their yoga classes, their Pilates classes.
And then there's just this fear of barbells as a piece of equipment for some people in people's minds.
It's more dangerous than like dumbbells and strength training in general has been painted as dangerous when it's actually not at all.
I think women For these reasons are especially disinclined to take the type of leap we invited them to take with us because they're told in so many words that they should just stick to cardio so that they can lose weight and stay small, stick to yoga, stick to Pilates so they don't get hurt.
But nevertheless, 90 women signed up and you know we have videos on our Instagram account Of the Zoom gallery of the live classes.
It's like tiny rectangles of women, you know, Zoom across the world, lifting barbells together from their living rooms, from their local gyms.
These are women in their 60s, their 70s, their 30s, their 40s.
And I actually, I watch these and I have to pinch myself because this is not an image you ever, ever see On social media, and it's just it's like amazing to me watching these 90 minute these 90 women go on this journey with us.
Their increase in self-confidence is my favorite part.
You know, we've watched them gain strength.
Some of them have doubled their strength.
Some of them are squatting and deadlifting three figures, which is super impressive.
But my favorite are the wow, I can't believe I could do that type stories that they're often sharing with us on our Facebook group.
And our podcast Movement Logic Strong Opinions Loosely Held is basically The same ethos as that, but a totally different format, right?
It's evidence-based anti-dogmatic movement edutainment, as I like to call it, on topics such as teaching movement, strength training, rehabilitation practices, and the politics of the female body.
I started lifting in the 80s with my father.
We had a basement gym and then he also, he had a job at DuPont, but he ran the company gym because he loved it that much.
And I've been, so this has been my culture.
And one of my favorite places, honestly, I know a lot of people do not like gyms.
I love them for social reasons and for physical reasons.
And I have personally really enjoyed seeing More women doing lifts and being in the gym over the years.
But I know there are a lot of problems.
Just as when I started teaching yoga in 2003, there would sometimes be 50 women in a class and no men.
And that evened out by the time the pandemic hit.
And there was still more women, but it was a lot more men.
But I'm wondering, from your perspective, there's the social media, I believe, has helped facilitate this because like any group, you can see, oh, other people are doing it.
And I'm wondering, What are some of the other barriers for women and how do you work through them to help them understand the importance of strength training in general?
Sarah, if you want to go first, I can just say that I work with a lot of women who are like me, right?
They're yoga teachers, they're my age.
They, you know, they came of age like that.
Some are baby boomers, right?
So, I'm not a baby boomer.
Some of them are Gen X, I'm Gen X elder millennial.
So they're kind of like spanning these generations.
And I was not so I was an athlete in high school.
And I was not invited into the weight room until senior year of varsity volleyball, when I think my coach went to coaches seminar and learned that like strength training is really important for athletes.
And then we all all of us girls just like walked into the weight room with the it must have been like the football players or whatever they're on.
Yeah, it was the football players.
This is fall.
And we're like, move over, boys, like, And that was my first time ever being told at the age of 18, having played sports since fifth grade, that I should probably lift some weights heavier than like the five pound hand, hand, you know, like change plates that I was using for my like rotator cuff strengthening.
Um, so it was, My experience to be invited at that early age then I never went back I started in on yoga and it wasn't until as a yoga teacher I had yoga related pain that I realized that like I needed to just change things up and strength training was the thing I did that
You know, maybe it was the strength, maybe it was just changing things up, but it helped me reduce my pain.
And so I'm working with all these people who have who actually share a similar story that a lot of them aren't athletes, former like high school athletes.
But I try to share my story, I try to represent myself online in front of them as like someone who has, you know, come to enjoy strength training, why enjoy strength training, also sharing evidence based information around how beneficial it is for women, especially for older women, especially.
And then, you know, I point out the bullshit around, like, all of the fear-mongering and all of the insidious insinuations that, like, you'll get bulky, it's not for you, like, you'll look ugly if you do it, and just try to call out the elephant in the room, which is, like, that's crap, that's not actually evidence-based, that this is keeping you from something that could potentially extend your life.
And benefit in so many other ways as well.
So I lean into how passionate I feel about this and communication skills, I guess, is how I do it.
Yeah, me too.
I mean, my origin story, if you will, is a little bit different.
I wasn't an athlete.
I still, if someone throws something at me, my first instinct is to duck.
So that was never part of my background, but I did, I did a lot of ballet, dance, you know, gymnastics kind of stuff.
And so I was absolutely mired in the, you know, what's known as the long and lean aesthetic, right?
The body shape that has to look a certain way that's not about your particular strength or capability from the inside out, but just from the outside in, what does it look like?
And that was really true for, for quite a long while, while I was a yoga teacher in Now that I'm a physical therapist, and I started lifting heavier, and you know, to be completely honest, Laura was a huge influence on me as far as working with barbells.
Because I was like, well, we've got them at the clinic.
She's like, okay, is that going to be enough?
I was like, yes, it's fine.
And then it wasn't.
And I was like, God damn it, I gotta go buy my own.
Oh, she's right.
But with all that said, you know, so I speak to a lot of my patients in the clinic, in particular, from my experience, where You know, I also was very, you know, hesitant around using a barbell.
And then I discovered it's actually quite a bit easier of an instrument of a piece of equipment to use.
So even, you know, in the clinic, we have a technique bar weighs 15 pounds.
So I might be starting with someone and particularly the women that I work with, I kind of mentally flag every woman that comes in as a like, is this a potential person to introduce to strength training and most of them are.
And it may be really far down the line in our treatment that I get to it with them, but I start planting seeds in their mind.
And more often than not, and this is the part that I just get so pumped about, by the time I get them ready to do, let's say, a deadlift with that lighter 15-pound bar, and they do it, the change that I see instantly, it's not even about the strength like Laura was saying before, is I see a look on their face like, holy shit, I did it!
And if I can do this, what else can I do?
Right?
So it's actually a huge confidence booster for women just to start to work with, you know, the equipment that they were told they're not supposed to use, right?
That they could hurt themselves and all of these things.
And the biggest, you know, the biggest thing that Laurel and I do, I think across the board is we just provide women with evidence over and over and over again through their own experiences.
That it is not only safe, but it is actually beneficial on a physical level, many reasons.
It's psychologically beneficial.
It changes the way you move in the world.
It does things like make you say no more, which women are conditioned to say yes to everything, right?
It changes a lot of things for women.
So that's a big part of why we're such huge proponents and the ways that we try to positively encourage other women to start lifting heavy.
