´óÏó´«Ã½

Raise Your Game: Can you start off by telling us a little bit about what you do?

Roger Golten: For the last 25 years I've been practising a relatively little known type of alternative therapy called Hellerwork. The generic term for it is structural integration, which tells you more about what it is. It's to do with improving the overall posture of a person, and helping people to maintain that over time.

RYG: How did you first get involved with Hellerwork?

RG: When I was about 27-years-old I developed an agonising lower back problem. After a while you think these things are going to go away, so I didn't do anything, but then it came back with a vengeance. I was introduced to an American woman who had trained with a guy called Joseph Heller in California. After three sessions I knew this was my vocation in life. I went over to California and re-trained in 1983. I've been practising ever since.

RYG: What is Hellerwork?

RG: Hellerwork isn't specifically designed to relieve symptoms. It's more an educational experience. When people come to me they often have a problem. What I do is give them back the problem by asking 'What is this trying to tell us about the way you use your body?' I try to turn it into a positive so that they learn from it, move on and overcome that problem.

Problems don't generally come out of nowhere. In general people's problems arise from their lifestyle. For example, the way they sit at work. It's to do with education as much as anything else. We educate the driver as well as servicing the vehicle.

We say 'You're the driver of your vehicle, you've got a problem. If I magically took it away, would that actually help you? It'll probably just come back again next week, next month or next year. If I can help you to discover something new, you can take it away with you.' It's take home value I'm interested in.

RYG: What kind of problems do people come to see you about?

RG: There's a small minority who come because they're aware their posture could be better. I usually deal with back ache, neck ache, shoulder ache and leg ache.

People sometimes come to me with tension, usually because they have a stressful job or they've had a personal trauma. It doesn't take a second to radically disorganise a body in a car accident, but you can't put it back together like magic. It takes time to rehabilitate people.

RYG: How do people go about minimising tension?

RG: Tension is an interesting word, because tension implies that you're stretching something. If you've got a piece of rope and you're stretching it tight, that's tension. In fact what most people are actually suffering from is compression, which is the opposite, which is where things are getting squashed together. If you're out of line with gravity, it's compressing you. If you're more vertical, you can oppose gravity more efficiently.

If you've got average posture, your body is getting compressed, and that is the problem. It's not tension. Most people experience tension in the form of tension headaches. It's to do with getting things squashed together. My job is to stretch them out again.

It's a kind of manual yoga. The woman who invented this kind of work in the twenties and thirties, Dr Rolphe, studied yoga. She was a biochemistry and physiology PhD as well. She married the two. It's a manual way of getting the results of doing a lot of yoga. That's how I describe what I do.

RYG: How do you get people to relax?

RG: You can't relax unless you can breathe. If I said to you 'Hold your breath and relax,' it's a contradiction in terms isn't it? What I do with people is get them to breathe out. The only time you relax is when you breathe out, put your feet up at the end of the day, and have a nice cup of tea. The two things go together.

RYG: How important is posture?

RG: It's something we all know about from our mothers and fathers poking us in the back and saying 'Sit up straight.' I want to encourage people not to do that to their kids. If you're trying to have good posture by pulling your shoulders out and sticking your chest out, you're probably compounding the problem that you've already got. Most postural problems aren't about people being lazy, or not having strong enough muscles, they're actually about muscles being too short and tight.

The answer to improving posture is to lengthen the front. If you lengthen the front the back can relax, and it's much easier. Posture is about being in harmony with gravity. Gravity's a very strict teacher. It only works one way. If you're in line with gravity, it's a supportive force that actually holds you up. If you're out of line with gravity, you're always using muscular effort.

I don't use the word posture that much, I use the word structure. Posture means 'To put yourself in a place.' Structure is about working with gravity and it being easy. I'm not interested in trying harder to get better. I believe that, a lot of the time, you get better by relaxing more and allowing things to happen.

RYG: How do we get people to improve their posture?

RG: I've encouraged a lot of schools to look at ergonomic furniture, that grows with the children. I remember being at primary school and the desks were really low. When you grow they get even lower. It's a problem. In Scandinavian countries you can adjust the chair as the child grows. Their classroom furniture also has slopes and angles. If you've got a flat chair and a flat desk you're going to end up hunched over.

A good chair should always slope forwards, to allow you to sit up with your hips and your pelvis being like a level bowl. The surface that you're working at should be inclined so you don't have to drop your head, so it comes up to meet you.

Laptops are a bit of a problem because they're on your lap. That's the worst place to have them. Some statistics say 40% of fourteen-year-olds are experiencing back aches, which is quite frightening. Carrying heavy bags on one shoulder, when you're still growing, is bad for you.

It's really about coming back to understanding what posture's about. It's about being in harmony with gravity. If you watch an animal, they're effortlessly in harmony with gravity. We're fitting ourselves into an unnatural, designed world and paying the price.