Lost Art Of Bending Over: How Other Cultures Spare Their Spines

To see if you're bending correctly, try a simple experiment.

• Stand up and put your hands on your waist,

• Now imagine there is a feather in front of your feet and try to pick it up,

Most people will immediately move their head and look down...

That little look down bends your spine and triggers your stomach to do a little crunch.

You've already started to bend incorrectly — at your waist.

In this process, our backs curve into the letter "C" — or, to visualise it in another way, we all look like really folded cashews.

But in many parts of the world, people don't look like cashews when they bend over. Instead, you see something very different.

In many other parts of the world you will find a completely different bending technique where people bend over with their backs nearly straight. But they don't squat with a vertical back. Instead, their backs are parallel to the ground. They looked like tables.

If you do a quick search online you will find this "table" bending in photos all around the world — an older woman planting rice in Madagascar, a Mayan woman bending over at a market in Guatemala and women farming grass in northern India. This bending technique appears to be common in many places, except in Western societies.

'Table' Bending Versus 'C' Bending

When you hip hinge (left), your spine can stay in a neutral position, while the hips and upper legs support your body weight. When you bend at the waist, the back curves, putting stress on the spine.

When people bend with the cashew shape in their back — like we often do — they're bending spine. This can put more stress on the spinal disks.

Disks are little rings of collagen found between each vertebra, which form a joint. But they aren't made for tons of motion. They have the mechanical characteristics of more like a fabric.

If you take a cloth, and you keep bending and stressing it, over and over again, the fibers of the weave of the cloth will start to loosen up and delaminate.

Eventually, over time, this fabric can fray, which puts you at risk of slipping a disk or having back pain.

On the other hand, when you hip hinge, your spine stays in a neutral position. The bending occurs at the hip joint — which is the king of motion.

Hips are a ball and socket joints and are designed to have maximum movement and lots of muscle force.

In other words, your boots may be made for walking, but your hips are made for bending.

Bending at the hip takes the pressure off the back muscles, instead, you engage your hamstring muscles.

And by engaging the hamstrings you are also stretching them.

Oh yes! In order to hip hinge properly, your hamstrings have to lengthen, If you have tight hamstrings, they prevent you from bending over easily in that way.

Tight hamstrings are extremely common in the Ireland. They may be one reason why hip hinging has faded from our culture: Stiff hamstrings are literally hamstringing our ability to bend properly.

But hip hinging isn't totally lost from our culture where many yoga websites recommend bending at the hips, too.

And the hip hinging is sprinkled throughout sports. Weightlifters use it when they do what's called a deadlift. Baseball players use it when they bat. Tennis star Rafael Nadal does it when he sets up a forehand. And in rugby, players kneel at the line of scrimmage with beautiful hip hinging.

Toddlers younger than 3 years old are great hip hingers. They haven't learned yet from their parents to bend like a cashew.

Whether or not hip hinging will prevent back pain or injuries is difficult to say.

We don't have these randomized trials, where we have people lifting things hundreds of times and see how their body responds to hip hinging.

Still, though, I personally try to hip hinge as much as possible.

I believe hip hinging intuitively makes sense, just given how the spine functions, so I try very hard to do it.

So how in the world do you do this mysterious bending?

How To 'Table' Bend

To hip hinge:

1. Place your feet about 12 inches apart.

2. Keep your back straight.

3. As you bend your knees, allow your pubic bone to move backward.

4. Fold over by allowing your pubic bone to slide through your legs, down and back.

As you bend your knees, your pubic bone should be allowed to move through your legs. A little crevice forms right at the top of your legs and your back should start to fold over, like a flat table.

Now you're using the large muscles of your hips, such as the glutes, to support the whole weight of your body, instead of the tiny muscles of your back. You may find that your hamstrings are very tight in the beginning!