Great, yeah.
It's wonderful work.
I feel like we're establishing quite nicely the Movement Logic tutorials and the work you each do independently in the world and why you're passionate about it.
And then there's this podcast where There's a level of analysis.
There's a level of digging into the science and identifying specific fallacies, not only in the yoga world, but also in the sort of fitness bro science influencer kind of world.
And really looking at a lot of the stuff like through a kind of a cultural criticism lens, which I find really fantastic.
So there's a recent episode in which you looked at the work of Dr. Stuart McGill.
Who, anyone who doesn't know, he's a professor of biomechanics.
His approach to back pain, rehab, injury prevention and peak performance has made him this internationally renowned figure.
I even thought quite highly of him before I heard your analysis.
But this didn't stop you from taking a really critical look at his unscientific claims, his guru-esque faith healer style of teaching groups of physical therapists.
So tell us about that because I thought that was really, you know, you really went after someone who has quite a pedigree. So perhaps
Sarah, if you'd like to address the science and Laurel, maybe you can speak to the faith healer
part because I really enjoyed how you broke that down. Yeah, I mean, I'm not personally sure
I've ever studied one particular practitioner quite so intensely. But our episode on our
podcast was sparked by Stuart McGill's most recent interview with Peter Atiyah on his Drive
podcast. And so after listening to that, we sort of, you know, responded with our thoughts. Since
then, we've also listened to a lot of other interviews. We've read his book, Back Mechanic, which he
wrote as a self-help manual to help people get rid of their back pain. And
And so we found just sort of across the board that he has a methodology that you can really kind of categorize into these big themes that he really sticks to throughout.
And probably the biggest one, because his entire approach kind of hinges on this, is that McGill thinks that something called non-specific
low back pain does not exist.
So for people who haven't heard of it, non-specific low back pain, it's an established
clinical term. It refers to discomfort or pain in your low back that does not have
a clearly identifiable cause or pathology.
And there's tons of research to support this.
People go, they have low back pain, they go get a CT scan or they get an MRI and it shows nothing.
There's no injury, there's no pathology.
And so that's why it's called non-specific low back pain.
Yeah, in Chapter 2 of Back Mechanic, the first sentence is, so far we've established there is no such thing as non-specific low back pain.
Something is causing the pain, and once identified, we refer to the pain as specific.
So that's the first sentence of Chapter 2, gives you an idea of what they talked about a lot in Chapter 1.
Per your question, Julian, about his guru-esque behavior, something I noticed really stands out about McGill is that he'll often employ an us-versus-them framing.
Which we'll talk more about, but this denial of nonspecific low back pain is a core belief that he uses to draw this line in the sand to create a differentiation.
McGill can frequently be quoted on podcast interviews and in his book Back Mechanic is saying that clinicians who tell you there's no physical or mechanical source of your pain That your pain is not due to some particular injury to your spine or some pain trigger or some pain mechanism.
Okay, they're telling you in so many words that you have nonspecific low back pain that these clinicians are incompetent.
Implying that clinicians who can identify these exact sources are competent.
He writes in Back Mechanic, even if your doctor tells you there's no physical cause, rest assured there is one and it can be addressed.
So, the problem with this There's a few problems, but kind of the biggest problem with this is that it can be quite literally impossible to find just a single pain trigger or mechanism in an assessment.
Pain is a complicated thing.
People are complicated in the way that they have their pain.
Now on the other hand, we're not trying to say that there's never a tissue source.
Oftentimes there is.
I see plenty of people who come into the clinic, they'll have low back pain because they have a disc herniation with a nerve referral pain.
They might have stenosis or arthritis or any of these conditions that can cause pain.
But I also see people who come in with scans that show nothing out of the ordinary and they
are still having back pain. So it's just really inaccurate to claim that it doesn't exist, but for
some reason this is this very firmly held belief on his part. It's the hill he's going to die on, you
know. And I also do want to be clear, you know, we respect, both of us really do respect his body
of work.
He's been working in the industry for 30 plus years.
He's done an extraordinary amount of research that is a fantastic legacy of learning for clinicians.
But this argument that there's always a mechanical reason, always a pain trigger, it falls apart If he acknowledges that maybe sometimes there's not.
Yeah.
And he also really misidentifies the whole psychosocial aspect of pain.
He kind of refers to it as like, you know, someone told you that pain is all in your head and now you are depressed.
That's basically his whole understanding of the model.
And it's just, it's just deeply inaccurate.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it seems like it's also very far behind the times in terms of where we're at with
pain science and really recognizing like, wow, pain science is complex.
We often there are mechanisms at play.
There are feedback loops going on.
We're talking about the brain, the nervous system.
We're talking about various kinds of neurochemical things that may be happening.
And yeah, sometimes there isn't a really clear and obvious sort of biomechanical reason or
structural insult that's happened to the body.
But Laurel, you know, you also talked about, you played several clips, I believe, in the episode that I'm thinking of.
And you talked about, you've touched on it already, his style of presentation when he's in the role of being an educator.
And the way in which he tells stories, he tells anecdotes.
about moments he's had with different patients, and very often he's name-dropping celebrities.
And there's a whole kind of guru-esque thing that he's doing, where he's positioning himself as the one who uniquely understands how to save people from their pain, where everyone else has failed.
And the way I interpret it is he's sort of haranguing this group of professionals.
It's like, you don't know what you're doing.
You're following these models that are just dumb.
I'm the one who really understands.
And here, let me tell you a story, particularly about an older lady who, you know, he describes
in ways that are, you know, incredibly insensitive, I thought.
Yeah, this is another line in the sand, rhetorical device.
He called therapists, surgeons, you know, physicians in this audience where he's presenting, you know, he's speaking, and calling people up to the to the stage, presumably in front of everyone to assess them, right? He's relating the story to a T and
refers to these clinicians as arrogant, because when he presents them with research on elite
athletes, they fail to see the relevance of that population to the population that they actually
work with, which are people who are probably pretty deconditioned, older.
And he's like, just think of the arrogance of that, that they don't see that, you know, if you understand like in back mechanic, he relates the elite athletic body to a Ferrari, right?
So let's like really understand the Ferrari.
So we understand kind of what the top of the line machine can do, right?
There's a lot of analogies to body as machine, body as a product of engineering.
Frankly, he's an engineer, right?
Instead of a, you know, an outcome of evolution.
So, he has this woman come to the front.
