Con-formed by Time
con·form, from the Latin conformare - con (‘together’) + formare (‘to form’), meaning “to fashion, to form, to shape; modify.”
Fast forward. Let’s check in on John in his last year of high school.
He didn’t ride his bicycle anymore, since he had a car. For the last couple of years, his interests have constantly changed. He went from gaming to trading and selling used games online. He learned how to code and even built a few websites. His interest in digital photography and video editing brought him to Instagram, where he started using his newly acquired skills to promote his parents’ business. He spent a lot of time in front of the computer or with his smartphone in his hands being active (the other type of “active”) on social networks.
At some point, he joined a gym with his buddy and started lifting weights – until he strained his back muscles trying to impress his father while they were unloading his truck one day. Since then, he had to take a break from physical activities, which was fine, as he didn’t have time for the gym with all the studying he had to do for the SAT.
As of John’s senior year of school, he spends over 12 hours a day sitting.
With his ever-changing interests, his different school-related and extracurricular activities, as well as rotating hobbies, John’s brain couldn’t really figure out what John wanted to be from the input it was getting. Neither could John, to be frank.
Whether it was playing a guitar, studying for school, lifting weights, or putting together websites, his brain’s job was to figure out the best way to do the things that John did repetitively for an extended period of time or those that were beyond his current physical abilities. One common denominator for most of the activities in which John was involved was – you guessed it – sitting. Therefore, his brain prioritized being proficient in sitting and started shaping his body accordingly.
With the persistent adoption of sitting as an all-day (or most-of-the-day) activity, the first thing lost is proper postural alignment. We are all familiar with the fact that prolonged sitting, and especially improper sitting, affects our posture. Not everybody can imagine, however, the full extent of the implications caused by some of these seemingly insignificant and superficial transformations.
Once again, there are reasons why our bodies need to be shaped the way they are. As mentioned, these reasons go beyond the purely aesthetic. Your posture is a snapshot of your form at any moment of time, representing your ability to engage the proper segments of your kinetic chain to perform a given action. To say that you have bad posture can and should be interpreted as saying that you move in a wasteful and dangerous way. (Strings Attached)
When we draw a stick figure, we can get away with using about five lines and a circle to represent our limbs, the torso, and the head. Yet, when we move under the effect of constant gravitational pull, it may take over 200 bones and about 600 individual muscles working as a team to be able to lift, push, or pull things while absorbing or minimizing all kinds of physical stresses resulting from our interactions with the ground and other things in which we come in contact. Someone must have put some thought into this design, don’t you think?
What would be the point of creating so many intricate parts and unifying them into one interconnected system if it doesn’t matter how each of these parts is aligned and how they all interact with one another? Of course, it matters!
Our bodies are collections of many parts that have been meticulously crafted by millions of years of evolution. During many months of our initial development, these parts are put together and activated, creating a chain of interacting pieces (the kinetic chain). It then takes us a few more years after that to learn how to use the body optimally, mastering essential, basic, and, later, more complex movements. Our developmental journey, however, will not peak for the next 10 years or so.
Going back to the case of John Smith, we expect that, during this time, John’s body would grow and become stronger. His nervous system would layer one skill on top of another, so he would eventually be able to move faster and produce more powerful movements with greater precision and control. That is, of course, if John entrusted his physical development to the natural order of things. This doesn’t fail to happen for animals in the wild, so I’m sure, therefore, it should work for him – or any of us, for that matter.
Unfortunately, not even halfway into the most important stage of our development, way before our body has a chance to evolve into a functional, mature system, we start setting our own rules. Our body works so hard to get us up off our butt, but we negligently and forcefully throw ourselves back onto it. We “yank its chain” and we reap the results – or rather the problems – that follow.