Like all species of nature, humans have a biomechanical design that is shared by all healthy people. Babies and young children, while teaching themselves how to stand and walk, discover the central axis around which the body organizes itself. This line almost perfectly divides the body in half. Because the bones do the primary job of providing support, babies’ muscles are soft and elastic, not tight and overdeveloped. Young children have not yet taken on poor habits of use, although this is something that is seen occurring now at younger and younger ages.
Adults who maintain alignment along this central axis enjoy great flexibility, strength and an ability to be relaxed and pain-free. They do not have to work at being strong or flexible, they simply are that way because these qualities are natural byproducts of living in natural, aligned bodies. They are able to perform tasks with ease that many other people would find difficult or impossible to do without strain or injury.
The position of our bones over the many years of our lives may have far more influence in how we age than has been previously understood. Healthy aging is not just about diet and exercise, but also how we sit, stand, bend, walk and engage in all the ongoing activities of our daily lives.

All the body’s systems – digestion and elimination, respiration, circulation, as well as the nervous system that regulates them all, are affected by skeletal alignment, making natural alignment essential to healthy aging.

Every species comes with its very own biomechanical design that defines how it lives. If a bird flaps one wing just a little bit harder than the other one, it will be doomed to fly around in circles.

While humans are able to adjust to demands put on us by influences in our environment, our adaptations come with a high price that is paid through a long list of painful consequences. Only humans appear to be prone, in ever-increasing numbers and at younger and younger ages to “throwing out” and straining our backs, necks, shoulders, knees, hips, ankles and wrists while engaging in ordinary everyday activities.

When learning to stand and walk, all healthy babies discover the crucial middle point—the central axis—around which their bodies organize themselves with exquisite symmetry. This places the bones where they belong and relieves muscles from having to do the work of holding up the body. The primary function of muscles is to move bones, and it is the bones that supply the structural support when they are arranged as intended. Those people who maintain this same natural alignment throughout their lives continue to move with same ease they did when they were young children, enjoying supple spines, open joints and inherent strength and flexibility into old age.

Ageless Spine, Lasting Health presents new and compelling evidence for how the human body is designed to work. Putting these principles into practice can help anyone learn to be relaxed and pain-free. Illustrated with numerous anatomical illustrations and photographs the author collected during travels around the world, this book questions some of our most basic beliefs and assumptions about what constitutes health, fitness and healthy aging.

The aims of Ageless Spine, Lasting Health are threefold:
1) to present a coherent picture of the biomechanical reality that governs the human body and the benefits to be gained by living from this balanced center;
   
2) to provide a basic set of instructions that, when practiced consistently, will enable the reader to discover comfortable pain-free living, whether playing sports or sitting at a computer all day; and
   
3)  to inspire research that examines the relationship between natural postural alignment and healthy aging, and between chronic misalignment and an ever-growing panoply of health problems. Right now, there appears to be no research whatsoever that is looking at this. This book is very much a plea for such research to be conducted.