She, you know, he characterizes her as being very afraid that she's gonna have to leave her house and not be able to take care of her pet because the doctors tell her that, you know, she can't stand up now, so she'll have to leave.
And he's like, well, okay, let's, um, let's look at you.
Let's try some things.
And he basically, in my opinion, in a very, at least this is like him relating the story that he, you know, of this, of this interaction, like in a very kind of overly complex way teaches her a sit to stand.
So a sit to stand is really just helping someone It's a squat, right?
It's a squat pattern, but like helping them stand up from a chair, right?
That's a sit to stand.
And I was getting volunteer hours for to apply to PT school.
And I was in a rehab ward of a hospital watching every single occupational therapist, every single physical therapist in that room, teaching sit to stands.
And that was like a decade ago.
So the way that McGill relates his ability to teach With the world's most elite strength coaches.
And that's why he helped this woman be able to, on stage in front of everyone, stand up.
Right?
And she starts crying and she's like, I'm not gonna need to leave my house now, am I?
And Miguel's like, no, you're not.
Right?
And it's like this whole, you know, moment where there's like, Miguel swoops in and saves this woman.
But like, we never really find out if she did have to eventually leave her house or like what the outcome was like, he never followed up on that.
But what the audience listening to the Atiyah interview, right, so this is a story he's telling on his podcast interview with Atiyah.
What happens to the audience there is that transported to the audience of this healing moment where, you know, McGill works this elite strength training magic on this woman, like he teaches her a sit to stand.
To get up from the toilet, right?
Yeah, to get up from the toilet.
And so yeah, so another thing that I found kind of just like, it made me uncomfortable was how there was just such a juxtaposition between McGill's status and power in this moment, and her level of vulnerability, not only as an older woman who's afraid of losing, you know, everything meaningful to her, but she's also getting up off of a toilet.
And so you're imagining this woman getting up off of a toilet.
Totally.
And it's like, I'm, you know, I'm probably too old to use this word, but it was like super cringe.
And you know what, Laurel?
I can't help but hear so much overlap with so many, especially in the late 90s and the early 2000s, yoga workshops and teacher training events I've been in where there's the like, bring this person up to the front and now let's do this
whole alignment thing on them and let's talk about what's going on with their bodies and let's talk
about what's probably going on with their skandhas and their you know the places where they're
hung up spiritually and psychologically that I have this unique way of I'm going to put them into
this pose and everything's going to change and then everyone's going to clap right.
Yeah.
And he actually has done a course with Bernie Clark on Yoga International, where he does exactly what you're describing with Bernie Clark.
And so there's women who come, you know, they're, they're on the yoga mat, like closest to the camera.
And the two men are sitting behind the woman and they're sitting in chairs.
And like, there's, uh, you know, one of Bernie Clark's books on display there.
Cause it's actually his course and Miguel's helping him out.
And this woman who has, I guess, like, it sounds like her, Si joint is bothering her.
She's doing warrior one and like both Bernie Clark and Miguel are coming up and like just like doing little micro tweaks on like where her pelvis is pointing and then Miguel whips out his pelvis and he's like you see how your pelvis it's like compressing down here at the lower end of the SI joint so that you like to have more space at the upper end of the SI joint and it's like how would you even possibly know that that's I mean This is where he just leans so heavily into the mechanical model.
And that's always the explanation.
And then he likes to often like he'll, he'll be on YouTube while he's being interviewed on a podcast at his BackFit Pro headquarters, like with all of his bones and disarticulated skeleton, you know, piece is like showing showing it all and it's all very impressive right like he has just a masterful way of explaining what's happening anatomically and biomechanically but the problem is that that's just one tiny little piece
Of what might be causing someone to experience pain according to the biopsychosocial model of pain and according to how pain works, which is like kind of weird and pain science has been around for decades and like that a lot of that stuff is kind of missing.
I mean, I'd love to share like I was recently in a really toxic interaction with somebody on social media, someone who is probably was an elite powerlifter, trains elite powerlifters and We got into a toxic interaction.
And, you know, I think that like, some of the beef that he had with what I was saying about McGill potentially like leaving out lots of important information that we would need to know about why or why not someone has pain might relate to the fact that McGill never talks about that stuff.
That like this lack of acknowledgement or discussion around non-mechanical causes of low back pain, those psychosocial, those like messy feeling type stuff factors, that this is possibly what at least in part is driving what I observed on social media as the fuck your feelings McGill bros.
Like so that when you get in trouble with the fuck your feeling McGill bros, like watch out.
If you use the term non-specific low back pain, they're like up in arms, right?
And so I think it's kind of a chicken and egg question.
This relates to the guru-esque question of yours, Julian.
It's like McGill has like a posse.
He has like a circle the wagon thing that happens around him on social media.
So I think it's kind of a chicken and egg question.
You know, are they fuck your feelings because McGill has not educated them on the relevance of the psychosocial pain triggers?
Or are they McGill sycophants precisely because he leaves out this messy, emotional, sociological stuff that they'd rather not have to acknowledge and deal with, perhaps because they fundamentally lack the tools to do so?
So I don't know, but it's a thing.
Like Julian, I was a fan of McGill.
If you see behind my shoulder here, you can see a few Jill Miller books.
There's an Aaron Harsheg book, Squat University, who's a big McGill fan.
And then there's low back disorders.
So I was really, after listening to the episode, I'm like, I'm going to have to get rid of my $80 manual over there.
No, I'm not going to do that.
I would say keep it.
I mean, I have a copy of Back Mechanic.
Sure.
We'll talk about this.
A lot of what Miguel says, I totally agree with.
It's consensus opinion.
It's consensus advice.
It's consensus insight.
It's these couple of things where he draws this line in the sand.
He's kind of a lone wolf in a way.
Sure.
Where you're like, wait a second.
Yeah.
Why are you taking such an adversarial tone on something that is far from settled science or actually not even a thing?
Like, what's that about?
Let's talk about one of those because I, my favorite move in the gym is deadlifts.
I've been doing them for years.
I am also a yoga, former yoga teacher and practitioner or in McGill's terms, a yoga master.
Which I found pretty funny that that's how he refers to yogis.
But there is this sense that he explicitly says, as you brought up, that people who deadlift shouldn't do yoga and vice versa, which just sounds absurd to me.
So can you unpack that a little bit?
Yeah, I mean, it is absurd.
