Drive Happy
Lilly and Catherine having coffee in the van.
During the last three years, I drove less than at any other time in my adult life! Between the at-home pandemic isolation and shifting my classes from in-person to online at the beginning of the COVID restrictions, my Prius sat in the driveway a lot. I even had to jumpstart it one day when I finally had somewhere to go.
I didn’t miss driving much. Especially the commute to my last journalism job, where I drove 60 miles in traffic each way from my home in the Sierra foothills to a radio station in Sacramento, California.
During my certification as a Restorative Exercise Specialist, I calculated the time spent sitting in the car on that commute as part of my total sitting time per week. It was a stunning 17% of my waking life. Seeing it quantitatively moved me to rethink how I wanted to live and care for my body growing older. A career spent sitting in front of a computer 10 hours per day under fluorescent lights in a cubicle after driving through urban traffic began to seem downright dangerous to my physical and mental health.
And then one morning, I was rear-ended on the freeway on my way into work. My car was totaled. Luckily only mild whiplash and a few months of back pain. As often happens, my injury was a wake up call. I was already on the road towards a life reshaped by the Nutritious Movement concept.
Q: What’s the best way to be in a car?
A: As little as possible!
Kudos to those of you who walk to work, park a bit farther from your destination to walk a bit more every day or who don't even own a car!
As many of you already know, from the "move better, move more" perspective, it’s not that we sit so much, it’s that we sit so much in the same way for so long every single day. And while operating a car, our limbs have to specialize. Blinkers operated by one hand, headlights by the other. Right foot on the gas pedal and left foot, what the heck is happening on our left sides? Let’s start thinking about alignment right there.
UNtwist your pelvis
When you push on the gas with your right leg (in US automobiles), it’s not just that your right foot and ankle are working in different ways than your left. It’s also that you are probably reaching with the right leg and rotating your pelvis forward on that side while moving it backward on the left, creating constant torque, along with back pain, too.
To re-align, stop pulling your left leg back. Let your left foot rest on that foot pad that’s hiding in the corner of your driving compartment. Because most of us have been driving since our teenage years, it will take a long time to reshape that habit. But the more you drive, the more opportunity is available for change. Pay attention to that one alignment check whenever you' re driving. Many times each trip, even on short drives.
Take the tension out of your gas pedal foot
Observe the way you put the pedal to the metal. Are you pointing or scrunching your toes? Lifting your heel to reach the pedal? Bring some mindfulness to that repetitive motion to figure out how you’re doing it. Then choose how you might change to make it better for your body. Here are a few ideas to consider:
Move the seat up, so that you don’t have to reach so far.
Keep your heel on the floor so you can relax the muscles in the front and backs of your legs a little more.
Relax your toes by pushing with the balls of your feet.
Notice if you are pushing more with your big toe side or your pinky toe side and balance that out with hip, knee and/or ankle rotation.
Shift your heel a bit to the right, so you are turning out your foot less as you push.
Alignment is managing the smaller body parts that make up the bigger movements. Changing one small thing can have big impact over time.
UNbucket your seat
Check out the photos in this article to see what your bucket seat is doing to your Neutral Pelvis alignment. Consider how the shape of that bucket is forcing you into a tucked position and flattening your low back. You may already be using a lumbar pillow to push you out of that into a more neutral pelvis. This is exactly like using orthotics in your shoe to hold your foot in a better position. Neither will help you create the muscle strength to support better alignment in the shoe or in the car.
As Katy says, “Alignment is when the position and the forces and the loads are “neutral”...so you don’t want to have a lumbar pillow shoving you uphill where the tendency is still passively rolling back down. You just want to get rid of the force that’s rolling you backwards.”
Answer: pad your bucket seat with a towel or flip your lumbar pillow over and put it in the seat to level out the surface that you sit on.
I’ve got two more ideas for better alignment while using a car.
Get your leg aligned before stepping out of the vehicle
This means taking the pressure off your knee. Instead of reaching your leg randomly out of the car and trying to hoist yourself while your ankles, knees and hips are UNaligned (see the photo), swing your hips to face the door opening, align your foot, knee and hip and use the big muscles on your backside to get you up and out. Hello glutes and hamstrings!
Ramp your head
Where is your head when you’re driving? My high school driving instructor’s phrases was, “keep your head on a swivel” while looking both ways before driving through an intersection.
Apply the Heap Ramp often during your driving time. This will support better rotational forces when you look both ways. Less neck pain!
Keep you eyes on the road (maybe try this first while parked)
Pull your chin straight back
Touch the back of your skull to the head rest (what a terrible name, right?) to lengthen the back of your neck
You might have to adjust that head rest to make it more functional
Catch yourself jutting your chin forward a hundred times on every drive
Head Ramp as often as you think about it
Some of the ideas in this article come from Katy’s The Car Show podcast Episode 12. You can listen or scan the transcript at that link. Some of the photos come from her article Un-pimp Your Ride. The gangster theme is cringe-worthy, but the information is solid.
The takeaway? Better alignment takes “loads” of practice.
Ha! See what I did there?
But wait, we didn’t even talk about your ribs! Quick Tip: see if you can figure out how to keep them down and centered over your hips while you drive.
And here’s an idea for how to stretch at rest stops.