Egoscue (named after Pete Egoscue, its founder) is a series of gentle exercises and stretches that provide pain relief by correcting postural dysfunctions. In a nutshell, the body is designed to line up in a certain way. From the front or back view, our head should be centered between both shoulders, and if you were to draw horizontal lines across our shoulders, hips, knees and ankles, each of those joints would line up horizontally or be a mirror image of each other. From the side, your ears should line up with your shoulders and your shoulders should be stacked over your hips, hips over knees, and knees over ankles. Your pelvis should not be tilted front or back and your weight should be distributed equally on both feet. This is a functional posture. Many of us don’t fit this mold either because of injuries, learned patterns of movement, or muscular compensations. The problem lies in repeated mis-use of the body. When we overuse one side of our body day in and day out for months or years, not only do we lose muscle, flexibility and neuromuscular pathways on the side being under-used, but we break down our joints and muscles on the side that is working too hard. When you have one hip doing the job of both hips, you’re going to have hip pain, knee pain, perhaps even shoulder pain. Rather than treating the symptom by having surgery, Egoscue offers another possibility for becoming pain free and treating the problem at its source.
There are Egoscue clinics all over the U.S. and even some in Japan. You can also work with an Egoscue trained Postural Assessment Specialist, like myself, and learn what compensations your body has made that are no longer working and are causing you to be in pain. Once we know what the dysfunction is, we can write you a menu which is a series of exercises, or as Pete calls them, “e-cises”, to help your body gain back its functional, pain-free design. If you stick to doing your menu, your body will transition back into a healthy, pain-free movement machine so that you can go about your daily life again.
To learn more, please visit contact me directly or visit www.egoscue.com.