If we talk about what he actually said in that interview, and then I also want to bring up his, he sort of did like a response podcast episode on a different podcast, but you know, people in particular, people who practice yoga Are generally, at this point, the most part, women, 40s to 60s, right?
I think we can say that's like a large part of the yoga.
It's not everyone, but it's a large part in the Western, you know, culture, yoga culture.
And a lot of these yoga practitioners kind of only do yoga, right?
And so they end up missing entire categories of fitness, like resistance training, right?
Which the CDC says everyone should do at least twice a week.
You know, yoga has a lot of gaps in what it encapsulates and so do lots of other movement modalities, but the problem with telling women in their, you know, middle, you know, 30s to 70s or whatever that they should not deadlift, which he quite literally says, yoga people should not deadlift.
Personally, I find this unethical because we know from research that this is the demographic of women who are most likely to benefit from lifting heavy weights, who can stave off things like osteoporosis, osteopenia, who can improve cardiovascular health, who stand to benefit the most From it, and yet he's telling them not to do it.
If someone comes to me and says, you know, weightlifters shouldn't do yoga or yoga practitioners shouldn't lift weights, I would ask them, why do you think that?
And I would maybe relate like how I used to kind of think that, right?
As a yoga teacher, I thought I shouldn't lift weights because I thought that if I got too much strength, I would then lose my flexibility because I thought strength and flexibility were these opposite qualities.
And they're not like you can actually increase your flexibility through strength training.
Um, but that's like very different, you know, thinking that is incorrect.
I mean, that's a, that's a, you know, myth, but that's different than what McGill was implying on the, on the podcast episode with Atiyah in that he's kind of suggesting that You know, people who strength train will harm themselves if they do yoga.
They'll like loosen their spine up too much and like yoga practitioners will, you know, not be able to handle heavy loads because their spine, their soft tissues just have been doing too much yoga or maybe like they were they're sort of genetically selected.
to like yoga and therefore like, just, you know, genetically,
they're not supposed to be lifting weights because they have flexi bendy spines. I'm not sure which is, you know,
what what his stance actually is. And then on the E3 rehab, kind
of right to respond episodes that they did, they put out like
kind of a similar episode as we did. And then they invited
Miguel on for two more episodes. He walked back a lot of these
statements, and he represented himself pretty differently. For the E3
rehab crew.
But I guess I would just ask, like, why do you hold these beliefs that you should stick to one way of moving, one format, one modality?
Because a lot of times when people have been told, you know, In a line in the sand kind of way, like you're, you know, doing the right thing.
If you do this type of exercise in the wrong thing, because you're doing this exercise, they've probably just been exposed to like some form of marketing or influence, right?
Like it's not really based in fact.
Well, and when when McGill in particular says this thing about yoga, people shouldn't lift weights.
He then also does this very bizarre moralizing around it, because he's like, well, and then, you know, you that's the lifestyle choice you made to make yourself live in a body that can't handle weights.
So when some sort of emergency situation comes, you're not going to be able to deal with it.
And oh, well.
Enjoy that yoga.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, as opposed to like, hey, maybe we should modify here a little.
Maybe it would be helpful to you to start doing it.
Hey, maybe cross-training is not a bad idea after all.
Maybe like what research shows is actually correct.
And it's interesting because he does, I mean, it is funny, the response episode that he did was very sort of like, Oh, well, I'm just a grandpa.
How do you expect me to understand the internet?
You know, it had a lot of that vibe to it.
You're just like, what are you talking about?
But he actually misrepresents himself because Atiyah, who, as we have acknowledged, is very pro weightlifting.
At one point in that original interview, Atiyah says to him, you know, we don't want to give people the impression that they shouldn't lift weights.
And in the response episode, Miguel claims that in that moment, he said, Oh, yes, absolutely.
Yes, people should lift weights.
But if you listen to it, he does not say anything.
So maybe his response was edited out, but he certainly didn't vocally agree with him.
And so that's why he's being taken to task so much for this position.
Can I just say as someone who's been involved in movement for so long though on this topic that I can't tell you, and this is anecdotal, but how many times that I confused tightness for weakness.
I thought I was a very poor backbender for most of my yoga career.
And then when I specifically got into full back training, a lot more deadlifting and various other like deltoids and all these different things, my backbending improved the stronger I got.
Wait, are you saying that strength training opened your heart chakra?
That's exactly what he's saying.
My throat chakra.
Yes, yes.
You know, McGill will frequently claim that formats like Pilates and yoga are not good for people who have low back pain to do, but then he'll lionize the McGill Big Three, which are the three exercises that you can use to stiffen your spine.
But the research says otherwise, right?
The research repeatedly shows no difference in a type of movement modality that is either better or worse They're all kind of equally neither better nor worse than any other modality.
Research does show that exercise in general is beneficial for people who have low back pain.
So the good news there is that people can be allowed to find a form of exercise that they like and will stick to in order to do things that will improve their back pain, like improve their metabolic health, get a sense of self-efficacy, improve their mental health, improve their body's resilience, you know?
We just don't have to make all these rules that have no scientific basis about right and wrong ways to exercise at all, and especially for people with low back pain, because then when we stop doing that, their options are expanded rather than narrowed.
And I feel like that's only a good thing.
You're saying that non-specific exercise is helpful for non-specific back pain.
In non-specific but measurable ways that tend to benefit most people.
I think people should do what they're going to do.
I think they should do what they like.
I think they should go to the classes where their friends are and be in community.
I think that they should do the things that make them happy, right?
Like Greg Lehman, who is someone I really respect, he's a physiotherapist out of Canada and a chiropractor by trade, right, and steeped in the research, said on a recent podcast of a colleague of ours, Caitlin Casella's Practice Human podcast, Get happy, get healthy.
There you go.
Get happy, get healthy.
It can be that simple.
So, you know, another thing this reminds me of is how McGill will often advise, in Back Mechanic, he advises against psychotherapy.
He says, I don't advise that you get psychotherapy.
Wow.
Because things like job satisfaction.
Yeah, I think more people actually need to read Back Mechanic, right?
I refer to it as the motherlode of myths, right?
So a lot of gems came out of that one.
So get happy, get healthy, but in back mechanic McGill writes, I don't advise that you go see a psychotherapist because, you know, things like job satisfaction and neuroses can modulate back pain, but they are not the cause.
Right?
So, think about this.
We know that pain is multifactorial.
We know that there are many, many inputs that conspire to create this emergence of pain, right?
Which is not linear.
It's system-wide, right?
