DAVID THURSTON straightens out with the Pilates Method.
I AM 51 years old and I have lived well enough with very little in the way of muscles. I wouldn't know what to do with muscles if I had them. As long as I can stand up, walk around, swing a golf club and hold a pint, type on a computer and carry a camera bag, that's fine. I'm the skeletal, sinewy type. I haven't turned to fat like many men of my age. They developed muscles when they were young to impress girls; then they neglected them when they started making money to impress women.
I hate machismo. I hate chrome and black fake leather, and I hate mirrors and those people who reflect the shape of the absurd baobab tree. I incline towards the bamboo. The problem is that my bamboo has been inclining of late. Through heredity, laziness and age, the elastic that holds the skeleton together has contracted. My posture had become unappealing. Perhaps I did need a few more muscles, after all. I was, in a real sense, out of shape.
My problem was diagnosed at the Hong Kong Pilates and Body Conditioning Studio. Viviane Hardy, a French physiotherapist with background in ballet, studied me through a grid and told me straight that my head was in the wrong place.
Hardy talks with an accent that makes banal English words such as 'body' and 'muscles' sing. My head, she said, was counterbalancing my back which had become lazy. She stopped short of saying so but I knew what she meant: I was spineless.
The condition is known as swayback - too straight a lower spine compensated by a curve in the upper spine. Architecturally, if I were to maintain this posture I would fall over backwards. As a counterweight, I relied on that significant weight of bone known as the head, which thrust itself forward. The solution, she said, was to find out what my back muscles - specifically my intra-scapulas - were doing.
Hardy bade me lay down on my front with my arms in a lozenge shape before me. From this position she asked me to operate my left shoulder blade, down and squeeze sideways like a lift door. I found that no sensation was available to my brain that could organise the correct miniscule action of the lower trapezius to pull the blades towards the opposite hip. Patient sessions followed including a series of exercises to be done at home.
