True to Form by Eric Goodman

True to Form by Eric Goodman

Author:Eric Goodman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-04-14T16:00:00+00:00


COMMUTING

More than 86 percent of Americans commute to and from work by car, van, or truck; 76 percent of us do so as solo drivers.*

Just consider: The right foot is pressing the gas pedal so that the foot and leg are always externally rotated. The hip flexors and chest are squashed. The ribcage is pressed down toward the pelvis, while the head is thrust forward in that Queen Nefertiti position called anterior head carriage, with all the ills that can result when the back of the neck becomes shortened and flops onto the neck. It’s worth mentioning yet again that such compression can have a seriously unhappy impact on the vagus nerve, and since the vagus nerve is responsible for keeping your heart rate constant and for the process of digestion, you really don’t want any kind of impact on it at all, much less a seriously unhappy impact. And that means that as best you can, you want to keep your neck muscles long and your head positioned for space at the back of the skull.

Now let’s be clear: When you’re behind the wheel of a car, you’re there to drive. Safety, obviously, comes first, and alertness is the first rule of safety. Whatever you have to do to stay aware and alert is your first priority; everything else is a distant second. But to whatever extent you can manage it, you will be doing yourself a favor when you press the back of your neck against the headrest put there for whiplash protection and keep your upper back pushed back against the seat. You want your chin to be over your sternum, not ahead of it, if possible. And you should try to keep both feet facing forward and your knees turned toward one another as much as possible. In this posture, you are fighting both external rotation and anterior head carriage. It’s a kind of vehicular version of the seated decompression posture—a way of fusing Foundation Training into the realities of our car culture.



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