The whole body is involved in this process.
And then you're writing in a book that thousands of people who are total strangers to you will read.
That are desperate, that you don't think that they should go see a therapist, even though that could be an absolutely phenomenal tool in their toolbox to address, like, so many things that might be beneficial to them in their life, including their low back pain.
Like, I love therapy.
Like, I go to therapy and it helps me in so many aspects of my life.
Like, why would you take that off the table for anyone ever, but specifically for people with low back pain?
Like, I just don't understand.
And this is, This is the only edition of the book that's been written.
It's never been updated.
It's from 2015, right?
It's an old book, but there have never been any updates.
He's still promoting the book.
He's still like, you got to get the book, Back Mechanic.
It's like, well, read Back Mechanic.
Like, really read it.
Right.
I mean, one of the problems that just stands out so much for me as a clinician is that McGill is not a clinician.
He's a PhD, he's very highly educated, but he is essentially an engineer and a researcher.
And he does all, and you know, this, to go back to that sort of guru-esque model, a lot of his stories as to why he is right are just that.
They're stories, they're anecdotes that he tells, and he dramatis...he dra...dramatisize?
Dramatize?
What is the word?
Dramatizes?
He dramatizes them.
He makes a very dramatic story.
So the one sort of category that I just wanted to bring up that makes me really, really furious is he tells a lot of, he has a lot of stories in his back pocket that he pulls out about suicidal people.
And so there's a couple, there was one in particular that he described on the Atiya podcast that we that we talk about where this man comes into his clinic and says to him, you know, I've seen so many practitioners, my back pain is terrible.
They're all telling me it's in my head.
I'm going to kill myself in two weeks if you can't fix me.
And McGill basically like rolls up his sleeves and he's like, let me at it, you know, and he does this like he has the man reproduce his pain, which is Already I'm like, you've got someone who's suicidal and you're saying, okay, what we're going to do now is we're going to, we're going to create the pain that's got you to this point.
He claims, you know, and again, this is his retelling of the story that he's able to reduce the pain after it's been incited, but now he knows the source.
And the man, you know, does get better and all this kind of thing.
But to my mind, you've got someone who's told you they're suicidal.
Let's say you do this and then they go home and they're like, wow, my back hurts again.
Here's yet another person who hurt my back.
Didn't really fix it.
You know what?
I'm going to move up my date on my suicide.
I'm going to do it tomorrow.
Like you just, you have no business.
behaving this way.
Nobody does.
Even clinicians don't.
I mean, we are something called mandated reporters.
If somebody came to me and told me they were suicidal or imagining self-harm or harm to anyone, I have to, it's a mandate, I have to report it.
And if I don't, I potentially go to jail.
But that is under the scope of practice of being a clinician.
And I don't know what scope of practice he works under, but I don't think it's the same.
And this for him is just yet another example of his like, I did it!
You're welcome!
And just don't ever bend over again in your entire life.
It's just another way that he's validating his method and his particular specialness.
And I just find it so deeply frustrating.
I think it's not terribly scientific to be so confident.
Right?
Because science is always changing, research is mixed, and yet he represents himself.
I mean, you asked about the faith healer.
I don't think he like lays hands on and does like religious rituals on people, but I do think he heals by faith.
He wins influence by faith.
Faith in McGill, right?
Faith in what he's able to do and know about your body.
And meanwhile, you know, science is not so certain.
And I think that most clinicians, most scientists that I listen to, they're hesitant to take really strong stances on stuff like non-specific low back pain doesn't exist or another one is key.
Another line in the sand is like competent physicians or therapists will be able to Find the exact mechanical cause of pain by doing a pain provocation test on you, right?
So, this is what Sarah described with this person who was suicidal, right?
He actually provoked this person's pain and was like, aha, I know exactly what it is.
But the thing about pain provocation tests is that they're not like 100% accepted by everyone in the medical field, right, Sarah?
Yeah, not at all.
I mean, a lot of research calls into question The reliability, the accuracy, the significance of these tests.
We learn all these tests in PT school.
We learn all these pain provocation tests.
And when we learn them, we're also taught what is the statistical significance and reliability of each test.
And many of them are not particularly reliable or significant, which kind of begs the question, why am I being taught them in PT school?
But that's like a whole separate podcast.
But they're not universally accepted as the right course of therapeutic action because their value is not clear.
But also, if you spike someone's pain with a test the first day they meet you, you're potentially demonstrating that you're yet another person not to be trusted, right?
You're yet another person who can't help them.
And in the case of patients who are overwhelmed by the stress of their pain, you could really be setting them back.
But McGill just likes to pain provoke all over the place and, you know, with no regard for any consequences.
I mean, he'll say like, if your if your physician or your therapist is unable to replicate the pain trigger, in so many words, like they're incompetent.
So you need to find a competent therapist who can do that.
And I think it's, you know, we have to mention that he has this course called BackFit Pro.
where he will train you clinicians and physicians to properly assess thoroughly and properly assess folks to find these exact pain triggers and pain mechanisms if you go through the course and it sounds pretty rigorous and like pass the test and things like that and like there's different tiers to the course and people pay a yearly fee to you know keep up their certification and he in many times in back fit pro or I'm sorry back mechanic he's like Listen, if your physician or therapist isn't cutting it, here's two things you can do.
One, take back mechanic the book to them so that they can like read it and know what they're doing.
or two, reach out and we'll refer you to one of our master clinicians.
Stuart McKeel is not your only kind of point of contention here.
Sarah, I wanted to come around to you on this idea of long and lean, which is part of the yoga and Pilates kind of marketing ploys, which it sounds like To me, really plays into gendered stereotypes about undesirable bulky muscle versus essentially being thin but strong, which we've sort of touched on already.
And it's linked to claims about specific types of exercise being the key to weight loss and even sculpting target areas.
This is a very popular marketing idea.
What's your beef?
You know what?
You know what, Julian?
You're right.
You're a cis, white, hetero man.
I should stop being so angry.
I should put on a dress that doesn't have any pockets.
I should go cook your dinner.
I would offer to make a baby, but my uterus is actually closed for business.
I think Laurel still might be able to cook a baby for us.
I don't know.
We have to check in with her.
Cook a baby.
Bun in the oven.
Exactly.
You're the oven and the house and the whatever.
I mean, bake a baby is probably the better.
Bake a baby.
Thank you for gratifying me.
So, yeah, in our in our Movement Logic podcast, we do a series on this, what I call the scourge of long and lean.
