What’s that lump on my upper back, and why should young people care?
I’m silently judging your posture…
A few years ago I was checking on how the back of my hair looked, and it was the first time I noticed that right below my neck on my upper back, a lump was forming. Going straight to Dr. Google, I entered: “old lady fat lump” and found out it’s known as a Dowager’s Hump. A follow up question revealed a dowager is a serious-minded older woman, especially one who is a wealthy widow. I wasn’t serious, wealthy or a widow, but I had older relatives who had curvature on their upper backs, and I wanted to know how to stop it from getting worse.
If you are sitting up straighter reading this, it happens every time I tell this story. Keep it up, because though a dowager’s hump is a severe curvature of the spine, the fat lump I had, known as a buffalo hump or a dorsocervical fat pad, can lead to the more severe dowager’s hump.
I found a terrific YouTube video by Michelle Joyce, who does the 30-day Posture Makeover. But the comments on the video were shocking, because they weren’t from other silly, serious, poor or wealthy older women. They were from alarmed teens who said things like: “I’m 16, and this is already happening to me, what am I going to look like when I’m old?!”
Michelle Joyce blames the time spent gaming and on phones for the forward-head posture that created this same fat lump for teens as it did for us serious-minded old women. The body (you have to respect this) lays fat cells down at the top of the spine to protect it when exposed (without the head and neck above it). The young commenters gave each other advice to protect one’s posture through long hours of gaming, including “get a good gaming chair.” In other bad news for youth, the University of the Sunshine Coast researchers David Shahar and Mark Sayers analyzed X-rays of 218 18–30-year-old Australians in 2016 and found that 41% had a bone growth at the back of the skull called an enlarged external occipital protuberance. The forward-head posture is also exhausting for the body to hold, using muscles instead of the skeleton for support.
Since I teach Wellness in a high school and this was now a shared concern of both young and old, I incorporated Michelle Joyce’s exercises into a yoga class. And for fun, I made my music playlist of video game original sound tracks. I included Yin yoga work for fingers, hands and wrists, hip opening and hamstring stretching yoga poses, and called the whole thing Gamer Yoga. As I played music from Minecraft to welcome my students to class, students who were just passing by wandered in as if called by the pied piper. I told them to stand up straight and sent them to their math class.
Yoga focuses on alignment and posture. The most basic pose, Mountain, is all about building a standing posture that is in line with how your skeleton can best support you. Tall, open, shoulders down and back. Now that I felt responsible for teaching students how to improve their posture and stop fatty and boney growths from disfiguring their bodies, I showed them Amy Cuddy’s power pose Ted talk. Her research claimed that holding poses that show power, rather than protection, open rather than closed, made you feel more confident and allowed you to be more authentic.
More from Amy Cuddy:
“Adopting expansive postures seems to activate the behavioral approach system. A bit of background: Two systems are believed to drive most human feelings, thoughts, behaviors and even physiology — approach and avoidance (i.e., inhibition). When our approach system is activated, we are happier, more optimistic, more confident, more creative, more likely to take action, more likely to seek rewards and opportunities, more physically energetic and less inhibited, among other things. Activation of the inhibition systems leads to the opposite effects. According to the well-established approach/inhibition theory of power, power activates the approach system, whereas powerlessness activates the inhibition system.”
Standing up straighter improves not only our physiological bodies and prevents them from being disfigured, it may also help us make decisions that are more authentic to us, enabling confident, loving choices instead of fearful ones. Following the advice of both Cuddy and Joyce, I’ve not only reduced the size of my fat lump, but I mindfully notice how I hold my body in space. When I catch myself slouching, I adjust, crown of head reaching up, shoulders back, head and neck in line with my spine. In feedback from students after taking my class, this awareness of posture is a popular response when asked if there is something they’ve learned that they expect to use in their everyday lives. It’s one of the quickest, most effective tricks to make one feel more calm and confident.