And we talk about this through line of the idealized female form over the last couple of hundred years that is racist, eugenic.
And it's frankly, it's genetically impossible for the vast majority of women to achieve.
And yet billion dollar industries exist so that women can continue to strive for this impossible form.
And, you know, there's a lot of movement methodologies that promote this aesthetic and that are considered acceptable modalities for women to do, like Pilates, barre, and yoga.
And they tend to have these kind of cult-like origins with very charismatic creators, right?
Meanwhile, the things that the CDC recommends, strength training, to positively impact women's health, as in, you know, help them stave off an early death or prevent chronic disease, these are discouraged based on what might happen to their appearance, right?
Like adding muscle mass.
you know it's it's but things like lifting weights using barbells to build bone density
improve balance mood confidence strength capability these are all research supported
benefits of strength training but you know don't do that because you don't want to get bulky but
it's not a coincidence that building a body that can do these things a building a body that is
capable and strong is discouraged You know, we say in the episode, the problem is not long and lean.
It's not bad to have a body that's long and lean.
The problem is, what is communicated to women is that everybody should aspire to be long and lean.
And it suggests that it's wrong to be anything except aspiring towards it, right?
So women of other shapes, other sizes, other physiques, They are wrong.
They are undesirable.
They are unacceptable.
They are less than.
And it's just unbelievably damaging to women's self-esteem.
It leads to eating disorders like anorexia, which is estimated to have affected 20 million women in the United States alone.
It's frankly disastrous for women's health, right?
Because as I said, strength training has been shown to reduce osteoporosis and heart disease, especially in women.
You know, telling women that they shouldn't put muscle on their body, that it's unattractive, is basically saying, like, one of the best ways you can help yourself for your health and longevity is, you know, yucky and ugly because it's not long and lean.
It's disempowering.
It's commodifying.
It's dehumanizing.
It's setting up a scenario where women can more easily be discriminated against, dominated, used for the purpose of upholding a patriarchal system.
So that's why I have a beef about it.
It's also not good for the professions of Pilates or barre where this language tends to be used more.
I don't notice it as much in yoga because basically what you're doing is you're You're selecting for people who are already long and lean, right?
So teachers who are working in these fields probably look the way that everyone's trying to look, right?
So they're like the advertisement.
They're the poster child of like, this is how we're gonna, you know, Try to look when we're done with this form of exercise if we stick to this form of exercise and that totally leaves out like most women right don't look long and lean I would say right and and so it selects for teachers that have a very narrow aesthetic and it might select also for students who you know I think students tend to want to learn from teachers who look like them who they can identify with and so if we have like lots of long and lean teachers who by the way also happen to
Overwhelmingly be white in a lot of these boutique studios, right?
You know, and one of the reasons for that, if I if I may, is that they're just not paid very well.
So they need to have, you know, some other source of income.
And I feel like there's, you know, there's gaps, socioeconomic gaps involved here.
There's like, you know, a complexity in terms of like, why?
Why are teachers overwhelmingly white?
But, um, I think that it's basically bad for the profession.
Like you're alienating a whole possible student base by emphasizing this really narrow aesthetic ideal when you could just emphasize like all the positive benefits that you get from doing exercise like barre and Pilates.
How these are actually wonderful ways to stay active and to stay you know moving and why do we have to bring it back always constantly to this like side of sort of low-key body shaming.
I feel like it's going out of style, but I still, if you go on the internet and you search like, will Pilates make you long and lean?
Will Bar make you long and lean?
Like, oh, there's a ton of like blogs and resources and like promises about how, you know, you won't get too bulky.
You'll get just enough muscle to not be bulky, but not too much.
Somehow, you'll become lean.
Lean is body composition, right?
It's the presence of muscle with the absence of non-lean mass, which is fat, right?
But exercise, as we talk about in this Long and Lean series in Part 2, is a really poor tool for weight loss.
Exercise is not the best tool for that job.
The best tool for that job is a diet.
Suggesting that exercise like Pilates or barre is going to somehow help you lose weight is a real stretch to begin with.
So, it's harmful to the profession, it's harmful to women, but it's also just factually wrong.
And if you go back to Depression-era America, being overweight was in vogue because it showed you could afford to eat.
Right.
So, the culture perceptions of the body changed, but also I wanted to just bring up something you've said a few times here and unpack it a little bit, which is cultural perceptions of pain.
I read a book by Rob Bodas, who wrote a book about the history of pain a few years ago, and he writes that depending on your culture, you can actually experience pain differently, both physically, mentally, emotionally, all the different ways that you can be in pain.
He writes about moral pain, for example.
And you've mentioned that McGill treats physical pain separately from psychological pain in the episode that you did, but we know that things like Advil have been shown to alleviate mental distress.
So it's a lot more complicated, and you've mentioned the biopsychosocial model of pain a few times now, and I just want you to unpack how you see that and what that is.
The biopsychosocial model of pain takes into account not just the biology, the possible physical component that might be driving someone's pain, but the contributions from their very specific and subjective psychology, and then also from their lives, their community, where they are in society.
So in a very sort of like short description of what happens, when we experience pain, what's happening is our brain is getting a message from the body that something is happening.
Essentially, something noxious is happening.
The brain then decides, okay, where am I going to score it on the scale of pain that is already known?
Like, is this thing as painful as a bee sting, or is this as painful as a broken arm, based on the person's past experiences?
Is it as painful as it was the last time this happened, or more so?
And then we're looking at things like, Were you already stressed out and then you tripped and you stubbed your toe and now that makes it feel so much worse?
Or are you actively dealing with depression, which research has also been shown to make pain feel worse?
And then we look at things like, okay, well, how did your family of origin deal with pain?
Was it something where everything was just a total catastrophe?
Or was it the opposite?
Everything was just sort of brushed off and you were told to toughen up, right?
For each individual person, is pain automatically a reason to increase their own anxiety and fear?
Or you might say something like, okay, how is this going to negatively impact your life?
Let's say you sprained your ankle the day before you're supposed to go on this huge hiking trip, right?
So just the future consequences of what it's going to mean to have your pain can make the pain more painful.
And then the social part, it has a lot to do with a person's support system, their community.
Do they have a family, a community to support them?
Or are they isolated?
Are they alone with their pain?
Do they feel like it's not something they can share?
Do they not have health insurance?
Right, right.
The social part also has to do with everything they're hearing out there in society on social media from influencers.
So I don't remember if we were talking about this before we started recording, but you know, Andrew Huberman put out an episode on low back pain just like a couple of weeks ago.
Riddled with, like, wild claims and, you know, kind of making these odd suggestions.
Sarah, can you, like... Well, there was one suggestion about, you know, a lot of it was very sort of McGill-esque, posture is everything, stay in one place kind of thing.
And he said something along the lines of, to keep your neck in a safe place, you should press your tongue to the roof of your mouth.
And so I instantly put my neck all over the place and I discovered that I can press my tongue to the roof of my mouth pretty much anytime I want with my neck anywhere I want, right?
Yeah, that was like the most bizarre of the litany of claims that he made, but it was like kind of a shit show.
It's amazing how much he borrows from traditional yoga, though, without maybe realizing it.
Oh, right.
Yeah, that is like a yoga thing.
I remember hearing that.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I characterize it as like kind of a poorly delivered book report on back mechanic.
Incidentally, he is going to be interviewing McGill soon.
So, yeah, so what people are hearing this, though, like Andrew Huberman has millions of followers.
He's like super famous.
People like him.
People also like McGill.
Right.
And so they hear like these claims from Andrew, he'll hear McGill like characterize their therapist
as incompetent, because like their therapist still hasn't done a pain provocation test on them.
Maybe I should take my book back mechanic to my therapist.
And all of this is influencing them, right?
So like if they're hearing things that sound scary, right?
They become hyper vigilant, they become more anxious about their pain.
If they hear that their, you know, therapist is maybe not like worth, you know,
like worth their salt or something, That might degrade the therapeutic relationship.
They might become confused and mired in misinformation and wondering, should I be pressing my tongue to the roof of my mouth all the time?
And all of this, too, is a social factor that influences the rehabilitation process, that can bog it down by causing confusion or that can weaken it by causing distrust.
And so this psychosocial influence becomes a psychosocial aspect of a person's experience of pain as well.
Doctors love it when you go in and say, I saw this thing on social media.
Well, I actually did have someone come in, a patient of mine, and he said, so I just listened to this amazing podcast about back pain.
I was like, oh gosh, here we go.
And I was like, was it the Huberman one?
And he said, uh-huh.
And I was like, uh-huh.
And he was like, what, what?
And to be fair to him, you know, he was very open to listening to what I had to say, and thankfully I had sort of already established that I knew a little bit about what I was talking about, so we could kind of go through what was problematic about it.
But also, it requires a certain skill to be able to listen to something like that and not just swallow it wholesale, but to actually go through and be like, okay, well, yeah, maybe these parts aren't bad.
There's nothing wrong with these exercises, but it's wrapped in this sort of like mythology of The right way and the wrong way.
And it's ultimately, if you don't have that kind of ability to take something apart when you're listening to it and not just agree with all of it, it becomes very hard to suss out like, well, what should I be doing?
And that makes people feel even worse, right?
Which strikes me really as the difficulty with pseudoscience in general is that pseudoscience usually has several valid observations, several things that you can actually find good scientific citation for.
But then there's always the posturing of, like, I am at the growing edge and the mainstream consensus hasn't caught up with me yet.
And that can be any number of things, right?
It can be paranormal claims.
It can be, you know, these things have been taught in the spiritual traditions and now science is finally understanding them.
It can be these supplements actually, it turns out, are the secret answer.
To the thing that Western medicine can't figure out because they're too incompetent or they're too driven by a profit motive, so they're suppressing it.
Like, this is the misinformation crisis that we're in on so many different levels.
And, you know, Stuart McGill may be quite good at playing like, I'm just a grandpa who doesn't understand how the internet works.
But he has an intuitive grasp of how the grift of being an influencer who postures as someone who is the bold maverick that you should really listen to because no one else knows what they're talking about.
Oh look, he is super likable.
He's charming.
You love him when you listen to him.
He's very charismatic.
He's very eloquent.
He has a very strong grasp on the English language.
He is a wonderful orator.
And he knows his stuff inside and out as it pertains to more than I probably could understand or say because I'm not, you know, I'm not a researcher, I'm not an engineer, and I'm definitely not a clinician or physician either, right?
But he leans so heavily into the anatomy, the biomechanics, he goes on and on, waxes poetical about it, but then there's these huge gaps between how that relates to the experience of pain as it is explained by the biopsychosocial model.
Well, and I would suggest that, and this is just my speculation, that there are personality traits that this kind of influencer that I'm sort of putting him in the category of, just based on my own opinions, there are these traits that include things like really enjoying So, you know, along those lines, we're running out of time, and I want to come back around to the connection between your podcast and your Movement Logic tutorials.
He sure loves being right.
So along those lines, we're running out of time and I want to come back around to the
connection between your podcast and your Movement Logic tutorials.
But I also want to, before we quite go there, just ask you about alignment dogmas, just
so we make sure we're touching in on yoga, which is where all of this starts for all
of us, right?
of us, right?
You have this series that you've been doing and I listened to the episode on the shoulder and it was fantastic.
About alignment dogmas in yoga and I just do you have a thumbnail on what that is and why you talk about it?
Yeah, I think that I don't know I'll speak for myself and I think Sarah can relate because we've talked about this a lot obviously is like a huge part of our evolution as teachers has been a process of supplanting one dogmatic belief with another.
And so what that suggests is that maybe you haven't really gotten down to the to the root or the seed dogmatic belief that's causing you to keep falling back on this like faulty reasoning.
And I would say that like the big one is that there is such a thing as a good or a bad or a safe or an unsafe or a healthy or an unhealthy alignment that alignment exists in this binary paradigm.
And so you have to draw that line in the sand and decide if you're going to choose the right one or the wrong one and then you can make like judgments on the other group that's like doing it wrong, right?
And by the line in the sand, you specifically mean the line between your front heel and the arch of your back foot, right?
Or the line between your kneecap and your second and third toe, the one that goes right between those, yeah.
Or how about the line where you are in between two panes of glass?
I like that line.
In triangle pose, right?
The lines of your rectangular mat, right?
So then what happened right around like I would say 2008, 9, 10, everyone in my world like as a newer yoga teacher trainer was like, I'm in a lot of pain, right?
So something, something ain't right with this alignment we're doing.
So now, You know what?
Alignment doesn't matter at all.
You know what?
We're not even gonna teach this crap.
Like, it's bullshit.
Like, fuck it.
We're just gonna, I don't know, do whatever.
Like, that also didn't happen.
Like, people kept teaching alignment because when you come to yoga, like, at some point, everyone's gonna have to, like, come into a pose, right?
So, like, that's also teaching alignment, right?
And so, I think my big aha moment in all of this was that alignment is neither good nor bad.
It's neutral.
It's a tool.
It's like a hammer.
It's neither good nor bad.
Its value depends on how you use it.
So alignment can be used to cause more problems.
And it can be used to help you can use a hammer to destroy something and you can use a hammer to build something, right?
So I think that when I had that realization, I stopped characterizing alignment as good or bad.
And I started to learn more about pain science and about tissue biomechanics and how, you know, You can have 10 different people in a yoga class doing Warrior 2, they can look 10 different ways, and they can all be benefiting.
Because whether or not alignment is positive or negative for any given individual depends on so many things that make them unique, like their history of loading, their sensitivity in certain positions, maybe how much sleep they got, right, who their former teachers were and what their values are about how
they should be aligned and it's it's totally fine that everybody looks differently. We don't
have to put people in cookie cutters to make them all look the same way. We can embrace that individuality.
We can make space for that individuality. But Laurel, how are you going to keep
everyone safe? I know, it's So that's the thing is like, research has repeatedly failed to show that not only is there not a causation or causative relationship between alignment or technique and injury, there's no relationship.
Right, so whether or not people get injured comes down to the fact that, you know, if their tissues were not ready to handle the loads of whatever it was that they were doing, if it was too much too soon or just too much, right, then there will probably be some type of injury or maybe just pain that results from that.
But like people adapt to what we would look at and go like that's That's terrible alignment, like, oh, my gosh, that person's gonna, their knee is gonna explode, they're gonna they're gonna break their neck or whatever it is.
And I think I use this realization to in the episodes, like if you watch a ballet dancer, right, their movement quality is like bordering on magical.
It's so beautiful to watch.
It's perfect.
It's idealized.
It's long and lean, right.
And and what we end up learning if we talk to some ballet dancers are like, are a part of the ballet world at all is like, A lot of ballet dancers are in severe pain.
They have a lot of pain.
They end up having to get their hips replaced and things like that.
It's not about the alignment, it's about the preparation, the level of preparedness that someone has with regards to their ability to tolerate a particular position and the loads that that confers on their body depending on the activity.
You can also have 10 different people doing a squat 10 different ways.
And they can all be benefiting from that exercise.
So we can let go.
It's so freeing.
It's so freeing to let go of this idea that there is such a thing as a right and wrong or a good and bad alignment and just start to recognize its value as it relates to the individuals in front of you and the goals of what you're trying to do.
You can use alignment To help someone acquire a skill to improve their performance, you can help them avoid sensitive joint positions so that they have a better experience and a shape.
You can use alignment, just add some variety, like let's do warrior two this way.
Now let's change the alignment and do it this way.
And now we're, you know, targeting load in the body in different ways.
And that's beneficial in and of itself.
So alignment can be a wonderful, wonderfully creative tool that I love to use in my classes.
I've just stopped characterizing it as Put your knee over your second and third toe, otherwise you'll pay for it later.
Or to protect our back, we're going to find our natural curve.
Or, you know, things like that.
It implies that there is a safe or correct way to be.
And, you know, human bodies are just too complex.
Too smart and self-organizing and also just too varied to impose this type of really overly simplistic rule.
Variation is the norm across the human, you know, population in terms of bodies and tolerance levels and levels of preparedness and history of loading.
So, yeah, we can let go of trying to put everyone in this cookie cutter and make them all look the same.
We don't need to do that.
As a someone who still teaches yoga, I want to say that from listening to you and being involved in these kinds of conversations with people in our circles over the years, I've really had to look at how Tempting it is.
How satisfying it is as an instructor to be like, I have learned now.
The old one was pretty good, but there were some things that were wrong with it.
But now I've learned the new set of rules that are going to keep people safe.
And I'm going to teach in that way because it also, when you're doing the performance of teaching in front of a group of people and asserting authority, It feels really good to be like, I know the stuff.
I'm going to teach you the stuff that's going to keep you safe and allow you to do this for the rest of your life and make you into the person that you're aspiring to be, which is maybe somewhat like me in some kind of way.
Yeah, absolutely.
Based on the stuff that I know with a degree of certainty that I'm going to communicate so that you have confidence in me.
It's just, it's all, it's such, to grapple with that and be like, Do I really have to do it that way?
Maybe not.
Yeah, and I think it's totally fine to take a point of view and say, like, this is what we're going to try today.
This is what we're working toward in terms of alignment.
But you know what?
This is not the right way.
It's not the only way, and it's not the safe way.
And if there's another way that you prefer that just feels better, here are some options.
Like, we can create space around this point of view.
I think it's also kind of boring to come into class and be like, well, whatever you want to do, Like, you know, I don't know.
Yeah.
Just kind of figure it out.
Like, I also don't think that has a ton of value.
Like, that's what I mean.
Like, it's, it is very tempting, though, to, um, it's very satisfying when everyone looks the same.
I agree.
Like, you're kind of like, I did my job.
Well, and the human brain loves patterns, right?
We like things to line up.
We like to, you know, line up our toy cars.
We like to line up our students' mats all in line with each other.
We really like it.
Everyone's knee is right over their ankle.
Fantastic!
That must be correct.
So speaking of people doing what you tell them to do.
First of all, how do people find the podcast?
And then second of all, how do they find the other work that you do that's associated with the podcast?
Which I'm actually really happy to endorse myself.
I've enjoyed Dishonored 4 immensely.
Thank you so much.
Yeah.
So the podcast is, as you said, it's called Movement Logic, Strong Opinions, Loosely Held.
And you can get it, I think, wherever you get your podcasts.
We're on Apple, we're on Stitcher, we're on all the platforms.
And then our website is www.MovementLogicTutorials.com and that's where you can find the tutorials and also if people want to sign up if they're interested in this barbell lifting course we're doing it again starting in October of 2024 and so people can sign up for that.
Um, we also, we give a lot of free stuff away, which we, people are very pleased about a lot of the time.
So it's worth getting on our mailing list just because we'll be like, Hey, look, here's this interview thing, or here's a piece of research that we found, or we thought you'd find this interesting.
And then on social media, we are pretty much for the most part, just on Instagram because any more than that, and I think our collective brains would just explode trying to manage it.
So we're Movement Logic Tutorials on Instagram as well.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
